Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

  MANHATTAN LOCKDOWN

  Also by Paul Batista

  Death’s Witness

  Extraordinary Rendition

  The Borzoi Killings

  MANHATTAN LOCKDOWN

  PAUL BATISTA

  Copyright © 2016 Paul Batista

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-197-3

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing Longboat Key, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Hazel, Nelson and Alma

  MANHATTAN LOCKDOWN

  CHAPTER ONE

  CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE ROSE above the acres of summer trees. In the glittering June sunshine two of the four sides of the thirty-six hundred-year-old Egyptian obelisk glowed in the light. It was the first time during the three-hour party that Roland Fortune had the chance to look out over the park’s thousands of trees, the green expanses of the Great Lawn where hundreds of men and women were sunbathing, and the heights of the grand apartment buildings that lined Central Park West.

  Sarah Hewitt-Gordan touched his arm. “They were geniuses, weren’t they?”

  “Who?” He looked at her. Even in the intense light her face was beautiful.

  “Olmsted and Vaux.”

  “The rock group?”

  She laughed. “If the networks only knew what a comedian you are, you’d have your own show.”

  Smiling, he kissed her forehead and turned to the crowd on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most of the guests at his forty-seventh birthday party were under the white party tent. The murmur of voices, the tinkling noise of glasses, and the music of the band.

  This was Roland Fortune’s third year as the mayor of New York City. Raised in the Bronx, he made certain that ten of the eighty guests invited to this early Sunday afternoon party were from the neighborhood on the Grand Concourse. But he also made certain that the other guests were the people he’d cultivated and who’d cultivated him in the fifteen years in which he rose as a member of the city council, then as a congressman from the South Bronx, and now as mayor; actors, writers, television news anchors, baseball and football players, other politicians.

  And Sarah Hewitt-Gordan. She’d spent almost every night with him at Gracie Mansion since they first met a year earlier at a party at the Asia Society on Park Avenue. The daughter of a retired major in the British Army, she had graduated from both Eton and Cambridge. She was a partner at Goldman Sachs.

  His closest aides, Hector Suarez, who had been with him since his city council days, and Irv Rothstein, his press secretary and a former New York Times reporter who joined him when he ran for mayor, had warned him against public involvement with a woman who had the style and accent of an English aristocrat, not to mention the tony name Sarah Hewitt-Gordan, “with a fucking ‘a’ instead of an ‘o’ in her last name,” Irv said. “And the hyphen is going to kill you in Bay Ridge.”

  “Not a chance,” Roland Fortune answered. “Look at her. I’m the envy of every guy in New York, especially the Italian guys in Bay Ridge. And besides, I love her.”

  Since it was early Sunday afternoon, guests were steadily coming and going. New people had arrived during the few minutes he and Sarah spent overlooking the undulating beauty of the park. Bill Cunningham, the eighty-year-old society photographer for the New York Times whose photographs of famous people at parties appeared in the Sunday society page, was slipping like an elf among the guests. He had already taken pictures of Robert De Niro, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Wolfe, and others. As Roland Fortune entered the shade under the festive tent, he embraced Matt Damon, and Cunningham unobtrusively pointed his old-fashioned Leica at them.

  Roland Fortune was exuberant.

  ***

  He felt the concussion just as he heard the first explosion. As broken stone and concrete instantly ripped the party tent to shreds, he fell to his knees, pushed down by a stunning wave of sound and force just as powerful as an avalanche. Suddenly there were bodies on the ground near him, covered in the same white dust and stained by vivid red blood. Even though his ears rang painfully, he heard screams and moaning, shouting and the words, “My God, my God.” Now there was no sun, just an opaque drifting mass of dust laden with shards of glass. He found it painful to breathe. Dirt filled his mouth. He rubbed his eyes to dislodge the debris. It felt as though the grit was cutting the corneas of his eyes.

  He stood up. He tried to shout Sarah’s name, but he gagged. As he moved with his hands in front of him like a man in an unfamiliar black closet, he was propelled to his left by the second thunderous explosion. Something struck his left shoulder. At first it felt like a punch. He put his right hand on his shoulder, groping. He touched a tear in the fabric of his jacket and then the warm, sticky blood. Feeling a freezing flush of fear throughout his body, he tried to lift his arm. The pain was excruciating. He screamed. His own voice sounded as though he were underwater. He barely heard it.

  He didn’t want to fall again. He feared the people on the ground were all dead. He had a sense that if he went to the ground, he’d never rise again. He staggered like a damaged boxer but stayed on his feet.

  In the aftermath of the second explosion there were no sounds: no screams, no sirens, no voices, not even the sounds of birds.

  That eerie silence lasted only seconds. A hand grabbed his right arm. It was as if a lifeguard pulled him from a drowning downward spiral. He came face to face with Dick Maguire, the leader of his security detail. “Stay on your feet, Mayor. Stay on your feet. You can move. Follow me.”

  “Where’s Sarah?”

  “Keep moving, keep moving. Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

  “Where’s Sarah?”

  “Let’s move, move.”

  They reached a security door at the edge of the roof garden. It had been blown open. In the stairwell the air was slightly clearer. Roland, who had been smothered by the swirling dust outside, began gulping for air. When he tried to sit on the steps, Maguire held him up against a wall. “Catch your breath, Mayor. We can’t sit down. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “What happened?”

  “Forget it. Got to get out.”

  Roland Fortune was an athlete. He ran almost every weekend of the year in Sunday morning races in Central Park, along with thousands of other runners, and that strength, and his fear, supported him as he moved down the stairwell.

  Two other members of Roland Fortune’s security detail were waiting for him and Maguire when they burst through the emergency door on the museum’s main floor. Screams, frantic movements, roiling clouds of dust. Centuries-old statues were toppled and broken, stained-glass windows shattered. Maguire and the other security men, bracing Roland Fortune up and hustling him along, were the only people with any sense of direction. They were headed to the rear wall—once all glass—that faced the lush greenery of the park’s gorgeous nineteenth-century interior. Everyone else was moving erratically. They were dazed. There were bodies all over the floor. Fires were burning on marbled walls and floors.

  And then there was a third explosion.

  Every pane of glass on the rear walls shattered into countless shards. More a
nd more dizzy and unfocused, Roland felt himself lifted through a gaping space in the wall. Outside, on the sloping lawn, the world seemed almost peaceful while he was eased gently onto the grass. Just as he passed out, he smelled the rich, moist odor of the grass and earth. And of blood, his own.

  CHAPTER TWO

  GINA CARBONE, THE commissioner of the New York City Police Department, began eating the rich antipasto her mother, that magician of food, had created for the family’s annual start-of-summer get-together. Gina loved the texture of the cheese wrapped in carpaccio, the succulent slices of tomato, and the tang of the marinated artichokes.

  The flagstone patio of the family house on Staten Island overlooked Fort Wadsworth, the Coast Guard base that resembled a small New England college campus and the glistening expanse of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. As a very young but observant girl, she had spent hours watching the bridge being built. It seemed to evolve out of air, gradually materializing like a spider’s web. Her father was an ironworker who spent six years of his life on the construction crews fashioning the stunning span that arcs like a filament for two miles between Staten Island and Brooklyn. They lived so close to the Staten Island side of the bridge that her father was able to walk to and from work each day, carrying his gunmetal-gray lunchbox. She still thought of him whenever she saw the graceful arc of the bridge.

  “Auntie,” her thirteen-year-old niece Elena said, “Mom says you had a date last night.”

  Gina was uncomfortable with the way Elena, her favorite niece, was changing. She had a small silver stud embedded in her left nostril. Gina had been tempted to tell her that it looked like snot, but she restrained herself. And now she noticed a tattoo in the shape of an eyelash on her niece’s left wrist.

  And, of course, Elena had taken to teasing about her unmarried aunt’s love life.

  “I did,” Gina said.

  “But you got home before midnight and he didn’t stay. Like what’s that about?”

  Gina Carbone spent at least one weekend each month at this three-story house where she’d been raised. The third floor had been converted into a separate apartment for her, complete with a state-of-the-art communications center. Gina felt deeply comfortable in this familiar home, redolent with the smell of slow-cooked food and her older brother’s cigars. She went to the early Sunday morning Mass at the Church of the Assumption, the granite church where her father had taken her every Sunday morning until she graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army.

  “It was a first date, sweetie.”

  “You didn’t even take him upstairs for a drink. I don’t get that.”

  “Elena, you’ve been looking at too much TV. What channels are you watching?”

  “How do you ever expect to get a man?”

  Playfully, she raised her voice. “Linda,” Gina called out to her sister, “you need to take your daughter to church.”

  Linda Kotowski—her estranged husband was a Polish plumber who had moved to Jersey City—laughed as she carried more food to the table. “What, and fuck up the nuns?”

  Linda, a schoolteacher, was two years younger than Gina. She was a slender, physically softer version of her sister. There was no rivalry between them; they had always loved each other.

  It was exactly 1:30 when Rocco Barbiglia, the lieutenant who traveled with her on the weekends, stepped through the door to the patio and said, in a subdued voice, “Commissioner? Can I see you for a second?”

  Gina gave a playful slap to the side of Elena’s head, as if saying Wake up, kid, and rose from the table. She walked past Rocco, who followed her to the edge of the patio. A refreshing sea breeze raised his thin hair.

  “What’s up, Rocco?” she asked. “Better be important. I was just about to tell my niece how to stay a virgin. I know a lot about that.”

  “There’s been a big explosion at the Met.”

  “When?”

  “Two minutes ago.”

  “Bombing?”

  “For sure.”

  “People hurt?”

  “Lots. The bombs went off on the front steps. A sunny Sunday afternoon. You know how it is, must’ve been hundreds of people sitting out there. Enjoying the sunlight.”

  “Bombs? More than one?”

  “Three, four.”

  “Send out the Code Apache order.”

  Code Apache was the order to close every entrance and exit to Manhattan. There were many bridges, large and small, and four tunnels connecting the island of Manhattan to the Bronx, New Jersey, Queens, and Brooklyn. There were also helicopter landing pads in Manhattan and docks, wharves and ports. Code Apache closed them all. No one was to enter or leave the island. The idea was to seal Manhattan as thoroughly as a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Only the president, the mayor, the police commissioner, the director of homeland security, the attorney general of the United States, and the chief of staff of the military could issue that order.

  “And let’s saddle up,” Gina said.

  A former Marine who had served in the Gulf War and still an agile man, Rocco jogged off the patio toward the unmarked van in which the mobile communication facilities were installed. At the same time Gina briskly walked toward the festive table on the patio. She was fearful and anxious. These were her brothers and sisters and their children and parents, all the people she loved in the world. The city was being attacked, people had been killed, and other assaults might soon happen. The possibilities of injury and death were endless, and there was no way, she knew, to predict whether the people she loved would be engulfed in it. And no way to protect them. Staten Island was in many ways a world unto itself, an island, but not immune.

  “Hey, everybody, I just got some real bad news.” It took a second for the friendly clamor around the table to subside. “Somebody’s bombed the big museum. There are a lot of people hurt. I’m on my way into Manhattan.”

  ***

  Gina was proud of the way she had organized the police department in the three years since her surprise appointment by Roland Fortune. She had spent thirteen years in the Army, first as an enlisted soldier and then as an officer. She had learned principles of management that enabled her to increase responsiveness in the police force into a more military precision. Only a few commissioners before her had ever served in the military. Most of them had been political appointees, and a few had served as chiefs of the police departments in other major cities. She was the first native of Staten Island, and the first woman, to command the NYPD. When she saw that the traffic was already suspended on the two-mile-long Verrazano Narrows Bridge as her convoy reached it three minutes after leaving her family home, she was gratified. At least the first step of what would be a long day had fallen into place perfectly, just as she had planned it.

  Rocco, crouched in the jump seat across from Gina, handed her the secure phone, saying, “It’s Billy.”

  “Talk to me, Billy,” she said.

  Billy O’Connell, one of the five deputy commissioners, was on duty in the secret underground crisis command center at the corner of West 14th Street and Jones Street in the Meatpacking District, once the place where meat and pork were distributed to city restaurants and grocery chains. The Meatpacking District had for many years been legendary for its complete control by the Gambino family. That grip had long been removed. The district was now best known for some of its new state-of-the-art, expensive apartment buildings and a variety of drug-happy clubs with deafening music for teenagers and trendy men and women who danced all night to hip-hop and rap music.

  The main entrance to the center, called Fortress America by those who knew it, was through a former meat warehouse that, at street level, appeared to be a boarded-up after-hours club, Le Zinc. It was a still seedy area of the city where no one would have expected to find a state-of-the-art security center inside a nineteenth-century warehouse.

  “The area around the museum’s not secure yet,” Billy said.

  “How many units are on the way?”

  “Six more squad
cars. And five crews from the 19th Precinct.”

  Gina knew she had to stay steady and focused. But, as she also recognized, she was afraid. From the mid-span of the bridge, she looked out at the glittering expanse of New York Harbor and lower Manhattan, one of the most remarkable sights in the world. The day was absolutely clear, just as 9/11 had been. What was it about beautiful days and explosions? The Statue of Liberty, the office buildings that fronted Battery Park, the vast expanse of the Hudson River: the scene looked like a postcard or a montage in a romantic comedy. All that was different now was a diaphanous tower of smoke rising from the museum six miles away.

  “What’s the status of Homeland Security?”

  “Alerted. They’re closing down the airports.”

  “Coast Guard, State Police, National Guard, Port Authority?”

  “All alerted.” Billy’s Irish accent was even more intense than usual, a sign of anxiety and adrenaline.

  And finally she asked the question she had wanted to ask first. “What about the mayor?”

  She had been invited to Roland Fortune’s birthday party on the roof garden of the museum. She’d called to tell him that one of her nieces was being confirmed that morning at the Church of the Assumption. That was not true. She avoided Manhattan society parties like a plague.

  “Our people are telling me he’s dead. Not confirmed.”

  In the far distance on this endlessly clear day, she saw two police helicopters, gleaming flecks of bright metal, suspended like toys above the tower of thickening smoke.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GABRIEL HAUSER’S ROUTINE on Sunday mornings was to walk with Oliver, his gentle collie, through the attractive streets in the neighborhood near the museum between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue. This was a particularly delicious Sunday morning. The London plane trees lining the quiet streets were lush, the air was sharp and clear, and a breeze shook the newly mature leaves, casting crisp and intricate patterns of light and shade on the sidewalks.