Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

Keep buzzing, you bastard, she thought. Come to mama.

  She had it!

  It was a cell phone!

  But not her cell phone. She could tell by the feel. It was just a cheap piece of crap. WTF?

  It was his. That dirty son of a bitch. She had him now. As soon as she got out of here, she could trace this sucker, ransack his phonebook. The little bastard would be sorry he was ever born after she turned the wrath of the Sinclair empire on his sorry ass. She started laughing. Revenge was going to be eaten hot and she was going to enjoy every bite.

  Her arm was moving!

  The dirt was falling away from her shoulder. All of that moving and shaking had loosened it just enough so that now, in her justifiable rage and anger and lust for vengeance, she could extract it.

  Here it came-

  Her shoulder popped out of the earth. She shrugged as hard as she could, just like she did in the gym with some light dumbbells in each hand, toning the traps, and raised her elbow. Pushing, pushing. Come on, do it. Remember the old bodybuilder’s motto: what can be conceived can be believed and achieved.

  She did it! It was coming up through the ground, her hand along with it. Which meant she could snatch the stupid baggie off her head and in just a few minutes-

  “Just what I was looking for.”

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, the voice sounded familiar. One of the things that made her a good reporter was her ear. She had an ear for music and an ear for voices, and she rarely had to think twice before being able to attach a name not just to a face, which was easy, but to a voice, which was much harder.

  This voice she knew.

  No time to think about it now. The cell phone disappeared from her grip. Shit. There went her last hope. The bastard had come back for it, and now he was going to kill her.

  “I was wondering how long it would take me to find you. Brave girl. Now, where is he?”

  He had not taken the baggie off her head, and he was behind her. But he wasn’t fondling her or anything like that, so she had to assume he was one of the good guys. Still, he didn’t sound like a cop-

  Hang on. Didn’t sound-sound-Say, she knew that voice…

  “What was his name?” The voice was sterner now. Somewhere a clock was ticking. No time for games. She’d find out who it was later.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Sure about that?”

  Something about this guy’s voice said not to fuck with him. Think-there. “No, wait, he did say.”

  “Thought so. You weren’t lying to me, were you?”

  “No, why would I-”

  “I can tell when you lie. I can tell when anybody lies. So be straight with me, collect yourself, and everybody will be happy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.” No point in arguing.

  “What did he say his name was? Some Arabic name?”

  “No, American.”

  “Go.”

  “Raymond. Raymond something.”

  “D.B. Do better.”

  “Gimme a sec. Something German-sounding…wait…it’s coming.”

  “So’s the Rapture. Hurry.”

  Her mind raced again. It was doing a lot of that lately. It was on the tip of her tongue…news business…anchors…She had it!

  “Cronkite, like Walter, I think. How could I forget something like that?”

  “I believe you,” her rescuer said. So he wasn’t going to kill her; he wasn’t another sick fuck psycho. He was a kind of guardian angel.

  “So? You’re going to get me out of here now, right?”

  No answer. She could free herself after a while, but it sure would be easier with a little help.

  “Right?”

  “Listen, you cocksucker,” the man was saying intro the phone. “I’m coming for you. O my Brother, this will be the last dawn you will ever see.” Except that she couldn’t understand a word: to her, it all sounded like a variation of haLA-haLA-haLA-haLA. She really had to start studying languages, especially those funny foreign ones they spoke in the Middle East. “Because I am sending you to hell.” That part at least was in English.

  She stayed silent and listened in case he spoke again…but could hear nothing. Either he was still here, or he was gone.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  “Mister?”

  Ditto.

  Fifteen minutes later, covered with dirt, Principessa Stanley tore the baggie off her head and took a deep breath. The back end of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had never looked so good to her. In vain, though, she looked around for the man who had saved her, the man whose voice she dimly recognized, and would now devote the rest of her life to discovering his identity. What a story that would be.

  She looked in a 360-degree circle, then ran out onto Fifth Avenue.

  But he, whoever he was, was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Central Park Reservoir

  The killing had begun again that morning. Raymond had never felt so liberated, so alive. Being a martyr was a wonderful thing.

  Up to now, he had never understood the principle, of life-in-death and death-in-life. He had never understood the relationship between Eros and Thanatos, which he’d read about in a book once and never quite got. The yin and yang thing he’d thought he understood, especially if it came with those sex diagrams attached, but it was one thing to understand something intellectually and quite another to feel something viscerally.

  But this was totally different. This was raw, exciting. This was what freedom felt like. Now he understood what those crazy suicide bombers felt like when they pulled the pin on their own grenades, secure in the knowledge that they were going to take bunch of the infidels with them, send them straight to hell, while they themselves would soon see paradise. He wasn’t quite sure if he believed all the blather about the seventy-two virgins, or raisins, or even if there was anything on the other side, but what the hell did it matter, because he was here, he was now and-

  Blam! Got the bitch with one shot.

  Blam! Another one.

  Blam! Another one.

  He could shoot them from the bushes. He liked the bushes. This was a nice park, much nicer than any he’d seen, even nicer than Golden Gate Park, where the Brothers had taken him once on an outing, although it didn’t have the same sweet smell of the eucalyptus trees, or the delicious salty taste of the fog in the late afternoons.

  As usual, the chicken passersby started running in all directions, squawking. It was just as the Brother had said: no one would fight back against him. He was not only invincible, he was invulnerable. He was free to kill as he liked. He not only like God, he was God.

  Devlin had already punched the name into the CSS database and gotten his readout: nothing. Raymond Crankeit or Kronkite or Krankheit or however you wanted to spell it, nothing. His worst nightmare: a punk with a rifle, a chip on his shoulder, and a limp noodle.

  His secure PDA buzzed: MARTIN FERGUSON read the display.

  “Eddie Bartlett,” as he’d been known on the last operation. Danny Impellatieri, his man main, his old buddy from Blackwater, now Xe, the country’s foremost PMC, or Private Military Company. There are dozens of them, and some very good ones, like Triple Canopy, but despite all the bad publicity Danny continued to work with and recruit from Xe-mostly ex-elite forces, like Danny, who knew what to do with a piece of equipment or a lethal weapon, and who also knew how to count money and keep their mouths shut.

  Even though they’d never met, and operated together under strict rules, including a rotating series of aliases that, for laughs, were generated by random run-throughs of the movie database imdb.com, they trusted each other with their lives.

  LOCATION?

  STEWART. NEED CHOPPER

  MILITARY? XE?

  NG. CITY SEALED. OFFICIAL CHANNELS OUT.

  ALL BUT ONE.

  EXPLAIN

  NYPD

  NO CONTACTS

  NO WO
RRIES.

  WHAT KIND OF RIDE?

  Danny had been one of the Army’s top helicopter pilots with the legendary 60th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), 2nd Battalion, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, known in the biz as the Night Stalkers. Danny, he knew, favored the MH-60/DAP (Direct Action Penetrator) Black Hawks, but the NYPD choppers were damn near as good.

  STAND BY AND BE READY TO HOP

  ROGER THAT.

  He didn’t care what Danny needed the chopper for; he owed him. His next message was to Byrne:

  HAVE POLICE CHOPPER STANDING BY ON MY ORDERS, WITH BARRETT. ANGEL

  He had to make sure Kohanloo did not get off the island, and a chopper, which could sweep from one side of Manhattan to another in a couple of minutes, was the ideal way to ensure that. With everything closed, there was only one way off Melville’s Isle of the Manhattoes, and that was the way the original Dutchmen had come: by sea. Whatever other reason Danny might have for wanting a hawk, he was going to make damn sure Kohanloo stayed put, or died.

  Kohanloo, if he was as smart as Devlin thought he was, would have had a boat ready, on a jetty, anything, most likely on the East River-the Hudson was too wide, he’d be a sitting duck, ripe for target practice-and would try to slip out under the cover of darkness.

  Then, over the police scanner he was picking up with his PDA, he heard the reports of shots fired at the Reservoir. And he knew, he just knew, it was Raymond.

  Byrne got the message. This was crazy, but crazy was all he had time for right about now. He didn’t like the tenor of his conversation with his brother-he never liked the tenor of their conversations-and he could tell the bastard was snooping around, planning something, plotting something, more likely. If it weren’t for their sainted mother, Irene, still alive and still living in the flat in Queens, although Frankie had been trying to coax her into a nursing home in the Bronx for years, a nice one, but she was convinced he meant the Hebrew Home for Aged and the very thought of that agitated the old Russian lady, who had retained her reflexive anti-Semitism all her life. Although, God knew, she had been through enough horror in her life, and the life of her family, for the world to cut a crazy old lady a little slack. Rufus even continued to keep watch over her, invisible and silent as ever, as he had for more than a decade. Rufus was a successful businessman in Jamaica, Queens, but he still cruised by the old neighborhood, looking for a random game of pickup hoops and always with the intent of checking in on Irene, just in case…

  He ordered the police chopper on standby. He’d deal with his asshole brother later. As much later as he could.

  Devlin moved slowly but deliberately, cautiously but not suspiciously. With the city still in lockdown, and the other shooters rounded up there would be cops rushing to the spot in minutes, converging on the Reservoir in full force. That’s what they were trained to do, and that’s the way he would have responded, too, were it not for one thing:

  He knew, dead-solid-fucking-certain knew that Raymond whatever his name was, Mr. Disease, would not be there when they got there. Not because he was a genius. There was no chance a guy like him was a genius. He was in fact an idiot. But there were idiots and then there were idiots savants, and he’d long since pegged this last of the Mohicans as a savant.

  Raymond would do nothing expected. He would do everything wrong. He was, in fact, like the enemy he served: technically inept, tactically amateurish, unable to grasp the basic concepts of warfare, except for the most important one: always keep your opponent guessing.

  To get Raymond, he would have to think like Raymond. This was not like taking on Milverton. Milverton was good, great even, but Milverton and he had battled according to an unspoken set of precepts, like two chess grandmasters locked in mortal combat. This putz was the Paul Morphy of gunmen, probably mentally ill, but there was a brilliance in his illness, a genius in his madness.

  Where would you go? What was motivating him?

  Devlin’s mind raced as he neared the Reservoir. He thought back to Atwater ’s report: Love and Revenge.

  There it was. Raymond was not a patch on Skorzeny and his crazy apocalypse, of which the attack on New York now obviously was just another piece of the overall mosaic, but just as ontology recapitulated phylogeny, Raymond was an adumbrator of the greater genius of his puppetmaster.

  What did he know about the man? Nothing, or close to it. He didn’t turn up in any databases, and Devlin hadn’t seen enough of his MO to be able to properly formulate a-

  Hang on.

  The burial. The bushes. He didn’t suddenly dig that grave for Ms. Stanley, he had dug it for some purpose. To bury his weapons, perhaps. But there was another reason. Jesus, it was so obvious:

  He felt comfortable underground.

  That was where he had slept. That was where he would go. Underground. And nowhere in America was there a more hospitable underground-if such an adjective could be used in this context-than New York City. The city was burrowed under by miles of tunnels: subway tunnels, steam tunnels, water tunnels, electrical tunnels; there was almost as much civilization under Manhattan as there was above it. Cops hated going down there, workers hated it, maintenance men hated it, and even the sandhogs, the brotherhood of blacks and Irish who were digging-and had dug-the gigantic water tunnels that flowed down from Westchester and gave life to the city-hated it.

  That’s where Raymond would go. He had to beat him to it.

  And where was the nearest underground?

  Under the reservoir. In the pump house.

  Like its now-vanished cousins, the reservoir had once been the oasis of the city, not to the extent the old Collect Pond had been in the early days, which had fed the Five Points, both now buried under the concrete of the august courts of lower Manhattan. Nor was it a rival of the real reservoir that once had stood, in all its faux-Egyptian splendor, where the New York Public Library was today. Now that had been a reservoir. Still, the Central Park Reservoir could boast of something the others couldn’t, which was its survival.

  He had to get to the pump house. And then he had to deal with Arash Kohanloo.

  He glanced at his watch. Maryam should have checked in with him long ago. Well, she was a big girl and could take care of herself. No time to worry about something he couldn’t control. To think otherwise would not only be unprofessional, it would make him crazy.

  Arash Kohanloo tried to stay calm. Everything was in readiness. The boat was going to leave from a private slip down the slope from River House. He was in River House, in the apartment of a fellow Iranian, who lived in the kind of splendor that he himself, for all his success, still aspired to. All he had to do was stay calm.

  Calm.

  The people who lived in River House were extremely rich, but while Manhattan’s newspapers may articulate the glories of philanthropy and the coerced public good of tax dollars, the bitter truth was that many of them had inherited their money, not earned it in any meaningful sense, and so could make a great show of working for a dollar a year, or donating their salaries to charity, or demanding that wage slaves pay up, secure in the knowledge that their capital was not only untouched, but always growing. After all, it was called an “income” tax, not a “capital” tax.

  From the earliest days of River House, there had been a private egress down the shore, which not even the construction of the FDR Highway had disturbed. Once upon a time, the East River had been awash with vessels plying the waters around Manhattan, including steamboats, pleasure cruisers and even, in the early 19th century, a brisk trade in river piracy. The ill-fated General Slocum had passed this way, back in 1904, aflame and doomed, rushed toward her destiny on North Brother Island, just to the north, off the Bronx shoreline, but Arash Kohanloo neither knew nor cared about that now; all he could think of was getting off the island as quickly as possible and slipping out to sea.

  He made his way down the dank stone stairs, slippery with age and shaking, in the damp and the chill, with his fear of this Malak al-Maut, this specter who h
ad emerged out of the night to read his every thought, to know his every intimate wish and desire. Him he must flee; what would happen after that, after he got down to the rendezvous point in Red Hook, only Allah knew.

  The boat was there, where it was supposed to be. On board were flares and firearms, maps and guidance systems, plus a communications device. He would have to run both silent and fast, but with the craft’s markings, he felt certain that no one would stop him. If anyone stopped him, he was on a mission of mercy, running medical supplies downtown. After all, he was on a Red Cross boat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Central Park

  The Reservoir-the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, to give it its full name-had not been actively connected to the city’s water supply system since the opening of a massive new water tunnel in 1991, but that didn’t mean the infrastructure wasn’t still there. As one of the main storehouses for the water that kept lower Manhattan alive, the reservoir collected the water brought down from Westchester and in turn sent it farther south, to where the people were. The area under the Park was one vast canal, much of it still in use, but some of it now abandoned. That’s where he would be.

  There would be cops crawling all around the reservoir, so Devlin went in the same way the city’s rats headed wherever they wished to go, via the New York City sewer system.

  People who were dazzled by Manhattan and who never ventured belowground, got only half the picture. True, the city’s skyscrapers, from the Woolworth Building to the late World Trade Center, had long been objects of wonder and envy. But underground, where the water tunnels, the subway tunnels, the steam tunnels, the electrical tunnels, the service tunnels and everything else all jostled for position, was a miracle of subterranean organization. Animals lived down there, and people too-the cops called them the “skells,” either in colonies or as lonely, wayward, and usually crazed souls, who had nothing to connect them to the world above.