Message Begins Urgent
Message Origin: U.S. Marshals Squad, Bronx Borough, South Bronx; USMS HQ; DOJ Date and time of Transmission: 18 September, 2215 hours
Message Recipients: IFO; FAT, NYPD; JTF-6, FBI Federal FAT of Greater New York; NYPD Traffic Dept.
See BOLO-CIA internal communication US9164-CT 4779, 0107TWEP See VICAP and NCIC link to BOLO
Message: U.S. and International fugitive, Hunter Caulfield, positively identified in New York City, Manhattan between 1522 and 1630 18 September. Computerized facial recognition confirms two verified sightings, one for subject walking in front of Henderson’s 24 Hour Grill on 42nd Street, and the second for subject leaving Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the main New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, one hour later. At library, subject was wearing postal worker uniform. Unconfirmed sighting, Daniel McGinty’s 24 Hour Bar and Grill at 81 West 31st Street, Precinct 14, Midtown South at 2100 hours.
Request: Immediate emergency dispatch of available units. IFO, Brooklyn nearest and has the lead. Coordinate by telephone. Do not wait for backup. All units move with all haste—lights and sirens. NYPD traffic division to coordinate route and traffic control
Comment: Subject is extremely dangerous. Full riot gear mandatory. Expect heavy gun fire response to approach by officers. RTA [Return to Archive] notation-CIA, FBI, Interpol. Special note: Presidential Green Light
There are 2,397 security surveillance cameras in Manhattan, plus 55 sighted on the major traffic arteries and 4,313 on the subway system. The vast computerized network of interrelated cameras includes Visionics company software, Facelt—which automatically locates faces in complex scenes—and Software and Systems International software—Mandrake, with a truly remarkable ability to identify faces. Mandrake identifies, collates, and separates faces even in crowds, taking into account head orientation, lighting, conditions, facial expression, aging, and attempts at disguise. The cameras are found in doorways, alcoves and above garage doors. There are full and half sphere globe cameras on light poles, on the corners of buildings, outside stores, and on the vast majority of restaurants and bars.
The camera mounted between the first and second stories of the Lennox Palace Hotel and focused on the hotel’s entrancewhich was also the entrance into Daniel McGinty’s 24 Hour Bar and Grillregistered two separate facial identification images during the previous 48 hours that were decoded by the system’s computer to correspond to the face of international fugitive, Hunter Caulfield. Close monitoring of the video feed from the hotel did not reveal the fugitive leaving.
The second message came immediately on the tail of the first printing:
Message Begins
Message Origin: RCMP Border Security Houlton, CPIC
Date and Time of Transmission: 18 September, 2128 hours
Message Recipient: IFO; FAT, NYPD; JTF-6, FBI Federal FAT of Greater New York; NYPD Traffic Dept., Interagency Fugitive Operations, Federal Building, Court Street, Brooklyn, NYC, Canadian CPIC [Canadian Police Information Centre] and FIRS-Canada-wide (Federal Information Relay Service)
See BOLO-CIA internal communication US9164-CT 4779, 0107TWEP
See VICAP and NCIC link to BOLO
Message: FYI. Possible sighting of subject of BOLO, Hunter Caulfield. Suspicious vehicle at border crossing late hours of 16 September, 2305 hours. Vehicle left in small private airport and suspicious persons entered helicopter and left without flight plan. Possible that one of the suspicious persons may be fugitive Caulfield entering Canada illegally.
“A day late and a dollar short,” Linc said. “Grab the next one and let’s get out of here. Hey, Franks and Tomlin, suit up, full gear, we have a big one. Expect action. We’ll give details en route. Head for Midtown South.”
The third transmission followed the first two, and was an automatic response to the RCMP message. That response had been prepared in advance by Yuri Yurievich Chopiak in faraway Khimki in the event that a new directive tied Sheep Dog to anyplace in Canada. It was directed to every federal agency involved in fugitive apprehension. Below the Message Recipient line the photograph of a Great Pyrenees sheep dog printed out. After that, the Interagency Fugitive Operations computer crashed. The same thing happened to the all 94 offices of the USMS FBI, ATF, DEA, JTF-6, NCIC, VICAP, FLO, NYPD FAT SQUAD, INS, CIA, NSC, all state and D.C. police and major city police offices, Canadian CPIC, FIRS-Nationwide, U.K.-Scotland Yard, U.K. wide Special Police Forces, SOCA-Serious Organized Crime Agency, French Gendarmerie National and Police Nationale, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and Ministry of Internal Affairs Militsiya, OMON: Russian—Отряд милиции особого назначения; Otryad Militsii Osobogo Naznacheniya, and Special Purpose Police Unit [OMOH] computers.
The result was a Chinese fire drill—or maybe a better analogy—is a Keystone Cop movie scenario involving blind lunatics in an unsupervised race to McGinty’s.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
2200 Hours, 18 September
Daniel McGinty’s 24 Hour Bar and Grill
When Sheep Dog arrived in New York City he searched for the most inconspicuous place to flop in Manhattan. He chose a room on the 15th floor of the Lennox Palace Hotel at 81 West 31st Street, 14 floors above a sleazy all night Irish bar and grill called Daniel McGinty’s even though it was owned by a small time hood named Rodrigo “Bad Tooth” Delatante, a Sicilian. Sheep Dog scouted out the room and made sure he had a good view of 31st Street and Fashion Avenue below and an easy escape route up the elevator or fire escape to the roof. The hotel had a breeze way bridge across to the next door Harmony Franks Office Building and Factory.
At nine o’clock, he came down from his room and found a small booth and took a Naugahyde covered seat in the polluted atmosphere of the bar. He ordered a Bud Lite and a grilled cheese sandwich. The cigarette and cigar smoke in the air was thick enough to cut. The Southern black man sitting at the table next to him was eating a bowl of dry Golden Flake cereal and alternatively drinking from a bottle of chocolate milk and a bottle of Thunderbird Wine, one of the three vintages offered in McGintys. Three older addicts hunched in a darkened booth and cooked up “Chiva”—Spanish colloquialism for heroin—and a small group of young men prepared to shoot up DOI—2,5-Dimethoxy-4-Iodoamphetamine, an hallucinogenic. “To each his own,” Sheep Dog thought.
The dim view afforded the discerning late night patron of McGinty’s included a Genesee Beer sign, a plastic reproduction of a green St. Pauli’s Beer bottle—a beer that did not sell because it was expensive—a Muriel Cigar clock, two tired and world weary waitresses, and a huge black man in a sleeveless, dirty, once white undershirt who served as a bouncer and janitor. A few men were scattered at card tables playing Liars Dice and a variety of brands of poker—Omaha, 7-Card Stud, and Texas Holdem. There were two billiards tables with noisy and profane games of 8-ball and snooker underway. It was a room full of drunks—men and women—air full and hazy with cancerous cigarette and cigar smoke, the smell of stale beer and sweat mingled with Bay Rum, Old Spice, and a hint of sweetness from a marijuana joint. The sound of constant white noise punctuated with intermittent strains of a Tito Puente or a Garth Brooks song formed the background music for the scene.
Outside, the occasional ambulance or police siren whined; but otherwise McGinty’s shut out the intrusions of the streets and real life. No one talked to anyone else, and no one could see all the way across the room. For a few days, it was Sheep Dog’s kind of place. At quarter of eleven, he finished his beer and sandwich and paid cash for his meal and a tip. He rode the elevator nonstop to the 15th floor and entered his room and double chain locked the door. Being his usual overly cautious self, he took one last look out onto the streets below. A light rain had begun to fall, and the usually dark streets were now opaque in the gloom. The street light on the corner was out, and only the glow of lights from across the street gave any hint that there was a future on the lifeless streets.
As he was about to turn away and get in
to bed, he saw—for the first time—something out of place on the street below. It had not been there before. He looked intently now. What he was seeing was the furtive movements of men running in zigzag patterns towards the hotel carrying the faint lights of neon glow sticks—policemen holding the lights to identify each other in the murk of the night. Despite his tiredness, Sheep Dog sprang into action. He did not give a nanosecond’s thought that this could have anything to do with anyone else but him.
It was his rule never to spread out his things in a hotel room or put anything into a drawer. He swept up his satchel of false passports, driver’s licenses, three guns, and a change of clothes and sprinted to the door. He peered out of the peep-hole; and, seeing no one in the dimly lit hall, he quietly and quickly went out into the hall. He ran to the elevator jumping up to knock off the ceiling light bulbs as he went. He got on the elevator and hit the top floor button.
Below, in McGinty’s 24 Hour Bar and Grill there was pandemonium. The first four U.S. Marshals entered through the doors and another set crashed through the street level window taking out the Beetle’s poster from the sixties and the Red Hot Chili Peppers band sticker from the nineties in the crash. Gallon jugs of Thunderbird and Gallo crashed off the shelves screwed onto the mirror behind the bar. The drunks cowered under their seats, and the bouncer/janitor was run over like a high school freshman football guard in an NFL game.
The heavily armed marshals shouted orders and flashed Hunter Caulfield’s photo to everyone in the room, none of whom could contribute a thing, and the only thing that came of that futile effort was a lot of blubbering and slurred denials. Linc Goodworth cornered the bar keep and shoved the photo in his face.
“I never seen him,” the half-drunk Irishman whimpered.
“He lives here, punk. Try again.”
The bartender wanted nothing more than to get the behemoth out of his face and away from his space.
He relented in his protestations of ignorance, “Yeah, maybe. There’s a guy what stays upstairs who maybe looks somethin’ like that. The book’s over by the phone. Your guess is as good as mine which room he’s stayin’ in.”
Linc hurried to the hotel register book and turned to the last page. He ran his index finger over each entry listing a man who booked into the hotel in the past four days. This yielded six men on as many floors. He shouted orders to five officerssome FBI, some ATF, and some USMSto head to the respective floors and gave each officer a name and room number. He took the one on the fifteenth floor himself. The elevator ride was a scene of frustrating chaos. Each officer pushed the button for his assigned floor, and the creaking old elevator moved with glacial celerity up the shaft, stopping at five floors and letting an officer out. The hotel shortly became a nightmare of door banging, shouting, and the tossing of several flash-bang grenades. The air filled with acrid smoke as the officers met the occupants in a cacophonous, blasphemous one-sided conflict.
On the sixth floor, a late-middle aged African American couple was startled out of their sleep by a marshal breaking down their door. The befuddled woman asked her husband, if it was the Dominos Pizza delivery man.
“No, Sophronia,” her husband said, “it’s the cavalry.”
Marshal Goodworth finally got to the fifteenth floor. His psychological fuse was lit and sputtering by the time all of the stopping and scrambling to get out of the elevator and into action had come to an end. He burst out of the elevator and raced to the end of the hall to number 1521 and banged on the door.
“U.S. Marshals. Open up!” he shouted three times.
He waited a full second and then kicked the door in. The door reluctantly splintered open after four bone-jarring front kicks. Three seconds later, he was satisfied that the room was clear. The only evidence that the room had been occupied was the fact that the bed spread was rumpled. He decided to act on a hunch, having nothing else to go on. He raced back to the elevators and waited for what seemed like an interminable period of time before the middle elevator came back down from floors above the fifteenth.
That confirmed Linc’s hunch, and he punched the topmost floor button—the 32nd—and rode to the top. He found the stairs and raced up the single flight of stairs to the metal door that led out onto the roof. He had to stop to catch his breath and to curse his own failure to keep in shape. He was hampered by the good forty-five pounds of gear he was packing. The order to suit up in full riot gear was roundly hated by every marshal and cop on the job because the gear was so hot and heavy to pack around that it impeded mobility. You had to be an Olympic marathoner and weight lifter to run in all that stuff.
In addition to his own not inconsiderable bulk, Linc was carrying a Kevlar second-chance vest with ceramic trauma plate. Around his waist he had a Sam Browne black webbed leather belt loaded with gear: a Beretta 9 mm semiautomatic, 2 sets of mat-black handcuffs, two extra 15 round magazines and a Smith & Wesson 9 mm on a shoulder holster rig, a can of Mace, a Mini-Maglite and a large Maglite with four D-cell batteries on belt hooks. He had a portable radio attached to a microphone mounted on his left shoulder, his gold Marshall’s star badge on a leather clip next to his large belt buckle, and slung over his shoulder a Heckler and Koch MP-5K minisubmachine gun with a half moon shaped magazine of 30 mm full metal jacketed bullets. His armamentarium was topped off with four flash-bang stun grenades, and, for good measure a Monadnock billy club.
Linc took a deep breath and blasted himself through the door and onto the roof into a defensive crouch. He saw no one near the door, and he was equally convinced that no one was on the roof as he raced around the periphery in a very quick search. He was about to admit that his hunch had been wrong when he heard the faint clatter of feet. He looked across to the next building top just in time to see a fleeing figure approach the far side of that roof.
He ran at sprint speed to the breeze way bridge between the two roof tops and across to the other side puffing, sweating, and swearing as he went. Breaths were coming hard now. He reached the roof’s edge and peered over at the fire escape in time to see his quarry descending with considerable speed and agility. He could not even tell if it was a man or a woman; but since he or she was running away from a cop, he or she had to be bad.
“Stop or I’ll shoot,” he choked out, having difficulty coming up with enough air to get out a good authoritarian order.
He didn’t have the breath for another yell; so, he fired three quick shots. He knew it would be nothing short of a miracle if he hit the guy, and all that came of it was the high pitched metallic ping of ricochets bouncing off the metal fire escape steps. He bit the figurative bullet and started down the rickety ladder clinging on for dear life and afraid that the extra weight would put him off the ladder for a thirty story fall. He somehow made it to the bottom and was—by then, soaked in sweat—and heaving for breath. He placed his hands on his knees to catch enough wind to be able to get on. He shouted into his shoulder radio for back up.
Frank Jefferies responded, “Where are you Linc?”
Linc coughed into the radio, “Nearing the corner of West 30th and Fashion. Perp’s headed west on 30th towards 8th Ave. Get everybody out of the Lennox and onto the street. I am in pursuit of a definite fleeing suspect who fits our guy.”
He ran out onto 30th as fast as his lungs and his equipment would let him move. He hated all the stuff on his Sam Browne. For one thing, as he ran, all those heavy pieces of equipment banged bruises on his butt and—if he turned just right—gave him a good jab in midline places he would be embarrassed to mention in polite company. He moved along fast enough just to be able to see the perp round the corner of 8th Ave, a block below Penn Station, and head southwest towards 29th Street.
He called that information in to Frank and continued to run. Suddenly, he felt a crushing, overwhelming substernal chest pain that radiated down his left arm and up into his left jaw. Everything started to go black. He knew that he was experiencing the classical deadly symptoms of a heart attack. He presumed that he was a dead
man as he pitched forward and landed on his face on the pavement.
Marshal Frank Jefferies came running down 30th behind Linc and was horrified to see his partner lying inert on the sidewalk. He assumed the worst. He knelt over Linc’s body and felt for a carotid pulse. It was there but thready. His partner was alive, but barely.
Frank caught his breath and called in the “officer down” code and Linc’s location. He decided that there was nothing he really could do for his partner and took off after the perp. The figure rounded the corner on 29th still heading west. Frank called that fact in and ran as hard as he had ever done in his life. As he passed an alley in the middle of 29th, he heard a man’s voice which startled him as if he had touched an electric wire.
“Stop!” the disembodied voice commanded.
Frank reflexively went for the Tec-Nine on his belt.
Sheep Dog had wanted to avoid at all costs what was going to happen next. He purposely held the Springfield XDN 9 mm hoping that he would be able to put a pursuing police officer out of commission without killing him by stunning the cop with a couple of well placed rounds in the man’s Kevlar vest that knocked him down. Frank Jefferies was about to have further reason to thank the policy requiring the vest and ceramic insert. Sheep Dog fired another two rounds directly into Frank’s vest stunning him and taking away his ability to breathe. He had not put in the “cop-killer” rounds; so, the marshal would have vividly memorable bruises when he came to; but neither round would penetrate into his chest; and he would live to work another day.
Sheep Dog took a quick look into the street. No one had as yet come to back up the two marshals, but he could hear the wailing sirens approaching. He sprinted to West 28th where he saw a Yellow Cab waiting on the street by Chelsea Park. The cab driver was taking a cell phone call. It is illegal for a professional driver to use a cell phone while driving, and the elderly Hungarian immigrant was not about to take a chance on losing his license. It was hot and muggy out and a fine rain still misted the air. He had opened the driver’s side window to get some air into his environment of tobacco smoke and mugginess.
Sheep Dog and the Wolf Page 45