Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  43

  Georgia handed over the report. She felt she had no choice. Brennan was her superior officer. He had every intention of discrediting her and Carter, too, if she didn’t. And what’s more, Brennan—like Hanlon—seemed genuinely scared. Someone had gotten to them—and that someone could get to her, too.

  “You don’t look too happy over there,” said Kyle as he drove Georgia to base. “Is Operation Robin Hood going south?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “This has nothing to do with the drop tomorrow. And besides, I can’t involve you.”

  “Because I’m the new fish,” he said glumly.

  “No. Because you’re a nice guy with a bright future in this department. I don’t want to take that away.”

  “Well, thanks for the ‘nice guy’ stuff you threw in there, anyway.” He sighed.

  “That wasn’t a brush-off, Andy. I mean it. You’ve got a lot going for you.” Georgia threw back her head and stretched. “I wish I had your self-confidence. Maybe I wouldn’t have just copped out back there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had something—something that could really ‘fry the bastards’ as you said before. And I…I lost my nerve.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t have lost your nerve.”

  Kyle was silent a long time. “I guess everybody’s different,” he said finally. “You do what you can do in this world, Georgia.”

  “Well”—she tossed off a bitter laugh—“I guess I just showed how little I can do.”

  Ladder Twenty was out on a run when Georgia and Kyle arrived at Manhattan base. They walked past the garage doors and took a small industrial-looking elevator to the fourth-floor marshals’ offices. The squad room was painfully bright, yet empty. Everyone was out on assignments or asleep. In the bunk room, Georgia heard Sal Giordano snoring.

  “Guess I’m going to be staying up,” said Georgia. “You want some coffee?” she asked Kyle.

  “Sure.”

  They headed into the kitchen. Georgia poured two cups. Someone had left Thursday’s Daily News on the table. The front-page banner read: “Mayor Gives Hacks $10M.” Underneath, a subhead read, “Ortaglia declares driving taxi most dangerous job in NY.” Kyle thwacked his hand at the story.

  “Can you believe it?” he asked. “Mayor Ortaglia’s got enough bread to put LoJack tracing devices and cell phones in every gypsy cab, yet he can’t buy the FD Handie-Talkies that don’t fade out if you jiggle them too hard.”

  “Guess we don’t have the most dangerous job in the world,” said Georgia dryly.

  “Next time someone’s in a burning building, I guess the fire department will tell them to hail a cab.”

  They lingered over coffee awhile, then Kyle headed for the bunk room. “Are you coming?” he asked Georgia.

  “I’m going to check my e-mail first. Maybe by then, Giordano will catch a job and have to wake up.”

  “Call me if you need me,” he said, then disappeared down the hallway.

  The squad room was like a department store late at night—eerily empty, yet lit up with a wattage that would rival Times Square. Georgia was alone, yet not alone, and the contradiction heightened her senses until she could practically hear the blood gushing through her veins. Every noise sounded louder, harsher and more abrupt—from the rattle of the window air conditioner in its patchwork of plywood, to the voices of dispatchers over the department radio. Even the rumble of Ladder Twenty backing into quarters downstairs had an undercurrent of tension to it.

  Georgia sipped her coffee and turned on her computer. There was only one e-mail—from someone calling himself “247.” There was no subject heading. She opened the message.

  The first line listed her home address.

  The second line listed her son’s name and age.

  The third line said simply: Mac Marenko is on Tier Three C, at the North Infirmary Command on Riker’s Island. He is the only white face there over the age of 25.

  Georgia stared at the screen. Blood crystallized in her veins. Her whole body felt as if it were encased in rubber bands. Her fingers were wrapped so tightly around her mouse, they felt arthritic. There was no threat—no warning. But the meaning—to Georgia, at least—was simple: Back off Delaney’s report or I’ll get to you, your family and Mac Marenko. I know where they are.

  Georgia massaged her forehead and thought through the possibilities. Someone connected to Delaney’s report wanted to be very sure she didn’t make those findings public. No one in the FDNY would threaten her like this. As Brennan had already aptly demonstrated, there were easier, more subtle ways to control Georgia’s actions. That left only one man with the clout to find out so much about Georgia and the power to use it. On the eve of the drop, she had a good idea where he’d be, too.

  She left the building without telling anyone. Andy Kyle would’ve insisted on going with her, and this was something Georgia wanted to handle on her own. She grabbed a cab to Chinatown. Sandowsky and his stakeout crew would probably be there all night, setting up surveillance cameras and recording monitors. A Hollywood movie could be shot in less time.

  The cab let her off beside a Pagoda-topped bank, a half block from the corner of Mott Street and Bayard in the heart of Chinatown. It was a narrow street fronted on each side by tenements with wrought-iron fire escapes and store signs in Chinese characters. The corner was quiet at two A.M., but Georgia knew that in seven hours, it would be crowded and chaotic. Robin Hood couldn’t have picked a better place for a drop.

  Command central was in a Chinese restaurant across the street from Tung Hoy Takeout, a cramped, low-rent joint that Lieutenant Sandowsky and his people had taken over for the operation, much to the annoyance of the owner, who seemed to be perpetually muttering harsh-sounding Chinese words about the police presence in his restaurant. There were listening devices, wires, microphones and video surveillance monitors all over the countertops. There were men in flak vests talking about “deployment” and “rendezvous checkpoints.” Operation Robin Hood might as well have been D-Day, the way they were going at it.

  “Holding up there, Marshal?” Georgia turned at the sound of a familiar voice. She caught the lopsided, world-weary smile of Phil Arzuti.

  “Hey, Phil. You’re still talking to me, huh?” Already Georgia had started to catch the cold shoulder from police officers who saw her as the girlfriend of a cop murderer.

  “Until this is over, at least.” He tossed off a laugh, but Georgia wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  “Do you know if Gus Rankoff is here?” she asked. “He’s an aide from the mayor’s office.”

  “Santa Claus without the beard?”

  “That’s him.” Arzuti tilted his head. “He’s in back, talking to Sandowsky.”

  Georgia maneuvered through the knot of detectives to the kitchen. Rankoff happened to look up. Their eyes met. Arzuti was wrong, Georgia decided. Santa Claus would never have eyes that dark and dead. Shark’s eyes, they were. And right now they seemed to bore straight through her.

  “Marshal?” Rankoff walked over. “You should be getting some sleep for tomorrow.”

  Georgia held his gaze. “I find that hard to do when I read my e-mail.”

  Rankoff smiled as if she had just told a little joke. “Shall we get some air? It’s very stuffy in here.”

  He excused himself and walked Georgia out back to an alley with wooden pallets and stacks of discarded vegetable boxes. Laundry lines crisscrossed the tenement yards like a game of cat’s cradle. “You have something on your mind?”

  “I understand you’re trying to dig up dirt on me to discredit my reputation.”

  Rankoff frowned. “Who told you this?”

  “I have my information from several credible sources.”

  “I was merely inquiring about you to Detective Leahy and some of the squad at A and E,” he explained. “You are going to be undertaking a very serious operation tomorrow. I wanted to make sure you were a stable individual.”

  “What about
after tomorrow?”

  “After tomorrow?” Rankoff opened his palms expansively and smiled. “It is always good to learn more about people we deal with—yes? In the event one ever needs say…leverage?”

  “Was that what that message on my e-mail was? Leverage?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I logged onto my e-mail tonight to find that someone had left me a message listing my home address, my son’s name and Fire Marshal Marenko’s location at Riker’s. What do you call that, Mr. Rankoff?”

  He sighed. “Perhaps someone is concerned that you are overstepping your authority as a fire marshal. But as long as you continue to focus on the job at hand”—he shrugged—“I see nothing for you to worry about. And who knows? In time, that kind of attention to duty could take a smart young lady such as yourself to great heights.” He checked his watch. “Now if you’ll excuse me…” He turned to go back inside.

  Georgia’s heart thrummed in her chest. “You need me right now,” she called to him. “But what about after the drop, Mr. Rankoff? Is my career—my life—going to be dangling by a shoestring? Am I going to have to look over my shoulder to make sure I don’t end up like Pat Flannagan?”

  Rankoff didn’t answer. His face became stony, and his eyes had a dull gleam to them. Georgia wanted outrage. She wanted him to deny her accusations and flail his arms about in protest. But in the end, he offered only a half smile.

  “Sleep well, Marshal. Fatigue can make a person careless. And careless people do stupid, dangerous things.”

  44

  Georgia was so exhausted when she got back to Manhattan base that she fell asleep in her bunk without even rinsing her face. She was awakened by a nudge to her shoulder.

  “Skeehan?” It was Andy Kyle. “We gotta go. Right now.”

  Georgia sat up, smacking her head on the bunk. She’d forgotten she was at work. As soon as she saw her clothes, she remembered. She always slept fully clothed at work.

  “What time is it?” she asked. The windowless bunk room gave no indication.

  “Just after seven.”

  “The drop’s at nine,” she groaned. Her neck hurt from sleeping on the pillow in an awkward way.

  “Not anymore, it isn’t.”

  Georgia ran a hand through her tangle of hair. “He changed the time?”

  “And the place.”

  “What?”

  Kyle shoved a doughnut in her hand. “Eat up, Georgia. The show’s been moved to Grand Central.”

  “Man, A and E must be pissed after all the setup they went through.”

  “Yeah, well…” Kyle grinned. “Every cloud has its silver lining.”

  There was no time to waste. Robin Hood had moved the drop time up to 8:15. Kyle hustled Georgia into a car and used his dashboard flashers and horn to snake past gridlocked intersections. It was 7:40 before Kyle was able to drop Georgia off on Forty-second Street, at the lower-level front entrance to the station. Georgia noticed the legions of unmarked NYPD cars immediately. Operation Robin Hood was big, and—like it or not—she was at the center of it. Georgia sucked back her fear and tried to put on a brave face.

  “Do you want me to call Randy for you?” Kyle offered.

  “Yeah, thanks,” said Georgia. She didn’t trust herself to say more. She started to get out of the car.

  “Georgia?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t try to prove anything in there, all right? There are worse things than having a deal like this go down smoothly.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as it not going down smoothly. Be careful.”

  Kyle drove off, and Georgia walked through the station doors. A few days ago, she’d seen Grand Central through the dull, monochromatic lens of a drill. But now, as she entered the sixteen-thousand-square-foot concourse streaming with thousands of commuters, every man with a briefcase, every woman with a cell phone gave her pause. On an average day, half a million people passed through Grand Central. Forget Chinatown—if ever there was a place for Robin Hood to get lost in a crowd, it was here.

  Georgia headed to the stationmaster’s office. A woman buzzed her through security doors. In the back room, detectives from Arson and Explosion and security officers from Grand Central were furiously poring over structural maps of the building and rail yards, tossing around code words and jargon. Willard and Arzuti were there. They were testing some electronic equipment they probably had had to cart over from the egg roll joint across from Tung Hoy Takeout. Lieutenant Sandowsky, his shoe-polish black hair reflecting the fluorescent lights, was talking to Chief Brennan and a security officer from Grand Central.

  Brennan beckoned Georgia over. He smoothed out an architectural diagram of Grand Central on the table and pointed a fleshy finger at a small black S on the map with a circle around it.

  “These are standpipe locations,” he grunted. Standpipes are water hookups inside commercial buildings and high-rises that can be attached to a fire company’s hose to put out a fire. Without them, firefighters would have to hook up every hose into street hydrants and run them across vast interior spaces and up dozens of flights of stairs.

  Brennan pointed at a standpipe box near the entrance to the Lexington Avenue subway line.

  “You will be given two brown paper bags, each containing five hundred thousand dollars of cash in hundred-dollar bills, as per our instructions. At exactly eight-fifteen, you are to walk up to this standpipe box and place the two bags inside. Lieutenant Sandowsky will have the box staked out by plainclothes detectives in Grand Central and the subway station. So once you make the drop, just head straight back to base. Don’t give Robin Hood any reason to follow you.”

  “Is there any way this standpipe riser could be breached internally—through some vent?” asked Georgia.

  “A and E ordered all the voids sealed last year, to prevent a terrorist attack,” Sandowsky explained.

  Brennan unrolled a set of engineering blueprints. “According to the blueprints, the void beneath this standpipe riser has a diameter of ten inches. That’s too small for an adult to climb through, anyway.”

  “Is there another way in?” asked Georgia.

  Sandowsky shook his head. “To breach the void, the perpetrator would have to drill through a three-inch-thick concrete ceiling beneath the concourse. We have teams deployed throughout the area in the event an attempt is made. You’ve got to remember,” Sandowsky assured Skeehan, trying to push up the overly long sleeves of his ill-tailored suit, “A and E knows this building in a way Robin Hood never could. You just put the money in the box and leave, Skeehan. We’ll handle the rest.”

  45

  There were any number of ways to get into Grand Central Terminal—through tunnels connected to high-rises, through shops and restaurants that fanned out from the concourse. There were subway passages and commuter rail lines. There was even a new subterranean corridor that ran a full fourteen blocks north of the main building, so it was now possible to enter Grand Central nearly a mile from the station. Still, Robin Hood knew, it wasn’t the entering that would be difficult. It was the leaving.

  At Fifty-sixth Street and Park Avenue, Hood descended a flight of stairs into the new north corridor. Commuters streamed past the pink granite walls inlaid with mosaic tile, checking watches, talking on cell phones. Most were heading out of Grand Central at 7:45 in the morning. But Hood was heading in, dressed in a pair of baggy navy blue coveralls, a white T-shirt, well-worn work boots and a hard hat. Hood carried a small toolbox and a beat-up backpack with a large ring of keys.

  No one paid any attention to the scruffy mechanic unlocking the door that read Authorized Metro North Personnel Only. On the other side was a narrow concrete platform that looked out over a wide stretch of train tracks. A scattering of incandescent bulbs offered the only source of light. There was no air-conditioning and the air had a dank, close smell to it.

  Hood walked down a metal staircase at the end of the concrete walkway. The air was cooler here,
another ten feet below the surface. But damper, too. The concrete glistened with moisture and puddles caught the light, reflecting the faint glow back like the stripes on a firefighter’s turnout coat.

  Hood scrambled across a set of tracks, keeping clear of the third rail and mindful of the air gusts that might signal an oncoming train. A metal door led to another passageway that sloped slowly downward, heat rising geometrically with every step. Hood had to crouch to keep from hitting the steam pipes overhead. They ran the length of a cement walkway and were covered with crumbling white plaster with faded red signs that read: Warning: Asbestos. Hood was soon sweating heavily. Workers who came down to repair pipes were never allowed more than fifteen minutes at a stretch in the steam tunnels. Heat exhaustion was a constant threat.

  The pipes extended for perhaps a hundred feet before Hood was able to take another turnoff and slowly ascend again. Here, the ceilings were higher, but more dangerous in some ways, as well. Steam leaks overhead gave the light a hazy quality and the pings of hot, compressed vapor ricocheted like gunfire through the space. Homeless people often lived down here, drawn by the warmth in winter and the chance to use the steam pipes as hot plates the rest of the year. Cut a hole in the asbestos, and you could fry an egg and bacon as easily as on a grill. It wasn’t uncommon for the tunnels to smell like a cross between a diner and a urinal, sometimes all in the same breath.

  Beyond the tunnels was another set of tracks. A graveyard for broken railway cars. Several silver passenger cars sat alongside a narrow platform strewn with steel plates, hydraulic fluid drums, electrical cables and pipes. A small utility shack of corrugated tin hugged the platform. Hood unlocked it now and walked to a metal door at the back of the shack, set into the concrete wall. It opened into a shaft of darkness—a vertical tunnel, three feet in diameter with a built-in set of rungs leading up. Hood left the backpack and toolbox in the shack and loaded the coverall pockets with screwdrivers, a pair of work gloves, a mirror and a prybar. Then Hood attached a flashlight to the rim of the hard hat and began the climb.