Early Warning (20 page)

Under the Hudson River

Few civilians knew that the Hudson River was crisscrossed by tunnels, those both successful and in use, and those failed and long since fallen into desuetude. The old North River—that had been its name until the mid-20th century, reflecting its origins as part freshwater river and part brackish estuary, like the East River—had been the object of man’s desire to simplify the crossing from Manhattan to Jersey for more than two hundred years. The Hudson and Manhattan Tunnels dated back to 1874, when the first attempts were made to dig beneath the silt of the river bottom and snake a tube across to the west side of the island. Because the technology was not up to the task, those early efforts collapsed, but they remained beneath the water today, unfinished and unused. Until now.

Devlin approached the edge of the water. He had committed to memory the old maps Maryam had showed him aboard the plane and, triangulating with his GPS device, knew precisely where they were.

He would have less than two minutes to find the old opening, long since buried in the river and under about ten feet of water. When the tubes eventually were successfully built—the railroad they had once served had become the PATH trains from New Jersey, operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which also controlled the other bridges from Jersey, as well as the late World Trade Center—most of the aborted tunnels had been simply left to rot. But bits of them had been incorporated into the design and, if the maps were correct, there was still access. All Devlin had to do was dive down, locate the ingress, and try to hold his breath long enough to get in.

There was no entry from the Jersey side. When Tyler had issued his order to close off the city, all trains had immediately stopped running. Both the passenger vehicle tunnels had been choked off at the Jersey end as well. And, since he did not officially exist, there was no use trying to pull rank on the PA cops. He was going in, and he was going in invisibly.

Diving was something else few people knew anything about, except divers, of course. What seemed like just a short distance—say, a hundred feet—might as well be a mile to a diver. The pressure grew exponentially with every few feet down, and while man may well have originated in the primal soup, he had long since accepted his fate as a breathing biped. Water might be fun at the Jersey shore sixty miles south of where he was standing, but at this point, it was an enemy.

Across the river, Devlin could see the smoke rising from where Times Square would be, to the north of where he was now standing. The prevailing winds were from the west, as usual, so he couldn’t smell anything, but he knew from his survey of the situation aboard the Gulfstream that the world’s most famous intersection was now very likely uninhabitable. The acridity of the smoke, the ongoing gunfire, the rapidly spreading fires were sure to destroy the place, and not even the best men in the NYPD and the Fire Department were likely to be able to stop it. How many times did this have to happen, he wondered, before the United States was ready to go on offense? To hit back, hard, to lay waste to its enemies without the albatross of the lawyers and the JAGs perched on its shoulder, warning, hedging, caviling?

He took a deep breath, then exhaled. Then another, deeper breath, expanding his lungs, prepping them for what was to come.

But whom to attack? In the world of asymmetrical warfare, it was impossible for the leaders of nation-states to make their decisions. There were no diplomatic establishments to deal with, no ultimatums to be issued and then either accepted or ignored. The country was fighting a shadow army, led by invisible commanders, troglodytes who could issue their commands from cell phones and sat phones in far-off caves in countries that only existed as diplomatic fictions. Sometimes it seemed that most of the world was a giant Potemkin village, a simulacrum of a country; only kick down the false front to reveal the savage beating heart behind it, so filled with jealousy and hatred.

And behind those cave dwellers? Who financed them, manipulated them, stroked them, plied them with fake understanding? Devlin had already met one of them, a man so implacable and hate-filled that their one, brief, unfinished encounter had chilled him to his soul. He—a man famously without a soul—had looked into the ferocious eyes of nihilism and had recoiled from the void. Pray to God that he would never end up like that, that he could hold on to just enough of his humanity to keep him on the other side of the line from well-educated beasts bent on an apocalypse far beyond anything that Wagner had dreamed of at Bayreuth.

Skorzeny. It had to be him.

They had come so close to him in Budapest. But even the tender ministrations of an Egyptian rendition stint had not been enough to get Farid Belghazi to talk, and so he had died, his body dismembered and fed to the crocodiles that still could be found along the Nile. President Tyler had given them permission to take Skorzeny out, but they had failed. And now, here he was.

The mission was simple: get into the beleaguered city and terminate each and every one of the terrorists the NYPD had not yet captured or killed. As usual, he was to remain invisible to the locals at all times, tracking and killing without ever revealing his presence either to friend or foe. To any NYPD officer he encountered, he was just another endangered civilian, and should they make him, he would have to kill them. That was the part about the job he hated. It was easy to kill the other side. They had richly deserved their fate and, in fact, many of them actively sought and embraced it. Devlin’s dispatching them made no difference to either of them, and it had the salubrious effect of creating one less dirtbag in the world. But the good guys didn’t deserve it.

Get Skorzeny and get out. That’s what the voice inside his head had been telling him for months now. Get out and take Maryam with him. Retire, and take your money with you—let the government take care of you for a change, the way it took care of so many these days, instead of you taking care of it. Take this woman, even though you know next to nothing about her. Have never allowed yourself to run so much as a cursory investigation on her. Never bothered to check her cover story with the NCRI, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or even the scattered remnants of SAVAK, half of whom now lived in Los Angeles. Didn’t care. If she was right she was right.

And if in the end she was the one who had his name tattooed on a bullet in her gun, well, that was a fate he was gladly going to accept. It would put an end to all this, to this life he saw vanish anyway, before his eyes, at the airport in Rome, to the lie he had been living for so long. It would be the end of him, but it would be the end of Seelye, too, and half the NSA. If this was martyrdom, then so be it. Perhaps he had something in common with the scores of men he had killed. In the end, when your turn came, there was nothing left to do but take it, and like it.

Get in, get out.

Get into the tunnel. Once inside he would find a change of clothes in a utility station, adjacent to one of the early monitoring posts that constantly measured the conditions in the tunnel for air quality, radiation, minute increases in humidity—anything that might signal the approach of catastrophe. In the locker he would find any other weapons he needed, in case any of his became unusable after the submersion, along with some heavier firepower beyond what the Gulfstream had provided.

He cleared his mind. He had done this many times before, although never under such hostile conditions. But at root the job was as simple as it always was.

Get in, get out.

Rely on his superior training, his instincts, and the vast emptiness at the bottom of his soul to get him through. Above all, don’t think of her. She was on her way back to Europe. She was already dead to him and should by chance she be resurrected after this was over and they were together again, well, it was just another of the miracles that life held in store for a man in his profession.

He stepped into the water. Nobody saw him, nobody noticed him. What eyes there were nearby were focused on what was going on across the river.

Ten feet, twenty at the most. He stayed in the bathtub longer as a kid, head at the bottom, pretending he was a hero, a treasure-hunter, a deep-sea diver about to come up with rare pearls for the naked Japanese girls admiring him from the shore. For men like him, there were rewards in both heaven and hell.

He filled his lungs with air and slipped beneath the surface of the Hudson.

Times Square

Francis Xavier Byrne had waited his whole life for a moment like this. It sounded horrible to say, but it was true. Every cop, every politician, every reporter, dreamed of such a moment. Not death and destruction, but opportunity. That was the way they saw it—opportunity to prove what they were made of. Unfortunately, it most often included violent death.

The country had so devolved, and heroism had been so devalued, that it was politically incorrect for little boys—and some girls—to imagine themselves the heroes of their own dramas. Peace might seem like a good idea to the ninnies of Code Pink and MoveOn, but it took a real crisis for the men to separate themselves from the boys and the cable news anchors and to step up. It was something they lived their lives for, hoping it would happen. Not for blood, but for glory. And if the two were intertwined, well, so what? The entire course of human history up until the 1950s had proclaimed that one simple truth, and only in a country infected with the postwar guilt-ridden moral relativism of America—the insane notion that up was down, black was white, and good was evil—could it be questioned or challenged.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some of the old virtues had briefly returned. Suddenly the cops and firemen were heroes again, instead of public enemies and figures of fun on account of their lack of an Ivy League education, their Queens accents. The motto of the NYPD had long been “first through the door,” a stone-brave Irish attitude that said you’d rather die than let your pals think you a coward. Cops and firefighters didn’t call their lawyers when they got punched in the nose, didn’t sue their neighbors or fight with them on the condo boards—in fact, they didn’t even live in condos, preferring rentals in Middle Village or small houses in Orange County, which were pretty much all they could afford. Instead, they sucked it up, put their kids through school as best they could, survived their divorces without eating their .38s, most of them anyway, and got on with their lives. Although Byrne had managed to move across the East River to the city, and his place on 50th Street and Tenth Avenue in what had once been the dregs of Hell’s Kitchen had turned into a very fashionable part of town, he’d never forgotten his roots, nor lost his fear of ever doing anything less than his duty.

A dying breed, he thought, that’s what I am. And if today is the day that the breed finally vanishes, well, so be it. He had the .38 in his hand, drawn and ready to fire, as he hit the wreckage of the AMC.

He’d never seen anything like the destruction.

Being a cop in New York City, especially when you’d been on the force as long as he had—which meant going back to the bad old days of the Dinkins administration—meant you had seen a lot of terrible things. But those bad things were usually small family tragedies, a single point of blackness located among the thousand points of light that were the lives of the normal New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers—in other words, those who had not gotten themselves killed on this particular day.

Most cops went through their whole careers, from the Academy to roundsman to squad cars to donuts and coffee to the desk sergeant to retirement, without every being involved in violence, except after the fact, when the crime, no matter how gruesome, had stopped bleeding and was even now bloating, swelling, and heading for the corruption of the grave. And even that was rare. Most cops only ever experienced corruption when it came to them not in the form of a popper fished out of the river or a dismembered body half-buried up near the Cloisters, but in the form of a bribe or a payoff, from a city councilman or a drug dealer or even just a two-bit hooker who offered you a blow job in lieu of a bust, and every once in a while you took it because it beat the alternative, which was nothing.

But he, Francis Xavier, would have no such luck. Sure, Mary Claire had left him long ago, and Doreen as well, and with her his entrée to the downtown Manhattan society he had always despised. But then came Ingrid and that mess with his brother Tom, and once again he had had to corrupt himself, to take a perfectly good bust and turn it, not in the direction of justice but to his own advantage, to give him power over people, over Ingrid, whom he’d condemned, and over his brother, whom he’d always loathed. He’d gotten out of that one alive and well and even prospering, just as his boss, Matt White, had, so many years ago. In that incident they both remembered all too well but which they never discussed, never could discuss, because to do so would mean the end of both of them. Behind every great fortune is a great crime, Balzac said, but far worse was the policeman’s axiom that behind every great career was an even greater crime, as he understood all too well.

He could still see Rikki Marcon, holding his dead girl, Rosa, who had begged the cops to save her from her violent boyfriend, and whom he’d loved so much that he’d gone to work on her with an ice pick, and there wasn’t much left of her when Matt and Frankie came upon them and without hesitation Matt had capped Enrique twice in the head with his .38 and that was the end of that. That was the reality of the city streets in those days, of bloody love and violent death, the only way these things could end when you got right down to it, which was maybe for the best. It spared everyone the happily-ever-after bullshit, the broadening of the hips, the weakening of the libido, the screaming children, the fights, the broken crockery, the sound of gunshots breaking the semi-stillness of the night in the south Bronx or Bed-Stuy or Brownsville or East New York or…

“RIP, motherfucker,” was all Matt had said when he blew Rikki away, and as far as Byrne was concerned, that was about all the valedictory and eulogy any one of us deserved.

From that moment on, neither of them had even mentioned the incident. It was the unspoken scales of Blind Justice between them, both of them eternally complicit in what had been a righteous kill, but what had also been a crime, and the fact that one of them was now Commissioner and the other the head of the CTU was the only possible virtuous outcome in a world long ago condemned.

And now here he was, twenty years later, not as fit as he was back then but twice as smart, not as clever but twice as wise, not as amoral but twice as opportunistic, faced with an opportunity even he had never dreamed of. Not even when he and Tom were boys, sleeping in their bunk beds back in Queens, Tom the older, Tom the tougher, Tom the dominant, Tom the one he’d hated all his life. Tom who lorded it over him after the death of their father, Tom the successful one, Tom the FBI agent, the lawyer with the gun, whereas he was just Frankie the cop, the Fordham grad with the old .38, because he was too old or too dumb or too scared or simply too lazy to change.

The .38, his dad’s service revolver, was in his hand as he looked up at what had been the AMC on 42nd Street.

The entire front of the building had been blown away, leaving two flanking sides with a great gap in the middle, with only the back wall of the lower floors still standing, although for how much longer was hard to tell. It was sagging, groaning with the agony of collapsing steel, a great expiring beast on its last legs, gravity about to claim it. If there was anybody still alive in there it was a miracle.

In the distance he could hear the sirens of the fire trucks. His job lay to the east, toward the gunfire that he could still discern among all the other sounds—screaming, moaning, shattering glass, the wordless voices of destruction. The voices that had always surrounded him, even back in Woodside, back when New York had been safe, when little Irish boys could sleep soundly in their beds, back before Kitty Genovese and the first World Trade Center bombing and 9/11. Back before the greatest city in the world had nearly been brought to its knees in fear and shame and guilt by 19 men from Saudi Arabia and other parts unknown. Back before invincible New York was bloodied. Back before the spiritual rot and nihilism that had long since infected the engine of capitalism and freedom had taken hold, hollowed it out, and rendered it supine before a handful of savages armed with box cutters and faith.

Twenty years ago, he remembered sitting in an Irish bar with Sy Sheinberg, Sid’s late uncle, and musing that the exhausted Irish couldn’t even muster one of their own as a bartender; today, the entire city couldn’t even muster a single priest to give it the Last Rites, if not absolution, on its way to Hell.

A man was running toward him. The hot dog vendor. Byrne didn’t have to think about the make: he
knew
.

Hope knew who it was before she looked at the display. Knew by the ring, the very same ring that announced the arrival of every incoming call. Hope didn’t have the patience of her children, who somehow had managed to assign a special ring tone to each of the callers in the phone books, the better to sort them out aurally as well as visually. How long that would take, she had no idea, but it was just one of those things she was never going to get around to. When Hope was a kid, all the phones came pretty much in black and rang pretty much the same, although there were those weird pink Princess phones, but you still couldn’t buy them, you just rented them from the phone company at a premium, and thought you were getting a bargain on some level. Such was the power of marketing.

“Danny?” she cried. “Help us! Oh my God, please help us!”

She knew he couldn’t. Even if he were overhead in one of his choppers right this minute he still wouldn’t be able to help her. But help was not really what she was after at this moment, not with the building swaying the way it was, not with hope fading so fast, not with her children clinging to her as if she were some sort of goddess, able to save them with a wave of her divine wand.

Well, why not—she had, once before. She had plucked her son out of the rubble of the middle school in Edwardsville, found her daughter in that awful prison in France when all hope had been lost.

“Hope—HOPE! Where are you? What’s happening?” She could hear the fear in his voice, but more than the fear—there was something else. Something else that she herself had been feeling, but not letting herself feel. It was too soon, that’s what she’d kept telling herself. Too soon for feeling, too soon after the death of her husband, too soon after the adventure in France, too soon. But Fate had a way of trumping Time, and too soon may not after all be quite soon enough.

“We’re okay, Danny, but we’re trapped. We were in the AMC on 42nd Street, when—”

Even in the vortex of sound, she could hear him punching a computer. “I’ve got you on video feed from the police helicopters,” he said, and she didn’t even bother to wonder how that was possible. “I’ve got the building on Google Earth. Now listen to me, Hope—”

Hope screamed as the building shifted and tilted. She had a flash of being on the
Titanic
, just like in the movie, when the boat began to slide beneath the waves, the elevation of the stern growing ever steeper.

“Hope. HOPE. Listen to me, baby, listen to me. I’ve tapped into the city building archives, so I’ve got the plans right here in front of me. Can you see all right? Can you breathe?

“We’re on the roof, Danny. Can’t you get someone here to pick us up?”

“Not right now, baby. So stay as calm as you can and listen very carefully…”

Ben Addison, Jr., saw the cop in front of him, made him as sure as he’d ever made any cop in his life. Cops were something he knew almost from childhood, cops were the things you’d best avoided unless you were ready to take them on, cops were the white men—even if they were black, like you—the white men who made your life miserable, the white men who were the font of all your misery, and your mama’s misery and your long-gone daddy’s misery, because after all he was probably in the jug somewhere, some guy you never knew whose rash action had brought you into this shitass world, and now here you were face-to-face with the Man, and it was long since past payback time.

To your left was the crackling hulk of the AMC, another evil infidel pleasure palace, where men and women could watch shameful films together, not segregated but side by side. There was a time when Ben Addison, Jr., enjoyed the company of women and, like every man, had measured his progress as a man by the number of women he’d seduced, or coerced or, once in a while, had even raped. But none of that was his fault—those were just terms, arbitrary definitions, judgments made by another culture on his culture. That was what they had taught him in the joint, the reason why the words of the imam had soothed rather than inflamed, had made him feel better about his own base appetites, although still ashamed, rather than angry. After all, he had a lot to thank the white man for, the removal of that awful guilt he had once felt, felt for so much of his life, to be replaced not by atonement but by righteous anger—by a burning desire for revenge, which had become his own personal version of atonement.

The cop was running toward him. So what if one of his AK’s was gone? The other one would be plenty to take this sucka down…

Byrne knew he had no chance if the shooter got off more than a few shots. Even a spray-painting gangbanger like this guy could get lucky once in a while. Byrne firmly believed in the cop’s adage that a single law enforcement officer with the right training and experience could take down an asshat with a single round left in the cylinder, before said asshat could blow away two little girls, an old woman, the milkman, a couple of cleaning ladies and half the side of the building, but miss his target, with an Uzi or an AK. As politically incorrect as it was to say, there wasn’t a cop in that situation, facing those odds, who didn’t like his chances.

Ben Addison, Jr., liked his chances. He’s seen the way the people fell when he pointed and shot them. What a feeling of power—to merely wish and will and down they went, all his tormentors from childhood, defenseless and helpless, unable to fight back because they were unwilling to fight back, having long ago disarmed themselves morally and emotionally. Whereas he had found the truth in the white man’s jail, where his brothers had come to him with love and mercy and the promise of justice, and then had put a gun in his hand to prove it.