by Paul Batista
“John almost vomited when I unwrapped Oliver’s blanket. He was upset; he asked what happened.”
“‘The fucking police,’ I told him. ‘Gabriel stitched up his wounds, but we need you to take a look at him and treat him here’. John said he would, and I left Oliver there.”
Always sensitive to Cam’s moods, Gabriel sensed that Cam’s obvious irritation was tied to something other than, or in addition to, the injuries to Oliver. “You’re upset, baby, aren’t you?”
Gabriel was right. Every muscle of Cam’s long and elegant body seemed to tense up. Cam began speaking rapidly, as if in the midstream of his thoughts. “After I left Oliver at John’s two men started walking beside me. They said they were agents from the NSA. They offered to show me their badges. I told them I didn’t have any spare change today.”
“I’m so sorry I got you into this.”
“No bother, Gabriel. I’m in it, hook, line, and sinker. I couldn’t shake them off. They were like seasoned panhandlers. They just continued walking with me, one to my left and the other to my right.”
Gabriel leaned against the refrigerator in the sleek, sun-filled kitchen. It pained him to see Cam’s nervous agitation and distress. Gabriel said again, “I’m sorry.”
“But listen, Gabriel. They told me things that truly scare me. About you.”
Internally Gabriel flushed. It was a powerful emotion of fear, concern, and inchoate shame. What now? he wondered.
“They handed me pages of e-mails between you and a man in Afghanistan named Mohammad Hussein. Lots of them read like love letters.”
“Cam, I told you I had a dear friend there. I even told you his name. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t intrude on your e-mails, Gabriel. I assumed you sent notes like postcards to him from time to time.”
“He was the only friend I had for two years.” Gabriel, still so physically anxious that he detected the quaver in his own voice, said, “He has a wife and kids.”
“Bullshit. You were betraying me, Gabriel. For six months you were telling him everything you were doing to get permission for him, not him and his family, to come here. You described your letters to the State Department, to the Secretary of the Army, telling them about all the heroic work Mohammad did for injured soldiers, the hours he spent just sitting with them. Christ, you even compared him to Walt Whitman spending two years in Union Army hospitals during the Civil War playing guardian angel to wounded soldiers. As if the people you sent these letters to even knew who Walt Whitman was. A gay poet trying to comfort wounded soldiers and falling in love with some of them.”
“I thought he was in danger in Afghanistan. I think he still is. After all, he’s devoted his life to working with Americans. He’s a marked man.”
“And what were you going to do if you got him here?”
“Set him up as an aide or a nurse in a hospital.”
“I don’t think so. I saw pictures of him. He is very attractive. Very. I read the e-mails. They weren’t about travel arrangements or finding work for him.”
“Come on, Cam, please, I love you. And besides, he lost interest. I haven’t heard from him in a month.”
“I know. Your e-mails to him have been heartsick. He hasn’t gotten back to you in a month, no matter how much you plead.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t jive me, Gabriel. I’ve read them. I’ve got them here.” He gestured to a neat stack of papers on which the e-mails had been printed.
“I’m sorry, Cam. It was one of those runaway emotional attachments. There was never a chance that he’d be allowed to come here. I’m not the only person in the world who loses control over what he writes in e-mails and text messages.”
“Do you want to know why you haven’t heard from him?”
Something in the wounded, angry tone with which Cam now spoke made Gabriel even more anxious. He asked, “Why? What’s wrong? Has he been hurt?”
“No, Gabriel. He’s been arrested. The guys who walked with me and gave me these e-mails said he was part of a plot to blow up a hospital. He was a plant of ISIS or Al-Qaeda. He cultivated you because he thought while you were there you would lead him to a hospital or ward where high-ranking officers were treated. After all, you were a major. When they booted you out of Afghanistan, your lover thought that you might be able to bring him here. These guys from the NSA said your boyfriend from Afghanistan would become a ‘sleeper,’ a plotter for ISIS. That’s why he begged you to help him. What a perfect cover, if you think about it.”
“None of that’s true.”
“This is why these people are so interested in you, Gabriel. You need to hear this. Your friend Mohammad has told them you knew about these bombings before they happened.”
“That’s off the wall, Cam. Totally beyond crazy. They’re making it up.”
“They told me he sent you regular letters, by mail, introducing you to his ‘family’ here. I saw the letters. They were picked up by the government from Nasar’s home just after the first bombings at the Met. One of them is about Silas Nasar. A man with a big birthmark on his face.”
“I never met that man.”
“Really? You met him at the museum. They know you treated him on the steps of the museum and then at the hospital. Even exchanged what looked like a big bracelet with him. Muslim men don’t wear bracelets. The NSA guys think it was a communications device.”
“That’s a fantasy. Why would he be there and let himself get caught in an explosion?”
“Because he was overseeing the last-minute preparations, they said, and the first food wagon had a faulty timing mechanism. It worked, but too soon. And Silas got caught in it.”
“You know this is crazy, Cam. Why would I do these things? I just want to lead a quiet life, treating patients, doing whatever good I can do. And loving you.”
“They know about all the angry protests and objections and appeals you filed after you were discharged. Your letters to the Times and other papers that were never printed. They think you’re angry and sick and deluded. They told me I should persuade you to talk with them right away. If you help them, they say, you can help yourself. You might get a lighter jail sentence, they said, if you cooperate right away.”
Gabriel knew that his hands and lips were shaking and that Cam could see that. Cam moved to him and hugged him. “This is all so sick, Gabriel. I want our life back. Look at what we’ve lost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SHE WAS LARGER and older than most of the women runners who even on this day, three hours after the assault in the George Washington Carver Houses, flowed uptown and downtown on the narrow esplanade along the shoreline of the East River as if this were a holiday on a lucid day in early summer. Gina had changed into running clothes in the back of an unmarked van parked near the seaport piers that had long ago replaced the seedy, mob-dominated Fulton Fish Market and that now had the feel of a suburban shopping mall. She slipped into the crowds of young runners. Moving gracefully, she made her way uptown to Pier 37.
The narrowest possible slit was open in the rusty, rundown chain-link fence that ringed the front of Pier 37. Unobtrusively she veered out of the stream of other runners, the innumerable slim blond girls in running shorts and tops and baseball caps out of which their ponytails hung, the tall young men, even a team of Sikh runners with their turbans in place, and slid through the slit in the fence. She was followed by the three muscular men, also in running gear, all carrying weapons in pouches in Nike belts—her bodyguards.
Raj Gandhi stood directly in front of the pier. He had been stung by the odd caller’s criticism that he hadn’t done enough shoe leather work. After Raj had reserved one of the plain unmarked Fords owned by the Times, he drove crosstown and parked the car near a cluster of several abandoned piers south of Houston Street.
The numbers assigned to the piers were random, inexplicable. Pier 63 was followed by Pier 71 and then Pier 37. All of them were massive, abandoned for decades, relics of
the 1940s and the 1950s. Like prison camps, they were surrounded by chain-link fences, some with razor wire on top.
Before he saw Gina Carbone slip like a phantom through a gap in the fence, Raj was baffled as to why he had acted on the eccentric direction of a man who could be, and probably was, deranged. Raj felt if he had been a savvy New Yorker rather than a newcomer and outsider he would have seen through the caller to the crank and recognized that it was just a guy who entertained himself with the fun of sending a New York Times reporter on a pointless frolic.
But Raj had the reporter’s imperious urge to act, the sense that he and he alone was learning something remarkable. And suddenly he was rewarded by the sight of the raven-haired and disguised police commissioner of the largest city in America, a woman who was the leading general of a police force bigger than the armies of most countries, slipping through a slit in the fence and jogging in runner’s gear toward a derelict warehouse. He used his iPhone to create a video of the scene.
Raj was a small man. He was also frail. When he had been taunted at Oxford for his accent, his clothes, and his diminutive parents the two times they visited their scholarship-endowed son, he stood still, shaking with fear, and took whatever abuse, punch or push was inflicted on him. During his years as a young journalist in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, he always cringed at the sound of gunfire or explosions. There was a time in Iraq when he was essentially confined to the fortress known as the Green Zone, living in such anxious fear that he used Valium and Xanax so often that he was afraid he would become addicted. He never drank alcohol.
But now he walked deliberately and steadily to the slit in the chain-link fence through which Gina Carbone and her guards had passed, as if into another world because they had disappeared quickly into one of the warehouse doors. There had been reporters in Iraq who thought of themselves as swashbucklers and who in fact acted that way. Although Raj was not one of them, he felt energized and fearless as he approached the same gap, the only non-runner on the chipped concrete pathway in front of the fence.
His sleeve caught on the exposed point of one of the torn links of the fence. That tug, that slight tear in the fabric of his shirt, also ripped his courage away. He jerked back from the fence as if it were a lick of fire. Once inside the perimeter of the fence, alone on the rutted pavement, he had a sense that he was vulnerable and exposed to danger. And then he had what he knew was an absurd thought: I’m invulnerable, I’m a reporter for the New York Times. As a student at Oxford he was obsessed with Shakespeare’s plays. Now he focused on the line in The Tempest where a powerful, invulnerable spirit says of his companions, My ministers are alike invulnerable.
Trembling, expecting to be hurt by someone or something, Raj stood in front of the big roll-up door. He tugged on the rusted chain that controlled the door. The chain rattled. Rust covered the palms of his hands. He hit the door with his fists, a feeble gesture. He shouted as loudly as he could, “Anybody home? Anybody home?”
He had the cell number of Commissioner Carbone’s gregarious press secretary, Charlie Brancato. He touched the screen of his cell phone and as he waited for the call to connect, he continued to stare at the massive front of the pier.
Like any good press secretary, Charlie had Raj Gandhi’s name and address in the memory index of his phone. When he saw Raj’s name on the screen of his iPhone, he took the call. “Mr. Gandhi, what can I do for you?”
“I’m interested in speaking to the commissioner.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“I do.”
“You do? How can that be? Her movements and whereabouts are classified for security reasons.”
“She’s inside Pier 37 on the East River. Just a few feet from where I am.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I need to speak to her. She’s twenty yards from me at the most.”
After a pause in which Charlie seemed to inhale on a cigarette, he said, “Maybe I can pass your questions along to her?”
“This is urgent. Tell her I need to hear from her in fifteen minutes. First, I have information that there is a dark prison inside Pier 37. I need to know whether men were secretly picked up. Extrajudicial arrests.”
“Say that again, Mr. Gandhi.”
“Extrajudicial arrests.”
“Meaning?”
“They were hijacked from their homes in Queens and Washington Heights and not taken to jail or before a judge. They’re hidden.”
“That’s off the wall, Mr. Gandhi. Who’s telling you this shit?”
“I also want her comment on the fact that there was a survivor among the men who were attacked at the Carver projects.”
“Mr. Gandhi, I’m going to contact Sandy Ellenbogen. These questions are completely out of line. You’re out of your freaking gourd. Unmoored from reality.”
Sandy Ellenbogen was the new managing editor of the Times. Raj had met him only once. Like other reporters at the paper, Raj had reservations about him. Sandy Ellenbogen was in his thirties, the youngest person ever to hold the exalted job of managing editor. Not long before his appointment, he had served as the editor of the Style section and credited with jazzing up the stories so that many of them became the most e-mailed articles of the entire paper every Sunday. Raj said, “That’s your prerogative.”
“The days of the Pentagon Papers are long gone, Mr. Gandhi. And Edward Snowden is going to rot in Moscow. You’re playing a losing game. Dangerous game, Mr. Gandhi.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“CHAOS, PURE UNADULTERATED chaos.”
If sober, methodical and detail-oriented Hans Richter described what he was seeing at the complex roadways that converged on the entryways leading up to the Triboro Bridge out of Manhattan as chaos, Roland Fortune accepted that. He had never known Hans to exaggerate or minimize anything. He was always calm, laconic, and accurate. That was rare in the world through which Roland moved. As he stood on the flagstone terrace of Gracie Mansion overlooking the East River and gazed at the arc of the bridge, its rows of lights beginning to glimmer in the oncoming slow summer dusk, he could see distant signs of that chaos. He saw wild concentrations of swirling police lights. Helicopters were suspended over the bridge. One of them even flew under it.
Roland asked, “What do you see?”
He didn’t want to hear the answer. He was alone for the first time since dawn, his body pulsated with pain, and his exhausted mind dwelled on the image of Sarah’s face and destroyed head on the concrete floor. He wanted to call her father, wanted to take more Vicodin, wanted most of all to sleep for hours and wake to the normal world of the city on the day before it was mutilated.
But efficient Hans Richter, of course, answered his question. “Traffic is backed up from the ramps and all the way back to Lexington Avenue along 125th Street. Horns honking. Hundreds of people out of their cars. Trash cans on fire. There’s a cordon of soldiers with rifles at each ramp to the bridge. There are guys screaming at them.”
“Soldiers?”
“Yes.”
“Not our cops?”
“Army soldiers, no cops.”
“I see emergency vehicle lights from here.”
“All Army.”
“When did they replace our people?”
“Not sure. They were here when I got here an hour ago.”
“Where are our people?”
“Nowhere in sight.”
A cool wind blew over the darkening terrace, as if miraculously created atop the glimmering waters of the East River to soothe him. He sat on a wrought-iron chair. “Hans, this stupid Code Apache plan: How long would it take to open the city?”
“You mean lift the lockdown?”
While he couldn’t be certain of it, Roland believed his calls were being monitored and recorded by Homeland Security. He hoped they were. “You know what, Hans? I hate the word lockdown. Every time somebody makes a loud noise in the mall, or some obvious crank calls a school, everything goes into lockdown. Lockdown this, lockd
own that. When these clowns from Homeland Security started having these bullshit confidential meetings with me about attacks and responses and talked about lockdowns, I rolled my eyes. This is Manhattan. Only some jerk from Kansas could imagine that you could close off this island. These plans were made by comic book action figures.”
Roland rubbed his eyes, still detecting that uncomfortable sensation that a film of grit covered his corneas. He waited for Richter to speak. Finally Hans said, “Who can lift it?”
“I can,” Roland said.
“I’m not sure of that.”
Roland wasn’t certain either but was convinced there were things he could do, such as a press conference or a speech, to force it to happen. “Hans, get back to me as soon as you can with a plan for what needs to be done to get services, like trash pickup, street cleaning, back up and in place.”
“I’ll get it done right away,” Hans said.
And Roland knew he would.
***
Irv Rothstein rapped with the edge of a coin on the glass of one of the tall French doors that opened onto the terrace. Roland genuinely liked Irv, a gregarious man in his late fifties who had the style of an earlier generation that led him to quick jokes as continuously as Walter Matthau and Rodney Dangerfield. But Roland held a hand up to wave him off. Roland knew that Irv had something important to tell him because, even in ordinary times, Irv was careful not to waste Roland’s attention on distracting or trivial issues. Roland had to make finally the call he’d put off for more than a day.
