by Paul Batista
“My reality is that the supermarkets, the bodegas, the big drug store chains, the delis, the places where people in Manhattan buy food, paper napkins, baby wipes, beer, cigarettes, condoms, have empty shelves.”
The president asked, “Why wasn’t this adequately taken into account before?” It wasn’t clear whether the president was asking Roland or Harlan Lazarus or someone else this question. Roland refrained from answering.
“It was,” Lazarus said. “But we didn’t anticipate a series of attacks on Manhattan that would require more than a few hours of quarantine. We envisioned, frankly, a single hit, like 9/11. Even the attacks in Paris were separated by only a few coordinated minutes.”
Roland was standing restlessly in his huge City Hall office. Its walls were mahogany. The big windows overlooked the old leafy trees of City Hall Park, whose gates were locked. He said, “That’s not an acceptable answer, you know that.”
“Let’s look at this, Roland,” the president said. “What kind of problem, real-world problem, is the food shortage presenting? The food didn’t just vanish. It’s in people’s apartments, don’t you think? Are there any reports of people starving in the streets?”
For Roland there was something liberating about the fact that this was not a video conference; it was on speakerphone only. He was annoyed, focused yet again on Harlan Lazarus’ presence in the room with Andrew Carter in Washington. He had the sense that Lazarus passed that question along to the president. Roland glanced around the office at the other people he had assembled for the conference. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He said, “Hans Richter is here. He oversees much that happens on the streets. His people are out there. They have eyes. And there is less waste being picked up at supermarket sites, because the stores have been swept clean by customers. Is that right, Commissioner Richter?”
“It is.”
“Are you saying,” Andrew Carter asked, “that the amount of trash waiting on the streets in front of supermarkets indicates something significant?”
Roland made an effort not to show contempt for the questions Andrew Carter, obviously prompted by signals or notes from someone in the Oval Office with him, was asking. Roland said, “Let’s be clear, Commissioner Richter, so that President Carter and Mr. Lazarus understand. We don’t want to alarm them unnecessarily. Are there any bodies in the streets of people who have died from starvation?”
“Of course not,” Hans answered.
“And that’s because you followed the plan and dumped them in the East River as soon as you found them, right?”
Hans, who was modest, methodical, and business-like, was startled by the sarcastic question. This was not the well-organized and cordial Roland Fortune with whom he’d spent many hours at highly structured meetings. Hans thought of saying the plans were “to dump the bodies in the Hudson River, not the East River” but instead said nothing. Hans knew he had no sense of humor. He was a nice man who never made anyone laugh or smile.
Roland was exasperated, persistent. “But you heard the president, didn’t you? Are there any bodies in the streets dead from starvation?”
“No,” Hans said again.
In pain for the last hour, Roland picked up one of the blue pentagon-shaped Vicodin pills on his desk.
***
Without appearing to notice, Gina counted that as the third Vicodin he’d taken in the last half hour. She had been told by people on the regular security team assigned to Roland Fortune that he was a drug user, with prescription pills as his drug of choice. She genuinely admired Roland and had no intention of doing anything about his drug use. But now she was concerned that he was entering the cozy, yummy, cottony world of Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, and Percocet. She knew about addictions. Her brother Victor, at one time a heroin user, had in the end become dangerously addicted to prescription pills, and they eventually killed him. She let the cops who served on the mayor’s security detail, more loyal by far to her than to the mayor, know that she wanted to be kept informed about the mayor’s drug use and that they had to keep it a secret from everyone else.
After Roland swallowed the pill, a look of anticipatory relief spread over his face. He said quietly, “Mr. President, let me tell you what I need. I need some symbol at least that the cavalry is coming to town. So far there’s a smattering of Marines on the streets. That’s not enough. We have a city where even on ordinary days people call the 911 and 311 emergency lines to ask questions and just to plead and just to complain and moan. This is New York, after all. So please have food delivered by helicopter drop into Central Park if you have to.”
“You can’t mean that, Roland.” The president’s tone was skeptical, his words almost a rebuke.
In the background, Lazarus said, “Helicopter? I think the public associates helicopters with the ones on the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as the last Americans were leaving Vietnam.”
“That was 1975, Mr. Lazarus. Ninety percent of the people in the city weren’t even born then. Nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.”
Andrew Carter, by nature a conciliator, said, “Let’s not get distracted by the history of 1975 or the Vietnam War.”
“Mr. President,” Roland said, “I’m a politician, not a military strategist. Why don’t you come up here today?”
There was an interlude of dead silence. Roland and the other people in his office looked at each other, exchanging glances as though the speakerphone connection might have been lost.
Then Andrew Carter said, “We’ve given that some thought, too. After all, Bush was in New York the day after 9/11.”
“I was here then,” Roland said. “No matter what you thought of him, that was reassuring. I was a new city council member at the time, and I was nearby, and it was a striking image watching him speak through a bullhorn with the towers still smoldering behind him.”
A new voice spoke. It was Gloria Reynolds, the head of the Secret Service. “This is different. We knew then that no further attacks were probable. Today we don’t know that.”
Roland knew that they would have anticipated that he would raise this issue and that they had choreographed this response. They planned to have the authoritative head of the Secret Service rule out a visit on the ground that the president would not be safe. Andrew Carter himself did not want to say that.
“Let me tell you, then, what I’m going to do,” Roland said.
He was speaking too loudly. Gina, who knew something about the impact of opiates, also knew that magical thoughts could almost instantly flourish in the mind of a user. Anything and everything seemed possible when an opiate was in the blood.
Suddenly the line went silent, a void with a barely perceptible hum. Roland and Gina glanced at each other. Roland paused for five seconds. “Mr. President?”
No answer. Hans Richter, a master of technical data as well as a master of logistics, touched the laptop computer on the edge of the mayor’s desk. His adroit fingers glided over some keys. He said confidently, “No problem on our end. They put us on mute.”
“I guess we wait,” Roland said.
“This is sick,” Gina said. “Are we on our own here?”
“Let’s be careful, Commissioner,” Roland said. “You never know when they’ll open the line again.”
“Funny,” Gina said, “that didn’t seem to bother you a minute ago.”
“We can mute our end,” Hans said.
Still standing but increasingly relaxed as the soothing web of Vicodin took deeper hold, Roland said, “Hans, I know you love to demonstrate the beauty of the technology, but let’s just wait.” He smiled.
***
As he waited, Roland gazed out of the eastern-facing windows. The mayor’s grand office was on the second floor of the three-story building. Barely changed over the years, it had been the office of more than twenty mayors: Theodore Roosevelt, LaGuardia, John Lindsay, and Rudy Giuliani. And Roland Fortune’s favorite, Jimmy Walker, flamboyant and racy. Through the tall windows he could see the Brookl
yn Bridge, its myriad suspension wires dazzling in the brilliant sunlight. He’d often looked at the bridge. In the daytime on typical days he could see colorful streams of traffic flowing into and away from Manhattan like unfurling ribbons. Today the bridge was empty.
A resonant sound filled the room. The connection was reestablished. The president’s voice rang out, “Roland, we need to suspend this. Our embassies in Nairobi, Dar Es Salaam, and Zaire have all just been attacked.”
And the connection went dead.
“Who gives a fuck about Dar Es Salaam?” Gina said.
Roland felt the onslaught of fear and confusion. He was, he realized, the leader of a city of millions of people, a place larger than many countries. But what did he really know about a crisis? He’d spent his adult life as a law student, a deputy commissioner when he was in his mid-twenties at the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, a member of the squabbling city council in his early thirties, a young congressman, and now the Mayor. He saw himself as a conscientious man with the flair of an actor and the ability to attract hundreds of thousands of votes, and the skills to keep the largest city in America running.
But nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He’d listened to briefings from the Midwestern men and women who appeared to dominate the Homeland Security department. They always struck him as fanatics, the zealots of security, men and women who were building an empire by disseminating fear. All that Roland remembered from those briefings, which they insisted on holding in the secret, antiseptic structure below the basement of the 1970s-style disco on West 14th Street, was the term Code Apache, a silly name that Roland saw as a movie title, like Operation Just Cause, the designation of the invasion of Iraq, as if war were a video game. Silly shit, Roland had once remarked to Sarah Hewitt-Gordan, would be a better name than Code Apache.
He had to shake himself out of the fear or at least appear to do that. “Talk to me, Gina. The Three Stooges can’t hear us. Assume we’re on our own. What do we do to stop the killing?”
“We need to take down as many men as possible and interrogate them. It’s almost impossible to find weapons or explosives. There are millions of apartments in this city. Any one of them can have an arsenal.”
“So, tell me how you find these people.”
“We do sweeps and pick up as many Arab street vendors, deli operators, and mosque-goers as we can. We talk to them. Not one of them is coming forward. So we go find them. Any random guy might give us a clue.”
Roland gazed at her. “Gina, these people have civil rights.”
“They can decide to talk to us or not. We have a right to ask questions. They have a right not to answer. My people don’t break legs.” Roland did not know that Gina was lying.
“Then we have a problem with racial profiling,” he continued.
Gina paused and then said quietly but intently, “We can’t really care about that, can we? When this is all over, they can sue us.”
“What else? Do you have another plan?”
“We have a very thin network of informants, but so far nothing has surfaced. I can bring in more police assets from other parts of the city. We have hundreds of cruisers stationed outside Manhattan. We also have armored personnel carriers and armored trucks. I can keep them moving around Manhattan. Shock and awe. But nothing will work as effectively as intelligence and information. And nothing will get that as fast as confrontation, as in I’ll beat the shit out of you unless you talk.”
Roland held a blank piece of paper in his hands and tore it into pieces as small as confetti. “You do what you think is best. And if nothing happens by tomorrow morning, I’m opening up the city.”
“Can you do that?” she asked.
It was the Vicodin coursing through his body that spoke, “I can do any fucking thing I want.”
So, Gina thought, can I.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
OLIVER WAS A heavily muscled dog. Beneath the silken fur his flesh was densely packed. Gabriel wrapped Oliver in a multicolored quilt. Only his head was visible. Although the body was heavy, Gabriel, who had often lifted patients, was strong. Gabriel made his way down the carpeted stairwell and pushed the door open. Suddenly aroused from the long vigil of waiting for him, the reporters scrambled to attention.
He walked among them. “I’m Gabriel Hauser. I have something to tell you.”
He paused while the reporters from television stations, newspapers, magazines, and the social media sources suddenly scrambled to attention and activity from their long lethargy of waiting. There were CNN, WNBC, and CBS panel trucks on the street with huge, Martian-like broadcast saucers on their roofs. The reporters with microphones, notepads, and tape recorders were immediately ready to hear the elusive Gabriel Hauser, the Angel of Life, speak publicly for the first time.
The blanket in which Oliver was wrapped was stained with blood. Rather than stand at a distance as if holding a press conference, Gabriel walked among the reporters and cameramen. They formed a tight cluster around him, like football players in a huddle.
“I’m carrying my eight-year-old dog. Armed men from the NYPD, the FBI, and Homeland Security shot him five minutes ago.”
Gabriel saw the looks of surprise in the faces around him. He also recognized their excitement. They were the first to hear news that was far beyond anything they had expected.
The first reporter to react was a young woman from CNN whom Gabriel had seen during the few times he watched television. “What were the agents doing in your apartment?”
“Doing? They were ransacking it. And shooting and wounding this loving, innocent dog.”
“How do you know they were law enforcement?”
“Law enforcement? That’s a strange expression. They were thugs.”
Another voice asked, “How do you know they were with the FBI and Homeland Security?”
“Three of them wore windbreakers with those words on them. So I assume they were agents. But they’re the kinds of jackets you could buy on the street, just as you can buy baseball caps with logos from the police department, the fire department, Vietnam Veterans.”
The same voice asked, “Well, did they say where they were from?”
“No one showed any badges.”
Someone at the outer perimeter of the group asked, “What else did they say?”
“That they had a search warrant.”
The CNN reporter reclaimed the questioning. She held the microphone within inches of Gabriel’s face. Over her left shoulder a camera was trained on him, adjusting to every movement he made. “What did the search warrant say?”
“As far as I know, nothing. They never showed it to me.”
“What were they looking for?”
“They ransacked everything, they took nothing.”
“How was it that the dog was injured? Was he attacking them?”
“I’m sure they will tell you that. I can hear them claiming they were lawfully in our home, and that we unleashed this vicious beast on them. This is a gentle, sweet animal.”
“What,” she asked, “do you plan to do?”
“Look for the truth. I want to know why these horrific people invaded our home, trashed our belongings, and shot an innocent animal. And by bringing this to you, I want to prompt you to ask questions. What exactly is the government doing to protect us from the government itself ? Who are the terrorists here?”
“But, Dr. Hauser, you must have done something that led the agents to get a warrant and search your home.”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing. I refuse to let outrageous conduct like this pass without a challenge. No one can shift blame to me. I did not do this.”
Still holding Oliver’s increasingly heavy, blood-soaked body, Gabriel turned to the five steps that led to the door of the brown-stone. Just as he pulled the heavy door shut, he heard the question, “Can you tell us why you were thrown out of the Army?”
***
Raj Gandhi watched the handsome, stricken, angry doctor on the screen
of one of the big monitors suspended throughout the newsroom at the Times. He had been placing calls to every possible source to get more details, any details, about the phantom detention center on the East River. He was still wary of the information the weird caller had given him. But he was also certain that the Ford that had tailed him, which was so much like those eight-cylinder cars in decades-old movies such as Bullitt and The French Connection, meant something. The tailing scared him; it had also made him angry. He prized the old-fashioned detachment he brought to his work as a journalist, and he wanted to embrace it now. But he understood the meaning of that tough-guy bluster: This isn’t business, it’s personal.
Raj was standing as he watched the flat screen television. He was intrigued by what he saw in Gabriel Hauser. The man was striking. He had that slender muscularity of a professional soccer player. He was intense, he was well-spoken, and he was vengeful.
Raj Gandhi wanted to speak to Gabriel Hauser.
Raj was resourceful. He had not only his own instincts and training as a reporter, he also had the resources of a fading and uncertain but still potent newspaper that, for the most part, was not afraid of letting its reporters loose to do investigative journalism.
Using his computer, Raj learned several things about Gabriel Hauser. He was thirty-eight. He was the son of a failed concert performer, once a briefly rising star for the New York Philharmonic who had committed suicide when Gabriel was twenty-seven. After several years in the Army, Gabriel was dismissed, in the midst of service in Afghanistan and Iraq, under the don’t ask, don’t tell rules which were then still in place and rigidly enforced. He had sent an angry, bitter letter to the editors at the Times, which declined to publish it. Like all other letters submitted to the editors, it had been lodged in the infinite ether of the Times archival information.
Checking a database that was even more thorough than census data, Raj located Gabriel Hauser living at 17 East 82nd Street. There was no telephone number. Roaming through other data, Raj found that Cameron Kennedy Dewar lived at the same address and in the same apartment. Again, no telephone number or e-mail address. But a ten second Google search revealed Cameron Kennedy Dewar worked at a public relations firm on West 23rd Street, the area around the wedge-shaped Flatiron Building that had attracted PR firms, publishing houses, and literary agents over the last ten years. They had migrated there from the overpriced office space in midtown Manhattan. The only object on the walls of Raj’s sparsely furnished, undecorated apartment was a reproduction of Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of the Flatiron Building, in the rain at dusk more than a hundred years earlier. He loved that strange, rain-drenched photograph.
