Tick Tock

by Patterson, James

  “Kind of looks like one, too, doesn’t it?” I said.

  Hobart nodded.

  “If it were up to me, I’d go in at two a.m. with night vision. As it is, we’re going to cut the electrical power to the apartment right before we breach, in case Mr. Mad-Bomber-Ass got something rigged.”

  Hobart turned and addressed the crowd of black-clad men around us.

  “Remember, people, once the door is down,” he called out, “three teams will split up. One per apartment floor. Berger Meister could be anywhere, hiding God knows what, so I want room-to-room sweeps that the fucking upstairs maid would be proud of. Also, check with your team’s bomb tech before you even think about touching anything. Capiche? Good. Now it’s hurry-up-and-wait time. All we need is the green light from the pencil pushers.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, we listened to the SWAT guys lock and load and exchange terms like “tactical action parameters,” “secure coms,” and “mission capabilities.” Sitting on a greasy steel bench along the wall of the stifling van, Emily and I tested our earpiece radios and quick-checked our own weapons.

  I glanced out the van’s one-way tinted window a hundred feet to the west, where the Ancient Egyptian stone obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle stood against Central Park’s bright blue sky. On the path beside it, a pudgy female jogger went by, followed by a dog walker pulling a ten-dog pack.

  I don’t know which was higher, the temperature, my adrenaline, or the tension. I was pumped that we were finally onto Berger, but also wary. I’d seen Berger’s meticulous handiwork firsthand. Not only was he smart, efficient, and completely cold-blooded, but we had zero intel about the place where he was holed up.

  We weren’t pulling a crackhead out of a closet, I thought, staring at the photo of the creepy penthouse. It was more like we were reaching into a black hole in the ground to pull out a viper.

  “Alpha One, we have a go,” a voice in my earpiece crackled, a long, hot five minutes later. The van roared to life and swung hard to the right with a squeal of tires.

  “Woo-hoo! This is it, y’all!” Officer Wong called out with an enormous grin as he adjusted his tactical helmet’s chin strap. “We’re moving on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky-high!”

  Chapter 68

  WHAT SEEMED LIKE a rapid heartbeat later, Emily slid into me as the van fishtailed with a shriek of brakes. My head almost hit the ceiling as the van crossed Fifth Avenue and hopped the curb in front of Berger’s building.

  The back doors popped open, and Emily and I quickly followed the tactical team across the sidewalk and under the hunter green awning. When my eyes adjusted to the dim lobby, I spotted the doorman pressed against the wall beside an immense oil painting, his hat on the floor between his feet, his white-gloved hands in the air. A sign beside him said ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED.

  “Not today, friend,” Hobart said, handing the guy back his hat.

  Everyone froze in place as the wood-paneled elevator door at the far end of the lobby dinged open. Half a dozen laser sights trained on a tall, gorgeous young couple in business attire. Before they could open their mouths, they were taken facedown onto the Oriental carpet.

  “They’re clean, Chief,” Wong said, tossing Hobart the young business guy’s wallet.

  A broad, black-haired man wearing blue work clothes and wire-rim glasses appeared from a door beside the elevator.

  “The back elevator is here, officers. This way,” he said in a thick Eastern European accent as he waved at us frantically.

  A contingent of men was left to secure the lobby while we went through a dusty back hall and packed into a film noir–era freight elevator.

  “This is so crazy, so crazy,” the super kept repeating as he operated the manual elevator.

  Damn straight, I thought. There was absolutely no joking now or even talking as we watched the floors slide by with a disturbing sound of rattling chains.

  At the top floor, we came out into a dingy, narrow, windowless hallway lit by a single hanging bulb. This was definitely the service entrance. A hand signal from Hobart halted us at the corridor’s bend beside some garbage cans. Two men rushed forward and knelt beside the lock on Berger’s apartment’s back entrance, placing the breaching explosive.

  They ran back, and Hobart radioed down to some of his men now in the building’s basement.

  “In position,” Hobart said.

  “Roger. Pulling the switch. The juice is off. You’re a go,” a cop radioed back.

  Hobart nodded. Then one of the commandos tapped a stapler-like detonator, and Berger’s back door was blown to smithereens with an enormous crunching blast.

  The next few moments were a chaos of running men and shouts.

  “FBI!” Hobart screamed in a voice that sounded like it could have knocked the door down on its own. “Down! Down! FBI! Everyone on the floor!”

  Behind the SWAT team, Emily and I entered over the remains of the still-smoking door into a high-ceilinged kitchen. Instead of the granite countertops and high-end cabinets I was expecting, there were well-used industrial-size stoves and stainless-steel countertops. But that head-scratcher was nothing compared with the dining room.

  A dozen tables were covered in linen and set with formal place settings and unlit candles. For some reason, all the china and crystal and silver set out made the room look unbelievably creepy. There was even a grand piano on a stage in the corner. It looked like we’d walked into a restaurant.

  “Talk about not knowing what we’re going to find,” Emily said, shaking her head.

  We passed into an even larger wood-paneled living room. There was an incredible amount of art on the massive mahogany walls. A mix of museum-quality sketches, photography, what looked like a Renoir. Modern stuff.

  “There’s more paintings than wall space,” I said.

  We were stepping toward the stairs at the opposite end of the room when we heard shouting from above. There was an enormous chandelier-rattling thump followed by a blood-curdling scream.

  “What is this? Why are you in my house? What the hell are you doing?” I heard as I arrived on the next floor at the commando-filled doorway.

  Then I looked inside.

  “No,” I said, staring in wide-eyed wonder.

  Emily bumped into me to look in as well.

  “What the hell?” she said, shaking her head.

  “You’re hurting my back. I have a bad back,” said the man on the floor—the tremendously fat, naked man lying facedown on the floor.

  Chapter 69

  I GAGGED AS A WAFT of the stifling room’s horrendous body odor slapped into me. I started coughing. I was surprised I didn’t throw up.

  Whoever the morbidly obese man was, he certainly wasn’t the suspect from the witness statements or sketch or the surveillance video.

  We’d screwed up, I thought as I lowered my gun.

  “God, somebody get a sheet, huh?” Emily said, holstering her service weapon as she averted her eyes.

  “And a case of Lysol,” Wong said, covering his nose and mouth as he finished cuffing him.

  Reluctantly, I went into the room and tore a filthy sheet off the bed and covered the guy’s backside with it. It barely fit. He was easily six hundred pounds. Maybe even seven. The ESU guy actually had to use two pairs of handcuffs to secure the fat bastard’s wrists.

  I knelt down beside him.

  “Lawrence Berger?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, lolling his large head in my direction. “Oh! Wow! Michael Bennett. I didn’t know you were here. My God. This is so surreal.”

  Emily and I exchanged baffled looks.

  “I know you?” I said.

  “You gave a lecture on homicide investigation to the general assembly at John Jay back in ’ninety-three, was it?” Berger said, looking into my eyes. “Your wife was there with you. A tall, pretty Irish lady. Tell me, how is your wild Irish rose these days? Oh dear, what am I saying? The article about you in New York Magazine said she died. Well,
she’s in a better place. My deepest condolences.”

  Before I could punch the man in his mouth, Hobart hauled back hard on his handcuffs.

  “Ahhh! My wrists!” Berger screamed, tears in his eyes. “Ow! Stop it! That hurts! What are you trying to do? Break my arm? Didn’t I tell you I had a bad back?”

  “I look like your chiropractor, fatty?” Hobart said in the man’s ear. “Watch your mouth before I fill it with my combat boot.”

  Berger nodded as he turned slowly toward Emily.

  “Don’t tell me you’re Agent Parker. You guys have teamed up again? I feel honored. Nice core. Pilates?”

  “That’s it,” Hobart said, tugging back hard on the cuffs again.

  But instead of screaming again, Berger did something as surprising as it was horrifying.

  He broke into giggles.

  “You call this pain?” Berger said, smiling back at Hobart after a beat. “I’ve paid more than you make in a week for far, far worse, Brown Sugar. What were you going to do with your combat boot again?”

  This was taking a bad turn. Getting weirder and weirder. Hobart let the cuff chain go as if it were on fire and wiped his hands on his pants.

  “Where were we again?” Berger said, turning back around to face me. There was an oddly chipper tone in his voice now.

  “Who the hell is this, Berger?” I said, showing him the sketch and FAO Schwarz surveillance photo.

  Berger squinted at it.

  “That would be a crappy rough semblance of Carl, I think,” Berger said.

  “Carl?” Emily said. “Who the fuck is Carl?”

  “Carl Apt is my friend,” Berger said. “My very close friend and companion. I know what you’re thinking. Longtime companion, aka gay lover, but no. Not that I didn’t make some overtures. Strictly business, Carl is. Pure as the driven snow and twice as cold.”

  “Carl what? Works for you?” I said, trying to piece things together.

  “Kind of,” Berger said. “It’s complicated.”

  “I say we gag this turd,” Hobart said.

  “Where is he? Where’s Carl right now?” I said.

  “Where Carl usually is, silly,” the fat man said, rolling his eyes. “He’s upstairs taking a bath.”

  Chapter 70

  OUTSIDE BERGER’S BEDROOM, Emily and I raced behind Hobart and a few SWAT and bomb guys to a circular staircase at the end of the hallway.

  “If this sick-ass individual really is up there, he knows IEDs, so keep your eyes peeled for trip wires,” Hobart called back to us as we quickly began to ascend in single file.

  IEDs? Trip wires?! I thought, wiping sweat out of my eyes. I couldn’t believe this insanity. We’d found Berger, taken him down, and yet this thing still wasn’t over?

  Of course not, I thought as we corkscrewed upward toward the penthouse’s third floor. It wasn’t over until the fat lady sang.

  It was noticeably hotter in the upstairs hallway. Dim, with the curtains drawn, it reminded me of an attic. A bizarre, mazelike one with ornate crown moldings and paneled walls and more art. Strange art, too, I thought, scanning the walls filled with photographs of hellish landscapes and oil portraits of melting people. We passed a large room nearly filled with hideous primitive sculptures.

  Sweat dripped from my nose and from the grip of my Glock as we slowly went down the hallway. Emily was pressed close behind me, her Glock 23 pointed toward the ceiling, her palm flat on the back of my Kevlar vest.

  Everyone jumped in unison as we heard a loud, electric clack and a deep humming from behind the wall we were walking beside.

  “Excuse my French, but what the fuck?” Emily said.

  “Must be the building’s elevator machinery,” Hobart whispered over the com link.

  “Can anyone loan me a fresh pair of boxer shorts?” asked one of the commandos.

  A moment later, Hobart and his men paused by an open doorway on our left. When I arrived beside them, I was surprised by a breeze.

  That wasn’t the only surprising thing. Inside was a bathroom. The most enormous white-marble bathroom I’d ever seen. It had a sunken tub, a fireplace, and French doors that opened onto a massive stone balcony. A soft breeze fluttered the bubbles in the tub along with the tiered flames of candles that blazed in the enormous fireplace.

  “Where the hell is this creep, already?” Hobart said, sighting his submachine gun at the tub. “Did Calgon take him away?”

  We followed Hobart out onto the balcony. A tar beach this was not. Talk about a million-dollar view. Over the ornate granite railing in front of us was nothing but Central Park’s trees and the distant, iconic towers of the Dakota and San Remo apartment houses on Central Park West.

  “What have we here?” Hobart said, kneeling down at the terrace’s south end. A rock-climbing rope was knotted expertly around one of the stone balustrades, its other end pooled onto the roof three stories below.

  Hobart cupped his mike with his fist.

  “I want a team on the roof at the base of the penthouse pronto. Be advised, it looks like our guy has bugged out, either into the building or onto one of the fire escapes.”

  I followed Hobart’s gaze. He was right. Looking down below on the roof of the building, I spotted the openings for at least two fire escapes. If our man Carl had bolted the moment we’d knocked the door down, he could have gotten down to the ground floor by now or onto the roof of one of the block’s adjoining buildings.

  Shit. We would have to go floor by floor now or maybe even building by building. It was possible he could even have gotten away.

  I immediately called Miriam.

  “I got good news and bad news,” I told my boss. “We found Berger, but apparently the guy from the security camera is his accomplice. Not only that, but he just went Spider-Man on us. We’re going to need Aviation on the block here, eyeballing the rooftops.”

  “On it,” my boss said.

  “Wait up. What’s this?” Hobart said, suddenly climbing over the railing on the north side of the balcony and hopping down.

  Five feet below the terrace around the side of the penthouse was another balcony with a massive garden of potted palms and shrubs and exotic plants. Beside the garden, alongside the building itself, was a suburban-type garden shed. Hobart raised his foot to kick its door in, but then thought better of it.

  Brian Dunning from the NYPD Bomb Squad popped a gum bubble as he climbed down and stepped forward. He took a digital video recorder out of a bag and worked its fiber-optic camera under the door’s bottom crack.

  “It’s okay. Clear,” he said after a minute.

  Still, a tense, collective breath was held as he opened the shed’s door.

  Most of the dim room was taken up by a massive worktable. The flashlight taped to Hobart’s MP5 played over a soldering iron and bricks of what looked like modeling clay.

  “That’s plastic explosive,” Dunning said, waving his arms frantically, warning everyone back. “Enough to crater this roof. We need an evac of the penthouse and the roof right now.”

  Chapter 71

  AN EMT GUY WITH LONG black headbanger hair stood beside a stretcher in the hallway outside Berger’s bedroom when we hurried back downstairs.

  “What do you mean ASAP?” he was saying to a cop as he pointed down at Berger with an incredulous expression. “You don’t need me, you need to call a piano mover with a boom crane.”

  Due to the evacuation condition, everyone pitched in. Everyone except Emily, who I noticed was suddenly conveniently absent. Very much like a beached whale, Berger was rolled onto a comforter and on the count of three was hoisted by ten groaning first responders out of the room and the apartment into the freight elevator.

  Downstairs, I hustled the doorman, whose name was Alex Rissell, into the coatroom off the lobby. We needed info—and quickly. For all we knew, Berger could have been totally bullshitting us about Carl.

  Alex seemed to have calmed down from our initial storming of the building. I walked over to Emily as sh
e unfolded the surveillance photo of Carl Apt and showed it to him.

  “Does this man live in Mr. Berger’s apartment, Alex? It’s really important,” she said.

  “Holy crap! I saw that picture in the Post,” the doorman said, scratching at a zit on his pasty double chin. “I didn’t think anything of it, but you’re right. It’s him. It’s Carl Berger.”

  “You mean Carl Apt,” Emily said.

  Alex gaped at us.

  “His name is Apt? I thought he was Mr. Berger’s brother Carl. That’s what we were told. We all called him Mr. Berger.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Was this Carl guy upstairs when we came in?”

  The doorman nodded rapidly. “The board says he’s been in since last night.”

  “How long have Berger and Carl been living here?” Emily said.

  “Berger grew up here. Carl came much more recently. I’d say about five years ago,” the doorman said, nervously flicking at his zit again.

  “Where did Carl come from?” Emily said.

  “I don’t know,” the doorman said with a shrug. “But I do know that when he moved in, Mr. Berger stopped going outside. Mr. B was always an odd duck, but after Carl came, he went full-tilt cuckoo. Started having all his meals catered. Mr. B was always rotund, but holy crap! I hear he’s a real whale now, am I right? I mean, break-the-boxspring, TLC-show fat. Imagine what a scandal this is going to be for his family, especially his famous brother.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You don’t know?” the doorman said, surprised. “Lawrence Berger’s brother is David Berger, the Oscar-winning Hollywood composer. The whole Berger family are, like, rich and famous geniuses from way back.

  “Lawrence’s grandfather was Robert Moses’s right-hand engineer or something, and his father was some kind of A-list computer-whiz business guy. The old super told us that, before the older Berger died, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs showed up here one night for a birthday dinner.”