by Jon Land
The cop holding Muldoon’s laptop computer looked on in dismay. “I wouldn’t get that close if I were you, sir.”
Muldoon didn’t look up at him. “It’s the only way I can calculate the precise specifications of the missing section.”
He slid the laser transit off its rest and took his computer from the cop’s outstretched hand. He used a cable to connect the two devices and then switched on the laptop. Instantly, a three-dimensional representation of the gap in the upper deck appeared on-screen, complete with all necessary specifications.
“Excuse me, sir, but what exactly are you doing?”
Muldoon plugged his cellular phone into his laptop and dialed a number. “The mayor wants a route into the city, and I’m going to give it to her.”
And with that he pressed SEND.
Back at City Hall, in the mayor’s conference room, Lucille Corrente and her senior staff sat facing the board members of the Diamond Merchants Association. Thus far the four men had listened without comment or question to Corrente. Now that she had finished, they exchanged looks of worry and concern before the association president leaned forward to speak.
“Your Honor, we are willing to help in this crisis in any way we can. But you’re talking about utilizing virtually the entire reserves of every jeweler and investor in this city. My problem is that, under the circumstances, my hands are tied until I am satisfied with what the city of New York is putting up as collateral.”
“The President himself has authorized the transfer of fifteen billion dollars in government securities from the Federal Reserve Bank to any bank or banks you choose.” The mayor leaned forward as well. “Now, will that be cash or check?”
FIFTY-FIVE
“It’s twelve forty-five already,” Sam Kirkland said to McCracken, looking up from his watch. “You really want to do this?”
A helicopter sat warming in the City Hall parking lot, ready to ferry Blaine and Les Carney to a walk-in clinic near Madison Square Park, which Carney had identified as one of the circles.
“You’re the one who said you needed at least one more team to get this done,” Blaine explained. “We’re it.”
Kirkland was responsible for coordinating the teams of explosives experts with the sites Carney and his people had identified from the circles. Running the effort from City Hall took three cellular phones and a pair of walkie-talkies. After seeing the last team off, Kirkland would return to the mayor’s offices on the third floor, ready to assemble whatever information came in from the field.
He gazed at the device strapped to Carney’s back, which looked like an elaborate version of the metal detectors used to sweep beaches in search of lost change. “Then you better get going.”
One of New York City’s bomb disposal trucks, under escort by two police cruisers, pulled up in front of the Empire State Building. The truck had barely come to a halt when two members of the nation’s oldest bomb squad popped out in full gear.
At the same time, one of the Humvees dispatched from Central Park with a team of combat engineers inside cruised to a halt in front of a downtown skyscraper. The engineers moved purposefully for the entrance, holding what looked like two long, extended microphones. Boxes attached to them dangled by their necks. These were sophisticated “sniffing” devices that had been programmed with residue of Devil’s Brew recovered from the blast sites. As soon as any of the substance was registered, the LED readouts would flash instantly to life.
A squad equipped with dogs instead of any form of sensor equipment found itself mired in the rubble of a demolished building. The piles of debris made it hard to get anywhere very fast; the team was having trouble just keeping up with the panting dogs as they nosed their way through the mess.
Liz stopped near West Twenty-third Street to let her horse drink from a huge puddle. From Columbia Presbyterian, she and Johnny Wareagle had ridden back to the West Side Highway and headed downtown, intending to cut over to City Hall just past the Holland Tunnel.
Sal Belamo, meanwhile, had gotten much more comfortable riding behind her—almost at ease, in fact.
“You’re pretty good at this,” he said, as the horse snorted.
Liz remembered the first riding lesson her father had ever given her. “I had a good teacher.”
And then something occurred to her, distant at first but quickly sharpening. So obvious she couldn’t believe she had missed it.
“Change in plans,” she said to Johnny.
“Huh?”
Liz looked behind her at Sal. “My son’s elementary school is just a few blocks from here. That’s where we’re going.”
“You ask me, it’s not a good time to stop by and pick up his report card.”
“I need to check something.”
“Now?”
“Trust me.”
The huge reserves held by member stores of the Diamond Merchants Association were kept in bank vaults throughout the city. The members of the association’s board of directors personally supervised the removal of these huge caches from the vaults, as well as the subsequent weighing and tallying procedures required to attain the fifteen-billion-dollar ransom.
After being tabulated, the diamonds were loaded into specially cushioned cases and kept under heavy police guard until the time came to deliver them to New York Harbor, where the payoff was set to take place.
“How many stones we talking about here?” the police captain Chief Logan had put in charge of the operation asked one of the board member’s assistants.
“At an average of value of fifty thousand dollars per stone,” the man replied patiently, “you’d need three hundred thousand stones.”
“You could fill a barrel.”
“Probably closer to three.”
After all the bomb squad teams had been dispatched, Sam Kirkland transferred the approximate locations of the target sites to a larger, detailed map of New York City he then placed on an easel in the conference room. He had added numbers to those circles, one to twenty-four, intending to fill them in once reports from the field began coming in.
By one-fifteen he had heard from a half-dozen teams that had completed their initial sweeps and were moving on to their second sites. Not one of them had found any trace of either a receiver or the Devil’s Brew, and Kirkland was beginning to fear the other teams working the field were going to encounter the same results, that their initial assessment of the circles on the map had been false.
When he received an identical report from a seventh team, he turned grimly to the mayor. “It looks like we better get McCracken ready to travel.”
Blaine and Les Carney had just finished a rapid sweep of the clinic with the explosives sensor, which had turned up nothing. The only floor remaining for them to check was the basement, the door to which was marked NO ADMITTANCE.
“You mind opening this?” Blaine called to a janitor mopping a floor nearby.
The man looked at him suspiciously. “You got authorization?”
“For a boiler room?”
“Hey, don’t ask me. All I know is the building inspector closed the basement off after the first-floor patients started getting sick.”
“Light-headed, nauseous, headaches?” Carney jumped in, suddenly anxious.
The janitor leaned against his mop, even more suspicious now. “You a doctor or something?”
“The door!” the one-armed man yelled. “Open it now!”
The crisis had led to noontime dismissals at all city schools, a bad situation worsened by the thousands of frantic parents lined up at the doors, waiting for their terrified children. By the time Liz, Sal, and Johnny Wareagle got to William T. Harris Elementary, it was almost deserted. Returning to the building for the first time since the shootout brought a nervous flutter to Liz’s stomach.
Maybe I shouldn’t have opened fire. Maybe I should have tried to talk the gunman calm. Maybe I should have waited for backup before doing anything at all … .
Feelings of self-doubt plagued her until she
remembered her father’s words. No way Buck would lie just to make her feel better. The fact that he said he would have done the same thing meant she had acted properly.
Johnny and Sal followed her into an office, empty save for a secretary clacking away behind an ancient IBM and an older man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, tinkering with an even older PA system’s console board.
“If the two of you came to pick up your kid,” the man said, looking up, “we’re fresh out.” His eyes sharpened, seeming to recognize her. He climbed to his feet, a dull hum in the background indicating that the power switch on the PA had been left on. “Mrs. Halprin, please forgive me. I didn’t recognize you.”
“Makes us even,” Liz returned, realizing this was Arthur Frawley, the school principal, who had supported her in the press all along. He had his ever-present walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, even though there was no one left to speak with in the building. “I was hoping you’d let me take a look at something. A file.”
Frawley cast a quick glance at Wareagle. “Should I consider this official business?”
“Yes.”
“Something to do with what’s happening in the city?”
“I’ll let you know after I take a look,” Liz told him.
“You ready to tell me what we’re looking for?” Blaine asked, sweeping his flashlight about the dark and dreary basement as Les Carney rummaged around.
Carney stopped and looked at him. “Smell it?”
“Smell what?”
“The odor comes and goes,” Carney said, shifting some boxes aside near the center of the floor. “That’s why we always have trouble pinning down the source.”
The clinic’s boiler room was lined with ancient pipes running haphazardly in all directions. The frothy thunk of blowers pushing air and the clacking of an occasional baffle opening and closing added to the eeriness of the scene. Puzzled, Blaine watched as Carney crouched down over a relatively clear patch of the asphalt floor, near the center of the basement.
“Just what I thought …”
That section of the floor was lined by small hairline cracks in the shape of a spiderweb, some too small even to wedge a fingernail through. Carney moved toward a sink, and Blaine heard water running as he knelt to make his own inspection. He was still tracing the cracks with his finger when Carney returned with a rusted steel bucket full of water. He poured the water out into a wide pool and then watched it bubble slightly while it drained through the hairline cracks into the floor.
“This is where the gas is coming from,” Carney announced. “This is why the patients upstairs were getting sick.”
“Where what was coming from?”
“Methane,” Carney announced, with a flatness Blaine quickly realized came from fear. “That’s how Tyrell’s going to blow up the city.”
Liz held the folder in her hand, almost hypnotized by it. The answers were right before her, in the birth certificate clipped to the file Mr. Frawley had provided: why Jack Tyrell had come back, why he had targeted New York City. McCracken had told her about Tyrell’s son. Only he had been wrong, wrong and right at the same time.
She dialed Sam Kirkland’s cell phone number. He answered on the first ring, obviously expecting it to be someone else.
“I thought you were McCracken.”
“I figured it out,” Liz told him. “Why Tyrell’s doing this.”
“I really need to keep this—”
“Tyrell’s son was killed in the shootout at the school, but it wasn’t the gunman.” She steadied herself with a deep breath. “It was the teacher, goddamn it! Tell McCracken that Tyrell’s son was the teacher!”
“McCracken, where the hell—”
“Your line was busy,” Blaine told Kirkland.
“I was talking to your friend Halprin.”
“Where was she?”
“The damn school. She says the teacher killed in the shootout was Tyrell’s son! According to his birth certificate, he was born one week before the Mercantile Bank bombing.”
“Just like the man from Black Flag said …”
Blaine felt a brief surge of static pass through him, as he was struck by the irony that the offspring of Jack Tyrell had grown into an upstanding citizen, only to suffer the violent fate his father had managed to avoid against all odds for so long.
“We’ve struck out across the whole city,” Kirkland told him. “We’ve got to get you to New York Harbor and pay this asshole. It’s over.”
“No, it’s not. Listen to me, Kirkland. Those circles on the map represent pockets of methane gas that have collected beneath the sewers and storm drains. Tyrell’s going to set off the Devil’s Brew in close enough vicinity to these pockets to create a ripple of explosions that will collapse the entire city.”
Silence.
“You hear me, Kirkland?”
“Shit …”
“You can do better than that … .”
“No, it’s Tyrell. He’s calling with your final instructions.”
Still standing in the office of her son’s former elementary school, Liz thought she finally understood why Jack Tyrell was doing this. She thought of him watching his son grow up from afar, never making contact with him as a boy or a man, accepting that as a necessary sacrifice of the life he had chosen. It wasn’t hard to imagine his son’s senseless death being enough to push him back over the edge, considering the gut-splitting terror she had felt when bullets had whizzed dangerously close to Justin.
If only her aim had been better … If only that ricochet hadn’t—
“Mr. Balls on his way?”
The voice echoing scratchily over the PA snapped her alert again. Mr. Frawley, the principal, jerked away from the console, banging his head.
“En route now, Tyrell.”
“Here’s what he’s got to do … .”
She was listening to Jack Tyrell! His latest phone call to City Hall had somehow been picked up by the walkie-talkie clipped to Mr. Frawley’s belt and then broadcast over the school PA system.
“He must be on the same frequency,” said Johnny Wareagle.
Liz stared at Frawley’s walkie-talkie. “What’s the range of that thing?”
“A few blocks,” Sal Belamo answered. “At the most.”
“The manhole cover! Hurry!”
Blaine lifted it off and set it down to one side, while Les Carney nervously checked the map yet again, seeing it in a whole new way. Blaine watched him trace the circles with his finger.
“He must have planted the Devil’s Brew along this line. Like playing connect the dots.”
McCracken was still waiting for Kirkland to come back on the line. “And what are our chances of disconnecting the charges?”
“Not very good.”
“Even knowing the locations?”
“Knowing the general sites doesn’t help much underground. There are five thousand miles of sewer lines and interconnected storm drains beneath the city. Our teams could be down there for days, weeks even, and never come across the Devil’s Brew.”
“They’ve got seventy-five minutes,” said McCracken.
The chopper slid through the sky, angling for the center of Madison Square Park as Blaine waited with the cell phone pressed against his ear.
“Tyrell’s orders are for us to place all the gems in airtight hazardous waste containers,” Kirkland explained. “After that we load the containers—and you—onto a boat at Pier Sixty-six.”
“Then what?”
“He hasn’t said yet.”
The chopper was coming in for a landing, its rotor wash spraying Blaine with dirt and debris. “Try this out: He strands me in the harbor and sets the rest of his underwater mines to go off.”
“I’m working on that.”
“Work fast.”
And, crouching, Blaine rushed for the chopper.
FIFTY-SIX
Les Carney swept his flashlight before him, stopping occasionally to shine it upon his explosives sensor, in the hope it might regis
ter some sign of Devil’s Brew. The sewer tunnel dipped sharply, and Carney picked up his pace. He realized he was under the city’s West Side sector, slated to be the first to undergo drastic repairs and upgrades, needed to bring the system into the twenty-first century. This particular tunnel, cut off for years, ended in a mass of rubble where back-flow had caused lines to rupture and collapse, the damage so great that the section had been bypassed instead of rebuilt. The resulting effect was that of a cavern or cave.
Carney was under no illusions that the other bomb squad teams would be as successful in their explorations. Before taking over the Department of Transportation, he had been a top assistant with the Department of Environmental Protection, responsible for drafting a twenty-year plan to rebuild New York City’s crumbling sewer system. During those months, this multilevel maze of sewers, storm drains, and abandoned railroad tunnels had become his world—one he knew not only from firsthand experience but also from an exhaustive study of schemas, maps, and blueprints.
Still, New York City’s system of sewers and storm drains had been revamped, renewed, restored, and renovated so often that no map was totally accurate. Some parts of the oldest piping were actually made of wood, and this section of the West Side, not far from the main laterals, was in the worst disrepair of any. The labyrinthine tunnels ended without warning, having been bypassed or abandoned years before, the levels built atop one another. Somehow Jack Tyrell had managed to find the same mothballed series of train tunnels running beneath the main sewer lines that Carney had selected to house the first stage of the new sanitation infrastructure. No way could Kirkland’s teams ever come to the same conclusion knee-deep in muck with no idea of what lay beneath them. And down here there was no way he could use his cell phone or walkie-talkie to alert them. Their searches for Devil’s Brew, almost certainly, would yield nothing in the few minutes that remained.