by Jon Land
Suddenly an acrid stench assaulted Carney’s nostrils. He proceeded until he nearly gagged. Water was dripping nearby, pooling en route to a slow drop through a fissure in the floor to the cavernous sublayers of Manhattan. Carney lit a match and extended it toward the crack, jumping back when a blue flame sparked and surged upward before he tossed it aside.
He steadied himself, trying not to breathe too deeply, aware he had found one of Tyrell’s methane pockets. He stepped back and started on again, sweeping his explosives sensor, rigged to the specific signature of Devil’s Brew, from side to side across the width of the tunnel.
Sam Kirkland dashed out of the elevator on the ninth floor of the FBI’s New York headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza. His knees ached and cracked, punishment for the pounding they had taken through years of football. They had begun to hurt so much the last few years that he’d had to give up jogging, and now a dash even halfway down the hall left him gasping and damp with sweat by the time he reached the office he was looking for.
The spacious office was wall-to-wall machines, so many, arranged so haphazardly, that they looked as though they’d been tossed in and left where they landed. Sitting on the floor amidst them, with his blue-jeaned legs crossed and a charred piece of steel balanced upon them, was a bearded man with a long ponytail. Kirkland didn’t know his real name; like everyone else in the building, he knew him only as “Mr. Peabody,” after the little dog who operated the Wayback Machine with a boy named Sherman on The Bullwinkle Show.
Mr. Peabody was an expert at deciphering codes and frequencies, at linking a bomb to its makers by the unique signature it gave off. He had been a key player in the World Trade Center bombing investigation and the subsequent capture of the terrorist team responsible, thereby preempting far more catastrophic attacks. Some people in the building swore he hadn’t left his office since.
Mr. Peabody looked up nonchalantly from his scrutiny of the chip from the receiver recovered near the Queensboro Bridge. “This is a hell of a piece of work, let me tell ya. I’d like to dance with the dude who made it.”
“I think I can arrange that,” Kirkland told him.
Chief Logan personally led one of the three convoys speeding toward New York Harbor under massive police security. The diamonds had been loaded into armored cars at each of the banks where they’d been stored and then had been provided with a visible and ominous escort.
According to Logan’s specifications, along all three routes police cruisers covered both flanks, as well as the fronts and rears of the armored cars. Additionally, all side streets had been blocked off and mounted patrol officers stationed at regular intervals to keep bystanders back. Though traffic lights continued to function, as they had all day, the streets had been cleared of all other vehicles, allowing the convoys to streak without delay to their destination at New York Harbor.
Mr. Peabody had taken a seat in one of the chairs now, shoving everything he didn’t need from one of his work stations to the floor.
“Well?” Kirkland asked him, after explaining what they were up against.
“Okay, what I got to do is identify the frequency Sherman’s using to talk to his mines in the harbor and then insert another signal into the code to confuse the son of a bitch.”
Kirkland glanced forlornly at the chip Mr. Peabody had had no luck with yet. “Slim odds at best, in other words.”
Peabody wheeled his desk chair sideways to a different computer. “Hell, no, ’cause the difference this time is I’m gonna be waiting when he sends the signal itself.”
“Then you’re saying you can do it?”
Peabody smirked. “Last time I couldn’t crack a code of any kind was ’cause my Johnny Quest decoder ring came broke out of a cereal box.”
McCracken spotted the three armored cars as his helicopter descended toward New York Harbor. Their collective cargo of fifteen billion dollars in diamonds was presumably now inside the concrete storage hangar extending down the slip. There the diamonds would be placed in the toxic waste containers, which would in turn be loaded onto a boat he was prepared to pilot in keeping with Jack Tyrell’s instructions.
Blaine knew he would be safe so long as those containers were on board, the mines switched off until he got to wherever he was instructed to go. But he also knew that as soon as delivery was complete, Tyrell would be free to switch the mines back on, leaving Blaine in the middle of the Hudson River to face the same fate as the flotilla sunk just a few hours before.
It was one fifty-five by the time the chopper touched down and Blaine rushed out toward Chief Logan, who was waving at him from the head of the pier.
On the George Washington Bridge, Public Safety Commissioner Bob Corrothers joined Warren Muldoon near the edge of the huge chasm blown in the upper deck. He stopped slightly behind the balding, bespectacled city engineer, who was called “Mr. Magoo” behind his back. Corrothers was astounded to see Muldoon standing fearlessly a shoe length away from the giant hole, while Corrothers himself had all he could do to stop his stomach from quivering as he stood five feet back.
“I see you’ve been busy,” he said lamely.
Muldoon kept his eyes on the sky, as if waiting for something to appear over the horizon. “I E-mailed the specifications to my counterpart in Jersey. He managed to locate everything we need, and three freight helicopters have already been loaded.” He checked his watch briefly. “They should be here any minute.”
“Freight helicopters?”
“You’ll see.”
Corrothers grasped a nearby steel support and turned his gaze in the same direction.
Blaine climbed down the short ladder onto the deck of the harbormaster’s patrol boat, a converted cabin cruiser. Along the pier, a platoon of police led by Chief Logan escorted the huge drums filled with diamonds toward the boat.
McCracken’s cellular phone rang.
“It’s one fifty-seven. We’ve got to make this fast,” said Sam Kirkland. “One of my men, dressed as a cop, is going to hand you a homing beacon when the containers of diamonds are lowered onto your boat.”
“Homing beacon?”
“Whatever happens,” Kirkland told him, “this son of a bitch isn’t going to get away.”
“What about the mines?”
“Tyrell’s got to turn them off before he can send you anywhere. We’ll have the frequency jammed from this end before he turns them back on. My man’s also going to give you a second cell phone, programmed with the number I gave Tyrell. Keep the line open on the phone you’ve got now, and put on that earpiece I gave you back at City Hall.”
“Already in place.”
“Okay. I’ll be able to hear what Tyrell says and talk to you the whole time.”
A trio of cops under heavy guard climbed down the ladder and joined Blaine in the boat. The airtight toxic waste barrels, gleaming in the sun, were placed one at a time on a mechanical platform built into the pier, then they were lowered. The officers reached upward to guide the barrels and then carefully hoisted each of them down to the deck in the boat’s stern. The stern settled a bit. One of the cops extended a hand.
“Good luck,” the man said.
Blaine took his hand and felt the homing beacon, encased in a tiny Ziploc bag, pressed into his palm.
“Just stick it on like a stamp,” he instructed, then gave McCracken a second cell phone, which rang as if on cue.
“I was just thinking,” greeted Jack Tyrell.
“That supposed to be some kind of first?”
“Don’t be rude, Mr. Balls. Here we are, a couple old warriors from another generation. You off fighting the same war I was fighting to stop.”
“What’s your point?”
“That we both had our time and now we’re back.”
“Some of us never left.”
“That was my other point,” said Tyrell. “How for a lot of the years in between we were working for the same boss, doing lots of the same shit. Then we run into each other at the Monument. Now here we
are, together again. Must be fate.”
“Maybe just bad luck.”
“Question is whose? Kinda funny when you think of it that way.”
“Too many people have died today for me to laugh.”
“I killed more than this in one day before. Difference is today I did it for myself.”
“I know about your son, Jack.”
“You know he’s dead?”
“I know he was a teacher, got killed for no good reason at all.”
“Life sucks, don’t it? Kid plays by the rules, only wants to do good. And some crazy with a machine gun walks into a classroom, a fucking classroom, and he takes a bullet in the head. But men like you and me, who never played by the rules, we’re still at it. Makes you wonder.”
“Don’t compare him to us.”
“Old soldiers who shoulda been put down—that’s what we are. We stick around ’cause we don’t know anything else. My kid tries to do some good and gets dead because of it. Dies with a piece of chalk in his hand, not a gun. I goddamn had to do something.”
“The guy who killed him’s already dead, Jack,” Blaine said, realizing Tyrell must have bought the story given to the press that mentioned nothing about Liz Halprin’s culpability.
“But not the society that spawned him. That’s where you and I part ways, Mr. Balls. You’re part of the system that’s gotten all fucked up. We’re both outcasts, fuck-ups in our own way. We’re from the same time, created by the same war, except on different sides. It’s like we’re twins. I’m just willing to go farther to set things right again.”
“How does blowing up a city set things right again?”
“Gotta make people take notice before they take action, ’cause no one believes in anything anymore. Well …”
In the command center, Jack Tyrell stopped long enough to glance at the men working their posts, every single eye upon him. They had all traveled with him and Midnight Run for some period after time served in the SDS, the Weatherman movement, or the Black Panthers. Restless men who had gone into hiding but never stopped missing the life that set them apart.
“ … we believed,” he continued, “and it cost us our identities, sometimes even our names and faces. But we stopped a war. Today nobody out there can even stop a clock.”
“There’s no war to stop today, Tyrell.”
“Yes, there is, Mr. Balls, and I’m declaring it. I’m declaring war on this whole damn country. You think it ends here, today? Bullshit. This is just the beginning. I’m gonna be visiting plenty of other cities. Put the whole damn country on notice, make everyone wonder where I’m headed next. Gonna get so people barricade their own doors until I get what I want.”
“And what’s that?”
“Satisfaction.”
“Tough to pack that into a toxic waste canister.”
“Guess I’ll have to settle for what you’ve got packed into that container now.”
“Fifteen billion the price tag you’re putting on your satisfaction?”
“Got to hit people where it hurts, my friend. Money’s all anyone pays attention to these days.”
“And maybe it’s all you’re really after. No better than anyone else who takes hostages. Same as the scumbag that killed your son … and the scumbags from Black Flag who sent you to ice the Monument.”
“I see you’ve done your homework.”
“They wanted me to go after you. You’ve become a nuisance to them, a piece of shit.”
“And they sent you to flush the toilet, that it? My, my, they’re just sending the both of us all over the place, aren’t they? From where I’m standing, that makes us the same.”
A long pause followed, Blaine wondering what Tyrell would say next.
“Trouble is you’re on the wrong side, Mr. Balls.”
“Facing off against you suits me just fine.”
“Then take your boat out to the center of the harbor and do it from there.”
McCracken turned on the engine of the harbor patrol boat, gazing back at the biohazard canisters stashed in the stern before inching away from the dock. He used only one hand on the wheel, keeping the cell phone pressed against his ear with the other one, and heard Jack Tyrell issue a single command.
“Deactivate the mines.”
The instant the mines were deactivated, information began flying across Mr. Peabody’s screen, his bar grids and wave indicators fluctuating madly. His headphones were on, frequencies dialed up on the screen before him. Two other machines laden with grids and wave flows held steady within easy view.
“Come on,” he said to himself, working the keyboard, “where are you? Where the fuck are you?”
Blaine eased the boat to a halt in what he judged to be the center of the harbor, halfway to New Jersey. The Statue of Liberty watched his every move now, along with the dozens of police back on the pier, who were mere specks from this distance.
McCracken brought the cell phone back to his ear. “What now, Jack?”
“Pop open the canisters and dump the diamonds overboard.”
“What?”
“You’re right, Mr. Balls, this isn’t about money; it never was. I just wanted to hit ’em where it hurt. Hey, people might tend to think I was crazy if I took a whole city hostage and didn’t ask for anything.”
“Because you planned to blow it up all along.”
“Do as I say and maybe I won’t. You seem to have a way of changing my mind.”
Blaine left the cell phone on a ledge in front of the wheel and moved to the boat’s stern. He unfastened the first canister’s sealed top and pried it off. With considerable effort, he tilted the canister over the gunwale and let the diamonds spill into the water. They clinked against each other, sounding almost like bells jangling as a few of them skittered across the currents. They hung on the surface briefly, then disappeared slowly beneath it toward the bottom of New York Harbor.
It was closing on two-fifteen when Liz and Johnny met Sal Belamo at a construction site on West Twenty-third Street a few blocks from William T. Harris Elementary School, where workers were rebuilding a section of sewers beneath an unusual motto: REBUILDING NEW YORK ONE RICK AT A TIME.
Her own efforts had so far been fruitless. The strength and duration of the signal the school PA system had accidentally picked up indicated clearly that Tyrell was in a three-or-four-block vicinity. But those blocks encompassed countless buildings, and all Tyrell needed was a single room from which to run his operation. Accordingly, she held little hope that either Johnny or Sal would have fared any better than she had.
But Sal, much to her surprise, approached her eagerly and gestured toward the construction pit. “Foreman down there remembers a tanker truck pulling into one of those tunnels this morning. Pretty close match for the rig you and the big fella here described from Pennsylvania. We better check it out.”
Liz frowned as she gazed into the darkness of the tunnels. “If the Devil’s Brew is down there, Tyrell won’t be far behind.”
“Good point,” Sal agreed. “The two of you take a walk. I’ll cover your backs.”
“How?”
Sal looked down into the construction pit. “Leave that to me.”
“You need to take this call,” Marbles told Jack Tyrell, handing him the headset he kept depositing around the command center. “It’s from the spotter watching the entrance to the sewers.”
“What is it?” Tyrell asked the spotter.
“A woman and an Indian just entered the tunnel via the Twenty-third Street construction site.”
“A woman and an Indian?” Tyrell asked incredulously, recalling the shootout yesterday in Pennsylvania.
“Less than a minute ago.”
Tyrell yanked off the headset and laid it atop the table before him. He considered the hulking shape of Lem Trumble, then fixed his gaze instead on the surviving Yost twin, Earl.
“I’ve got a job for you.”
Mr. Peabody swung round excitedly to face Sam Kirkland.
“
I got it, man!”
A single unvarying wave modulation had locked onto the center of his three screens, looking like the blueprint for the path of a roller coaster. He reached to his right and pressed a red button, causing a red light flashing over it to switch to green.
“Take that, asshole.”
“Tell me you’re not impressed, Mr. Balls,” Tyrell said to Blaine on the phone seconds after he had finished dumping the diamonds into the Hudson River.
“Nothing about you impresses me.”
“How ’bout how easy it’s going to be for me to kill you?” With that, Tyrell turned toward Marbles. “Reactivate the mines.”
Marbles worked his keyboard rapidly, then hit EXECUTE. He narrowed his gaze on the screen, scowling, then repeated the sequence.
“Er, something’s wrong here.”
Tyrell leaned over Marbles’ shoulder in disbelief. “Switch to a different frequency!”
“I’m trying!”
“It’s jammed!” Kirkland screeched into Blaine’s ear.
Across the office from him, Mr. Peabody was reclining comfortably, smoking an imaginary celebratory cigar. Suddenly long bands of figures began to fly across his computer screen. A noise like a bird chirping sounded at regular intervals, and the green light turned back to red.
Peabody rocked forward and squeezed his chair back under his desk.
“You’re better than I thought, Sherman,” he said out loud.
In the harbor, Blaine was racing for the pier, weaving through the mire of floating hulks and chunks of other craft, when an exploding mine blew the aft side of his boat apart. It spun out of control, directly into the path of another mine, which blew out its stern, hurling Blaine into the air. He hit the water hard and clawed back for the surface.