Early Warning (12 page)

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 was 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.

The only rules Ben Addison ever knew were the rules of the street, the law of the jungle. School held no interest for him, and when his mama managed to scrape together enough scratch to send him to that Catholic school one year, he never got along with the other kids, mostly Latinos; never liked having to wear a uniform; and seriously disagreed with the turn-the-other-cheek tenets that they preached there.

One hot summer night Ben and some of his crew had gone into the city—gone into New York, as some Brooklynites still said—to see what was up. Even after one of the former mayors had cleaned up the place, there were still parts of Manhattan that outsiders were well advised to stay out of, and when they found a group of smashed college kids bar-hopping along the old gangland main drag of Allen Street, near Rivington Street, they decided to mug them. The boys gave it up quick, but one of the girls had mouthed off to him, called him out, dared him to do something, and so he did. He shot her in the head and then, because the guys had seen them, he shot the rest of them too. One, though, had lived, and it was his testimony that had sent Ben to the slammer. The mouthpiece had managed to negotiate the beef down to manslaughter, on the grounds that the kids had provoked him, and that they reasonably should have known that a man with his underprivileged background might react violently to any perceived assault on his manhood. At sentencing, Addison’s court-appointed shrinks made the pitch that “black rage” had contributed to the events of that night, that Ben was not solely responsible for his actions, and the judge saw it their way. Ben got eight-to-twelve years, was out in seven.

And that had been the only break he had ever caught in this life until he got to Green Haven, which was where he met the Imam. It was not until then that he learned what the words mercy and compassion truly meant—not weak weasel words, the way the Christians used them, but strong, muscular language that befits a warrior race. Courtesy of the people of New York State, and cheered on in the editorial pages of the
New York Times
, the Imam came regularly to minister to his burgeoning flock. He was so much more compelling than the pallid padre and the timorous rabbi, both of whom spent their time trying to understand the men and their crimes, to “work with them,” to tell them that God forgave them. The hell with that.

Most of the converts were, like Ben, African Americans, but there was a smattering of white boys as well, guys looking for something better than passivity and forgiveness toward others, cons who regretted their time but not necessarily their crime. In Islam, they found a new way of looking at the world, at their society, and at themselves, and they liked what they saw. The Imam Abdul never forgave anybody; forgiveness jive was not what he was selling. Instead, the Imam was selling punishment, misery, pain. The Imam didn’t want to understand the old you: he wanted him to die, and be reborn, not as a Christian but as a fighter. You died in Christ, but arose again in Allah, whose plan for mankind required killers, not healers. “We love Death as you love Life,” the Imam taught them to chant in Arabic, after he had trained them in the recitation of selected verses from the Holy Koran. Ben’s childhood Christianity, what little there was of it, had sloughed away like an old skin, to reveal the proud Islamic warrior beneath.

And so Ben Addison, Jr., had become a new man, with a new name. He was now Ismail bin-Abdul al-Amriki, Ishmael the American, son of Abdul, and his vengeance on the society that had spawned him would be terrible.

Once he had nothing to live for; now he had everything to die for.

“You know how I hate that word,
schmuck.
” said Shirley Acker, just as they heard the shots behind them. Not that they recognized them as shots. Like most New Yorkers, the Ackers lived in a gun-free world, at least as far as their social circle was concerned. They were against firearms in all forms, didn’t see why a little thing like the Second Amendment couldn’t easily be ignored, failed to understand why anyone would hunt for food when you simply buy it at Fair-way, and were quite sure that, were they ever to possess a gun, one of them would quickly kill the other, or perhaps him-or herself, entirely by accident. And should there ever be trouble in a post-Giuliani New York (they hated the sonofabitch, but had to admit that fascist had cleaned up the town), they would simply call 911 and the cops would come running.