The gathering erupts into pandemonium.
A bodyguard and two other men appear in this same upper doorway; they scuttle down the staircase to aid the Rebbe’s daughter.
ORTHODOX MAN
(cries from stairway)
The Rebbe! Someone has murdered the Rebbe!
Manning’s right hand flies to the holster. Empty! Our weapons, we both now remember, have been secured by the Shomrim.
Manning takes off in a flat sprint toward the staircase. I tear behind him. The room has broken down into chaos. Mothers and fathers snatch up their children. The hall fills with cries of terror and grief.
As I plunge into the crowd, something makes me glance to the auditorium entry.
The woman stands there.
The woman from Georgetown.
The one who sent the “lamed vav” text via the burner phone.
She sees me.
For an instant the woman looks as if she will flee. Then she realizes I cannot stop for anything except to race after Manning.
Ahead of me, Manning swims against a tide of black hats and white beards. He’s onto the speaker’s platform now. He crosses to the landing and the staircase behind it, taking the steps two at a time. I can see several of the Rebbe’s security team in the upper doorway, ashen and paralyzed.
Manning bowls past them into the upstairs chamber. I can hear him shouting to the people inside, “Who did it? Where is he?”
I’ve got my own shield high in my right hand. “Police officer!” I’m on the stairs now too.
An elderly Chasid swoons three steps above me. His black-mantled form swan-dives into my right shoulder. I tumble. I can hear Manning’s voice from the stairs above me, calling something I can’t make out. I peel the old man off me and pound, empty-handed, up the steps and through the door.
Ahead opens an old-fashioned, homey apartment. The Rebbe’s body lies crumpled against one wall. His family and bodyguards stand and kneel over him in postures of shock and horror. Lamps, a table, and a heavy couch have been overturned.
“Where?” I’m shouting to the family, seeking Manning. “Where did the officer go?”
There!
The rear exit!
I tear across the open space and into a dark hinter chamber, apparently the access to a staircase leading down.
Manning stands at the far side of the space, facing to my right as I enter.
Directly across from him stands Jake Instancer.
For an instant I think, The prof is going to help Manning go after the killer.
Then I realize: Instancer is the killer.
Manning bull-rushes at the taller, younger man. He attacks like a wrestler, grappling with his adversary, seeking to throw him or pin him.
Instancer peels Manning away from him as effortlessly as if he were fending off a child. The professor seizes Manning by the collar. With his left arm only, Instancer lifts Manning a foot in the air. He flings him into the wall.
The breath goes out of Manning in one percussive whoop. He drops like a load of bricks.
An interval passes, no longer than half a second. In it Manning’s eyes fix onto Instancer’s. His glance says, You were not at the library by accident. You set this whole scene up.
Instancer does not speak, but the glint in his eye is unmistakable.
He turns toward me. Instancer meets my eye for a fraction of a second, then wheels and bolts down the stairs.
Manning lurches to his feet.
MANNING
(to me)
Go. Go!
Twenty seconds later I’m spilling, behind Manning, out the ground-level door and into the alley.
No one to the right.
No one to the left.
Rain has started—the leading front of an unseasonable tropical storm rising fast out of the Carolinas. Already drops the size of silver dollars are splatting onto the dark pavement and the hoods and roofs of parked cars.
I scramble behind Manning into the street. Security alarms are blaring. Shomrim men race from the auditorium.
Manning peers up the street and down. Lights are coming on in building after building. Heads appear in apartment windows. Cries in Yiddish resound. Already the space between the curbs is filling with grief-stricken Chasidim, men and women, pouring from buildings and brownstones.
Instancer is gone.
MANNING
Fuck!
Manning’s glance searches the shadows left and right. The mounting downpour makes it harder and harder to see. Suddenly, across on the opposite curb, Manning spots the woman.
She’s alone, eyes wild.
She sees Manning.
MANNING
You!
Manning shouts to the woman to freeze. She bolts. I take off straight at her. Manning sprints half a step behind me.
A twenty-year-old Hi-Top van sits double-parked at the curb. The woman leaps into the driver’s seat. The engine starts. The van screeches away.
Manning and I still have no weapons.
MANNING
Sonofabitch!
13
CHASE MODE
AN NYPD SELF-DRIVING VEHICLE is meant to operate autonomously. The car doesn’t even have a steering wheel. In override mode you accelerate, brake, and steer with a tiller that rises between the driver’s legs like the control stick on a fighter plane.
Manning plunges into the tiller seat and commands the unit verbally to switch into manual. He unlocks the Remington twelve-gauge from the ready rack between the seats. I snatch his backup sidearm, a nine-millimeter P226, from its slot beneath the dash.
In the two seconds that the mystery woman appeared on the sidewalk, I got a good high-resolution photo of her. This pic I send now to the car’s automated pursuit system. I do this by hovering the phone over the dash screen while pressing the SEND PHOTO icon. It’s like holding a fugitive’s sweaty shirt beneath the nose of a bloodhound. Instantly the photo, including its FaceRec parameters, enters the pursuit database of every street-corner surveillance camera, precinct house, and patrol vehicle in the city.
Manning jams the tiller forward. The car lurches wildly into the street. The reason there’s no steering wheel on a self-driver is because you aren’t supposed to drive it. The whole point is that the technology is smarter than you.
Ahead half a block we can see the woman in her Hi-Top—an ancient Kia micro-camper with a pop-up top—swerving and careening through a sea of grief-seized Chasidim. Time is 2320. The Orthodox are pouring into the street in shirtsleeves, without umbrellas or rain gear. Many in their state of hysteria are hatless, covering their heads only with yarmulkes.
Manning hits the siren. Our unmarked unit has no exterior light bar, just white and red interior lamps forward, white and blue to the rear. The storm has broken. The volume of the downpour seems to double every thirty seconds. Through the beating wipers, we see nothing but beards and curls and black fedoras.
MANNING
Chase assist. Now.
Manning barks this to the dash sensors. All NYPD cruisers since ’31, including the unmarked units issued to detectives, are grid-integrated, meaning their systems are linked electronically to the network of 277,000 aerial, interior, and street-corner surveillance pods that blanket the five boroughs so totally that, as the claim goes, a rat couldn’t fart in a subway tunnel without someone at City Hall picking it up.
What that means for us now is that the photo I took sixty seconds ago is at this moment “in the pocket,” meaning every surveillance cam in the city is seeking/tracking its object via FaceRec technology, which is so good, it can ID a fugitive from a profile or a three-quarter rear view, through a windshield, or even from a reflection in a mirror or a storefront window. (Why is the market so bullish for burner phones? Because people hate this Big Brother, Eye-in-the-Sky shit and will do anything to get around it.)
Our mystery woman’s Hi-Top has hauled ass out of Fourteenth Avenue (the Rebbe’s residence/auditorium is between Fiftieth Street and forty-ninth) a
nd turned east on Forty-Ninth, rocketing toward Maimonides Medical Center. We’re three blocks behind but we can see her big as life on three dash screens and two heads-up windshield displays.
MANNING
Where the hell is she going?
The woman blasts through the intersection at Forty-Eighth and Fort Hamilton Parkway. Her speed on the screen is fifty-four. In chase mode the system turns every light red in the path of a fleeing perp. Our girl either knows this or doesn’t give a shit. Manning’s tiller jacks us to sixty-six and accelerating.
The pursuit system has called in drones now. Our map display shows them as icons overhead, “pie plates” and “hummingbirds” that can follow a vehicle under the El, through a tunnel, even inside a multifloor parking garage. The system too has alerted the Six-Six and the Six-Eight. Precinct cars, under automated direction, are cutting off likely escape routes. DivSix is on the air now too. Area hospitals and paramedics are being alerted. All along the chase route, alarms are going off, red and yellow lights flashing to warn pedestrians to get the hell out of harm’s way.
Our woman may be an off-the-gridder, but she knows not only how to handle a wheel but also how to outsmart a pursuit. The single vulnerability of an integrated chase system is a vehicle that runs straight at it. Entering Sunset Park, our fugitive hangs a hard U and cannonballs past us in the opposite direction.
Manning, I’m beginning to realize, learned to drive on vehicles with steering wheels. He’s not worth shit on a tiller. Screaming out of Sunset Park, our AV sideswipes a garbage truck and nearly flips, bounding over a median into a double opposing lane.
ME
What the fuck!
Our girl takes us through Greenwood Heights, out under the Gowanus Expressway, and into Industry City, hard by the docks and the bay.
We still can’t see her.
She’s too far ahead.
Through my earbud and on the console terminal we’re receiving ID intel on the woman for the first time. No name. No FaceRec intersects. Neither Manning nor I possesses bandwidth at the moment to absorb any of this.
Where the hell is she going?
Forty blocks into the chase, the woman leaps a median, hangs a second one-eighty, followed by an immediate hard ninety, and highballs into a homeless encampment in an area known as “under the steel.”
The camp is a maze of parked and squatting vehicles covering thirty blocks beneath an abandoned section of the old Belt Parkway. It’s a chase nightmare. Every car, truck, and van radiates its own unique search signature, not to mention those of the human component of the habitat, whose combined facial contouring, body heat, sound, and physical motion meld to produce an overload of FaceRec, acoustic, thermal, and G&P input. Barrel fires and cooking pits are screwing up our search scans further. One of our drones has crashed into the collapsed overhead.
MANNING
We’re losing her!
The glowing speedo in front of Manning reads eighty-one. Our electric motor smells like a kitchen toaster. Suddenly . . .
There she is!
We’re under the steel now too. I’m peering down an unlit lane that looks like Main Street of a Tunisian souk. Directly overhead, blocking all light both natural and man-made, looms the girder-and-concrete vault of the half-collapsed Belt Parkway. Beneath our tires spreads a slick of seawater, urine, cheap wine, and thirty years of gutter waste and petroleum by-products. Both flanks of this unlikely speedway are choked with shell tents, campers, RVs, mini-Winnies, converted panel vans and school buses, camper-shell pickups, gypsy wagons, rejiggered tanker shells, and every other mobile sleeping rig the ingenious mind of man can think of. Hibachi blazes and barbecue pits stud the slumscape.
Our female flees up this midnight Broadway. We’re half a block behind when her left front tire blows. The Hi-Top nosedives to port, all four wheels spewing black smoke, bounces with unbelievable violence over a median, teeters, rights itself, and crashes head-on at fifty-plus into a ten-foot-wide, thirty-foot-high, graffiti-blackened concrete abutment.
Manning hauls the tiller into his belly. Our AV slews to a stop. Manning leaps out, twelve-gauge in hand, sprinting for the Hi-Top’s driver’s door. I dash toward the opposite flank.
On both sides of the crashed vehicle, precinct cruisers are skidding in. Uniformed officers, all with weapons drawn, race toward the nose-crumpled, smoking van.
MANNING
Hold fire! Hold fire!
Manning reaches the Hi-Top first, moving from the rear in a low crouch along the vehicle’s flank. I’m approaching from the front, head-on to the windshield—left palm heel under the butt of the P226, right forefinger on the trigger, all safeties off, advancing one step at a time at ninety degrees to Manning so we don’t wind up shooting each other, with my muzzle extended in front of me and my eyeline over the front sight. I can smell the van’s airbag—the nitrogen from the explosive charge and the talc from the sack itself.
Manning is shouting, “NYPD!” and ordering the woman to extend both hands, empty, out the driver’s-side window. Her airbag’s white lacerated shell drapes, limp and steaming, over the steering wheel and half of the dash. The woman herself sprawls facedown and motionless atop the deflated cocoon. I have two seconds to glimpse her through the windshield amid the reflection of the flashing red and yellow lights of the police and emergency vehicles surrounding the crash site; then Manning’s left arm jerks the driver’s door open hard. The woman pitches, head and shoulders foremost, out under the flashing lights.
Manning catches her before her skull hits the pavement. Is she dead? Manning cradles the woman with one hand behind her neck. Immediately two uniformed officers reinforce him and take the bulk of the female’s weight into their arms. Manning checks her swiftly for weapons. One of the officers aims a tac light into the woman’s eyes. She groans and tries to turn away.
Manning waves the other officers to stay back. His immediate priority, after securing the fugitive, is to clear the vehicle of any possible accomplice or booby trap that might turn us all into smoking body parts. From my position in the glare of the van’s headlights I can achieve only the shallowest view-angle on the woman. Her face is bruised and blackened; both eyes are contused and shut. Her left arm is twisted at an unnatural angle. With one hand Manning snuffs the smoldering fabric of her collar, apparently set alight by the airbag detonation. He hands the woman into the care of the two officers and motions to me to follow him. I skim in his wake along the van’s flank toward the right sliding door that leads into the living compartment.
Manning takes a position aft of the door. I’m covering him from a half crouch, directly flanking the van. Two uniformed officers from the Six-Eight back him from the rear.
One, two . . .
Manning yanks the door open. He plunges in. I pile in behind him.
No one inside.
The patrol officers scramble up, flashlights in fists. Manning commandeers one. He’s fully aboard now. So am I. Manning calls through the open driver’s door to the two officers who hold the woman.
MANNING
Lock her up! Get a bus and get her to the hospital.
A bus is an ambulance.
Manning shouts to the other officers to call in for the crime lab. He wants the Hi-Top combed for prints ASAP.
Manning himself pushes farther into the vehicle. The interior is as compact as a submarine—stowage space forward, sleeping berth above the cab. The right flank holds a fold-down table with two banquette seats and a galley kitchen with fridge, sink, and cooktop.
A homemade corkboard covers the left wall across from the table. The vertical surface takes up a quarter of the length of the vehicle, as tall as a standing man. Every square inch is plastered with typed and handwritten notes, photos, documents, maps, and index cards.
MANNING
What the fuck is this?
He takes a step back and aims the 750-lumen SureFire tac light at the corkboard. I shine mine too.
In the gleam of both our lamps, M
anning glimpses what appear to be scriptural passages in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, whatever, side by side with photos of at least two dozen men arrayed in some order that seems to be deliberate and definitive. Numbers of the men’s pix are X’d out. Esoteric-looking mathematical formulas cover a quarter of the Obsession Wall (which is what it apparently is), along with phone numbers and addresses, satellite-photo maps, occult signs, and arcane markings.
Dead center on the wall, with broad black Sharpie arrows pointing to it from all directions, is a poster-sized photo of our murderer and self-described associate professor of Judaic studies—Jake Instancer.
14
INTENSIVE CARE
ANY INDIVIDUAL ADMITTED to a medical facility while in the custody of the NYPD becomes by law the responsibility of the city of New York, specifically the Office of the District Attorney for the borough in which he or she was apprehended. The person is no longer under his or her own insurance. The city picks up the tab. There’s an elaborate procedure for checking a suspect into a hospital, which I’ve never done but fortunately the paramedics have down cold and so do the admitting clerks. Nor can you take an individual in custody to just any hospital. The facility must be approved; it must operate under a contract with the city. That means Maimonides Medical Center in this case, thank goodness, which is a beautiful modern hospital with clean floors and nurses who speak English.
Manning has been required to return to the murder scene of the Rebbe. His orders to me as he packs me aboard the ambulance evacuating our runaway female are delivered with an intensity I’ve never seen from him before.
MANNING
Stay glued to this woman, Dewey. Do not leave her side for any reason. Forget Gleason’s bullshit about Russia, this female is the key to the case.
36 Righteous Men Page 7
