The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  It was an easy train to get on—an easy story to believe. Leonard himself had started to believe it himself. For a time, he had started to think that the gleaming city of the past ten years, with a new skyscraper on every block and a suspicious cop on every corner, had been the better one. He had begun to doubt the fresh, darker, looser city that was poking its head back above the parapet. Until that night. Until walking to Davenport’s and seeing the messy city at play once again. Del Rio and the rest of them thought they were cleaning up the mess, but in fact they had been setting the stage for an even bigger one.

  The train roared into Brooklyn as Leonard’s sweat eased away. The kids were still lounging and fondling each other, headed deeper into the borough to crash in their shared sublets on Flatbush or their parents’ place in Midwood. Leonard was the only one to get off at Borough Hall; downtown Brooklyn died at night. Staunch municipal buildings set off against quiet townhouses where comfortable professionals stay as close to Manhattan as their pay scale allows. No matter how far the city fell, Leonard thought, crime wouldn’t swarm back to Brooklyn Heights anytime soon, so they didn’t have his troubles. As he walked up the stairway from the subway and was met again with the heat—past one in the morning and still thick, heavy, wet—Leonard realized that no one had his troubles.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  NIGHT

  Crossing Cadman Plaza, Leonard could see the garbage strike taking its toll. The bags that had been tied taut and placed carefully on the curbs already bore telltale gnawed holes, and small puddles of gunk seeped out of them. The headquarters for the Office of Emergency Management were still pristine—OEM had some way, in the crevices of that place, to take care of its own. But everything else—the court, the muni building, the McDonald’s that fronts the expressway as you turn toward Flushing Avenue—was piled with trash. The neat bundles had descended into scattered piles of wretched-smelling refuse and torn plastic. Even this late the air was still hot, and the urban reek that usually only lingers in alleyways and less desirable subway stations had become pervasive.

  Leonard didn’t smell so great himself, he realized. It was nearly two, and the best he had to look forward to was crashing on the hardwood floor of Roshni’s office and trying to make sense of this all in the morning. He wasn’t sure even that she’d be there to let him in. She hadn’t given him a key. At least he had the flash drive. He hoped there would be something on it. Some kind of valuable news.

  There was no one on the street. He wandered down past the on-ramp to the expressway, to avoid the Whitman courtyard. The toughs in there would have been able to spot the gun in his jeans, making him a legitimate target. He passed into the blocks surrounding the Navy Yard, abandoned for the night, crossed a deserted corner near the warehouse, and stared down the sickening road.

  The sidewalk was sticky with ooze. Busted trash bags poured across the asphalt, leaking plastic containers, wet crinkled wrappers, and mottled sludge that had once been food. The scene was much worse than when he had left. It was the middle of the night and no one lived on this street; the trash hadn’t been tossed from nearby apartments. Up the road, Leonard could hear a diesel rumble and a familiar hydraulic hiss. He stepped onto the sidewalk and into the doorway of the Coalition’s building. It was dark enough that he could hide, so long as no light shone directly at him. He breathed deep and held still. The sound of an approaching truck wouldn’t ordinarily fill him with fear. Ordinarily, though, he didn’t break into buildings to steal documents and throw cops out of windows. There was nothing ordinary going on that night.

  The truck turned the corner toward the trash-speckled street. A sanitation rig, all right. The kind driven by the guys who were on a full-on strike. The kind that no one believes is out of the garage. And here it was, carrying a full load down to the Navy Yard. As it passed the warehouse, the belly of the truck heaved upward and the flaps at its rear sliced open. A thick wave of trash gushed straight onto the asphalt, coating it slick and warm. The load spent, the truck roared on, righting its payload and gliding toward downtown, light on its feet now that it had released its burden.

  Leonard stepped out of the doorway. Someone was dumping trash on purpose. Maybe certain neighborhood bosses had paid off their local council members to arrange for a few runs to ease the misery of the strike. Maybe the people running the basketball arena or the arts complex had found a way to get their special pickups. But what would be the point of spreading it all over the road? Who were they trying to punish? Wouldn’t somebody notice, with the drivers allegedly out on strike?

  Leonard pushed through the doorway. No buzzer, no lock, just like this morning. He hiked through the dark stairwell to the steel door hosting the Coalition offices. He tried the handle. Nothing. He bunched his fist and banged the door. Three, four times, hard. Hoping he wouldn’t wake up the guys loading glassine envelopes downstairs; they might come out shooting. No answer.

  There was nowhere else safe to go. He slouched, his back against the door, and slid to the floor. He was exhausted. He smelled. His shoulders were throbbing and all he wanted to do was sleep. He cradled his head into the doorframe, a steel pillow, and was almost asleep when Roshni, groggy herself, opened the door. He slid almost to the floor, catching himself on the doorframe before he banged his head.

  “Leonard. Did you find anything?”

  He turned to his knees and reached into his pocket. What to tell her? By now someone would have found the body. It would be over the radios. If she knew what kind of danger Leonard had brought with him she wouldn’t let him stay. Accessory after the fact is a real crime when the fact is a murder. And Leonard himself had to worry about more than just the cops from the Harbor Patrol. The whole force would be out after him. Someone would be talking to the doorman. They’d be getting a description. Not long after that . . . He didn’t like to think about it. Better to say nothing. For her own safety, after all. He pulled out the flash drive.

  “We have to take a look at this.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  SPARKS

  First Rowson, then Del Rio, Sergeant Sparks thought as he stepped onto the dock. These new officers were eager and hungry, but they couldn’t keep their cool. It was hard enough training them to be cops. Getting them onto bigger projects, getting them to keep their heads on under pressure, was almost impossible. It was a risk they’d both taken. They knew the drill. Rowson had a family, but the NYPD had good death benefits, they’d be well taken care of. Del Rio was just a kid, dumber than a sack of hair really, but they’d give him a hero’s funeral. Getting killed on the job was the best thing that could happen to him. The way it went down, people would think the kid was breaking up a robbery or something. Posthumous promotion to detective and a thousand cops who never knew how slow he was saluting him.

  There were a few of them left, but Sparks wasn’t even sure he could trust them. Not after what just happened. He’d sent Del Rio after the investigator for a reason, but the investigator had turned the tables on them. A shoddy, sloppy civilian. It was an insult to the force to have someone like that best a uniform. Someone who didn’t have posture, didn’t have form, didn’t have self-respect. Not like the police. To Sparks, that was what the project was all about, after all, teaching the city the value of respect. The money was the least of it. No matter what the man who was paying him thought, to Sparks that was just a means to an end. A way to get the people back under control. And here was the evidence that they were necessary, a civil servant sneaking into an apartment after midnight and killing a police officer. Someone who carried a badge himself, no less. Shameful. No wonder crime was on the rise.

  And who knew if Mitchell had found something. Sparks had the team search the apartment but you never know if everything is there. If the investigator knew, then Sparks would have to act quickly. There had already been too many mistakes. Del Rio had let Rowson get shot. Setting up Mulino for it by taking the gun had been gravy, but there was nothing
on the wires about Del Rio having two guns on him. Del Rio didn’t even know how to wipe someone out and plant a gun on him properly. And it meant that Mitchell now had Rowson’s gun. That wouldn’t do him any good. It would only be a matter of time before the apartment was dusted for prints or the security guard sat down with a sketch artist—now every cop in town would be looking to take him out. The guy wouldn’t be able to cross the street without being shot. It was one less thing to worry about.

  He stood at the base of the pier. Spindling out from the Harbor Precinct into the bay, the lights of the Verrazano signaling the way home to Staten Island. He walked down the scraggly wood toward the edge. The NYPD ought to renovate the docks. With the money being spent on iris scans and fingerprint sensors at One Police Plaza, it was a travesty that the special patrols in the outer boroughs had to suffer like this. A board creaked and nearly gave way; proof of his point.

  It didn’t matter if Mitchell had found something at that apartment or not. Sparks would have to finish the job tomorrow, and he would have to do it alone, but after that, the people would come round. The fear that he had lived in for the past two years would fade, and he would be able to go back to the bright shining life he had been promised when he first put on the uniform.

  Sparks stepped toward the last few feet of the antique dock. The water was still. He reached the edge of the pier and hauled in the little dingy. He pulled back the tarp and checked on the bricks. Tightly wrapped plastic packages, ready for their duty. He counted them, as he did every night. The full load was there. Time was short. He looked back up at the bridge. The Verrazano, the greatest bridge in the city, but the one that snobs in Manhattan don’t even bother to know exists, stood triumphant over the channel. On the edge of the pier at the Harbor Patrol, Sergeant Sparks folded a tarp over enough Semtex to bring it down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  IDLEWILD

  Leonard Mitchell, soaked and broken in the tatters of his work uniform, couldn’t help but notice that Roshni appeared pressed and fit, still in her silk suit, long after midnight. She had slept in the suit, or maybe she hadn’t slept at all, instead pacing through her near-empty office waiting for the computers to spew out another faraway tragedy. The cool metal glow from the screens enchanted the office, otherwise dark. Sitting at one of them, looking over his shoulder at her before slipping in the hard drive, Leonard wondered at her poise. Imperial cheekbones, stone-dark eyes, and a twenty-first century indeterminate skin tone. He had always considered Roshni Saal a zealot. But didn’t he need a zealot now? Hadn’t the hour grown desperate? The machine caught the drive and buzzed awake.

  Leonard felt slow and sick and hot and tired. “Roshni. Is there anywhere in here I can clean up? Is there a shower?”

  “The bathroom is in the hallway. There’s a sink.”

  He had seen the sink. It wouldn’t do him any good. He could splash enough water on his face to keep him awake for half an hour, but if he needed to go back out in the world and not stand out like a homeless man, he would need another plan. He thought as he shuffled in his chair. As he did, Roshni stepped away from him disapprovingly.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I told you. I went to Davenport’s apartment. I found what she had been working on.”

  “No. Not the hard drive. That.”

  The gun was still crammed in the back of his pants. He marveled that he had made it on the subway ride and the walk here without it being spotted. Now he was alone with someone who could maybe help him. Would maybe be his ally. And she had spotted it right away.

  “I told you that I’m in danger, Roshni.”

  “You don’t have the gun because you’re in danger. You are in danger because you have the gun.”

  In one sense this was true, but Leonard couldn’t tell her that yet. He still needed her help. And as much as she didn’t like cops, he was pretty sure she didn’t think killing one was the best plan. He could explain that to her too. But he wouldn’t be able to explain away the dozens of officers who would come to arrest them if they knew he was here.

  He lifted the gun and set it slowly on the counter, the barrel against the wall. “I’m pretty sure that this belonged to Brian Rowson. The dead detective. The police took it from the scene so that they could frame up Mulino, and they were going to use it to frame me up tonight.”

  “Mulino killed that detective on the boat. Whether or not he had a gun, Mulino killed him.”

  “Maybe. But if he was set up, don’t you want to know why? Don’t you want to see what they are planning to do next?”

  As if on cue, the computer gave birth to the hoard of files on Davenport’s little drive. Some of it they had seen before. Plans for the crane. A schematic showing how to get into the restaurant where the rats had been let out. A series of codes to the security doors of the chemical factory. And e-mails sent to someone at EHA, explaining all of it. Now decoded, except for the recipient. Brian Rowson had been writing EHA to give a quick little heads-up to the money people that the job was about to be done.

  But there was more. Davenport had added to the trove of documents she’d been given by the bank. She had tapped in or broken into the NYPD computers herself. Leonard had seen the scraps of the IAB investigations, but this was new. A digital dossier on all the Harbor Patrol cops and a few more, showing what they’d been accused of, how they had been cleared, and their new assignment. Del Rio had been busted for working at a card game. Rowson had stolen the earrings. Davies had shot a man’s dog when executing a search warrant. Each investigation had started honest enough, but each had been dropped before it was done. And at the end of each file was the same neat signature closing the case and reassigning the officer. A signature that Leonard couldn’t believe that he recognized. The officers had mostly been reassigned to Harbor, under Sparks’s command. The few that hadn’t—Officer Davies and another—were assigned to the Seven-Oh, just like they said. Only they too had special notes regarding an assignment to Sergeant Sparks.

  “Sparks has a small army of officers. A whole command that will do whatever he says.”

  Roshni was standing just close enough to see, but far enough to show her disdain, for the gun if not for Leonard.

  “I see.”

  He turned to the next file. Payment records. Wire deposits. Every two weeks, ten days sometimes. Tens of thousands at a time. The next page showing the account holder: James Sparks. So the sergeant was at the center, after all. Not just sending his officers out to bust heads. But getting paid for sabotage. There was nothing on where the money was coming from. Nothing to show that EHA was bribing the officers, that it was dictating what buildings to wreck and which businesses to destroy. Another page. The e-mails they’d seen before. These to EHA, telling them that jobs had been completed. Davenport had cracked the code that had been used. The e-mails where short and plain and had been sent just hours before each of the little disasters. One had been sent the night that Mulino had shot Rowson on the container ship. The last one.

  “How did she get all this?”

  The room was quiet, and even this late, it was sufferingly hot. The open windows offered feeble hope of a breeze, not enough to counter the glow coming off the computers. Never mind that there wasn’t any wind, the streets outside were slowly piling up with garbage, and the wet, heavy air from the outside injected just as much misery as the wet, heavy air inside.

  “I don’t know how she got it. But we have it now.”

  And the last set of documents came onto the screen. Something new. Blueprints, designs. A path into a basement. A computer-generated lobby design, maybe from a real estate firm. Except this one was highlighted with red arrows and cross-signs, pointing out sight lines and emergency exits. The next page, a map of the basement. Six markings on it, each noting “structural support” and “carrying capacity twenty-six tons.” Each marking followed by a bright-red X.

  The schematics
were all marked with the logo of Idlewild Construction. One of the many that had been busy hoisting buildings during the boom, only to slow down during the slump. But Idlewild had been back in the game quicker than most. It had a few new buildings to boast of. Like the one they were looking at the blueprints for. Leonard wouldn’t have to look up the stock price to know it was booming. Or to know how quickly it could drop after the wrong kind of news.

  Roshni said it first. “It’s a demolition plan. It’s a map of how to take down a building.”

  Leonard nodded. Davenport had found the next target after all.

  “Roshni. You’re going to have to help me. I know someone who can put us in touch with the FBI. We can give them the documents. They can investigate. And they can stop this.”

  The third computer down the line chimed forth a small cold noise. Roshni walked over to it and peered at the screen. A woman in Moscow had died of diabetic shock on the way to the precinct after being arrested at an anti-government protest. So much unfairness in things to keep track of.

  Leonard was scrolling through the pictures. The plan was detailed and precise, the building familiar. It was obvious in retrospect, the perfect target.

  “Roshni, look.” She turned from her printout and stared at the plans. Page after page of schematics.

  “Oh, Leonard.” Roshni stared at the diagrams. As Leonard scrolled the pages, the whole plan came into view. A final slide: the basement floor. Her walnut eyes open wide, she leaned over his shoulder. “Leonard, you can’t go to the FBI.”