“So what are you worried about?”
“Guns. How many guns Blunt has with him. Handguns, like his sister saw. Automatic rifles,” Mike said, also eyeballing the enormous terminal from top to bottom.
“But he slit the throats of his victims,” I said. “He didn’t shoot them.”
“Yeah, and you don’t work for NorthStar unless you can hit a moving target from a speeding vehicle.”
We were waiting for the scattering troops to clear.
“You’ve got to think of the catalysts for radical behavior,” Mike said.
“War College stuff?”
“Yeah. There are obvious triggers that incubate this kind of behavior. On the economic side, a guy without a job and no means to support himself. Socially, a guy with the perception that he’s alienated from everyone else. Personally, the death of someone very close to him—and Blunt’s witnessed the death of his younger brother and the father he idolized, as well as his mother’s mental deterioration.”
“And he knows he’s got the same disease that ravaged her,” I said. “So he’s a poster boy for being radicalized, even if it isn’t political.”
“But every bit as dangerous as if his cause was a jihad.”
We turned the corner behind the staircase and I saw Yolanda Figueroa’s partner standing outside the stationmaster’s office. He spoke first.
“Ms. Cooper. I’ve been waiting for you. Commissioner Scully wants me to take you back upstairs to the situation room.”
“What about Yolanda?”
“She’s already gone up there with Ms. Blunt.”
I looked at Mike.
“The sister was refusing to leave until her brother’s in custody. She’s afraid because he knows where to find her. The commissioner figures she might be useful in coaxing him out.”
“I’m glad she changed her mind,” I said.
“Scoot, Coop. It’s like a bunker up there. Safest place in the building.”
“Don’t jinx it for me.”
“See you later. Keep excavating. You’re pulling great stuff from the sister.”
“Where are you going to be?”
Mike threw up his arms as he moved away from me. “Wherever Scully wants me.”
“Stay safe.”
“Have to. I have a hot date tomorrow night.”
“Mr. Blunt. I want you to listen up.” Keith Scully’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker from the stationmaster’s office as Mike walked away from me. “We found your toy bombs, Nik. You’re just upping the stakes every time you do something stupid like that. We know you have a gun, Mr. Blunt. We know you might have several guns. Time for the white flag. Time to surrender so we can make a deal with the district attorney’s office. It’s your best hope.”
I turned in the direction of the elevator that had taken us up to the situation room earlier.
“Not that way, Ms. Cooper. They’ve turned off that particular elevator. Scully and the FBI chief are concerned that Blunt might still have that key. We’re going up on the east side of the building. There’s an elevator in the far corner,” he said, pointing in the direction of the Lexington Avenue exit.
“Are you sure?” I asked, looking over my shoulder to see whether Mike was still in sight.
“Yes, ma’am. There are uniformed cops stationed at the elevator doors on every floor. I promise to get you there just fine.” He smiled at me, and I smiled back, despite my growing case of jitters.
“Lead the way.”
Dogs were guiding their handlers to all points on the concourse. We skirted the information booth in the center of the floor, going kitty-corner toward Lexington Avenue. I kept stride with the officer, passing the newsstand and walking through the arcade of shops that were shuttered tight, with metal gratings like those you see in third-world countries.
“You don’t think any killer’s gonna buy that, Ms. Cooper, do you?”
“What?”
“That your boss is gonna give him some kind of a deal. Doesn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t kill nobody. Kill three people and think somebody’s cutting you a plea bargain? He’d have to be insane. Forget surrender. I’d be so far away from this place you’d never find me.”
There were two NYPD officers stationed on either side of the elevator. Both were armed with shotguns, wearing vests and helmets. My Metro-North police escort held up his key, tin badge in hand, and they nodded to us as we got on the elevator.
The officer hit the button for the sixth floor.
“But it’s on seven, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Ms. Cooper, but the only way directly to the seventh floor—to the situation room—is that elevator they shut down. We’ll walk up from six. Trust me.”
“Of course.”
The elevator moved at the pace of a machine built a century ago. I was beginning to feel oppressively confined by the time it groaned to a halt.
The small landing onto which it opened—which held the elevator as well as a wide stairwell with steps to the flights above and below—was also guarded by an NYPD officer. It was a desolate space, with chipped and grimy paint, and steam pipes running in every direction.
He held open the door to let us out of the landing. “You know how to get there?”
“Not this way,” the Metro-North cop answered with confidence. “We need to take the stairs one flight up, to the situation room. My partner’s in there with a witness.”
“Go ahead.”
I followed the cop up the double-height staircase. The door at the top of it was locked, and he used some kind of master key to open it and enter. I took three steps in his wake, and then abruptly stopped in place.
It seemed as though I was suspended in midair. There were long windows—with panes of glass more than six feet tall—on either side of me. Most terrifying of all was that when I looked straight down, I could see sixteen stories to the floor of the terminal. The catwalk I needed to cross was made of glass brick.
“What’s wrong?” the cop said, looking back at me.
“I—I feel like I’m going to fall. It actually makes me dizzy to be up here.”
“First time is tough for everyone, Ms. Cooper,” he said, walking back to me. “It seems like nothing’s holding you up, I know that. Grab my hand and you’ll be fine. It’s just an illusion.”
I took baby steps, as though I was moving to the edge of a gangplank.
I was halfway across the catwalk, trying my best not to look down, keeping my eyes on the back of the cop’s head while he guided me across the glass floor. Pellets of rain were pounding against the windows to my left. The storm had started.
Suddenly, there was a new voice on the loudspeaker. The microphone crackled and screeched as whoever was at the controls increased the volume.
“Your turn to listen up, Commissioner. There’s no white flag in your future.”
It was Nik Blunt.
The police officer dropped my hand and pulled his gun. “Get down,” he screamed at me, as he placed himself in one of the windows, looking down over the concourse.
I followed his orders and lowered myself onto the floor, watching as he took hold of a huge metal wheel that was attached to the frame of the window and pulled on it. The glass pane next to me cranked open, almost two hundred feet above the terminal floor.
“Just so you know, Commissioner,” Blunt said. “It’s impossible to shut down Grand Central, no matter how hard you try.”
I was flat out on my stomach, peering through the glass bricks to see what was happening below. The few remaining cops were scrambling for cover, as though they were trying to figure out where this madman was.
“Is he in the stationmaster’s office?” I asked. “Do you think something happened to Scully?”
“No, no,” the cop said. “I can’t quite see him, but I know where the other loudspeaker is. He’s talking from inside the information booth.”
“You want to put cuffs on me, Commissioner?” Blunt’s voice was sharp and angry. “Come and get
me, Scully. The shock and awe portion of your evening has just begun.”
The next thing I heard was the rapid-fire repeat of an automatic rifle, spraying bullets onto the floor of the main concourse from the very center of Grand Central Terminal.
FORTY-ONE
The noise stopped abruptly after forty or fifty seconds.
As soon as it did, the deafening sound of return fire coming from four or five police sharpshooters echoed up to the celestial ceiling, very close to where we were.
“Stay down,” the cop said. “Crawl. Go behind me and get over to the far side, toward the situation room.”
I crossed in back of him and then shut my eyes, wiggling my way to the safety of the landing behind the massive wall that stretched above us, as high as the building went.
Now it was Scully’s voice. “Move in, men. If he’s still breathing, bring him out alive.”
The commissioner was challenging Blunt, trying to flush out his position as well as his physical condition.
I sat upright, slightly nauseous from the dizzying view but drawn to the drama playing out below. At least two officers had been wounded in Nik Blunt’s surprise shelling. They were being dragged by other cops across the concourse floor in the direction of the old waiting room.
“Snipers, take up positions.” Maybe a Code Black was in effect, affording Scully a screenshot of the scene, allowing him to give orders to the men on the ground. He shouted to them, a disembodied voice like the wizard behind the screen in Oz. “Move in now.”
Four of the SWAT team members approached the information booth, guns aimed directly at the glass partitions. All were coming from the same direction, obviously to avoid friendly fire.
I couldn’t see the solid brass door at the rear of the information booth. I’d stood at it dozens of times in my life, asking for directions, checking for the next train to Stamford or to White Plains or to Pelham. I knew the door opened on the side closest to the departure gates, which was out of my sight line.
“Stand up,” the cop said to me. “Let’s run you over to Yolanda.”
I got to my feet, still edged against the wall, looking down at the concourse. “Wait,” I said. “I want to see if they got him.”
The officers were up against the circular booth, kneeling below the glass windows. One of them stood up, aiming to blast the lock on the door.
“C’mon, Ms. Cooper. I need to get back down there. They didn’t get him.”
I stopped to question my escort. “How do you know? Why do you say that?”
“That’s one of the best-kept secrets of the terminal,” he said. “There’s a hidden staircase inside the information booth. It spirals down to the lower level. Blunt got the jump on your men, Ms. Cooper. Screw the lockdown. He’s on the run now.”
FORTY-TWO
“Put this on, Ms. Cooper,” Yolanda Figueroa said. “Your lieutenant sent us up here with these.”
She was helping me into a bulletproof vest, just like the ones she and Zoya Blunt were wearing.
Her partner had left the three of us together. I bolted the door behind him, then dialed the stationmaster’s office from the landline.
“Let me speak to Chapman or Wallace,” I said to whomever answered, and waited while the phone was passed. “Mike?”
“I guess I was a little quick to blow off our tour guide yesterday. We should have been the ones to know about the staircase.”
“Blunt really got out of there?” I asked.
“We caught a shot of him on the surveillance camera, although no one had any way to make him at the time, to know who he was.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s dressed in camo and assault boots, carrying an automatic rifle. He looks like half the guys on the floor here, like one of the guardsmen. It was only when we hit REPLAY to see how he got into the booth that we spotted him. He just melted into the crowd.”
“We couldn’t have given him better cover,” I said.
“When the information booth employees were let go at nine fifty, Nik Blunt came out of whatever hole he’d been hiding in, unlocked the booth while everyone around him was busy doing his or her own thing, and apparently crouched inside.”
“Then Scully sends half of the troops back out on the street—”
“And Blunt sat in the crown jewel at the center of the terminal, knowing he could escape by way of the spiral staircase and come out on the lower level, which had just been evacuated because of the pipe bombs,” Mike said. “All cred to NorthStar. He’s a wily little bastard.”
“Zoya says everybody’s kids knew about the staircase. Her guess is that Nik went down to the lower concourse to get to the tracks, into the tunnels.”
“Those gates to the platforms and tunnels are all manned, Coop. Pretty hard to slip out that way. Pin her down for any other sweet spots she remembers, okay?”
“How badly hurt are the two cops?”
“One has a shattered kneecap, and the other one just got knocked down, saved by his vest. You suited up?”
“Yeah. We’re good,” I said. “You?”
“Mercer and I are itching to get into this, but at the moment we’re chained to the commissioner.”
“Scratch the itch, Mike. Scully needs you. It’s almost eleven o’clock and no one’s dead,” I said. “Let’s make it a record-breaking day.”
We hung up and I repeated the conversation, including how Nik Blunt was dressed, to the two women. Zoya was chain-smoking the remainder of a pack of cigarettes, filling the room with smoke.
I was pacing back and forth. The operation center attached to the situation room still had four workers in it. I could see from the monitors that there were no trains moving south of 125th Street. They were watching the rail connections far to the north.
I sat Zoya down at the table and pushed her again. “So none of us knew about the staircase inside the information booth. That’s not your fault—and you couldn’t have guessed that Nik would get into there any better than we did—but we want you to rack your brain to tell us about other places like it here. Nik almost killed several cops tonight. Doesn’t the hidden staircase make you think of anything else?”
“Honestly not, Ms. Cooper. For me, it’s been more than ten years since I used to come here. I wouldn’t have thought of that staircase until you told me about it.”
We went back and forth for another fifteen minutes. I picked up the phone again to call Mike. I told him about the Campbell Apartment near the Lexington Avenue entrance. It had been built as a private residence for one of the original railroad trustees, John Campbell, and was a luxurious sanctuary in the middle of the terminal. Unoccupied for much of Zoya’s youth, it was now a glamorous bar—closed for the night—that Nik knew well, too. It was the only other place the young woman could recall as a special hangout of her brother’s.
“I’ll check it out,” Mike said.
“Anything else?” I said, fidgeting with the snaps on my vest.
“Mercer just spoke with a man who worked for NorthStar.”
“How’d you find him at this hour?”
“We didn’t. He found the NYPD hotline. Called in when he saw Blunt’s photo on the news tonight.”
“Does he solve the problem of where in the world Nik Blunt was?” I asked. Zoya’s head snapped to look in my direction. “Was he ever in Russia?”
“Never. No Muslims, no jihadist mission. The US government had a contract with NorthStar to go into Uganda, looking for a rebel leader who was abducting hundreds of kids to turn them into child soldiers. That kind of thing.”
“And Nik?”
“Caught the fever. Lived there for eighteen months,” Mike said, “and seemed to have enjoyed the danger, the license to kill.”
“Voices or no voices?”
“Yeah, voices, all right. At least for the last few months. Now don’t go telling Zoya what I’m about to say to you next. Promise me?”
“Okay.”
“Just so you know what we’re
dealing with, Coop. Nik and another man went off the reservation after their compound was attacked by the rebels. They attacked civilians in one of the villages in the countryside.”
I kept a poker face. Zoya was trying to study my reaction to the information I was receiving.
“Yeah?”
“All the men were off pillaging somewhere else, so Nik and his partner took it on themselves to rape four of the wives who’d been left behind.”
“Like the other guy living inside him told him to do.”
“Then he must have also told Nik to slit their throats from ear to ear,” Mike said, “because he did that, too.”
I was speechless. How many other killings had there been between the women in Uganda, Zoya’s rape, and Corinne Thatcher’s murder? And what ever put a woman like Corinne in his line of fire?
“Say something, Coop. Something normal so you don’t freak the girl out.”
“So nothing about any political mission, right? No work in Russia?” I knew it would sound like I was babbling and repeating myself, but I didn’t want Zoya to learn about the other murders yet.
“Nope. But NorthStar is where Nik picked up all his moves. Blinding security cameras, like he did at the Waldorf. Enlisting marginal types, like Carl the mole, to do his dirty work, the way he found recruits in the Ugandan villages. Killing for pleasure. You’ve got to sink pretty low to be fired from a place like NorthStar. They got him out of Uganda before he could be charged for the crimes there. Or executed. That’s why he wound up on the city streets—or below them.”
“Okay, we’ll keep on talking up here. Don’t forget about us.”
“Much as I might like that, Coop, it would be hard to do.”
I hung up the receiver.
Zoya asked what Mike had been telling me about Nik. Before I could answer her, the entire room went black.
I walked to the wall and flipped the switch, but there was no power at all. The only light in the situation room was the glowing tip of Zoya Blunt’s cigarette.
Terminal City Page 31
