Banquo's Ghosts (45 page)

Back in the Hung Fat van, Anton’s call was traced to a loft space on 35
^th
Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth. The Garment District. Rug merchants selling $50,000 Bokharas, Korean restaurants down the side streets, and crummy walk-up flats over the thread-needle houses. One-third of all clothing manufactured in the U.S. is designed and produced
in this neighborhood—though the huge sweatshops are long gone to less expensive real estate in Jersey or Florida, Texas and Mexico, and further afield to the factories of Taiwan, Malaysia, all points east. The area still had a kind of 19
^th
century Industrial Revolution feel about it: big square clunky buildings, block after block, squeezing the narrow cross streets. During business hours, delivery trucks, garment workers, rolling racks from cut-shop to warehouse choke the district curb-to-curb. Feeding its lace or bead sellers, textile importers, fabric shops, and of course, some of America’s most famous designers, Oscar de la Fendi and the rest of the Haute Couture clans. From nine to five, Monday through Friday, the long narrow streets in the district were a roiling Hogarth print.

But at night the place became a graveyard. They parked by a fire hydrant on 35
^th
Street a hundred yards west of Fifth Avenue, making the Hung Fat van stand out like the Barnum & Bailey clown mobile, and it didn’t help that four police cars blocked off both ends of 35
^th
Street, and two NYPD SWAT trucks parked on either side of the building entrance.

“
This
?
This
is the plan?” Johnson had hitched a ride, now crouched in a corner of the Hung Fat van sitting in the semidarkness next to Jordan the Technician, who smelled vaguely of Bonomo’s banana Turkish taffy, Slim Jims, and Lay’s Rancho potato chips, which seemed to cover all the food groups as far as the man was concerned. Smith had slithered up next to Wesson, and Bryce huddled on the opposite side, while geology student Han Lee, earning extra credit, scrunched himself on Bryce’s skinny lap like Edgar Bergen’s wooden sidekick, Charlie McCarthy. And finally Wallets, thinking of nobody’s comfort as usual, smoked a cigarette—making the whole lot thoroughly nauseated.

“Can someone please crack the door?” Johnson asked softly; he could feel the cigarette smoke going right to his stomach, twisting it into knots.

“Will someone shut him up? I’m watching TV,” Jordan said, mouth working over taffy.

Johnson snapped, “Nobody asked you—” his gratitude from earlier ancient history.

And the whole van barked,
“Shut up!”

And so they watched TV in silence. Geology major Han using his expert’s eyes to see if there were any radioactive hot spots on the colored tubes. Not that Jordan really needed the help, but another pair of eyes couldn’t hurt, and besides, nobody was going to turn young Han loose on the city yet. Or back to the
New York Post
editorial offices. Double secret probation.

Three monitors stared back at them, but only two at the moment showed images, the last just a blue screen. The first monitor fed RT vid-cam from a SWAT team member’s helmet labeled
SWAT, Murphy
, with the cop’s badge number. So on Monitor One Johnson saw what the cop saw, stifling his impulse to shout,
Hurry!
The policeman crept along, one in a line of officers down what looked like a dingy stairwell-hallway. In the van, they all watched the bobbing heads of other SWAT helmets that
SWAT, Murphy
showed them, and Johnson squirmed in silence—every sound from the hallway magnified, shuffling, waiting for orders. It couldn’t have been that noisy in the hallway itself. What were they waiting for?

The second monitor gave the target apartment in microwave image and was piped over to the SWAT team leader’s laptop, a map he could read. The image showed the ghostly outline of the fourth floor: a large loft space, in some places duplex-high, maybe a couple of thousand square feet. The place divided into 3-D rectangles and boxes, with a main hallway running from front door to a fire door at the back. So you had one main artery with mini hallways and rooms, some larger, some smaller, branching off on either side—and two stairways to upper-level rooms or platforms.

The red and yellow ghosts of the Iranian occupants moved from one room to another, unaware they were being watched. Some sitting at tables, others standing before the white hot burners of a stove, then opening the dark blue of a refrigerator. A bathroom showed through as a blinding green mist as someone took a shower, his body also green except for the red pumping of his heart.

“Jesus, the thing’s a fucking maze,” the technician commented, as he swallowed a wad of banana glue.

“No hot spots that I can see,” geology major Han told them.

“See if you can locate one isolated body,” Wallets said. “That may be her.” Johnson wanted to crawl into the screen, go through the wires himself.
Find her.
C’mon, she’s there; just look!

The third monitor suddenly blinked on with a new live feed. This from a miniature audio-video probe inserted under the front door, showing merely baseboards, and a long, empty hall. At the far edge of the camera, someone’s shoes walked across the frame and vanished. Friggin’ pointless. They jerked the probe back, and the monitor went blue again. Should he smash the screen? Not yet . . .
Stifle yourself.

The technician chomped on a Slim Jim and used his joystick to traipse down halls and up stairways through the bright microwave hues. Then he stopped. A small room, upper level—a body signature. The body was curled up on the floor in a fetal position. Johnson found himself grasping the technician’s armrest in a death grip. The man glanced at him, and he knew enough to let go.

“Yeah,” Wallets said. Then began to speak into a headset connecting Hung Fat to the SWAT Team Leader. “We count nine. She’s number ten. Up and to the right.” Then listened carefully, just repeating what the Tactical Unit Commander told him. “Flash-bang? Then gas? Uh-huh. Yup. Uh-huh. Good luck. See you at the front door.”

The video from
SWAT, Murphy
tilted back and forth as the SWAT team began to murmur to one another, recapping their plan: the order of clearing room by room. The extra two-man team reserved for securing Giselle both said, “Right,” at the same time.

All at once the Real-Time Cam on
SWAT, Murphy
exploded with light. The loft’s front door went down; flash-bang grenades whumped twice in the hallway. Then the long hiss from tear gas. And with the tear gas floating in every direction you couldn’t see a damn thing. So everyone’s eyes went back to the microwave monitor. They could see the tactical team members rushing down the hallway in a tight formation, then splitting off room by room. In some rooms taking bodies by surprise. In others the flash of gunfire. Some bodies fell; then men swarmed over the fallen.

The joystick followed the two tacticals assigned to Giselle up a flight of stairs, then bashing into a room. The body on the floor leapt up in fear.

And Wallets’ sober voice filled the Hung Fat van: “We have her.” And then to Johnson alone: “She’s okay.”

Johnson nodded tightly once in thanks, his face very pale. Suddenly he rose from his place. Shoving past the technician just as the man popped a bag of Lay’s Rancho, and knocking the chips everywhere: “Thank you. Sorry, sorry. Thank you,” breathing heavily. “I don’t feel well, I’m gonna be—” And clanged past Wallets and into the street.

Johnson barely recovered in time to press Giselle’s hand as she came out of the building on a stretcher; she looked up at him with glassy eyes and weakly pressed his hand back. “They sedated her,” a paramedic explained. “Makes ’em easier to handle.” Before he could reply the ambulance doors banged shut. St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital. He’d remember that.

Then from the shadow of the Hung Fat van he watched Yasmine led from the building, hands cuffed behind her back and placed in a waiting NYPD paddy wagon along with the others arrested in the loft. She seemed of all things, mildly distracted, even
bored
—and didn’t notice him. Mission accomplished?

Fifteen minutes and fifteen blocks later, the paddy wagon followed by the Hung Fat van pulled up to the limousine entrance of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 49
^th
Street between Lexington and Park Avenue. The limo entrance, reserved for VIPs, was a cavelike carport a single car wide, which ran the length of the building from 49
^th
Street to 50
^th
north-south. The squat car park forbidding: a low narrow tunnel that widened slightly to two lanes. A vehicle could enter and vanish from the streets, then slip out the other side unseen. The limo pass-through was low-ceilinged, cramped, and darker still, as there were almost no lights in this place—a long narrow corridor, bare concrete apron, bare concrete walls.

Recessed hotel entrances led from the two-lane limo corridor, curb-side vestibules. Oddly, the vestibules were brightly lit but illuminated nothing beyond: people could exit a limo and vanish into the hotel with
no one the wiser. The west vestibule led to the Waldorf proper, the other to the “Security Tower” to the east. A separate section of the hotel reserved for VIPs, with added features—lockdown elevators, private conference areas, and quarters for private security. The two-lane limo corridor was also adjacent to a large delivery bay, a cutout, leading directly to the service elevators. A dark service bay and wide service elevator stood about four feet off the ground ever-ready for deliveries.

A phalanx of city cops entered from both sides of the street surrounding the holding vehicle, a tight wall of blue. In the Hung Fat van outside the hotel on 49
^th
Street, Wallets offered Johnson a handkerchief and a cracked bar of Bonomo in its silvery paper.

“Nothing’s going to happen to them for a while,” Wallets said, nodding at the van. He meant the prisoners. “They’ll cool their heels half the night. Here, wipe your mouth, have some taffy, and let’s go upstairs. I have things to do.”

E
arlier that evening a fellow named Walid exited the Union Square subway at the southeast corner of Union Square Park. He had appeared inconspicuously enough under the round frilly green awning that is one of the park’s signatures: an art nouveau aedicule slightly reminiscent of 1890s Gay Paree, but this one an overblown glass-and-metal translucent awning like a skylight in Captain Nemo’s
Nautilus
. He walked past a young girl in a bright T-shirt trying to hand out tickets for a comedy show and a bearded guy taking signatures for some petition or other. Walid’s gait was brisk but stiff.

No one noticed when he reached back with his gloved hand to feel for a Velcro flap on the side of his backpack. With practiced fingers, he pulled it open. His eyes stared straight ahead, and he never stopped walking. Up the three steps from the sidewalk toward the Union Square Park entrance, he mingled among a small crowd. Passersby were listening to a tinfoil-hat buffoon with a bullhorn standing next to a big red banner with white lettering proclaiming “9/11 Inside Job.” The large banner showed the famous photo of the World Trade Center Tower collapsing on itself, and below the caption “controlled implosion.”

The protestor’s amplified voice echoed around the square: “This regime will never tell us the truth! This regime lives on lies! This regime
staged this
so-called
terror attack! I have a physics degree from NYU, and I can categorically—”

Walid kept walking into the park, past the usually unnoticed statue of George Washington on a horse. He walked north up the park’s eastern pathway, unevenly paved with pentagonal stones, benches on either side with people enjoying the early evening of a gorgeous mid-September day: couples talking or making out, a bum sitting with his grocery cart full of bags of aluminum cans, a mangy twenty-something guy strumming Dylan on a guitar, people doing a sudoku puzzle or reading the
Times
or a book.

Walid walked the length of the park down this path, occasionally looking behind him, like something was dogging him, a tail or maybe just a bad conscience. He took a left out of the park—the neon-red sign of the pretentious restaurant Coffee Shop ahead of him—and doubled down its outside perimeter southward, past a jazz band playing for dollar bills thrown in an open guitar case and the skateboarders doing their ollies and other tricks on the vacant asphalt between the iron park fence and Broadway. He walked on . . . past panel trucks from the farmers’ market packing up the merchants’ produce at the end of the day; past the statue of a frail Gandhi, a necklace of withering flowers around his neck; past the dog run with dogs of all shapes and sizes chasing and sniffing and barking at each other with the simple joy of life. Finally passing the exit he had just come from, making a full circuit. He kept on for another loop.

Along the sidewalk this time, past the people sitting on the steps of Union Square and among all the foot traffic of people coming from work. He stayed on the sidewalk northward, up the west side of the park along its chest-high exterior stone wall, past a newsstand and another subway exit and to the northwest entrance to the park, where he crossed the park yet again, past the people lined up for happy hour at a streetside bar called Luna Park, with tables under umbrellas and waitresses holding drink trays high in the air to squeeze between customers.