Early Warning (16 page)

Manhattan

In his heart, nearly bursting from the exertion of his sprint, Frankie Byrne had always known he would be too late, but he didn’t know what else to do. “First through the door” was the motto of New York’s Finest, Irishmen to the core no matter what their ethnicity. He had lived by this motto for his entire career on the force, and he was not about to give it up now. Not even when the danger was greatest, which made the urgency all the more fierce. First through the door meant first through the door, whether the door was real or figurative, whether a shithole in the Bronx or a Park Avenue apartment, whether the door opened onto a swanky restaurant, an East Village head shop, a Queens crack house, or the Archbishop’s fuckpad across from MoMA. It was all the same to him. You went in to sort the situation out, or you died in the attempt. There was no sense rationalizing it. You just did it, and if the devil got you, well, you hoped you’d be in heaven long before the cocksucker knew you were dead. That was the Paddy way, and it was the only way he knew.

Why this was true was a mystery, but it was departmental lore and so every cop on the force abided by it. For Byrne, however, it went deeper. His father had died in the line of duty. In a firefight, you shot first or you died, and Robert Byrne had had been shot in the back, and even though he managed to turn on his unknown assailant he had not fired his weapon, out of fear of hitting a civilian. And so he died. Byrne honored his father’s memory, but he had no intention of ever letting that happen to him.

The explosion at the AMC movie theater practically hit him in the face. Luckily, he had not yet rounded the corner, or else he would have been instantly as dead as all the other pedestrians in the vicinity, from the Port Authority to the Great White Way. Instinctively, he fell to the pavement, rolling as close to a nearby building as he could manage, waiting for the shitstorm to stop.

He had never been this close to a general disaster—personal disasters had been enough for him—but he found himself strangely calm in the midst of it. In all his other encounters with the forces of evil, he had been a lone man, facing another lone man, both of them holding a sidearm. The romance of the movies was that men fired at each other from great distances with pistols, but Byrne knew from bitter personal experience that in urban confrontations your opponent was usually standing right in front of you, so it was not a matter of marksmanship but alacrity. Despite the caterwauling from the sissies and the nancy boys on the city council and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an officer’s first job was to go home safe every night.

Even as an NYPD officer, Byrne had never experienced anything like this: a rain of fire, of molten brick and steel and plastic. When he was finally able to peek around the corner, a stunning sight met his eyes: shredded bodies, some of them headless, many of them limbless, all of them dead.

Despite the increasingly militarized nature of urban police forces, cops weren’t supposed to be soldiers. They kept the peace up close and personal, not from a marksman’s dispassionate remove. They fought one-on-one, like the street fighters they had once been, battling the thugs, grifters, and second-story men their forebears knew so well. In the old days, back when Byrne’s grandparents had come over from Ireland and settled first on the Lower East Side and later in Queens, you grew up with the criminals you would eventually put in jail. Today, they came from thousands of miles away, disembarking at Kennedy Airport, their support staff already in place along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, just waiting for a signal, whether from their controllers or Allah.

Right now, what he had to do was get to the AMC Theater and figure out what the hell was going on.

All thoughts of the hot dog vendor guy were lost. Given what was unfolding in front of his eyes on 42nd Street, Times Square was a million miles away. The uniformed officers in place would have to deal with it, and the reinforcements that were undoubtedly already on their way. Although it was clear that this was an attack on the order of 9/11, Byrne found himself hoping that the feds would let the NYPD handle it—this was their turf, and nobody knew it better. It was already a blow to the department’s pride that something like this was happening, but in fact this is what they had trained for, prepared for—it was not their fault that geopolitical developments had intervened. The job of a New York City police officer was to protect and serve, and that was exactly what he intended to do.

The AMC, or what was left of it, was only a couple of hundred yards ahead.

“Dinner at the Four Seasons it’s ragheads,” said Sid Sheinberg.

Lannie Saleh piloted the unmarked police car at top speed through traffic. From time to time, he skirted the shoals of the sidewalk, expertly navigating around rogue parking meters, illegal sidewalk cafés and the usual urban flotsam and jetsam that wouldn’t have known the city was under attack if the Last Trump was being sounded by the New York Philharmonic. “You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do,” said Sheinberg. “It ain’t nuns or Norwegians. Probably al-Qaeda.”

“Now I know you’re an ignoramus,” said Lannie, negotiating around a couple of BMWs with New Jersey tags. “And probably a bigot, too.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because
if
,” began Lannie, “and this is a big
if
, this is some kind of Muslim assault, it’s far more likely to be Twelfthers than Sunnis.”

“Who cares? What’s the diff?”

Lannie downshifted, even with the automatic transmission, and nearly threw Sid into the windshield. “If this is as big as I think it is—as big as we both think it is—then this isn’t al-Qaeda. All they want to do is kill us.”

“As opposed to—”

“As opposed to starting the apocalypse.” Lannie glanced over at Sid and saw that he had no idea what he was talking about. “Look,” he said, “Christians and Shi’as believe in the Last Days. The rest of us, not so much. If and when they come, they come, but we have no intention of hastening them. When al-Qaeda attacks, it’s because they’re pissed off, refighting some fucking battle against El Cid or whatever. Let’s face it, since Mohammed swept out of Arabia and Islam conquered everything to the east, including Persia, India, and Indonesia, we’ve been on a hell of a losing streak.”

The street buckled. “Holy shit!” shouted Lannie.

The force of the blast knocked the car sideways, then up in the air. It sailed for just a moment, hit the pavement, spun. Lannie tried desperately to control the vehicle, its siren still wailing, but the Crown Vic was being tossed around like a skiff at sea. The car hit a mailbox, rebounded, and caromed off a fire hydrant. The hydrant ripped a huge gash in the passenger’s side and exploded, water geysering straight up. They clipped several parked vehicles, flipped, and came to rest, upside down, in the middle of street.

A couple of miles to the south, Lisa Richmond was headed home to Jersey after a lunch in SoHo. She didn’t come often to New York anymore, even though she had been born in the Bronx. What had once seemed close now seemed so very far away, what with a family and all, and despite everything she had believed as a young career woman working on Wall Street twenty years ago, Jersey had turned out to be not such a bad place to live and raise a family after all. Sure, the taxes were a killer, although the new governor was making noises about reducing them—yeah, right—but the air was a bit cleaner, parking was less of a problem, and the schools were a heck of a lot better.

The approach to Holland Tunnel was always a pain. It was as if the city planners hadn’t reckoned on the population of northern New Jersey mushrooming, so they decided to cram it in down here where Canal Street met Varick and Hudson streets. No matter how you approached it, or what time of day, you were practically guaranteed at least a twenty-minute wait to enter the tube. Lisa shuddered at the memory of the old days, when the squeegee men had lurked around the tunnel entrances, wielding their spray bottles and their dirty rags and their threatening countenances as they shook you down for a quarter. A lot of her friends paid them, just to make them go away, but she never did. For one thing, she was too frightened to open the window, and for another she felt instinctively that the service they offered was an indirect form of assault. Her husband, Adam, always gave them money, explaining that it was safer and easier to pay them off rather than to risk their probably drug-addled wrath. It was one of their many areas of disagreement.

At least there were no squeegee men anymore, not in New York and certainly not in Montclair, New Jersey.

Lisa’s mind was still on the squeegee men, inching her 2010 Jeep forward toward the mouth of the tunnel, when she felt the earth tremble. At first she thought it was just the rumble of the subway, the vibrations, but then, as she began to take notice, she realized that the car was moving—not forward, but from side to side, as if it were in an earthquake. The next thing she knew she was looking down at lower Manhattan from a very great height, and screaming to earth at the speed of gravity.

Raymond Crankheit was a tourist from Wahoo, Nebraska, or so he had told everybody he met, especially the girls. New York City girls were not like the girls back home, which in fact was not Wahoo, Nebraska, but that didn’t matter at the moment. Contrary to popular myth, or at least what he saw in the movies, New York City women were harder to get than the tramps back home, snooty and stuck-up; they could smell a rube like him a mile away, and their noses visibly crinkled as he approached, so Raymond Crankheit had decided to get even. Which was why he was here, standing by the Central Park Reservoir, waiting for a call on his cell phone.

For a long time he had wondered precisely how he was going to go about it. New York City had tough gun laws, and he didn’t own a gun himself, you couldn’t take one on a plane, he was too scared to drive across the country with a heater in his glove compartment. Originally, the family named had been spelled Krankheit, but that meant “disease” in German and his father had quickly had enough of such jokes back home in Pullman, Washington, and so in partial homage to the host of the CBS News program, he’d changed the spelling, although he still got it wrong, and moved the family across the Cascades to Seattle, where they left unspoken the implication that they were related to the famous newscaster.

Luckily, the flat accents of Wahoo were very similar to the flat accents of Pullman, so Raymond had to work only moderately hard to be able to pass for a Nebraskan. For some reason, he had decided that for this mission to succeed—“Operation Revenge,” he had dubbed it in his own mind—his cover story was going to have to be perfect, and he practiced like Travis Bickle in front of a mirror, holding a broken broom handle instead of the gun he didn’t have, and coldly shooting down every woman who had ever refused him a date.

Raymond Crankheit wouldn’t have said that he hated women, exactly. He was not a mishshogomast or whatever the term was that one of the crazy shrinks his parents had sent him to after the second incident, the one with the neighbor’s dog, had used, but on the other hand, it really pissed him off when some cunt blew him off and called him a dork or a geek or an asshole or any of the other unladylike terms girls were using these days. Yeah, those same girls that tattooed themselves up like the cheap whores working the old Skid Road back in Seattle. It was payback time for a life of rejection.

Pullman, Washington, was just across the state line from Moscow, Idaho, and for a time as a kid Raymond had fantasized about running away from home by “defecting,” as he thought of it, to Idaho. Eastern Washington State was a pretty dreary place, apple farms where there was water and alkaline deserts was there was not, and in his youthful imagination Idaho was a land of green mountains and secret communists. Then he got uprooted and transplanted, and that was the end of that notion, although he kept his lifelong fascination with the Soviets, the heroic protectors of the Third World and of people of color everywhere. There weren’t many people of color, except for the odd Mexican migrant worker, in Pullman, Washington, and so in the absence of people at whom to direct his compassion, Raymond’s sense of injustice burned even fiercer.

And so Raymond left home without telling anybody, not the ’rents or the parole officer or anybody. He hitched his way down to Frisco, and that had pretty much been the extent of the plan except that he never actually made it to Frisco. Instead, he wound up across the bay, in Oakland, where his money ran out, and he decided to find a place to crash in the Oakland flats. Everybody told him the Oakland flats were no place for a white boy like him, but by chance he had wandered into a little bakeshop not far from the Berkeley border, a Black Muslim bakeshop, the kind of place that attracted big black tough guys and those hot little white girls and Asian tramps from the UC campus, the ones that liked to walk on the wild side and pretend they were fucking for social justice when in fact they were just fucking.

The place was called the Malik Shabazz, Jr., Bakery and Book Store, and it was a place where you could bum a halfway decent, if halfway eaten croissant if you promised to help with the washing-up, and there was always plenty to read. That’s where Raymond encountered the Holy Koran, which at first he found hard to understand until one of the Brothers explained some of the more interesting suras to him. It was one of those moments he had wished for all his life, when a flash of knowledge, of revelation, comes and all at once he could see exactly what he had to do and how to do it.

The Brothers saw the flash of light in his eyes and knew they had found a soul mate. Instruction had begun immediately. Raymond was an apt pupil.

And now here he was. He glanced around at the cityscape, a 360 maneuver that rotated him from the top of the park to the residential towers of Central Park West, south to the wall of 59th Street and then back around again, east, across Fifth Avenue.

His cell phone rang. It was one of the Brothers, telling him that all his dreams were about to come true.