Terminal City (40 page)

“The only backup they have powers up the trains first,” Yolanda said. “You’ll know that when the lights go back on the screens in the operations center.”

I looked through the window, but it was as dark in there as it was on our side.

“Not so fast, Ms. Cooper. That could take half an hour,” Yolanda said. “There’ll be no lights in the terminal till they figure how and why they went off. And no generator to serve as an intermediate power source.”

“You don’t know about the button, do you?” Zoya Blunt asked me. She had stepped on her cigarette to put it out, and now there was no glow at all.

“What button?”

“My father used to call it the red button. It turns off all the power in the terminal with a single switch, and it stops every train that’s on a track, as far off as they may be.”

I tried to control my anger that she hadn’t thought about it during my questioning. I tried to control my fear at the idea that this blackout could have been caused intentionally. “Where is it, Zoya? Where is that button?”

“You think I was holding out on you, Ms. Cooper? I just don’t know where it is. I was never allowed to see it. It’s in a subbasement that nobody’s allowed in. It wasn’t a place for kids, my dad always said.”

“Is it in M42? The subbasement with the rotary converters?” That’s where Nik had been sleeping, but Scully had stationed men there so he couldn’t go back.

“No, no. It’s not M42. But it’s downstairs somewhere near there.”

I had to tell Mike and Mercer. “Yolanda, let me have your walkie-talkie.”

“It’s not getting any reception,” she said. She was slow in passing it to me. “I think I ought to bring you two back to the stationmaster.”

“I want to go with you,” Zoya said. “I don’t like the dark.”

“Let me have your lighter, please?”

She lit another cigarette and passed me the small plastic tube. I flicked it on and tried to make a call on the walkie-talkie. I pushed the right buttons but couldn’t get through.

I pulled the laptop to me and linked to my Internet service. I typed an urgent e-mail to both of the guys—and to Nan Toth, who was undoubtedly safe at home. I clicked
SEND
, but the notice that my message could not be delivered until a later time came back immediately.

“You won’t get anything on the Internet now,” Yolanda said. “And you can’t call or text. We’re in a dead zone, and once we lose power, it’s hopeless.”

“It wasn’t a lightning strike that did this, Ms. Cooper. It has to be Nik. He’s going to find me here,” Zoya said, growing more and more hysterical. “I want Yolanda to take me back to the detectives.”

“There’s no reason for Nik to even know you’re in the terminal,” I said. “No one wants him to know.”

“Well, what about you? He’d be after you, wouldn’t he?”

“I’m nobody in all this, Zoya. He doesn’t have a clue who I am, and that’s how I want to keep it. Nik’s bought himself a confrontation with the NYPD. That’s what he seems to want.”

The young woman drew a deep breath. “From the looks of things downstairs,” she said, “I’d have to say that’s suicide.”

Zoya Blunt was exactly right. Suicide by cop.

Suicide, though, that took with him as many innocent lives as he could muster on his way out.

Nik’s madness, his murderous rampage, was most likely a desperate effort to call attention to himself. Not a cause, not a political mission. The psychopathology of a schizophrenic who was driven by the torment of an inner voice. The psychopathology of someone who had lost everything to live for.

The young woman walked to the door of the room and opened it.

“No!” I shouted. “You can’t try and figure out your way down alone. You have no idea where Nik is.”

“I’m taking her, Ms. Cooper. I’ve got a gun.”

“He’s got a bigger gun, Yolanda. Probably more than one.”

“I have orders not to leave you here alone. And two of us don’t want to stay one minute longer,” the officer said. “I have orders to keep Ms. Blunt safe from her brother, too.”

“Are you telling me I have to leave this room?”

“I can’t make you do anything, Ms. Cooper. But I’m ready to go. There are NYPD officers with automatic weapons stationed at every landing between here and the concourse,” Yolanda said. “You must have seen that on your way upstairs. I can send one of them back up to hold your hand.”

“I—uh, I saw one where we got off the elevator.”

“You can be a sitting duck up here,” she said, patting the decorations on her breastplate, “or you can come with us. I didn’t get these citations for cowering in the dark.”

I thought about letting the two women go and bolting myself into the room. Nik Blunt didn’t know who I was. There was no point for him to target the situation room.

“Nik has no reason to come here,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

“You know the most damage he could do, Ms. Cooper?” Yolanda said. “He could get inside the operations center, to those guys on the other side of this wall who’ve still got thousands of lives in their hands.”

People speeding north through the night to Hudson and Hartford, I thought, unaware of the monster in the terminal they’d left behind.

“Nik Blunt could get in that room and throw switches. He could derail trains all over the Northeast Corridor, if he’s rigged that power button in a way that he can control it from wherever he is within Grand Central.”

And NorthStar probably taught him how to rig some controls exactly like that.

“So you can sit here on your ass, Ms. Cooper, and watch for the neon glow of those distant train signals to light up the operations board again.”

“But—”

“You cross your fingers and hope those passengers won’t know what hit them when the trains jump the rails while they’re cruising along at sixty-five, seventy miles an hour tonight. Me? I’m going out to make sure the bosses send more men upstairs to guard the workers in that room. They’re a little more important in the big scheme of things tonight than you are.”

FORTY-FOUR

Yolanda Figueroa was the first of us to step into the darkened corridor. Zoya was behind her, and I was third in line.

“I’ve been up in these hallways several times a week for nine years,” Yolanda said. “I can find my way down easily and guide you there. For now, you should follow the pipes.”

“What?” Zoya asked.

“Some run vertically and others horizontally. Just keep a hand on the ones that travel lengthwise over your head. They go the full distance of the corridor. Holding on to one of them will steady you. Keep you from bouncing off walls.”

There was an eerie stillness in the short hallway that was even more unpleasant as we made the right turn into the longer one that led back in the direction from which I’d arrived. Earlier in the evening I had been able to hear voices on the loudspeaker from time to time—some of them familiar to me. Now, no one was speaking.

I flicked on Zoya’s lighter again. It was a plastic disposable Bic, and I had no idea how much butane was left in it. I could see that there were no obstructions ahead of us so I turned it off.

Yolanda was more sure-footed than we in moving forward. I reached up to grab the old piping overhead, which was dust-covered and rough with rust. It made me more comfortable than the prospect of stumbling as I walked. Zoya Blunt couldn’t reach the pipes, so she held on to the bottom hem of Yolanda’s uniform jacket.

We reached the end of the corridor, and Yolanda pulled on the heavy door and opened it.

“No officer here,” she said.

“There wasn’t one when your partner and I came up,” I said. “The last cop I saw was guarding the elevator door one flight down.”

I moved into place, around Zoya, to face Yolanda. For the first time since the blackout, I could see into the terminal.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“If you can’t deal with heights, then don’t look down.”

Off to my right, the pounding rain hitting the long windows over Lexington Avenue in sheets was now accompanied by ragged streaks of lightning. At that very moment, a clap of thunder caused Zoya’s heels to lift off the ground.

The lightning illuminated the all-glass catwalk, focusing me on the dizzying effect of the translucent flooring we had to cross to get to the stairs that were next to the incapacitated elevator.

“I can’t do it,” Zoya said.

“This is no time to be afraid,” I said softly. “I can’t stand heights, either, but it’s our way out of here.”

“It’s not about heights.”

“What, then?”

I was looking down through the glass at the floor of the concourse below us. I’d never seen it cloaked in darkness before. I could make out figures moving across the wide space but had no idea who they were or what they were doing.

“We played on these catwalks all the time when we were kids. My dad used to rest in the lounge. The engineer’s lounge.”

“Quick, Zoya,” I asked. “Where’s that?”

“On the fourth level, southeast corner. We played hide-and-seek,” she said, trembling again. “Nik will see me if I walk out on that glass. I know he will.”

Yolanda was determined to get us down. “He doesn’t know you’re here, Zoya. He’s looking for cops. He’s looking for ghosts that don’t exist. Besides, you can’t glance up from down below and know who anyone is. Trust me, I’ve spent hours looking for trespassers who get in here. You gotta be face-to-face, not looking at the soles of someone’s shoes.”

There was a flash of light that blinded me for several seconds. The three of us retreated from the lip of the catwalk back into the stairwell.

“Was that lightning?” Zoya asked, holding on to my arm.

Yolanda answered. “No. Emergency Services must have gotten some floodlights set up. Looks to me that’s what it is.”

“That will help,” I said. “They’ll do floodlights and bullhorns.”

“It won’t help anything,” Zoya said, clutching on to me. “They’ll just make it easier to see us walking across up here.”

Yolanda was losing patience with Zoya Blunt. “Tell you what. You two stay right here in this landing, okay? You can lock the door to the corridor we just came from till I get back. I’ll go down to get the other officer and you can wait—”

“We don’t split up,” I said.

“Shit. You’re worried ’cause you don’t have a gun, Ms. Cooper? We’ll get somebody up here with one in five minutes.”

“It’s not about the gun, Yolanda. I just don’t want you to be alone.”

“We patrol alone most of the time. We only have partners in the tunnels and for VIP security setups. I’m used to this.”

Yolanda Figueroa was determined to head out on her own. Zoya Blunt had seated herself in a corner of the dark landing. I was torn between how to handle both of them.

Just then, Keith Scully’s voice shouted through a bullhorn.
“Sorry for the glitch, guys. The stationmaster tells me that Mr. Blunt put his finger on something called the red button, to rather dramatic effect. He’s managed to jury-rig the power controls in the terminal, so I apologize for the loss of light and sound.

“I also apologize for putting so many of you men and women, whom I respect enormously, in danger. So I’ll give Mr. Blunt exactly three minutes to show the white flag. If not, then there’s no deal on the table. The district attorney has withdrawn all possible plea discussions. And I’m reminding you that Nik Blunt is armed and extremely dangerous. We’ll get you some light back as soon as we can.”

“Another ten minutes,” I said, “and we’ll be able to see where we’re going and who’s around to help us.”

“I’ll be back before then,” Yolanda said.

A crash of thunder cracked the quiet of our landing.

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” she said, Glock in hand. “I’m going down this staircase, just the way you came, Ms. Cooper. If you can bring yourselves to do it, just inch out a bit and you can watch me cross over on the catwalk. Right inside that door across the way, you said there’s an officer on patrol. You won’t ever lose sight of me.”

I peered out onto the catwalk. The improvised lighting from below and the occasional streaks of lightning from outside showed that it was empty, top to bottom.

Yolanda Figueroa stooped in front of Zoya Blunt, resting a hand on her knee. “You okay with this? Is this what you want?”

The young woman bit her lip and nodded.

Then Yolanda smiled at her. “My boyfriend’s one of those guys in the operation room, so you know I’ll be right back. Gotta keep him safe at all costs.”

No wonder the cop was so eager to get extra protection for the men in control of the train lines.

She stood up. “You get it now, Ms. Cooper? Or are you heartless?”

“I can’t fight with you, Yolanda. He’s a lucky guy, so you’d better be careful.”

“I’m good at my job. I’ll be back.”

Yolanda Figueroa took the staircase down, moving faster without us. When she reached the floor below, about fifteen stories over the main concourse, I watched from my vantage point, where the catwalk met the enclosed landing that shielded us from sight. I envied the confidence with which she strode over the glass bricks, backlit by an occasional lightning flash.

She pulled on the door and it opened. She disappeared inside.

Since the elevator was incapacitated, I knew it would take several minutes longer for her to jog down the many steps necessary to get to the ground floor, and several more to find Scully or our team.

“You okay?” I asked Zoya, lighting another cigarette for her.

“I just want to sit here. This is fine.”

The storm was passing right overhead. The lightning streaks and thunderclaps were coming much closer together in time.

But only ninety seconds later, the door that Yolanda Figueroa had entered, one flight beneath us, burst open onto the catwalk.

From the angle at which I watched, I could see the figure of the young woman—gone almost limp, her head flopping against her chest—being pushed back out over the glass flooring by a young man dressed in camouflage clothes and assault boots.

I knelt beside Zoya and put my hand up to signal her to stay back.

Nik Blunt had Yolanda in his arms. It appeared from the blood on both her upper body and on Blunt’s clothing that he had already slit her throat.