Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  Stranded in the middle of the great intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Uwe, Helga, and Hubertus Friedhof watched the crossing signals carefully, awaiting the green light. They had been to the movies, where, despite all the years of English they had taken in school in Germany, they had hardly understood a single word of the dialogue, which bore not the slightest resemblance to the English they were used to hearing back home.

  They were discussing this strange new language of the New World as they crossed the street, heading for one of the chain restaurants they had heard so much about back in Wiesbaden, one of those places that made Americans so amazingly obese, which they simply had to see and experience for themselves.

  “Look!” exclaimed Hubertus, who was nearly 19 and about to leave for university. With any luck, under the German system, his parents would only be financially responsible for him for another seven to ten years.

  Hubertus pointed up at the JumboTron and Jake Sinclair’s face. Everybody knew Jake Sinclair’s face, even foreigners, and in point of fact the movie they had just seen and hardly understood a word of had been made by Jake Sinclair’s studio. “…we betray our real values, the values that made this country,” Jake Sinclair was quoted in the electronic crawl—in real English—across the bottom of the giant screen, “the values that made this country the greatest country on earth…”

  Uwe was just about to ask Helga why the Americans were always banging on about being the greatest country on earth when the light changed. The crowd moved forward, in that impatient New York way, but Uwe’s path was blocked by a young man standing stock-still. Being German, Uwe’s instinct was to plow ahead. He was sick of these Americans and their uncivilized ways, and it was high time he showed one of the natives how things were done in Germany. Back home, if somebody was standing between you and wherever you were going, you simply knocked him aside, whether you were a pedestrian with the right of way or a bicyclist zipping down a marked bike path onto which some hapless tourist had inadvertently wandered, or even a speeding motorist, exercising his God-given vorfahrt vom rechts.

  The pedestrian signal had already turned to the blinking red hand, and the numerical countdown begun. Uwe pressed forward in that familiar way that Europeans have and that Americans, with their greater need for personal space, invariably resented. The young man, however, did not budge. Instead he barked over his shoulder. “What is your fucking problem?”

  Uwe stopped, taken aback. In Germany, nobody spoke back. They simply got out of the way. But these rude Amis were a different tribe. Well, their days of strutting around the globe as if they owned it with their no-longer-almighty dollar were over. “Ja, okay,” said Uwe, “so now we can go, yes?”

  Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz had come to America on an express visa from his native Saudi Arabia. It amazed him that, even after 9/11, Americas were still so friendly, so trusting. Part of that friendliness, true, was owing to the country’s desperate need for oil, which ensured that the old partners in Aramco would still have need for each other’s goods and services, and a little thing like 3,000 dead people and a gigantic hole in the ground in lower Manhattan would not be allowed to come between them. As long as America ran on oil—and as long as the Americans, unaccountably, tied both hands behind their backs by not drilling for it in their own country—Saudi-American friendship would go on and on.

  It felt good to be standing here, just a few miles north of where his holy brothers had accomplished their spectacular act of martyrdom. Before he embarked on his own martyrdom, he had made sure to tour the holy site, still essentially empty after all these years. It was typical of the degenerate state of America and its inhabitants, he thought, to still be squabbling about something unimportant like a memorial when there was work to be done. They could have shown the world that even a grievous blow such as 9/11 would not stop them in their godless pursuit of commerce and harlotry, but instead they reacted just as the sheikh had predicted, in sorrow and fear.

  When the Towers fell—something not even the sheikh had predicted—there was much joy across the ummah. But in the succeeding years, as blow after blow was plotted and then failed, the opportunity to bring forth the tribulations was slipping away. What was needed now was a killing blow. Beneath his breath, he began to pray.

  And then he felt a tap on his back, more of a bump, and he began to fear that his prayers were not sincere enough, that he had been discovered by the enemy. He slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the grip of the gun as he turned to see what was the matter.

  The taxi let Hope and her children off at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. To the east, a series of multiplexes beckoned. They weren’t the kind of theaters she was used to back home—for one thing, there was noplace to park—but she’d heard that once you were inside, it was like being at an especially nice shopping mall. Behind them, the ugly monstrosity that was the Port Authority bus station loomed.

  “What’s that?” cried Rory, pointing across Eighth Avenue at something called the Adult Entertainment Center. “Never mind,” said Hope, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him east along 42nd Street. He would learn about porn soon enough, if he hadn’t already. Up ahead, the theater marquees beckoned…

  The man blocking the Friedhof family had still not budged. Instead, he was staring at his cell phone, as if waiting for a call. He was also cocking his head to one side, as if listening for something, but the only thing he could possibly hear, besides the traffic, was the rumble of the IRT subway under the ventilation grate beneath his feet. In any case, he wasn’t moving.

  His patience exhausted, Uwe pressed forward again, deliberately bumping into the man. Pedestrianism was a full-body contact sport in much of Europe, especially in Germany, so what Uwe was doing was, by his lights, a perfectly reasonable way to show one’s displeasure and to remind the fellow to get a move on. Unfortunately for Uwe, the man did not see it that way. Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz turned back to him, but instead of speaking he pulled a revolver from beneath his Windbreaker and shot Uwe Friedhof right in the face.

  At that moment, Byrne was on the blower to all available patrolmen in that part of Times Square, and was calling in reinforcements from elsewhere in the city. If his hunch was right, there was no time to lose.

  “I want a cordon around Times Square. Nobody in and nobody out. Shut down all the West Side subway lines, including the IND, the BMT, and the IRT. No need to be subtle about it: I want the full surge. But this is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

  Lannie and Sid caught up with him. “What is it?” asked Sid.

  “It’s a go, isn’t it?” said Lannie. If this was for real, it would be his first taste of action.

  Byrne turned to his two protégés. “Not for you—I need the two of you right here. Lannie, check all the communications monitors and see who’s been calling into Times Square on cell. Sid, go back over the SIGINT files for the past 48 hours and see if you can get the slightest lead on whatever the hell it is that’s going down.”

  A voice from the back of the room—“There’s a report of shots fired, somewhere in the pedestrian zone. That’s all we’ve got right now.”

  Mentally, Byrne gauged how long it would take him to get from Chelsea to Times Square. With the surge already under way, there was no point in taking a car—if he hustled he could get there on foot in ten minutes. He wasn’t as fit as he used to be but, damn it, he could still run down a perp if he had to.

  “I’m going in,” he shouted, heading for the door.

  Uwe Friedhof never had time to realize what had happened as he toppled and fell. Helga started to scream and then she, too, dropped with a bullet in the chest. Hubertus, who had dreamed of studying the law in Munich, had just enough time to register a dark beard and a pair of piercing brown eyes when the next shot hit him in the gut. He collapsed into the street, where he was hit by a speeding taxi anticipating the change of the light. His body flew into the air as the cab stopped, then landed on the windshield and rolled off and
onto the ground.

  The cabbie, a recent immigrant from Bangladesh, jumped from his taxi, recoiling in horror as he realized what had happened. Three young women dropped their ice cream cones as the enormity of what they were witnessing overtook them. Others screamed, cried, fled. The gunman, however, never moved, but instead seemed to be talking to himself, muttering really, as the roar of the Seventh Avenue express train approached. As the brakeman slowed the train, the roar changed to a screech, and Ali held his cell phone aloft in the air for all to see, and bear witness.

  At that moment, Marie Duplessis decided that her Metro-Card needed a refill, and that as long as she was here, she might as well go back down the stairs and put some more money on it. She hated running for a train only to realize she was short of funds, so while she had money in her pocket and plenty of time to get to her next job she could take care of it now and not have to worry about it later. She turned and headed back down the stairs. She stuck her card into one of the addfare machines, punched in how much she wanted, and inserted a $20 bill.

  Hope and her children were moving east on 42nd Street, savoring the marquees of the theaters on both sides of the broad crosstown street, trying to decide what to see. This was not like even the big cineplexes back home. This was a veritable feast of cinematic choices. There were a couple of vulgar sex comedies, which she was under no circumstances going to allow them to see, along with the usual assortment of full-length cartoons, vampire movies, gruesome slasher flicks, and movies about giant robots that could turn into cars and other heavy machinery. She had not been to the movies on a regular basis for years, and from the choices available, she could see she wasn’t missing much. Why couldn’t they make movies like Tender Mercies anymore? Well, she supposed those days were long gone; not enough sex, and nothing to blow up. It was going to have to be the talking cars.

  They went inside the AMC Theaters complex on the south side of the street and bought their tickets. Even though she was expecting the worst, Hope was still amazed at how expensive they were, twice as much as back home. How in the world could people afford to live here was beyond her.

  They took a series of endless up escalators, higher and higher, until she was sure they were heading for the top of the Empire State Building, which she knew was around here somewhere. At last, they got to the top floor, where a giant candy counter practically begged them to spend some more of their money, but Hope steered Rory clear of temptation and pointed him and Emma toward the theater. She was about to wonder what had happened to grownup culture when suddenly the whole building shook and everything went dark.

  A car bomb is no ordinary bomb, nor even an enhanced Improvised Explosive Device (IED). In fact, it is three bombs in one. The first bomb is the one packed tightly in the trunk or under the vehicle—Semtex, or C-4 plastic explosive. Detonating with the force of 150 pounds of TNT, it will destroy everything within a 100-foot radius, shattering glass, penetrating and exploding brickwork and masonry, tearing and rending flesh. Its fireball will incinerate everything it touches, and as the blast radius extends outward, it will singe all living creatures within a tenth of a mile. But that is just the beginning.

  The second, and worse, effect is the air-blast shock wave, which causes devastating failure in exterior walls and interior columns and girders, resulting in floor failure. The third effect is shrapnel. For, packed tightly into the plastic explosive, is an array of common objects—nails, screws, ball bearings, washers—that turn suddenly lethal when propelled at several hundred miles an hour. They rip through flesh and bones effortlessly, hurtling outward like some ontological recapitulation of the phylogenic Big Bang. And, in a confined space such as a movie theater or a New York city street, the amount of damage they can do to human beings is almost incalculable.

  The United States military calls them “VBIEDs,” or “Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices.” When there is someone at the wheel, willing to die for his cause, they are referred to as SVBIEDs, the “S” standing for “suicide.”

  They are often referred to as “the poor man’s air force,” for they accomplish on the ground what cannot be managed from the air. But the effect is the same.

  Byrne’s mind raced as he ran. He’d seen the gun on the man’s hip, but worse, he had seen the assault weapons beneath the pushcart. A man might carry a gun in Manhattan, even legally, but there was no way that a brace of AK-47s was ever going to be allowed. And what did he have two of them for? A lone nut with a semi-automatic weapon was high on the list of things that every cop worried about, but a lone nut with two of them was capable of anything.

  His radio crackled. The cops on the scene were converging. In the distance, he could hear the sirens as the surge charged toward Times Square. The surge was something the NYPD had practiced since 2004—the sudden, unannounced arrival of dozens of squad cars on a single area, up to 200 heavily armed and flak-jacketed cops bursting from the vehicles. It was meant not only for tactical practice but as a very visible show of force designed to put the fear of God—or Allah—into anyone witnessing it. Police work had changed dramatically since Byrne was a rookie—instead of the kind cops on the beat, the NYPD had become a paramilitary force, with some of the best tools and tactics in the world.

  He listened up ahead, trying to detect the sounds of gunfire. A single shot might be lost in the noise of the city, but multiple shots would be unmistakable. Even with the exertion, he started to breathe a little easier. Maybe his men had already taken the perp down, pre-crime.

  Then he heard the explosion, and he knew this was going to be a very long and shitty day. There was more to come, and it was his job to be in the middle of it. If he could not save those people, it was at the very least his duty to die trying.

  Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz also heard the explosion. In fact, he could see it, across Times Square to the west. That would be the signal to the others, the sign that the glorious strike was beginning. They had planned this martyrdom operation for years, since right after 9/11, but the Americans had been too quick for them, had reacted too fast. They had instituted all sorts of safeguards, been aggressive in their counterattack, disrupted the domestic cells, shut off much of the funding. What the movement had hoped would be a killing second blow had been on hold, first for months, then for years.

  But then they had learned how to penetrate the defenses, how to hack the security codes. Not on their own, of course, but with the help of their friends in Russia and central Europe. Left to its own devices, the ummah would never be able to create even a single computer, much less a network. The only proper study in a university was the study of the Holy Koran, the divinely revealed word of Allah to Mohammed, his Messenger. But al-Aziz and the others were no longer students, they were holy warriors, jihadis; no longer dwelling peacefully in the dar-al-Islam but fighting the infidels in the dar-al-Harb, the territory of war and chaos, where the final battle against the West would be fought and won: on its turf.

  It was true: so decadent had the West become that there were many who actively supported the jihadis and their networks, not men of Islam but men of no faith at all. Men who would be among the first killed when the final triumph was proclaimed, men who cared so little for themselves, their wives, their families, and their decayed culture that they would rather submit to the holy blade. They deserved nothing less than scorn and death.

  The subway train beneath his feet had stopped. He could hear the conductor’s voice over the loudspeaker. He said a quick silent prayer and then pushed the talk button on his cell phone just as he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”

  Marie Duplessis waited for the machine to spit back her card at her. She was old enough to remember the days of tokens, and she guessed that, on balance, the present system was better than the old one. But still, it was a racket, since a lot of times you never quite managed to use every dollar of your fare before you bought a new card. Marie, who had a head for figures, reckoned that the MTA made millions a year in unused credits on the fare cards, but somehow it wa
s still always broke, always asking for fare increases, and usually getting them.

  The card snapped back out at her and she took it. There were plenty of rides on it now, and when she got home she would give it to her daughter to let her take a ride out to Coney Island to get some sea air and some exercise before the baby started weighing her down. Then, before she really started to show, before the other kids in her school started making fun of her, before the boy who had knocked her up started bragging all over Jamaica about how he’d treated this “ho,” they would catch a flight home, maybe leave the child with her mother to be raised properly, maybe put it up for adoption with the church. It would all work itself out, and they could get on with their lives.

  Alas, Eugénie would never learn of this plan, because these, as it turned out, were the last thoughts Marie Duplessis ever had.

  At the sound of the explosion Ben, the hot dog vendor, pulled out his AK-47 and opened fire. God, but it felt good to finally be able to strike back. All the years in Green Haven and other prisons had hardened him, made him even more vicious and relentless than he had been growing up in Brownsville/East New York, Brooklyn. Guys from Brownsville prided themselves on how tough they were, how relentless, how remorseless. They had to live up to the standards of the old neighborhood, the place that had given America Murder Incorporated, guys who would put your eyes out with ice picks, who would hang you from meathooks and leave you there to dangle until you finally died.