“Okay, Zoya. That’s the detective who was working with us downstairs. We’re going to be fine. He’ll tell us what to do.”
“He doesn’t even know where we are.”
“I think he knows where Nik is, though.” I opened the door through which we had entered the landing. I knew Mike wasn’t going to send us across the glass catwalk and expose us to this maniac.
“My team needs to report immediately to Captain Poseidon’s son,” Mike said, choosing his words carefully. “Got that? To Poseidon’s son.”
This was not a time for Mike’s dark humor. If there was a Captain Poseidon, I didn’t know him. I took Zoya’s hand to lead her, but I wasn’t sure where to go. The beating of my heart seemed louder than the crashing thunder.
I kept repeating Poseidon’s name to myself and all that surfaced in my mind was Greek mythology, not an actual police captain. Of course, Poseidon. God of the sea. Did Mike want us to make our way downstairs to the Oyster Bar?
“Remember, men,” Mike called through the bullhorn. “The captain’s son has wings. Wings.”
“Did you and your brothers learn mythology when you were kids?” I asked Zoya.
“No. Not me. I never heard anybody talking about it. Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s great. Right now it’s great.” I couldn’t compete with Mike’s knowledge of the Greek and Roman warriors, but I’d learned a lot from listening to him over the years.
“Why is he calling us ‘men’? He’s not talking to you at all.”
“Oh, yes he is. He’s just trying to throw Nik off, not alert him to the presence of the two of us.”
Poseidon, god of the sea, was also the father of Pegasus. And Pegasus was the divine winged horse of Greek myth—and of the zodiac. The golden image of Pegasus was one of the larger figures in the mural of the celestial sky that stretched above us.
Of course it made more sense for Mike to direct us upward than to chance an encounter with Nik Blunt, who was at least one floor below when he encountered Yolanda Figueroa. One flight up and we would be in the corner of the building, directly below the painting of Pegasus.
“Repeating, gentlemen, that I will meet you by Captain Poseidon’s son. Not where his son actually is, but where he should be. Where his son should be,” Mike said. “As God is my witness.”
I stood still and repeated Mike’s last words. “As God is my witness?”
He was telling me something. Something he was convinced I knew. I got who Poseidon was and from that had figured Pegasus. What did God have to do with any of this?
I played the words over and over again in my mind, until the clues finally locked into place.
The celestial ceiling had been painted in reverse, we had learned in our tour. The information had seemed irrelevant at the time but satisfied my curiosity about the magnificent aqua sky. The artist had made a mistake in creating his great mural. I tried to remember everything we had learned such a short time ago.
And then I recalled what happened when Commodore Vanderbilt’s heirs had been informed about the mistake, the very week Grand Central had opened. They announced that the mural was not an error at all, but a view of the earth from the heavens. God’s view. God was their witness.
“Mike will meet us on the other side,” I said to Zoya. Not where Pegasus really is, but where he’s supposed to be. “On the top floor. Let’s retrace our steps and you can follow me across.”
I let the door to the landing close behind us, lighted the Bic to make sure the path ahead was clear, and started jogging to the far corner of the building. The winding corridor was the entire length of a city block, parallel to 42nd Street, taking us from the Lexington Avenue side of the terminal to the Vanderbilt Avenue side.
When we reached the opposite landing, both of us took thirty seconds to catch our breath. There were no sounds from the corridor behind us. No voices, no footsteps, no gunshots.
“Ready?”
“You think your detectives are out there?” Zoya asked.
“If not now, then any minute. It’s a lot of territory for them to have to cover quickly. Sixteen flights or more up the staircases, most of them locked.”
Who knew what kind of carnage they faced in the wake of Blunt’s maneuvers, and whether he had placed other obstacles in their way?
“How will you know when they get up here?”
“I’ll—I’ll take a look. I’ll open the door.” I was as anxious to see protection for us as she was.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?”
“As sure as I can be,” I said. “I’m going to open it now, okay?”
“Yeah.” She had her back flat against the wall, out of sight of anyone who would be in a position to see inside.
I cracked the door a couple of inches. The concourse was still bathed in darkness, but floodlights were panning the entire room. Some were running horizontally, along the walls and back and forth on the catwalks on both ends, while others were scanning from the top of the vaulted ceiling back to the floor. I figured I had less than ten seconds to stay out of the spotlight.
Mike still had the bullhorn and now he was talking to the fugitive. “We got your stash, Mr. Blunt. Whatever ammunition you don’t have with you, we’ve got most of it. So if you’re running low, you might want to rethink your plan.”
I closed the door, counted to thirty, and opened it again.
“All that ammo you left in your crib in the tunnel, Mr. Blunt? That’s gone. Thanks to Smitty, former mayor of the moles. Cleaned you right out.”
I wanted Mike or Mercer or Scully—anyone who knew Zoya and I were on the loose—to spot me and send cops to make us safe, but the last thing I wanted was for Nik Blunt to catch us. I placed my shoulder against the heavy door and looked again but saw nothing and no one. Mike wasn’t talking to Blunt about Yolanda’s death. I’m sure he didn’t want to give the murderer the satisfaction of knowing how everyone guarding the terminal felt about the killing of a police officer.
I was getting as depressed as I was anxious. Maintaining a stiff upper lip in front of Zoya Blunt was becoming more difficult by the minute.
Why hadn’t any of the cops reached our position yet? Had Blunt intercepted and killed more of them, or was it just the steep and circuitous route they had to take to get to us?
I thought Mike would have raced up the many flights of stairs himself, but it was more like him to stay on the loudspeaker, letting me hear his steady voice talking directly to me, communicating his presence and support. He would have dispatched other cops to come find Zoya and me.
I knew there were sharpshooters set up all over the terminal by this point. I hated the idea of sticking my head out into the open space at the very top of the catwalk.
“Attention, team!” Chapman’s voice again. “Meeting unavoidably delayed. I know where you are, team. Check the Edisons. Check the Edisons. Waiting for power, team. Waiting for four thousand bare bulbs to go on.”
I was fast becoming too exhausted to play Mike’s word game. Edison and bulbs suggested lighting. We knew the power was out. And four thousand bulbs was another count that figured in the structure of the terminal. Architects wanted to show off the new technology of the day: electricity. Every bulb that ringed the circumference of the ceiling of Grand Central—thousands of them—was absolutely bare.
Mike was broadcasting something to me that I needed to know. It had to do with the innumerable bulbs that were just overhead outside the landing.
“What does he mean?” Zoya asked.
I put my finger to my lips. “Be absolutely still, okay?”
“Are they nearby?”
I figured Nik Blunt was closer to us than the cops.
“On the way.”
I put my hand on the knob, bracing my arm against the door so it opened only slightly. I focused my eyes, which was hard to do going from total darkness to the combination of searching floodlights and bolts of lightning. Nothing.
I closed it and waited ten s
econds. Zoya took another cigarette from the pack in her pocket and asked me for the lighter.
“You can’t do that right now.”
“It helps my nerves.”
“You’ll give us away when I open the door.” I didn’t want to tell her that snipers must have been setting up everywhere. “Just wait.”
“You said that before. I’ve been waiting, okay?”
I shushed her again and cracked the door. This time, the spotlights all seemed to be aimed in the same general position. They were crisscrossing the giant molding that formed a channel from the catwalk on the east side—from which Blunt had thrown Yolanda—to the one next to us, on the building’s west side.
I stood on tiptoe, so close to the ceiling of the terminal that my vertigo almost overwhelmed me.
In the man-sized gully—which appeared to be an architectural design element from the concourse below—where workmen stood twice a year to change thousands of lightbulbs, I could see Nik Blunt. He had crawled onto the deep space through one of the long glass windows—clearly fearless of heights, unlike me—and was creeping across the entire length of the terminal in our direction.
Spotlights from the floor tried to follow his movement, but most of Blunt’s head and body were below the rim of the channel.
I had no idea whether he had spotted me when I saw him throw Yolanda off the catwalk, or whether she’d had a chance, before he slit her throat, to give up the fact that his sister was in the terminal, helping the police find him.
Someone from below yelled the word “fire.”
A hail of bullets flew in the direction of Nik Blunt, who flattened himself against his sky-high gully and laid perfectly still. They struck the marble walls and burst scores of lightbulbs.
I pulled the door shut before someone mistook my shadow for the killer.
FORTY-SIX
I had my back to the wall, next to the door.
“What do you have in your apron pocket beside the lighter?” I asked Zoya.
She had heard the volley of shots and was ten steps ahead of me, backtracking in the corridor.
“Nothing. Just a Swiss Army knife and a bottle opener.”
A waitress, of course. “Let me have them, please.”
She fished in her apron and handed me the multitooled gadget first. I pocketed that, then held out my hand for the corkscrew. I pushed in the lock on the door—there was no bolt—then asked her to come back and hold the lighter so I could see well enough to jam the keyhole with the wine opener.
“Let’s go. That should buy us a few minutes.”
“But the gunshots?”
“It’s the cops. They think they see your brother up here.”
“Near us? Coming toward us?”
“I don’t know, Zoya.”
She started to run in the dark, holding the lighter out in front of her. “He’ll kill me,” she said. “Why aren’t the cops here?”
He’ll kill anyone he encounters, I thought to myself. “Where are you going, Zoya? You’re heading back the same way we came.”
Nik could just as easily crawl back to the catwalk he’d started from as come out to the one we’d been standing near. I wanted to find a place to hide.
The young woman kept running ahead of me.
“Zoya, how well do you know this area? There must be supply closets up here, aren’t there? Somewhere we can be out of sight.”
“I’m getting out.” She was frantic now, and I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t thinking any more clearly, although there didn’t seem a way to escape from the top of the building that had countless entrances and exits on the street level.
“We’ve got to stay together, Zoya.”
“I don’t have to do anything you tell me. You’ll get me killed. You’ll get us both killed.”
Halfway down the corridor, she took a right turn, which was the way back to the situation room that we’d exited with Yolanda Figueroa.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
I caught up with her as she pulled on the door. It wouldn’t open. She stepped aside to let me try, but I couldn’t move it.
“Don’t you have a key? Don’t you have anything to help us?” Zoya had lost it, emotionally. She was unable to talk to me now. Everything she said was a scream or a high-pitched rant.
“I don’t have keys. I never did.” This hadn’t been the plan for the evening.
Zoya swept past me and continued down the narrow hallway. I looked back before I followed her. Blunt didn’t appear to be coming yet, if he was still alive. There was no noise from the direction of the landing, where I’d blocked the keyhole—at least temporarily.
Ten seconds later, Zoya let out a shriek. I ran toward her in the dark space, farther away from the corridor that led to the two catwalks, and to the stairwells that eventually could take us down to the concourse.
There was a body on the floor, directly in front of the door to the operations command center. A man in some kind of military camouflage who’d been shot in the chest. He was African American, so I knew that it wasn’t Nik Blunt.
Zoya was out of control. She began banging on the door of the operations center.
I knelt beside the soldier—a National Guardsman or reservist. I grabbed the Bic lighter from Zoya’s hand to take a cursory look at his face and chest. The man was dead.
“Let me in,” Zoya yelled to whoever was inside.
Keith Scully and his colleagues had obviously stationed someone outside the room where the trains were controlled. It appeared that Nik Blunt had killed him and taken whatever gun—whatever kind of weapon—the dead man had thought would protect him.
“Nobody’s coming in here,” a voice called back. “Who are you?”
“I’m—I’m—just a woman. Just—just—help me. What’s the difference?”
“I’m a prosecutor. I’m Alex Cooper,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“You got ID? You got a badge?”
“No, no, badge. But you can call the stationmaster. Call the police commissioner. They’ll tell you who I am.”
“Lady, we can’t call nobody. How the hell do I know who you are? Somebody was supposed to be outside this door keeping us safe. Sounds like he’s gone. We’re barricaded in here till I see the man I work for. All our furniture’s against the door, so don’t try anything.”
“The man guarding you is dead,” I said.
I didn’t know whether I was talking to Yolanda Figueroa’s boyfriend or not, but it wasn’t the time to break that sad piece of news to him.
“I’ve got a gun, lady. Locked, loaded, and perfectly legal. Try to get yourselves in here and you’re dead, too.”
Zoya started stumbling forward again, farther into the dark hallway, into what was unfamiliar territory for me.
I stood beside the man who’d been killed, unable to move.
Then I heard noise, remote but audible. Someone was playing with the lock that I’d jammed with the corkscrew, jimmying it, trying to force it open.
I reached up for one of the horizontal steam pipes and grasped on to it. It was so dark that I couldn’t even see Zoya, but there was only one direction in which I could move.
In ten or twelve steps, I could hear her breathing. I practically bumped into her, where she had stopped at an intersection in the narrow passageway.
I drew next to her and whispered in her ear, as softly as I could. “I think Nik’s going to be coming back this way. We won’t be able to talk. We can’t use your lighter.”
“How do you know he’s coming?” She was panicky, shaking like a leaf.
“There’s someone trying to get through that door on the landing we just left. If it was cops, they’d be calling out to us by now. They’d be offering help.”
“But you said—”
“We had to leave the position Mike sent us to, so the guys don’t know where we are anymore, Zoya. How can they help us till they do?”
“Well, I’m getting out. I’m getting out of here.�
�
“Where are you going? I’m trying to help you stay safe. There must be some hiding place you remember.”
She turned her back to me and started to walk briskly. It was too dark to run.
Zoya Blunt had no intention of answering me. She was simply trying to put as much distance as she could between her brother and herself.
She made a right turn at the intersection in the corridor. I had no choice but to follow her.
We must have taken another twenty or thirty steps. To my right was a series of doors—probably equipment closets. I slowed down to twist the knobs, but nothing gave.
Zoya Blunt stopped short just ahead of me. To her left were only two choices: a steel-framed door or a wooden staircase located at the bottom of a dozen steps.
I watched as without hesitation she chose the door.
I was practically on her back as she worked the handle. There was no lock.
Zoya pushed on the door and it swung open.
I looked out and gasped. She had stepped out onto the sloping roof of Grand Central Terminal, twenty stories above 42nd Street.
FORTY-SEVEN
Rain pelted my face as I froze in the doorway, half of me inside and half out. Thunder rolled overhead.
“You can’t do this, Zoya. You’ll fall!”
She sat down on the copper plates of the rooftop and started scooting sideways like a crab, heading to the west side of the building. Clearly neither she nor her brother shared my fear of heights.
I followed her progression with my eyes but was too paralyzed to copy her moves. The tiles were slippery from the storm. Zoya’s skirt ripped as she slid down to the edge of the roof, catching herself on the concrete trim that decorated the entire edge of the vast building.
Fear was a powerful motivator. She rolled onto her hip and clawed her way up the side of the incline, closer to the top, then continued to propel herself westward.
Zoya had left me behind. I understood why but didn’t know which way to go to save myself.
Nothing was moving below me on 42nd Street. Undoubtedly, the massive police operation had resulted in the closure of all traffic routes around the terminal.
Terminal City Page 33
