The next thing I heard was the rapid-fire repeat of an automatic rifle, spraying bullets onto the floor of the main concourse from the very center of Grand Central Terminal.
FORTY-ONE
The noise stopped abruptly after forty or fifty seconds.
As soon as it did, the deafening sound of return fire coming from four or five police sharpshooters echoed up to the celestial ceiling, very close to where we were.
“Stay down,” the cop said. “Crawl. Go behind me and get over to the far side, toward the situation room.”
I crossed in back of him and then shut my eyes, wiggling my way to the safety of the landing behind the massive wall that stretched above us, as high as the building went.
Now it was Scully’s voice. “Move in, men. If he’s still breathing, bring him out alive.”
The commissioner was challenging Blunt, trying to flush out his position as well as his physical condition.
I sat upright, slightly nauseous from the dizzying view but drawn to the drama playing out below. At least two officers had been wounded in Nik Blunt’s surprise shelling. They were being dragged by other cops across the concourse floor in the direction of the old waiting room.
“Snipers, take up positions.” Maybe a Code Black was in effect, affording Scully a screenshot of the scene, allowing him to give orders to the men on the ground. He shouted to them, a disembodied voice like the wizard behind the screen in Oz. “Move in now.”
Four of the SWAT team members approached the information booth, guns aimed directly at the glass partitions. All were coming from the same direction, obviously to avoid friendly fire.
I couldn’t see the solid brass door at the rear of the information booth. I’d stood at it dozens of times in my life, asking for directions, checking for the next train to Stamford or to White Plains or to Pelham. I knew the door opened on the side closest to the departure gates, which was out of my sight line.
“Stand up,” the cop said to me. “Let’s run you over to Yolanda.”
I got to my feet, still edged against the wall, looking down at the concourse. “Wait,” I said. “I want to see if they got him.”
The officers were up against the circular booth, kneeling below the glass windows. One of them stood up, aiming to blast the lock on the door.
“C’mon, Ms. Cooper. I need to get back down there. They didn’t get him.”
I stopped to question my escort. “How do you know? Why do you say that?”
“That’s one of the best-kept secrets of the terminal,” he said. “There’s a hidden staircase inside the information booth. It spirals down to the lower level. Blunt got the jump on your men, Ms. Cooper. Screw the lockdown. He’s on the run now.”
FORTY-TWO
“Put this on, Ms. Cooper,” Yolanda Figueroa said. “Your lieutenant sent us up here with these.”
She was helping me into a bulletproof vest, just like the ones she and Zoya Blunt were wearing.
Her partner had left the three of us together. I bolted the door behind him, then dialed the stationmaster’s office from the landline.
“Let me speak to Chapman or Wallace,” I said to whomever answered, and waited while the phone was passed. “Mike?”
“I guess I was a little quick to blow off our tour guide yesterday. We should have been the ones to know about the staircase.”
“Blunt really got out of there?” I asked.
“We caught a shot of him on the surveillance camera, although no one had any way to make him at the time, to know who he was.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s dressed in camo and assault boots, carrying an automatic rifle. He looks like half the guys on the floor here, like one of the guardsmen. It was only when we hit REPLAY to see how he got into the booth that we spotted him. He just melted into the crowd.”
“We couldn’t have given him better cover,” I said.
“When the information booth employees were let go at nine fifty, Nik Blunt came out of whatever hole he’d been hiding in, unlocked the booth while everyone around him was busy doing his or her own thing, and apparently crouched inside.”
“Then Scully sends half of the troops back out on the street—”
“And Blunt sat in the crown jewel at the center of the terminal, knowing he could escape by way of the spiral staircase and come out on the lower level, which had just been evacuated because of the pipe bombs,” Mike said. “All cred to NorthStar. He’s a wily little bastard.”
“Zoya says everybody’s kids knew about the staircase. Her guess is that Nik went down to the lower concourse to get to the tracks, into the tunnels.”
“Those gates to the platforms and tunnels are all manned, Coop. Pretty hard to slip out that way. Pin her down for any other sweet spots she remembers, okay?”
“How badly hurt are the two cops?”
“One has a shattered kneecap, and the other one just got knocked down, saved by his vest. You suited up?”
“Yeah. We’re good,” I said. “You?”
“Mercer and I are itching to get into this, but at the moment we’re chained to the commissioner.”
“Scratch the itch, Mike. Scully needs you. It’s almost eleven o’clock and no one’s dead,” I said. “Let’s make it a record-breaking day.”
We hung up and I repeated the conversation, including how Nik Blunt was dressed, to the two women. Zoya was chain-smoking the remainder of a pack of cigarettes, filling the room with smoke.
I was pacing back and forth. The operation center attached to the situation room still had four workers in it. I could see from the monitors that there were no trains moving south of 125th Street. They were watching the rail connections far to the north.
I sat Zoya down at the table and pushed her again. “So none of us knew about the staircase inside the information booth. That’s not your fault—and you couldn’t have guessed that Nik would get into there any better than we did—but we want you to rack your brain to tell us about other places like it here. Nik almost killed several cops tonight. Doesn’t the hidden staircase make you think of anything else?”
“Honestly not, Ms. Cooper. For me, it’s been more than ten years since I used to come here. I wouldn’t have thought of that staircase until you told me about it.”
We went back and forth for another fifteen minutes. I picked up the phone again to call Mike. I told him about the Campbell Apartment near the Lexington Avenue entrance. It had been built as a private residence for one of the original railroad trustees, John Campbell, and was a luxurious sanctuary in the middle of the terminal. Unoccupied for much of Zoya’s youth, it was now a glamorous bar—closed for the night—that Nik knew well, too. It was the only other place the young woman could recall as a special hangout of her brother’s.
“I’ll check it out,” Mike said.
“Anything else?” I said, fidgeting with the snaps on my vest.
“Mercer just spoke with a man who worked for NorthStar.”
“How’d you find him at this hour?”
“We didn’t. He found the NYPD hotline. Called in when he saw Blunt’s photo on the news tonight.”
“Does he solve the problem of where in the world Nik Blunt was?” I asked. Zoya’s head snapped to look in my direction. “Was he ever in Russia?”
“Never. No Muslims, no jihadist mission. The US government had a contract with NorthStar to go into Uganda, looking for a rebel leader who was abducting hundreds of kids to turn them into child soldiers. That kind of thing.”
“And Nik?”
“Caught the fever. Lived there for eighteen months,” Mike said, “and seemed to have enjoyed the danger, the license to kill.”
“Voices or no voices?”
“Yeah, voices, all right. At least for the last few months. Now don’t go telling Zoya what I’m about to say to you next. Promise me
?”
“Okay.”
“Just so you know what we’re dealing with, Coop. Nik and another man went off the reservation after their compound was attacked by the rebels. They attacked civilians in one of the villages in the countryside.”
I kept a poker face. Zoya was trying to study my reaction to the information I was receiving.
“Yeah?”
“All the men were off pillaging somewhere else, so Nik and his partner took it on themselves to rape four of the wives who’d been left behind.”
“Like the other guy living inside him told him to do.”
“Then he must have also told Nik to slit their throats from ear to ear,” Mike said, “because he did that, too.”
I was speechless. How many other killings had there been between the women in Uganda, Zoya’s rape, and Corinne Thatcher’s murder? And what ever put a woman like Corinne in his line of fire?
“Say something, Coop. Something normal so you don’t freak the girl out.”
“So nothing about any political mission, right? No work in Russia?” I knew it would sound like I was babbling and repeating myself, but I didn’t want Zoya to learn about the other murders yet.
“Nope. But NorthStar is where Nik picked up all his moves. Blinding security cameras, like he did at the Waldorf. Enlisting marginal types, like Carl the mole, to do his dirty work, the way he found recruits in the Ugandan villages. Killing for pleasure. You’ve got to sink pretty low to be fired from a place like NorthStar. They got him out of Uganda before he could be charged for the crimes there. Or executed. That’s why he wound up on the city streets—or below them.”
“Okay, we’ll keep on talking up here. Don’t forget about us.”
“Much as I might like that, Coop, it would be hard to do.”
I hung up the receiver.
Zoya asked what Mike had been telling me about Nik. Before I could answer her, the entire room went black.
I walked to the wall and flipped the switch, but there was no power at all. The only light in the situation room was the glowing tip of Zoya Blunt’s cigarette.
FORTY-THREE
“I want to get out of here,” Zoya shouted.
For three minutes, PO Yolanda Figueroa and I had scoured the room for a fuse box or an alternative source of power. Even the brightly colored screens tracking train movements had gone to black in the operations center next door.
I unbolted the door and cracked it open to look in the hallway, to see whether it was simply our area that had lost juice, but the corridor was entirely dark, too.
“Don’t you carry a flashlight?” I asked Yolanda.
“Something had to give. I rarely use one working days, and they kept me overtime tonight. I had these three vests to carry up here, my walkie-talkie, water bottles, notepads. I’m sorry. Nobody thought I’d need a flashlight.”
“You have matches, Zoya?”
“A lighter.”
“Better still. Let me have it,” I said.
“No. I’m keeping it. I want to go.”
I tried the landline again, but that was dead, too. “Give it five minutes. There’s nowhere for you to go, and no sense going by yourself. The commissioner will have someone come up and get us as soon as possible. Generators usually kick in pretty quickly, don’t they, Yolanda?”
Yolanda Figueroa was jumpy, too. “Are you crazy? They’ve never been able to maintain a generator in Grand Central. Do you understand how much power would be necessary, between the train grid and the size of the terminal?”
I was trying to convince myself as much as the two women to remain calm. “There’s no generator? Maybe the rainstorm caused the blackout. Maybe that’s what did it. Lightning has knocked out the train system many times. They’ll get something up and running,” I said. “They’ll have to.”
“The only backup they have powers up the trains first,” Yolanda said. “You’ll know that when the lights go back on the screens in the operations center.”
I looked through the window, but it was as dark in there as it was on our side.
“Not so fast, Ms. Cooper. That could take half an hour,” Yolanda said. “There’ll be no lights in the terminal till they figure how and why they went off. And no generator to serve as an intermediate power source.”
“You don’t know about the button, do you?” Zoya Blunt asked me. She had stepped on her cigarette to put it out, and now there was no glow at all.
“What button?”
“My father used to call it the red button. It turns off all the power in the terminal with a single switch, and it stops every train that’s on a track, as far off as they may be.”
I tried to control my anger that she hadn’t thought about it during my questioning. I tried to control my fear at the idea that this blackout could have been caused intentionally. “Where is it, Zoya? Where is that button?”
“You think I was holding out on you, Ms. Cooper? I just don’t know where it is. I was never allowed to see it. It’s in a subbasement that nobody’s allowed in. It wasn’t a place for kids, my dad always said.”
“Is it in M42? The subbasement with the rotary converters?” That’s where Nik had been sleeping, but Scully had stationed men there so he couldn’t go back.
“No, no. It’s not M42. But it’s downstairs somewhere near there.”
I had to tell Mike and Mercer. “Yolanda, let me have your walkie-talkie.”
“It’s not getting any reception,” she said. She was slow in passing it to me. “I think I ought to bring you two back to the stationmaster.”
“I want to go with you,” Zoya said. “I don’t like the dark.”
“Let me have your lighter, please?”
She lit another cigarette and passed me the small plastic tube. I flicked it on and tried to make a call on the walkie-talkie. I pushed the right buttons but couldn’t get through.
I pulled the laptop to me and linked to my Internet service. I typed an urgent e-mail to both of the guys—and to Nan Toth, who was undoubtedly safe at home. I clicked SEND, but the notice that my message could not be delivered until a later time came back immediately.
“You won’t get anything on the Internet now,” Yolanda said. “And you can’t call or text. We’re in a dead zone, and once we lose power, it’s hopeless.”
“It wasn’t a lightning strike that did this, Ms. Cooper. It has to be Nik. He’s going to find me here,” Zoya said, growing more and more hysterical. “I want Yolanda to take me back to the detectives.”
“There’s no reason for Nik to even know you’re in the terminal,” I said. “No one wants him to know.”
“Well, what about you? He’d be after you, wouldn’t he?”
“I’m nobody in all this, Zoya. He doesn’t have a clue who I am, and that’s how I want to keep it. Nik’s bought himself a confrontation with the NYPD. That’s what he seems to want.”
The young woman drew a deep breath. “From the looks of things downstairs,” she said, “I’d have to say that’s suicide.”
Zoya Blunt was exactly right. Suicide by cop.
Suicide, though, that took with him as many innocent lives as he could muster on his way out.
Nik’s madness, his murderous rampage, was most likely a desperate effort to call attention to himself. Not a cause, not a political mission. The psychopathology of a schizophrenic who was driven by the torment of an inner voice. The psychopathology of someone who had lost everything to live for.
The young woman walked to the door of the room and opened it.
“No!” I shouted. “You can’t try and figure out your way down alone. You have no idea where Nik is.”
“I’m taking her, Ms. Cooper. I’ve got a gun.”
“He’s got a bigger gun, Yolanda. Probably more than one.”
“I have orders not to leave you here alone. And tw
o of us don’t want to stay one minute longer,” the officer said. “I have orders to keep Ms. Blunt safe from her brother, too.”
“Are you telling me I have to leave this room?”
“I can’t make you do anything, Ms. Cooper. But I’m ready to go. There are NYPD officers with automatic weapons stationed at every landing between here and the concourse,” Yolanda said. “You must have seen that on your way upstairs. I can send one of them back up to hold your hand.”
“I—uh, I saw one where we got off the elevator.”
“You can be a sitting duck up here,” she said, patting the decorations on her breastplate, “or you can come with us. I didn’t get these citations for cowering in the dark.”
I thought about letting the two women go and bolting myself into the room. Nik Blunt didn’t know who I was. There was no point for him to target the situation room.
“Nik has no reason to come here,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”
“You know the most damage he could do, Ms. Cooper?” Yolanda said. “He could get inside the operations center, to those guys on the other side of this wall who’ve still got thousands of lives in their hands.”
People speeding north through the night to Hudson and Hartford, I thought, unaware of the monster in the terminal they’d left behind.
“Nik Blunt could get in that room and throw switches. He could derail trains all over the Northeast Corridor, if he’s rigged that power button in a way that he can control it from wherever he is within Grand Central.”
And NorthStar probably taught him how to rig some controls exactly like that.
“So you can sit here on your ass, Ms. Cooper, and watch for the neon glow of those distant train signals to light up the operations board again.”
“But—”
“You cross your fingers and hope those passengers won’t know what hit them when the trains jump the rails while they’re cruising along at sixty-five, seventy miles an hour tonight. Me? I’m going out to make sure the bosses send more men upstairs to guard the workers in that room. They’re a little more important in the big scheme of things tonight than you are.”
Terminal City (Alex Cooper) Page 32