“What the hell?” Halladay shouted, as a wet mass hit the hood in front of him. He raised his arm to the front of his face when some of the blood splashed toward him and mingled with the rain that was already hitting the dashboard.
Jon stared, unmoving, at the burning wreckage of the teachers’ car, the same way he had stared at the door when Gant had abruptly left the lobby.
“I watched that car the whole time,” he finally said, pointing at it limply and looking over at his partner. “From the moment I told Gant that they were gonna talk. There’s no way someone could have planted explosives in it.”
“What, you think it was an RPG or something?” the older cop said, looking around at the buildings nearby.
“That’s a thought. Didn’t look like it, though.… Looked like a bomb under the car, the old-fashioned way.”
“Maybe it was already there,” Halladay offered, “before you started to watch the car.”
“What?” Jon said, then thought a moment. “Yeah, that could be it. They knew the professors might talk about the bribe and blow up their plans to take over the city, so they planned to blow them up during Dayfall. Makes sense.… That would get rid of them and also add to the chaos and sense of danger at the same time. I could see the headlines—‘NYU faculty members who predicted apocalypse are killed in it.’ I bet Render and Gant could see those headlines in their minds, too.”
“But do we know that Gant was actually in on this?” Halladay asked.
“Whattaya mean?”
“Maybe he called Render to tell him, and Render made the move. Maybe Gant doesn’t approve of this kinda stuff, like you were guessing when you talked to him.”
Jon thought back to his conversation with Gant in the lobby, and had to admit it was possible. He wondered if they should confront Gant again and see how he responded to what had just happened.
“One thing’s for sure,” Jon said, looking at Halladay. “It’s definitely not the Mayor who’s behind this. I’m sorry for accusing her, Frank, and for doubting your judgment.”
“Don’t apologize to me, kid. I’m totally biased against Render, ’cause he’d probably mess up the deal I’ve got with the cathouse.”
Jon stared openmouthed at his partner, as the sirens of first responders became audible for the first time. Then he asked, “Do you think I should apologize to the Mayor?”
“Naaah, I wouldn’t talk to her until you have some hard evidence for her. You’re not exactly on her good side right now.”
John nodded humbly.
“On the other hand,” Halladay added, “the same question I asked about Gant applies to Render: Do we even know he was in on it?”
“Who else would Gant have been calling?” Jon said, thinking it through. “Maybe just someone to detonate the bomb.”
“Ya know what else is interesting.… They didn’t blow it in the parking garage, which would have damaged the place where Render lives. They waited until the car got clear of it.”
“Yeah, so the perp probably had eyes on.”
Jon unconsciously began to drum his fingers on a non-bloody part of the dash in front of him as it all came together in his mind but then retracted his hand when they hit some of the wet pieces of glass that had come to rest there. “The killers are our only chance at proof now—we need to find one of them.”
“Forensics from that might turn up some leads,” Halladay offered, pointing at the burning remains of the car.
“That could take days, which we don’t have,” Jon said. “Let’s head back to base.”
While Halladay started navigating the traffic jam caused by the explosion to make it the couple of blocks to the garage for the Flatiron, Jon called Amira and told her to comb all the surveillance footage available from the block where it had happened, in the hope that she might get a look at someone who was casing the street, and maybe even using a cell or some other device that could activate a bomb.
“You think he’d be that dumb?” Halladay asked after Jon ended the call. “The chaos killers avoided any cameras during their other attacks.”
“Desperate times, desperate measures,” Jon said.
Halladay suddenly braked so hard that Jon almost hit the dash.
“What?” Jon said.
“If the bomber did rig that car just now,” the big man mused, “this one was sitting in the same garage. And you weren’t even watching ours.…”
The two cops looked at each other, and then instinctively down at the floor of the car, and then back at each other again. A car door slammed next to them at the curb, making them both jump in their seats, and then chuckle nervously at each other when they realized what had happened. But both seriously thought about getting out and walking the rest of the way to the Flatiron, knowing that might pose some significant dangers, too. In the end they decided to brave the brief car ride, figuring that they would already be resting in pieces like Gunther and Carter if their car had been rigged, too.
24
DAYFALL MINUS 2 HOURS
Not long after they reached the lab in the Flatiron Building and began watching Amira do her thing, she picked out a possible perp from the street cameras. She found a male figure mostly concealed in an unused doorway that provided a vantage point of the street, just prior to the explosion. She watched the footage of his movements before he situated himself there, and noticed that he might have been subtly scanning the area for a hiding place. She found the best angle to zoom in and lift a shot of his face, which was unremarkable except for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline.
The facial recognition scan didn’t take long. The military records database quickly identified the man as an Army explosives expert named Kevin Witwer. The data trail on him went blank after he left the service three years earlier, which was a classic sign of mercenary activity. There was no record of him ever being in New York, let alone recently, but fortunately another name popped up as a possible identification by the software. This one was Kevin Williams, who entered the Homeland Security database when he had to show ID to purchase some materials that could possibly be used in the manufacture of EFIs or “slapper detonators.” This Kevin had a current address near Times Square.
“Looks like the cameras today wasn’t the only time he got sloppy,” Halladay said.
“Lucky for us,” Jon said. “Compare his address to the underground map, and see if there are any Belows near it.”
Amira did, and she found one behind a subway platform in an unused part of the Port Authority station along the Eighth Avenue Blue Line.
“I would guess the main access point for that would be here,” she said, pointing at a spot on the screen with one hand, and adjusting her olive-green head scarf with the other. “This is an entrance just beyond the north end of the used portion of the station, so to get to it they would just walk among the commuters and step aside into this hallway. No one would see them when they’re opening the door, so I imagine if Williams and the other perps are using that Below, that’s how they would get in and out of it.”
“Is there another way to that Below?” Jon asked. “One they’re not likely to be using as much, or watching as closely?”
“Let me look,” Amira said.
“You wanna go there first,” Halladay asked, “and not Williams’s apartment?”
“Yeah,” Jon answered. “This close to the chaos they’re trying to cause, I doubt he’d be in his apartment. But he might be getting some bombs ready in that Below.”
“Yeah, and if Render is behind all this then it could be rigged with some of those bombs, waiting for us to trigger them. Remember, he knows we have the map to the underground.”
“Well, that’s a chance we’ll just have to take,” Jon said, “‘cause we need to capture one of the mercs.”
He waited for Halladay’s objection, and when none came, began to wonder if there was more to the big Scot than just self-pleasure and self-preservation.
“Okay,” the older cop said, then return
ed more true to form: “But you’re goin’ in first.”
“There is another way to get to that Below,” Amira interrupted, pointing at the map on her computer screen. “One that probably isn’t used much, if at all, because the access is through John’s Pizza. Which is an interesting place…”
“Tell us about it on the way,” Jon said, moving toward the exit. “Let’s visit the armory to top us off, and get you something, too.”
He gestured toward Amira when he said this, knowing they were going to need her help if they happened to get in a firefight with up to three murderous mercenaries, two of whom were ex-military. He didn’t relish the thought of her in that situation, but he knew there was no one else they could trust enough to be involved.
“And then we’ll get a new car,” Jon added as they all made their way through the lab section.
“Why’s that?” Amira said, stopping them momentarily.
“The one we had is a big mess from the bombing,” Jon explained. “Plus it was parked in the garage with the one that blew up, and we were kinda on pins and needles driving it here.”
“Hah,” Amira laughed, “big policemen afraid of a little bomber?” Then she added, “We’ll take my car.”
Once they were headed toward the Times Square area, Amira told them all about John’s.
“They say it’s the biggest pizzeria in the US,” she said, “though you sure wouldn’t know it by looking at the outside. But what’s really interesting about it is that it’s in an old church building, with a stained-glass dome on the ceiling and all. It was built about a hundred years ago by a famous pastor named Simpson, who started a whole denomination. The passageway to the underground probably dated from his time, since a lot of the underground access is from old churches. Many of them were part of the Underground Railroad during slavery, but in this case I think it was immigrants. Simpson took care of the kinds of people who were hated and sometimes in danger because of xenophobia.”
“Wow,” Halladay said, impressed. “For a towelhead, you sure know a lot about other religions.”
Jon winced at his partner’s choice of words, but Amira didn’t seem to care.
“Well, I’m an American towelhead,” she said, right in stride, “and I have a friend who happened to grow up in that denomination and teaches at a college here in the city. He tells me a lot about Christian history.”
“He?” Halladay said, and Jon winced again, knowing what was coming. “Sounds like the Princess has an admirer.” He raised his eyebrows at Jon.
“He definitely likes me,” Amira offered, not shying away from the topic at all. “But from what I gather, he can’t go any further with it unless I convert to his faith.”
“So it’s a Romeo and Juliet kinda thing,” Halladay said, whistling. “Which didn’t end well, by the way, if I remember correctly.”
“Is that a possibility?” Jon asked Amira, and when she looked puzzled, he added, “I mean the conversion thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t get executed for it here like I might have in Pakistan,” she said, “but my parents definitely wouldn’t be happy.”
“Then don’t tell ’em,” Halladay said predictably. “Just get some on the side.”
“Well, neither of us believe in that,” Amira said.
“Not much else to believe in, if ya ask me.”
During the rest of the ride, Jon couldn’t help but think of his own star-crossed love for Mallory, and was further plagued by the nagging feeling that he had come here to fail in much more than that relationship. The sense of dread was compounded during the latter half of the drive, as he craned his neck to look up at the sky above the buildings and noticed how the thinning clouds had grown an even lighter gray. Since he knew that the apocalyptic Dayfall predictions had been fabricated, he wondered why he would still have this negative emotion inside of him, and figured it was some kind of psychological hangover from before he knew the truth. He hoped the fears about himself were equally unfounded.
* * *
The outside of John’s Pizza was as inauspicious as Amira had said—its frontage was no more than twenty feet wide and sandwiched between a theater on the right and an apartment building entrance on the left. But after they traversed a narrow hall inside the entrance, Jon saw why Amira was so impressed and fascinated by the restaurant. Beyond a smaller section housing the bar, it opened up into a spacious old church sanctuary with the large painted-glass domed ceiling that she had mentioned, and a few other pairs of ornate windows high up on several of the walls. Covering one whole wall from floor to ceiling, where the church’s altar used to be, was a huge sepia-tinged black-and-white mural of Manhattan from the air, which looked like someone might have used oversized pencils or pieces of chalk to draw. There were at least twenty tables on the floor, in the middle of which a stairway wound up to a spacious balcony, where there were about ten more tables.
Many of the tables were occupied, which reminded Jon how accustomed to the endless night the citizens of this city had become. At this early morning hour, most people in the rest of the country would be eating breakfast food rather than pizza, but even dietary schedules here had been changed by the constant darkness. He wondered if they would return to normalcy after the daylight returned.
Halladay, who was much less interested in checking out the unique space than the other two cops, found the manager and got her to lead them downstairs into the ancient basement, where the restaurant’s stores were kept. The dark metal door she showed them, however, was obviously a lot newer, and she explained that this access to the subway had been here since the tunnels had been dug, but for a long time had been sealed and inoperable unless someone had the right tools and a reason to open it up. Gotham Security had both, so when the River Rise occurred and GS was securing the underground and adding Belows to it, they’d replaced the old obstruction door with one of their shiny new ones, which could be unlocked by the master key Jon had in his pocket.
He asked if there were any other exits from the basement to the restaurant above, and the manager said there was another stairway on the other end of the basement, which led up to the far side of the ground floor. But there was no external exit on that side of the building, because of the theater jutting up against it.
The cops sent the manager away with their thanks and a warning to be quiet about this, and headed through the door into the subway with trepidation, because they knew they weren’t very far from the Below where the mercs might be. They used their own police flashlights they had brought along, instead of the GS ones on a shelf inside the access door, because they were more familiar with them and wanted to approach the Below with as much stealth as possible.
They didn’t have to use the flashlights for very long. After they emerged from a small anteroom onto the walkway along the unused subway tunnel, they could see some light from about a hundred yards up the track, on the other side of it. Jon knew the Below was there, from the map on his phone, so he also knew that the light probably meant it was being used by one or more of the perps. He turned off his own flashlight, gestured to the other cops to do the same, and whispered to Halladay that he should cross the track and use the walkway on the other side, so that they wouldn’t be bunched up in case they were seen and fired upon. The fact that Williams was an explosives man made Jon think of how easy it would be for the killer to lob a grenade or something else at them, and take them all out in one stroke.
As they continued moving down the tunnel toward the light, Jon began to notice that there was no walkway on the other side of it, so Halladay was walking down along the track itself, hugging the wall on the far side. When they got closer to the light, Jon could tell it was coming from the ceiling of a small platform along the line, which seemed too small for a train stop and was probably used for maintenance. Not all the ceiling lights on the platform were working—just enough of them that he could see, on the far side of it, a closed door similar to the one in the basement of the restaurant. In front of that entrance, a
bout twenty feet away from it and about five feet from the ledge above the tracks, were three large support pillars, equally spaced from one another.
Good cover for our approach, thought Jon, and whispered across the tracks to Halladay, telling him he should use the first one. Then he told Amira to go across the tracks to the middle pillar, but to hang back for a minute first, while he moved along the walkway to the other end of the platform. If someone was watching from the patches of darkness near the Below entrance, he wanted to make sure it was he who was exposed first rather than Amira.
25
DAYFALL MINUS 1 HOUR
No one was watching from the shadows on either side of the platform, but someone did appear from them when the three cops were almost in position behind the pillars. Halladay had climbed up and situated himself behind the pillar on the left, Jon had done the same behind the pillar on the right, and Amira was crossing the tracks toward the one in the middle when they all heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs at the right side of the platform.
Jon gestured to Amira to get down, and she wisely took another couple of steps forward and crouched in the shadowed area near the platform where the light was blocked by the wall. Jon and Halladay stayed behind the big square pillars so that whoever was coming couldn’t see them either, but Jon listened intently to the footsteps and got ready to move if they happened to come toward him. They didn’t, but proceeded along the back wall of the platform to the door of the Below, which was in the center of it.
Then Jon risked a glance around the edge of the pillar and saw Shinsky using a key to open the lock on the door, and pull it open. The big killer didn’t enter the room, however, but stopped halfway into the doorway when he saw who was inside.
“Sturm?” Shinsky said, obviously puzzled. “Where’s Williams? He told me to meet him here.”
“He’ll be back in a minute.” Jon could hear this voice from within the room. “Come on in. And thanks for not using those stupid code names.”
Dayfall Page 16
