Terminal City (41 page)

I was helpless as I watched him drag her to the window he had opened over the concourse. “Hey, Scully! Commissioner!” Blunt screamed out into the poorly lit space.

Someone played the floods until they caught the two bodies—one alive, one probably dead—framed in the giant glass box so high above them.

“Hey, Scully! You looking for your officer?” Blunt screamed. “I told her to mind the gap, but she didn’t listen to me.”

I watched as Blunt threw Yolanda’s body to the concourse fifteen flights below. Before she hit the marble floor, snipers were firing at Blunt, bullets seemingly deflected by the thick panes of glass.

“I told her,” he yelled down, laughing as if he’d been seized by a demon, before he scurried back to the safety of the landing and let the door slam behind him. “I told her to mind the gap.”

FORTY-FIVE

“We’ve got to move,” I said, pulling Zoya Blunt to her feet.

“What happened to Yolanda?”

“She’s been hurt. We’ve got to go.”

“Nik? Was that Nik shooting?”

Maybe Zoya hadn’t heard his voice in the recess of the landing. “Probably. I think he’s on his way upstairs. I think Yolanda was right about his goal. We need to get out of this space as fast as we can.”

I knew that we couldn’t go downstairs. The risk of encountering Blunt on the way was too great. But he was headed in our direction and we had to change position as quickly as possible.

“Put out your cigarette, Zoya. Someone might see the light.”

“Attention, team.”
There was a new voice on the bullhorn. It was Mike Chapman. He had undoubtedly seen Yolanda’s body splatter on the concourse floor and knew Zoya and I were in trouble.
“Change of plans.”

Now he had to talk to us without giving Blunt any idea who or where we were.

“Okay, Zoya. That’s the detective who was working with us downstairs. We’re going to be fine. He’ll tell us what to do.”

“He doesn’t even know where we are.”

“I think he knows where Nik is, though.” I opened the door through which we had entered the landing. I knew Mike wasn’t going to send us across the glass catwalk and expose us to this maniac.

“My team needs to report immediately to Captain Poseidon’s son,”
Mike said, choosing his words carefully.
“Got that? To Poseidon’s son.”

This was not a time for Mike’s dark humor. If there was a Captain Poseidon, I didn’t know him. I took Zoya’s hand to lead her, but I wasn’t sure where to go. The beating of my heart seemed louder than the crashing thunder.

I kept repeating Poseidon’s name to myself and all that surfaced in my mind was Greek mythology, not an actual police captain. Of course, Poseidon. God of the sea. Did Mike want us to make our way downstairs to the Oyster Bar?

“
Remember, men,”
Mike called through the bullhorn.
“The captain’s son has wings. Wings.”

“Did you and your brothers learn mythology when you were kids?” I asked Zoya.

“No. Not me. I never heard anybody talking about it. Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s great. Right now it’s great.” I couldn’t compete with Mike’s knowledge of the Greek and Roman warriors, but I’d learned a lot from listening to him over the years.

“Why is he calling us ‘men’? He’s not talking to you at all.”

“Oh, yes he is. He’s just trying to throw Nik off, not alert him to the presence of the two of us.”

Poseidon, god of the sea, was also the father of Pegasus. And Pegasus was the divine winged horse of Greek myth—and of the zodiac. The golden image of Pegasus was one of the larger figures in the mural of the celestial sky that stretched above us.

Of course it made more sense for Mike to direct us upward than to chance an encounter with Nik Blunt, who was at least one floor below when he encountered Yolanda Figueroa. One flight up and we would be in the corner of the building, directly below the painting of Pegasus.

“Repeating, gentlemen, that I will meet you by Captain Poseidon’s son. Not where his son actually is, but where he should be. Where his son should be,”
Mike said.
“As God is my witness.”

I stood still and repeated Mike’s last words. “As God is my witness?”

He was telling me something. Something he was convinced I knew. I got who Poseidon was and from that had figured Pegasus. What did God have to do with any of this?

I played the words over and over again in my mind, until the clues finally locked into place.

The celestial ceiling had been painted in reverse, we had learned in our tour. The information had seemed irrelevant at the time but satisfied my curiosity about the magnificent aqua sky. The artist had made a mistake in creating his great mural. I tried to remember everything we had learned such a short time ago.

And then I recalled what happened when Commodore Vanderbilt’s heirs had been informed about the mistake, the very week Grand Central had opened. They announced that the mural was not an error at all, but a view of the earth from the heavens. God’s view. God was their witness.

“Mike will meet us on the other side,” I said to Zoya. Not where Pegasus really is, but where he’s supposed to be. “On the top floor. Let’s retrace our steps and you can follow me across.”

I let the door to the landing close behind us, lighted the Bic to make sure the path ahead was clear, and started jogging to the far corner of the building. The winding corridor was the entire length of a city block, parallel to 42nd Street, taking us from the Lexington Avenue side of the terminal to the Vanderbilt Avenue side.

When we reached the opposite landing, both of us took thirty seconds to catch our breath. There were no sounds from the corridor behind us. No voices, no footsteps, no gunshots.

“Ready?”

“You think your detectives are out there?” Zoya asked.

“If not now, then any minute. It’s a lot of territory for them to have to cover quickly. Sixteen flights or more up the staircases, most of them locked.”

Who knew what kind of carnage they faced in the wake of Blunt’s maneuvers, and whether he had placed other obstacles in their way?

“How will you know when they get up here?”

“I’ll—I’ll take a look. I’ll open the door.” I was as anxious to see protection for us as she was.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

“As sure as I can be,” I said. “I’m going to open it now, okay?”

“Yeah.” She had her back flat against the wall, out of sight of anyone who would be in a position to see inside.

I cracked the door a couple of inches. The concourse was still bathed in darkness, but floodlights were panning the entire room. Some were running horizontally, along the walls and back and forth on the catwalks on both ends, while others were scanning from the top of the vaulted ceiling back to the floor. I figured I had less than ten seconds to stay out of the spotlight.

Mike still had the bullhorn and now he was talking to the fugitive. “
We got your stash, Mr. Blunt. Whatever ammunition you don’t have with you, we’ve got most of it. So if you’re running low, you might want to rethink your plan.”

I closed the door, counted to thirty, and opened it again.

“All that ammo you left in your crib in the tunnel, Mr. Blunt? That’s gone. Thanks to Smitty, former mayor of the moles. Cleaned you right out.”

I wanted Mike or Mercer or Scully—anyone who knew Zoya and I were on the loose—to spot me and send cops to make us safe, but the last thing I wanted was for Nik Blunt to catch us. I placed my shoulder against the heavy door and looked again but saw nothing and no one. Mike wasn’t talking to Blunt about Yolanda’s death. I’m sure he didn’t want to give the murderer the satisfaction of knowing how everyone guarding the terminal felt about the killing of a police officer.

I was getting as depressed as I was anxious. Maintaining a stiff upper lip in front of Zoya Blunt was becoming more difficult by the minute.

Why hadn’t any of the cops reached our position yet? Had Blunt intercepted and killed more of them, or was it just the steep and circuitous route they had to take to get to us?

I thought Mike would have raced up the many flights of stairs himself, but it was more like him to stay on the loudspeaker, letting me hear his steady voice talking directly to me, communicating his presence and support. He would have dispatched other cops to come find Zoya and me.

I knew there were sharpshooters set up all over the terminal by this point. I hated the idea of sticking my head out into the open space at the very top of the catwalk.

“Attention, team!”
Chapman’s voice again.
“Meeting unavoidably delayed. I know where you are, team. Check the Edisons. Check the Edisons. Waiting for power, team. Waiting for four thousand bare bulbs to go on.”

I was fast becoming too exhausted to play Mike’s word game. Edison and bulbs suggested lighting. We knew the power was out. And four thousand bulbs was another count that figured in the structure of the terminal. Architects wanted to show off the new technology of the day: electricity. Every bulb that ringed the circumference of the ceiling of Grand Central—thousands of them—was absolutely bare.

Mike was broadcasting something to me that I needed to know. It had to do with the innumerable bulbs that were just overhead outside the landing.

“What does he mean?” Zoya asked.

I put my finger to my lips. “Be absolutely still, okay?”

“Are they nearby?”

I figured Nik Blunt was closer to us than the cops.

“On the way.”

I put my hand on the knob, bracing my arm against the door so it opened only slightly. I focused my eyes, which was hard to do going from total darkness to the combination of searching floodlights and bolts of lightning. Nothing.

I closed it and waited ten seconds. Zoya took another cigarette from the pack in her pocket and asked me for the lighter.

“You can’t do that right now.”

“It helps my nerves.”

“You’ll give us away when I open the door.” I didn’t want to tell her that snipers must have been setting up everywhere. “Just wait.”

“You said that before. I’ve been waiting, okay?”

I shushed her again and cracked the door. This time, the spotlights all seemed to be aimed in the same general position. They were crisscrossing the giant molding that formed a channel from the catwalk on the east side—from which Blunt had thrown Yolanda—to the one next to us, on the building’s west side.

I stood on tiptoe, so close to the ceiling of the terminal that my vertigo almost overwhelmed me.

In the man-sized gully—which appeared to be an architectural design element from the concourse below—where workmen stood twice a year to change thousands of lightbulbs, I could see Nik Blunt. He had crawled onto the deep space through one of the long glass windows—clearly fearless of heights, unlike me—and was creeping across the entire length of the terminal in our direction.

Spotlights from the floor tried to follow his movement, but most of Blunt’s head and body were below the rim of the channel.

I had no idea whether he had spotted me when I saw him throw Yolanda off the catwalk, or whether she’d had a chance, before he slit her throat, to give up the fact that his sister was in the terminal, helping the police find him.

Someone from below yelled the word “fire.”

A hail of bullets flew in the direction of Nik Blunt, who flattened himself against his sky-high gully and laid perfectly still. They struck the marble walls and burst scores of lightbulbs.

I pulled the door shut before someone mistook my shadow for the killer.

FORTY-SIX

I had my back to the wall, next to the door.

“What do you have in your apron pocket beside the lighter?” I asked Zoya.

She had heard the volley of shots and was ten steps ahead of me, backtracking in the corridor.

“Nothing. Just a Swiss Army knife and a bottle opener.”

A waitress, of course. “Let me have them, please.”

She fished in her apron and handed me the multitooled gadget first. I pocketed that, then held out my hand for the corkscrew. I pushed in the lock on the door—there was no bolt—then asked her to come back and hold the lighter so I could see well enough to jam the keyhole with the wine opener.

“Let’s go. That should buy us a few minutes.”

“But the gunshots?”

“It’s the cops. They think they see your brother up here.”

“Near us? Coming toward us?”

“I don’t know, Zoya.”

She started to run in the dark, holding the lighter out in front of her. “He’ll kill me,” she said. “Why aren’t the cops here?”

He’ll kill anyone he encounters,
I thought to myself. “Where are you going, Zoya? You’re heading back the same way we came.”

Nik could just as easily crawl back to the catwalk he’d started from as come out to the one we’d been standing near. I wanted to find a place to hide.

The young woman kept running ahead of me.

“Zoya, how well do you know this area? There must be supply closets up here, aren’t there? Somewhere we can be out of sight.”

“I’m getting out.” She was frantic now, and I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t thinking any more clearly, although there didn’t seem a way to escape from the top of the building that had countless entrances and exits on the street level.

“We’ve got to stay together, Zoya.”

“I don’t have to do anything you tell me. You’ll get me killed. You’ll get us both killed.”

Halfway down the corridor, she took a right turn, which was the way back to the situation room that we’d exited with Yolanda Figueroa.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

I caught up with her as she pulled on the door. It wouldn’t open. She stepped aside to let me try, but I couldn’t move it.

“Don’t you have a key? Don’t you have anything to help us?” Zoya had lost it, emotionally. She was unable to talk to me now. Everything she said was a scream or a high-pitched rant.

“I don’t have keys. I never did.” This hadn’t been the plan for the evening.

Zoya swept past me and continued down the narrow hallway. I looked back before I followed her. Blunt didn’t appear to be coming yet, if he was still alive. There was no noise from the direction of the landing, where I’d blocked the keyhole—at least temporarily.