The Grave Above the Grave

by Bernie B. Kerik

  The desk officer leaned over and forward to hear what Allegra had to say. “We’re going to be doing a vest and weapons inspection. Everyone must be wearing a vest.” The DO looked at Allegra for a second, searching for any clues about what was up, then ordered everyone present to line up in two rows, and open the top of his or her uniform shirt so he could see the bulletproof vest underneath.

  Allegra then said, “Lieutenant John Picciano, from my office, who is standing on the side, is going to be checking your firearms. There was a cloud of confusion, but no one objected. One by one, the lieutenant took the automatic service weapon from each cop, walked over to the clearing barrel, cleared the weapon, checked the ammo, reloaded the gun, and walked back over to the officer and had him put it back in his holster.

  Hamadi was in the second row of cops. The lieutenant took his weapon, went to the clearing barrel, pulled out the magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, reloaded the gun, but this time, instead of returning the gun, he stuck it into his own waistband. The other officers turned and looked at Hamadi. Just then, the commissioner, Gallagher, and Jones and a number of FBI agents and police detectives walked through the door, with Breshill in tow, and just stood there.

  Raymond whispered something in Allegra’s ear and then turned to the front of the group. He stood at attention and then asked Hamadi to step front and center. He waited until Hamadi was there, directly in front of him. Raymond gave him a dead cold stare, leaned forward, and whispered into his ear, “You are a fucking piece of shit.”

  He took a step back and said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, “You are under arrest. Turn around and put your hands behind your back.” Raymond looked at Allegra. “Cuff him.”

  Just then, Jones leaned over to Raymond and said, “We’ve got someone to do this.” Raymond nodded. Allegra stepped back, and FBI special agent Michael Khoury, whom Raymond recognized from the FBI command center, walked directly in front of Hamadi.

  With his long hair pulled back and tied into a ponytail, a full beard, and dark skin, there was no doubt he was of Middle Eastern descent. He Mirandized Hamadi, closed his cuffs around the officer’s wrists, and said in Arabic, “You’re a disgrace to every Muslim American, and every cop in this country.” Hamadi said nothing as he stared at Khoury with murder in his eyes.

  Breshill, still standing near the door, watched the arrest of Hamadi go down, then was shoved out of the way as nearly a dozen FBI agents and NYPD cops walked Hamadi out and placed him in a Bureau car. It then sped off in a six-car caravan to 26 Federal Plaza.

  Raymond, Jones, and Breshill walked out the front door of the precinct in time to watch an NYPD robot close in on Hamadi’s vehicle, while just outside the gate, bomb dogs were being held with tight leashes, ready to do their thing.

  Breshill was out of his mind; Raymond had given him the whole thing, exclusive, and he had made notes of everything on his small spiral pad. Raymond turned to him and said, “Now do your job and report something that’s worth reporting for once.”

  CHAPTER 12

  7:30 am, Saturday, 14 October

  Raymond had gotten a much-needed full night’s sleep, and was in his office by seven the next morning. In front of him was the early edition of the New York Herald. The headline read:

  COMMISSIONER TAKES OUT TERROR COP

  Story by Sammy Breshill starts on page 3

  As Raymond read Breshill’s story, impressed with its accuracy and attention to detail, he knew this was not the end of anything. He couldn’t relax or bask in the capture of Hamadi. He knew the mastermind in Detroit was probably reading the same story, taking it all in. The way these cells worked, the cell members operated independently once they received their orders. No one knew who anyone else was, and each member only reported to one person, in this case, the guy in Detroit. Raymond knew he had to get him before the next attack took place. For all he knew, New York may have been a dry run, to see where the flaws were in the plan. Raymond was sure the next phase was likely already in place and ready to go.

  His cell phone rang. It was Sheilah. He punched her in. “What are you doing tonight? You have time for dinner? How about that Italian spot in Jersey City?”

  “I’ll be there at eight,” he said and hung up. The nondescript Italian restaurant in Jersey City was just on the other side of the Holland Tunnel. He then went across the street to meet up with the mayor, and together they held another press conference, one that was carried all over the world on CNN International. The eyes of the world on both sides of the war were on them.

  That night, Shelby and Archer drove him to Jersey City in the unmarked black Suburban. When they arrived, Raymond got out and was escorted by Archer through the back door of the restaurant to the private dining room, where Sheilah was waiting for him. As the curtain closed behind them, they kissed. Sheilah reached down and felt his hardness. “My, my, Commissioner, you’re always armed and ready!”

  He wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. Instead, they sat in their banquette, close, and shared martinis. “Tell me about your day, darling,” she murmured. That did get a laugh from Raymond.

  Archer left through the back, but did not go directly to the car. Instead, he surveyed the street from the shadow of the alley, stopping when he saw Breshill’s car pull up. How the fuck did he know where we were, Archer wondered, as he called Gallagher on his cell.

  “Okay,” Gallagher said. “Leave the commissioner alone to finish, but let him know before he comes out.”

  Gallagher, too, wondered how Breshill could possibly have known where they were, and was annoyed that the tip they had given him about Hamadi apparently hadn’t been enough. Okay, plan B, he told himself.

  Archer waited until they finished dinner, then advised Raymond that Breshill was outside in his car. Raymond was pissed off. He told Sheilah to remain behind for about 15 minutes; then he and Archer walked out to his car and left.

  Sheilah waited and then left the restaurant. Outside, her driver pulled the car up, and as she was about to get in, Breshill came up to her. He had dashed over as soon as he saw her. “Madame DA,” he said, “I’d like to ask you about your personal relationship with the police commissioner.” He had his pen and pad out. Sheilah stared at him, said nothing, and got into the back seat of her car. Her driver took off, leaving Breshill standing alone in front of the restaurant.

  As soon as her car emerged on the Manhattan side of the tunnel, she punched in Raymond’s number on her cell. He picked up immediately. He was, by now, almost home in Riverdale. Sheilah told him what happened. “We need to find out how this fucking guy knows every move we make,” Raymond said, as his phone began to buzz. “I’ve got to take this,” he said, and promised to call her back.

  It was Jones. “Detroit is talking to two players, one right outside of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the other in Vegas.”

  “Anything new from Hamadi?” Raymond asked.

  “Negative. We have JTTF teams from New York and Detroit on the way to Fayetteville, and two of my guys are heading to Las Vegas to personally assist and supervise. We know this—whatever they’re planning, it appears it’s going to happen the same day, same time. We believe we have 10 days to stop it.”

  “Okay,” Raymond said. “Keep me in the loop.”

  “Will do.”

  It was nearly midnight by the time he got back to his apartment. He opened the door, took his jacket off in the living room, walked into the bedroom where he dropped his clothes, and then went back to the living room and sat down on the couch. Taking some documents he had to go over, he spread them out on the glass coffee table. As he started to read, his mind drifted to Breshill, and within minutes, fell asleep on the couch, his pen still in his hand.

  He was awakened at 4:30 in the morning by a call on his cell phone. It was Gallagher. “Two cops involved in a motor vehicle accident in Brooklyn . . . injuries serious, not critical, both st
able.”

  “Okay,” Raymond said, blinking himself awake. “I’ll see them first thing in the morning, but listen, we need to find out how this fucking reporter knows my every move.”

  “I agree,” Gallagher said, and Raymond hung up. He figured he could squeeze another hour of sleep in. He never bothered to get off the couch, just stretched out and slipped back into nightmare-land.

  CHAPTER 13

  8:15 am, Monday, 16 October

  Gallagher arrived at his office at One Police Plaza, next to Raymond’s, and while having his first cup of coffee, called in Bob Timmins, the captain in charge of the commissioner’s protective detail. He gestured for Timmins to sit down in the chair opposite the desk.

  “Okay,” Gallagher said, “we have a problem. How does this reporter Breshill know every move the commissioner makes, on duty and off? Everywhere he goes. How is that even possible? I hate to say it, but is it possible this fucker has a tracking device on his car? How is it possible?! Could it be one of our guys?”

  The captain stared back at Gallagher, wondering if he had lost his mind. “No way, sir. There’s no way.”

  “All right,” Gallagher said, raising his hands as if he were waving, “then he must have a device under our car. How else could he know everything?”

  “We can try something,” Timmins said. He picked up Gallagher’s desk phone and punched in the number of the department’s deputy commissioner of technology. While he was holding, he asked Gallagher to write down the reporter’s cell phone number. “Listen,” the captain said, when the deputy commissioner came on the line, “the commissioner wants you to run this number through our system. I need to know any cell phone or hard line department phone that calls that number.”

  “Roger.”

  “Today.”

  “Yes, sir.” The deputy commissioner hung up the phone. “I’ll let you know how we make out.”

  Gallagher nodded his head and gestured with his hand for Timmins to leave. As Timmins got to the door, Gallagher repeated, “Today.”

  “Roger that.”

  Raymond arrived at eight-thirty, poured himself a cup of black coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his messages. The first slip had Gallagher’s name on it. He walked over to the door to Gallagher’s office, opened it, and said, “Come here.” When Gallagher walked into the office, Raymond held up the pink slip. He was smiling as he said, “Why do you find it necessary to give Janey your messages to me, when your door is closer to mine than hers, and you have a direct intercom to me and can walk in here anytime you please? Yet you feel the need to leave a fucking message with Janey?”

  Gallagher had a big shit-eating grin on his face while Raymond was on his rant, and when Raymond had concluded, Gallagher said, “Every once in a while I walk in here and you give a look like I’m intruding on your territory, so I figured I’d just give you some space and act like the rest of your minions and make an appointment.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Raymond said, laughing as he threw the crumpled-up pink slip at Gallagher. Then he asked, “What are we going to do about this fucking reporter?”

  Gallagher was holding a container of coffee in one hand and a half-eaten roll in the other, crumbs spilling down the front of his shirt as he took a bite. He took a wash-down sip before speaking. “I’m on it. I’ve got Timmins checking something out. Give us a day or two.” Raymond nodded his head up and down, frowned, and told Gallagher to keep him informed every step of the way as they both got up and went to the conference room for the morning cabinet meeting.

  They were last to arrive. Already there were Department Chief Allegra, First Deputy Commissioner Joe Nagle, the other deputy commissioners, and all the bureau chiefs, ready to discuss the business of the day. First came a review of the city’s crime numbers. They were down, which pleased Raymond. A city councilman’s daughter was busted for possession. One of the mayor’s assistants was involved in a domestic dispute. The deputy commissioner of budget and management reported that he was unable to come to terms with the mayor’s budget office. “If they take any more money out of special ops, all of our horses in the mounted unit will die because there will be no hay to feed them.”

  Raymond listened to all of it, thinking to himself that he was working in a fucking insane asylum. “The horses won’t die,” he told the deputy commissioner.

  The bureau chief of Internal Affairs wanted to discuss, in private, a corruption case involving a police sergeant. Raymond stared at him for a few seconds; then he said, “All of the top men and women in this department are sitting in this room, including the chief of department, the first deputy, the chief of patrol, and the chief of detectives, but you want to see me in private? Tell me who in this room you do not trust, and I’ll ask them to leave, but I honestly believe it’s okay to discuss a corruption case with everyone in this room listening, because if they’re not to be trusted, they don’t deserve to be here. Now, what do you have?”

  His face red from the dress-down, the chief of Internal Affairs said, “We have a sergeant who’s been taking money from the drug dealers for protection.”

  “Good,” Raymond said. “Lock him up. Let’s move on.”

  When everyone around the room had finished speaking, Raymond looked at Chief Allegra and said, “Listen, call the precinct commander up at the 19th Precinct. Let him know that I received a call from the mayor at 11:30 last night, and again at 6:30 this morning, complaining about panhandlers on 96th Street by the FDR Drive. If I get one more fucking call from the mayor, I’m going to stick a van on that corner, and that’s where the precinct commander is going to have his new office. You got that?”

  The chief looked at him and said, “I got it.”

  “Thanks, everyone,” Raymond said, and got up and walked out.

  Because of all the recent upheavals and killings, this was a day Raymond had designated to stay out of the public eye and catch up on some of his office work, while he continued to wait for the grand jury to hand down its decision.

  He had forgotten how good it felt to sit behind a desk, take care of the day-to-day business, and plan a normal dinner with Sheilah, without killing anybody, or some mass chaos.

  Precisely at 9:00 his phone began to ring, and kept ringing every 15 minutes. When he wasn’t on the phone, he was taking meetings via conference calls. He worked that way, uninterrupted, through lunch. He had Archer call out for a turkey on whole wheat with lettuce, tomato, and mayo, and a diet Coke, and ate while reading the Herald, bypassing the cover story that had somehow gotten a photo of the minivan just at the moment it was blowing up. Later that afternoon, he was planning to head up to the Bronx for a town hall meeting with community leaders who had been complaining of rampant drug dealing in the streets.

  At 2:30 pm, just as he was preparing to head uptown, his personal cell rang. It was Gallagher, who was in Chinatown having a dumpling lunch. “I know you’re heading up to the Bronx shortly, but I’m on the way over, and I need to see you before you leave. I’m having the first dep head that way in case you’re running late, but this is important.”

  “What?”

  “I just got word on who’s leaking to the reporter. Someone in your office is telling him every move you make,” Gallagher said. “I’m on my way.”

  Gallagher arrived 20 minutes later. Raymond poured them each a cup of coffee, and they sat in the chairs in front of the desk. Gallagher began, “So we ran the reporter’s cell through the department’s technology bureau. Turns out that there’s a number in the outer office, calls him 5 to 10 times a day, all day, all night.”

  Raymond frowned, “Who?”

  “We narrowed it down to a block of phones in the protocol office, and we discovered that same number that calls the reporter is also calling Taylor Shelby the same amount of times, if not more.”

  “Shelby,” Raymond said grimly, as if pronouncing sentence on a prisoner.
“Are you sure? I just can’t believe it. It just can’t be.”

  “Maybe not him,” Gallagher said. “There’s a female in the protocol office—Mandy Walker—who’s fucking around with Shelby. She may also be fucking Breshill. Every time after she talks to Shelby, she calls the reporter.”

  Raymond’s eyebrows went up in a mixture of genuine surprise and amusement. “That little twerp Breshill gets laid?”

  Gallagher continued, “I already spoke to Shelby. He admitted to me he’s been seeing this chick for six months and that they talk several times a day. Whenever he’s driving the Suburban and waiting for you, he calls her to bullshit, and he’ll tell her where he is or what he’s up to. He swears he never gives up anything personal about you; just figured she was part of the team and never thought twice about saying where he was at any given time. He had no idea he was giving away secrets, and that they were going straight to Breshill. He also didn’t know she was fucking both of them. He’s more devastated over that than just being a jerk.”

  “He should be,” Raymond said, suppressing a smile.

  “We haven’t approached her yet. You’re going to leave the office in a little while, to go up to the Bronx, and Taylor will tell her where you are. He’s going to make it sound hot and juicy, and if that fucking reporter shows up, we’ll know for sure it’s her.”

  Raymond looked at Gallagher for a long time, and finally put his coffee cup down on the edge of the desk. “Is she married?” he asked Gallagher.

  “Yes. All three of them are. I think of it as some kind of mass cluster mind-fuck.”

  Now they both started laughing, until the phone rang. Janey told him it was FBI agent Jones. “I’ve got to take this,” Raymond said to Gallagher. He cleared his throat to make sure he sounded serious.