Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

  Although it was the middle of the night in England, John Hewitt-Gordan picked up his cell phone on the first ring. His voice was as clear as if he were answering a roll call in the British army. “Roland, thank you for calling.”

  “I wanted to call you earlier, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. I know you’re busy. I am listening to everything.”

  “John, I found Sarah.”

  “Very well.”

  Roland had spent enough time with Sarah, John, and other British people to know that “very well” meant “oh.” It was just a remark, a punctuation, an invitation for Roland to say more. “I saw her, John. She died instantly.”

  John said, “That is often said to be a solace. But, Roland, I’ve never been certain of that. In my many years in the service I was never in combat so I can’t say that I’ve had experience with sudden death in combat. But it has to be, don’t you think, that there is an instant, however brief, when a person has that moment when the thought, the reaction, the imprint on the mind is I die now.”

  Roland knew John Hewitt-Gordan was cerebral, a tactician, a retired high-ranking officer who had commanded several support and intelligence divisions, including the British recapture of the Falkland Islands. Sarah, too, had some of these qualities. One of the senior partners at Goldman Sachs had told Roland that the key to her success was her ability to visualize big strategies, not her skills with numbers.

  Roland knew that John’s use of sentences sometimes masked his anxieties or fenced away subjects he wanted to evade. Roland said, “I don’t have the answer to that, John. I was never in a war. I never saw people die in front of me until now. I was there. I can tell you that it was sudden, overwhelming.”

  “How are you, Roland? The first news reports were that you were gone, too. Now the reports are that you were injured.”

  “Thanks for asking. Just a scratch.” At that moment, as the deliciously smothering effects of the last Vicodin receded, he felt that pulse of acute pain that came with each surge of blood in his system. What he had on his shoulder and back was in fact a deep gash. It was becoming infected.

  “What,” John asked, “is happening to her now?”

  Roland was disoriented by the question. All he knew at that moment was that Sarah was on a floor in a cool former auditorium in an abandoned hospital in the West Village. There were at least one hundred other bodies there, assembled in straight rows under identical blue sheets, like the orderliness of military cemeteries. “The simple truth, John, is that I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “Understood, Roland. Your only concern now is with the living.”

  This man, Roland thought, has that high-minded style of a colonial general in India in the 1800s. Roland admired that. He said. “I have a suggestion, John. The airport in Boston is now operating. Why don’t you fly there and then drive to Connecticut or New Jersey?”

  John chuckled, “The gates of Carthage.” That literate British humor.

  But Roland’s complete attention was arrested by that. For the last two days the words Carthago delenda est had been fixed in his mind, Carthage must be destroyed, like a phrase of music, Cato the Elder’s words about the Roman army’s destruction of Carthage on the shores of North Africa. Carthage has been destroyed evolved in his mind to New York delenda est.

  Roland said, “I expect the lockdown to be lifted gradually in the next twenty-four hours. As soon as I can, I will have one of my helicopters pick you up and bring you here when you reach Connecticut or Westchester County. We’ll go to the morgue together and we can figure out a way to give her to you.” He paused. “To take her home.”

  “That would be very consoling, Roland. But wouldn’t that lay you open to criticism? Certainly the media will pick it up. Preferential treatment, that type of issue.”

  “I’m at a point where that doesn’t matter to me. I’m surrounded by death and killing, John.”

  “You’re a brave man, Roland. Very few people act well under catastrophic circumstances. Wasn’t it Hemingway who defined courage as grace under pressure?”

  For a moment Roland wanted to tell his lover’s father that he was consumed and totally preoccupied by dread, fear, and uncertainty, not courage or grace. He was angry. He was in pain. And he was worried about his own mortality. He was aware of his vulnerability. Somehow he had survived three deadly explosions, any one of which could have killed him. It could have been that one of them, the first as his birthday party unfolded, was calculated to do just that. He had never in his life had to deal with deadly, anonymous people who had the will and the ability to kill. And Gina Carbone and others had treated him as if he were a target, and he believed he was.

  He said, “Thanks for the kind words, John. Let me know when and where you arrive.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  GINA CARBONE DIDN’T change out of her running clothes. Almost at a jog, she passed through the security checkpoints inside Pier 37. Rocco Barbiglia led her to the far eastern corner of the pier to what was called the Supermax wing of the pier, isolated and austere.

  Silas Nasar sat in an aluminum chair. There was no other furniture in the cell. He was naked. The birthmark on the left side of his face—shaped like a seahorse—was even more distinct than in the pictures she had seen of him.

  “Mr. Nasar,” she said, “we’ve been waiting for you.”

  His eyes, profoundly black, were alert. He was fully conscious, almost brazen, defiant. She was surprised and impressed to see this. His left arm was wrapped from shoulder to wrist in tight, bloodstained bandages. There was, as she had been told there would be, an untreated gash across his hairy chest inflicted as he was dragged across the glass-strewn floor in the smashed apartment from one of the rooms at the Carver Towers.

  “Who were the people in the apartment with you?”

  No answer.

  “I don’t have time, Mr. Nasar. I don’t have time to wait for you. You are going to talk to me.”

  He stared at her. She recognized instantly that he was a special man. He was seriously wounded. He was naked. Just hours earlier he had been in a room of unimaginable chaos: thunderous noise from guns and rifles and grenades; the stench of cordite; and the sight of dead bodies, blood and torn flesh, some of it smeared on and clinging to the walls and ceiling. He had been dragged from that room. He had been blindfolded. He had been bound up for two hours in a slow-moving ambulance. He was now in an unknown place with strange people capable of torturing him and killing him. He was face to face with an unusually beautiful woman who was plainly in total command of the men who had seized and held him.

  Gina said, “Many, many men, women, and children have died in the last day, Mr. Nasar. Hundreds of children. I know you have children. You’re a good family man, sir.”

  Gina was unsettled by the impassive silence and solidity of the man. Roger Davidson, the former Secret Service officer who was one of the chief architects of this off-the-books program and this dark, undocumented prison just half a mile from the United Nations building, stood behind her. He had the reputation of a stone cold killer. She resisted the impulse to cede the field and have him take over the unnerving contest with Silas Nasar.

  “You’re a seriously religious man, Mr. Nasar. We’ve known about you for a long time. We’re surprised that you let yourself become involved in all this carnage. It’s not in your character.”

  Davidson stirred behind her. He was an impatient and explosive man. She held up her right hand, signaling him to remain quiet.

  “I need you to tell me where your other people are, Mr. Nasar. You know where they are. You are the electronics expert, you know in real time where these men are. You even have that information in the bracelet you gave to your doctor friend. And I want to hear from you everything you know about the doctor, too. No secrets, no holding back.”

  No answer.

  “If you don’t talk to me and tell me what you know, let me tell you what’s going to happen. We are going to arrest you
r wife, your children, your son-in-law. I know they moved the day before the bombing. Do you think we’re stupid? We know where they are.”

  He listened but didn’t respond in any way. Bulletproof, she thought, this man is bulletproof.

  “Do you know where you are? No one else does. You belong to me. I have the power to let you live and to let you die.”

  After ten seconds of utter silence, Gina said, “Do you see the men behind me? They have spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. They do things that I don’t know how to do. That I don’t even want to think about. We’re the only people who know you’re here. In a way, you’re already dead. We left your body in the apartment with your friends. Do you understand?”

  When Davidson stirred again, she didn’t raise her hand to quiet him. “Commissioner,” he said, “we can help you.”

  If Silas Nasar flinched at all, if he had any kind of reaction, Gina Carbone didn’t see it. “You’re not a very smart man, Mr. Nasar.”

  Roger Davidson nodded politely at her as she left the cell. Terrible things, she knew, were about to happen here.

  ***

  The Olympic Tower, at 51st Street and Fifth Avenue, was all black. It was built in the late 1970s directly across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The construction was financed by Greek shipping magnates, rivals of Aristotle Onassis, hence the name Olympic Tower. Greeks, in fact, had lived on its top floors until the early 1990s when the rich from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait began to supplant them, but the building still retained the Olympic name.

  Within minutes after Roger Davidson reported to the commissioner, and that was only half an hour after she had left Pier 37, that nine men in black combat uniforms, body armor, and weapons entered the towering granite lobby. Ambient sound filled the lobby from the waterfall that shimmered perpetually down the surface of a three-story wall.

  There were two elevator banks. One was for the commercial tenants on the first ten floors, which were law firms, public relations companies, a charitable foundation. The other elevator bank was for the private apartments on the upper forty-one floors, each of them larger and more opulent as they ascended: the two apartments on the two highest floors had Olympic-size swimming pools.

  One of the armed men shouted at the doormen: “On the ground, on the ground.” The nine men moving rapidly through the lobby all wore jackets on which the words NYPD Counterterrorism Unit were stitched in big letters. Like most of the people who lived in the building, the two doormen were Saudis. They were stunned by what they saw and fell first to their knees and then to the floor, as if praying.

  The team divided into two squads. Roger Davidson, who was steeped in the rare ability to command with the absolute certainty that his orders would be obeyed, signaled the first squad into one of the elevators. When that elevator reached the eleventh floor, Davidson led his squad, three large men and Cynthia Chambliss, a slender and gorgeous black woman with a knowledge of weapons almost as skillful as his own, into the elevator. They rose in total silence to the fifty-first floor.

  As soon as Davidson emerged from the elevator, he knew the information he had was accurate. Despite what all the politicians and television experts said, torture, especially extreme torture of men like Silas Nasar, in his experience, was a fast and efficient way of extracting very reliable information.

  The wide church-like double doors to the top-floor apartment, once owned by Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer who in the 1980s had helped to manage the Iran-Contra exchange of weapons for cash, were already blasted open. Just as he had been told by the now broken-armed Silas Nasar in the total privacy of the Supermax cell, an orderly row of six RPG launchers stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the world famous cathedral. The RPGs were locked and loaded, that expression Davidson had first heard at the transformative moment when, at the Marine base at Quantico, he had for the first time pushed a full magazine into an M-16 and disengaged the safety switch. The RPGs were, as he had known for the last forty-five minutes, smuggled into the apartment piece by piece over the last three weeks by men posing as guests of the current owner, Ahmed Khalife, and as electricians, a pool cleaner, cooks. The doormen now kneeling in the lobby had played to perfection the roles of the “hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil” cartoon characters.

  Precisely cut holes had been excised from the row of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the immense roof of the cathedral. On the floor three black-haired men in business suits were already bound up in plastic sheathing from their upper chests to their feet. One moaned just as Davidson had been told to expect. The others were quiet.

  “How close were we?” he asked Jorge Ortega, the squad leader.

  “Close, sir. Motherfuckers had just engaged the rocket grenades.”

  “Any resistance?”

  “They’re pussies. Nothing. They were all crying, ‘Please don’t hurt me, please.’ One of them is still crying like a baby.”

  Davidson raised his hand to silence the room. In that hand was his secure cell phone. Almost instantly he heard Gina Carbone’s strong voice: “What’s the story?” she asked

  Roger Davidson respected her. She was steady, calm, no nonsense. She wanted the scene described in the way it happened.

  “The story is good, Commissioner. We stopped them in their tracks. The RPGs were fully engaged and set to go. They would have blown St. Patrick’s to kingdom come. The room is secure. Three arrests here. The two doormen are under arrest, too. They must have known who was bringing the elements of the weapons up here.”

  “What fucking condition are the three of them in? Don’t tell me they’re wasted. I have enough dead Arabs on my hands already.”

  “They’re all alive. Not a scratch on them. One of them seems to be suffering a damn emotional issue. He’s crying like a baby and wants his mama. I’m going to give him a hug soon and tell him everything will be just fine.”

  “Don’t,” Gina said, “let anything happen to them. I want them clean, presentable, and charming. The Kingston Trio. Don’t bring them to the river. I want them at Central Booking downtown just like anybody else who’s been arrested. I’m making arrangements with a judge to get them charged and with cameras in the courtroom. I also want the weapons down here so that I can show them to the press. Get pictures of the RPGs pointed at the cathedral. The mayor will have a press conference. I’ll be there. Nobody sees your face anywhere.”

  “What face?” Davidson asked. “I’m not even sure what my name is any more.”

  Gina spoke evenly. “You did a great job getting this stuff out of Mr. Nasar. He had a reputation for stamina.”

  “Really? I didn’t see that once I got to know him a little better. He found his voice, so to speak.”

  “And one other thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “That Indian reporter.”

  “Is he bothering you?”

  “I don’t think his presence is very helpful.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  GABRIEL HAUSER WAS immediately overwhelmed by the utter silence in the apartment. Over the last several years there’d always been movement and excitement. The familiar, welcoming sounds as Oliver ran to him, his toenails clicking on the floorboards. Cam—whom Gabriel always called from the hospital as his shift was ending—making sandwiches or soup in the kitchen with the radio on NPR regardless of the time.

  Calling Cam’s name softly, Gabriel walked through the apartment they loved. He even opened closet doors. For what he realized was a moment of lunacy, he was afraid Cam was dead.

  In the small kitchen, the only room in which the lights were on, everything was as usual, clean and orderly. The only objects on the counter around the sink were a gleaming toaster, a blender, and a coffee grinder, all in brushed, burnished metal. On the kitchen table was a slender vase with new flowers.

  And then Gabriel noticed in a corner on the floor a neat stack of white paper. Gabriel instinctively knew what the papers were: they were printed copies of the e-mails he had excha
nged with Mohammad Hussein. Gabriel carefully, and nervously, raised the neatly compiled papers and carried them to the living room. He sat on the sofa in front of the coffee table.

  The e-mails were in chronological order, for the most part in chains of one e-mail responding to the preceding on consecutive pages. For Gabriel it was like reading a diary he had cowritten with Mohammad. It was Mohammad who sent the first. It read: “Doctor, what happened to the soldier with the burns on his chest? You were wonderful with him.”

  Gabriel remembered the inner thrill he experienced when he first saw the e-mail. This beautiful, intelligent man had made the initial overture. It was only when he saw his response to that first e-mail that he recalled the soldier, Rodney Jones. His answering e-mail, sent on the chunky cell phone less than five minutes after Mohammad’s e-mail arrived, said that Rodney Jones had been airlifted to Germany for treatment. “I think he’ll recover,” Gabriel wrote. Nothing else on Rodney Jones. And then, as Gabriel was now surprised and almost embarrassed to see, his very first e-mail had been a flirt. “Would like to see you.”

  It took four days for Mohammad to answer. In those four days Gabriel was in turmoil. Had his e-mail been too blatant? Afghanistan was not Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, still that epicenter of gay life. Moreover, Gabriel didn’t truly know who Mohammad was, other than a man in hospital service who had just one day appeared at the hospital at the Bagram Air Base. As he now read it, he remembered how elated he was with Mohammad’s next e-mail. “How about Tuesday at three at the Red Rose on Zafir Street? Do you know it? Let me know?”

  Gabriel let him know in ten seconds that the answer was yes. And so it had started, as Gabriel was reminded when he read through the several hundred e-mails, some as brief as three words, that he was rapidly falling in love. He could see now that anyone reading these e-mails, even though some were terse and appeared coded, could trace the evolution of the relationship and how it continued even after Mohammad first mentioned his wife and children. The disclosure that Mohammad had a family didn’t give Gabriel any pause. He ignored it. He had had affairs with married family men in the past.