Alert

by James Patterson

  We’d heard that there were similar National Guard units at Times Square and in Rockefeller Center. The whole borough of Manhattan was suddenly in lockdown, apparently.

  Coming up onto Broadway, we saw heavy dump trucks and front-end loaders were still sweeping up what was left of 26 Federal Plaza. There was even more security around City Hall’s little fenced-in park off Broadway. I counted at least twenty cops and National Guard guys as we slowed alongside the bomb-shield concrete planters by the gate.

  As we were ID’d again and finally let in through the wrought iron, I remembered the last time I was here. It was in 2009, and I was with the kids at the ticker-tape parade along the Canyon of Heroes, where the Yankees were being honored by the mayor. It had been a great day: Chrissy was up on my shoulders, laughing and swatting at the shredded business-paper confetti as the Yankees went by on a flatbed truck.

  Way back in the days when ticker tape wasn’t paper raining down from blown-up buildings.

  FBI technical analyst Ashley Brook Clark and Dr. Michael Aynard, the NYU physics professor, who’d both helped us on the EMP portion of this case, were already inside City Hall’s grand foyer.

  “You can cool your heels, guys,” the ever-acerbic Aynard said with an epic eye roll as he looked up from his iPad mini. “They said we’d be granted an audience with Her Honor in ten minutes—oh, I’d say almost half an hour ago. I’m so glad I’m volunteering my time here. It’s not like I have a life or anything.”

  Instead of responding, I decided to take a peek around. Through a threshold, I could see a massive life-size oil portrait of George Washington on the wall of a darkened room. A brass plaque on the wall said that the museumlike building was the oldest city hall in the country that’s still being used as a city hall.

  “Hey, Mike, you want to check out the upstairs?” Emily said, reading another plaque. “It says Lincoln lay in state up there after his assassination.”

  “Nah, I’m good,” I said, glancing at the unlit landing beneath the rotunda. “I find history much less interesting when it starts to repeat itself before my very eyes.”

  Chief Fabretti appeared about ten minutes later and led us through a wood-paneled space that once might have been a chapel. The pews had been replaced with a warren of cubicles and desks, and at them, half a dozen wiped-out-looking mayor’s deputies and staff were mumbling among themselves, trying to stay awake.

  Three more staffers were conferring quietly by a corner desk when we finally made it to the mayor’s office. Acting mayor Priscilla Atkinson, in yoga clothes and with her sneakers off, sat in a club chair beside a huge stone fireplace talking on her cell phone. Though she was dressed casually, the heavy concern on her tired face was anything but.

  “Would you like anything? We don’t have coffee, but there’s green tea,” said one of her slim majordomos as he came over.

  The mayor got off her cell and stood before we could answer.

  “Thank you for coming, everyone,” she said, padding over to her desk in her No-See-Um socks.

  “This came in about a half an hour ago,” she said, opening an audio file on a laptop.

  “We are the ones who bombed the subway and killed the mayor,” said an electronically disguised voice. “We are the ones who set off the EMPs and blew up Twenty-Six Federal Plaza. Do we have your attention? On the northwest corner of Thirty-First Street and Dyer Avenue is a mailbox. Inside the mailbox, you will find a FedEx envelope that will prove we are who we say. We will call back tomorrow with what you are to do next.”

  “We grabbed the package half an hour ago,” said Fabretti as he handed out a short stack of papers. “There were no prints on the package or the papers. This is a copy of what was in it.”

  “What’s the drop site looking like?” I said.

  “We’re canvassing, but it’s just old office buildings and warehouses around the drop.”

  I shuffled through the stack of papers. There were blueprints, technical schematics on the cube robots, some computer programming stuff, and a diagram that looked like one of the EMPs next to a series of mathematical equations.

  I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, really. Neither, apparently, could anyone else, as all eyes were on Dr. Aynard. He licked his thumb and flipped quickly through the papers, mumbling from time to time. We all stood and stared and waited as he rattled through page after page.

  “This is fascinating,” he whispered to himself.

  “Screw fascinating,” said Fabretti sharply. “Is it real? Are these the people?”

  The NYU professor looked up and nodded vigorously at Fabretti, his eyes very wide.

  “Without a shadow of a doubt,” Aynard said.

  Chapter 70

  As we left the mayor’s office, I didn’t know what to think about the contact the attackers had made. By that point, I was too tired to even try. Luckily, Robertson and Arturo were pulling the night shift at the intel division, so I sent an e-mail of the schematics over to them to see what they could make of it.

  I dropped off Emily at her hotel and headed home. I gauged that I was about 10 percent awake when I stumbled in through the front door of the Bennett Estate half an hour later. Make that 5 percent, I thought as I almost tripped ass over teakettle on a Frozen princesses lunch box in the hall.

  I wasn’t the only sleepy one, apparently. I found Martin on a stool in the kitchen with all the lights on. He was facedown, snoring lightly between some engineering textbooks open on the counter. He woke up as I crouched down and lifted a worn paperback of the science fiction classic Ender’s Game that had fallen on the floor beside his stool.

  “Mr. Bennett!” he said, sitting up suddenly, stifling a yawn. “There you are. You’re back from your travels, I see. What time is it?”

  “Eleven thirty.”

  “Eleven thirty so soon?” Martin said, checking his phone. “Well, let’s see. The kids are all fed, teeth brushed, and sacked out, et cetera. I got the boys’ laundry done. The girls didn’t have any. They never do. Funny. I had the boys running sprints down in the park. While I had Trent doing calisthenics, Eddie lost the soccer ball. We looked and looked but couldn’t for the life of us figure out where it had gone to. The Hudson River? But I told Eddie not to worry. I have plenty of practice ones I can bring from my dorm tomorrow.

  “I wanted to do vegetarian for the crew, but Seamus came by and insisted on making turkey clubs. He’s quite a heavy on the mayo and bacon, if you want my opinion. Especially for a man of the cloth. That’s about it. So if there isn’t anything more, I’ll be on me way.”

  “Nice try, Martin,” I said, my head still spinning from his dispatch. “Only place you’re going, kid, is the couch,” I said, pointing toward the living room. “There’s blankets and a pillow on the top shelf of the hall closet.”

  “I couldn’t impose,” said Martin, yawning again. “Besides, I have an eight o’clock exam.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll wake you up and drive you to campus.”

  “In your cop car?” said Martin, excited. “Get out! Never been in a fuzzmobile. That’ll be a gas, so it will. Will you hit the siren and lights?”

  “If you’re good, Martin. Now, good night.”

  I smiled as he left. There was at least a little silver lining in all the current chaos. Seamus had hit one out of the park by finding Martin.

  He really was a great kid. It was especially funny how he was running the couch potato out of the boys. They griped, but if Ricky’s request for a FIFA Soccer PlayStation game for his birthday was any indication, Martin was starting to grow on them as well.

  I made the mistake then of glancing at the mail table.

  There was a letter on top addressed to me, and I stood there staring at Mary Catherine’s familiar perfect handwriting.

  One part of me wanted to tear it open immediately and devour it, but something else told me, “Not so fast.” Maybe it was just my exhaustion, but I suddenly felt like there was something ominous about it, as if the news in it
actually might not be so good.

  Mary Catherine and I had become so close recently. Closer than ever. And yet here we were, still with an ocean between us. Her last call especially spooked me, how comfortable she seemed running her mom’s hotel. I couldn’t stop thinking that somehow we were drifting farther and farther apart.

  Bottom line was I couldn’t deal with bad news. Definitely not now.

  I left Mary Catherine’s letter on the mail table untouched and quietly turned off the light in the hall as I headed to bed.

  Chapter 71

  As it turned out, I actually ended up using my lights and siren to deposit Martin back at Manhattan College after all.

  We didn’t have time to stop for coffee as I slalomed the Chevy at speed through the West Side Highway traffic, but I could see by the size of the whites of Martin’s eyes when I screeched to a stop under the elevated subway tracks on Broadway and 240th Street, near the Leo Engineering Building, that he was pretty wide awake.

  There was actually a method to my mad dash to Riverdale. There’d been a breakthrough on the case. Robertson had done it. He had found a plate on a surveillance camera near the drop.

  Thirty-First Street and Dyer Avenue was a boxed-in intersection; 31st Street, like most of the odd-numbered cross streets in the Manhattan grid, runs one-way to the west. If a car had come to drop off the package, it had three options when leaving: west, north, or south.

  As it turned out, two of the exit routes—the ones to the west and to the north—actually had surveillance cameras pointed at the street. The camera aimed at the western route was highly visible on the corner. The camera to the north was much less visible, so that’s where Robertson had concentrated his search.

  The last pickup on the box had been at 5:00 p.m., so Robertson had recorded the plate of every car that had stopped at the intersection since then. More than two hundred plates. From the DMV database, he got a list of names, then cross-referenced them with everything we had on all three outstanding cases, every lead and tip. Finally, at six fifteen this morning, something popped. A name.

  A Russian name.

  Dmitri Yevdokimov was a Russian immigrant with no priors. His name had been on the list of the more than nine hundred anonymous tips that had come in after the publication of the subway bomber stills.

  The anonymous caller had said that Yevdokimov resembled the younger of the two subway bombers from the paper and that he was a chess genius with such a negative, unpleasant, antisocial personality that the Russian-accented caller said he “wouldn’t put it past the bastard to blow up the city.”

  The note on the follow-up report by the FBI agent who’d worked the lead stated that Yevdokimov had been interviewed and had provided a solid alibi for the morning of the subway bombing.

  But now that his car had been found a block from the drop site, it was time for a follow-up interview, I thought as I ate a light on Bailey Avenue and roared east.

  Arturo and Robertson were already on scene with an ESU breach team at Yevdokimov’s last known address, in the East Bronx. The entire block and most of the neighborhood were slowly and meticulously being surrounded by half the department. Since the bloody fiasco in Queens, we were expecting the unexpected, and no one was taking any chances.

  I’d gotten as far as East Tremont Avenue when my cell rang with Arturo’s number.

  “What?!” I yelled.

  “We bagged him, Mike! We were just setting up when a car turned the corner, and Doyle verified the plates. We swooped in as he was getting out of his car. Not a shot fired. ESU has him on the ground, and Mike, listen. There was another guy with him. It could be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We may have just ended this!”

  “Great job, Arturo. I hope you’re right. I’m about five minutes out. Where are you taking him? The Four-Five?”

  “Yep. The Four-Five. We’ll meet you there,” said Arturo.

  Could it be that we actually caught this guy? I wondered as I tossed my phone into the passenger seat. I screeched around a double-parked fish truck and turned on the jets, the siren screaming.

  “Let it be. Let it be. This must be the answer. Let it be,” I sang hopefully as I pinned it up East Tremont.

  Chapter 72

  The Forty-Fifth Precinct station house, near City Island, was on Barkley and Revere Avenues. I parked and flew up the stairs to the DT department on two and found Arturo and Robertson outside the detective CO’s crowded office. I happily greeted them as well as Brooklyn and Doyle, who were just inside with an ESU sergeant and the precinct captain.

  “It looks like them, Mike,” was the first thing out of Arturo’s mouth. “No facial hair, but they look like the suspects from the subway bombing.”

  “Anything on the other guy yet?” I said. “Tell me there’s a Facebook selfie of him holding a bunch of plastic explosives.”

  “His name is Anatoly Gavrilov,” said Brooklyn. “Like Dmitri, he’s claiming he doesn’t know what the hell is going on—that they’re just cousins who work together as computer programmers and were coming back from a night on the town. They claim they’ve worked for plenty of Wall Street firms, which, from our preliminary look into it, might actually be true. Odd, though, since I wouldn’t exactly peg these two on first glance as Goldman Sachs consultants.”

  “You had to see the guy’s house, Mike,” said Arturo. “Hoarders, except organized. Stacks upon stacks of labeled plastic containers of comic books, chess magazines, newspapers—mostly Daily News dating back to the fifties.”

  “Exactly,” said Doyle. “Real strange shit.”

  I remembered what Kaczynski had said about the bomber being a hoarder. And that he might play chess. Had we actually caught these guys?

  I looked at the two men on the interview-room monitor on the lieutenant’s desk. The resemblance was there. They easily could have shaved their goatees because of the manhunt.

  “It’s them. Has to be, right?” said Arturo.

  “Nothing has to be, Lopez,” I said. “But so far, not bad.”

  Chapter 73

  I spoke to Yevdokimov first.

  “What the fuck is this? Russia?” were the first words out of the Russian’s mouth as I opened the door.

  He was not a handsome man, but his casual clothes were expensive—a fastidious sandwashed silk T-shirt; tailored jeans.

  “Why’d you do it?” I said.

  “Blow up the subway?” he said, staring at me with bulging eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. I was bored. No, wait. I thought I’d start the Fourth of July off early this year, that’s it. Plus of course my mother didn’t really love me.”

  His chair creaked as he attempted to shift his weight with his hands cuffed behind him.

  “How many times do I have to say it?!” he cried as he began rocking back and forth. “It wasn’t me. I have a lot of enemies, okay? That happens when you’re a genius. Most people are stupid, and when they come into contact with a towering intellect, they become fearful and jealous. I was at work when that bomb went off. I have twenty witnesses who will testify to it.”

  “Where were you last night around six fifteen?”

  He stared at me as he rocked.

  “I was at Orchard Beach in the Bronx. I walk my dog there. Why?”

  “Bullshit. You were at the corner of Thirty-First and Dyer Avenue in Manhattan, Dmitri. Your genius must be slipping a bit, because you didn’t think about that second camera on the corner past the box.”

  He laughed as he rocked, shaking his head.

  “The box? What box? The jack-in-the-box? You’re unbelievably wrong,” he said as he started squeaking around again in his cheap hard plastic chair like the world’s largest hyperactive four-year-old.

  “That’s the spirit, Dmitri,” I said. “Rock that boat, but remember, just don’t tip the boat over. Get real comfy, because we’re going to be here for a long, long time.”

  He whimpered.

  “This is unreal,” he said. “Let me guess. You guys are out of ideas, a
nd since you have no clue who’s doing this and never will, the plan now is to find a scapegoat.”

  “Your car was there, Dmitri,” I said. “A gray Civic. Your car, your plates. You were there.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” he said sadly as he finally stopped squiggling around. He shook his head and looked down at the floor.

  “Someone is framing me.”

  “Oh, a frame job,” I said. “I haven’t heard of one of those since television came in black-and-white. Tell me more.”

  He lifted his head.

  “Do you play chess?” he said.

  “No. I put murderers on death row.”

  “Ah, very funny,” he said with a pained grin. “New York City is one of the most competitive chess arenas in the world, especially for big-money underground games. I haven’t lost a game in six years—six years—and I play every day. They set them up, and I knock them down. Some people are gracious winners. I’m not one of those people.

  “I crow. Sometimes I laugh. It’s emasculating to get owned. At least I suppose so, because I wouldn’t know. And now I guess one of those very bright people I beat has had enough. This is their moment to make their mark or whatever. Why not get me back, right? School the master. Revenge! Now, please take off these cuffs. I want my lawyer. Let me out of here. I have to feed my dog.”

  Chapter 74

  I thought about what Dmitri had said as I came out of the interview room into the bull pen. Some of it actually made sense. Anyone who blew up 26 Fed with robots and all the rest of it could easily have framed this guy. A thought that was pissing me off. Were we being played again? Was this loser actually being framed?

  I turned to see Emily Parker coming up the precinct-house stairs.