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Brooklyn showed the next video, which was of a much better, less grainy quality. Another pump truck with Con Edison markings was visible out in the street by the 168th Street subway entrance with two men behind it. The same white-goateed guy was there, but the other guy was different; on the short side, tan, no facial hair, a little pudgy. The pudgy guy got into the hole with the pump this time while the older man waited by the manhole up top.
None of the guys had any distinguishing marks that we could really see. No tattoos or birthmarks or buck teeth. Was that on purpose? I wondered. It seemed like it. It seemed like these guys were going out of their way to be nondescript.
“Is that the same truck?” a cop behind me called out.
“No,” Brooklyn said. “There were two of them. We found both on a deserted stretch of the Harlem River Drive near the Macombs Dam Bridge early this morning. No tags; their cabs were burned to a crisp. We’re still trying to trace down where they might be from through their manufacturer. The good news is that the FBI lab people found traces of the material they pumped into the tunnel in the backs of the trucks. It was powdered aluminum.”
“Powdered what?” said someone else near the front of the room.
“Powdered aluminum,” Brooklyn said. “It’s the main ingredient in flash powder, the stuff they make fireworks out of. We’re still trying to track down where you could get your hands on such a massive amount. It’s not easy, because it has many industrial uses. Apparently they make lithium ion batteries out of it.”
“Unbelievable,” I said, gaping at the screen. “So you’re saying these three guys got all this expensive industrial equipment together and then just up and went ahead and stuffed that train tunnel with gunpowder like it was a huge firecracker?”
Brooklyn nodded slowly, a solemn expression on her face as she stared with me at the white-goateed man, whose image was paused on the screen.
“And then they set it off,” she said.
Everyone turned from the screen as Lieutenant Bryce Miller came in, clutching some photocopies.
“Attention, everybody. This just came from the State Department. We sent the mayor’s shooter’s prints to the feds, and they just ID’d him.
“His name is Alex Mirzoyan. He was born in Armenia, came here when he was eleven, lives in Sunny Isles Beach in south Florida. We don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly, but Sunny Isles Beach is where a lot of the Miami Russian Mafia live. He has the priors of a low-level criminal: credit card fraud, some burglaries, drug possession. But what’s concerning is that last year he traveled to Armenia and stayed there for six months.”
“Armenia? Is that near Russia?” said Arturo.
“Sort of,” I said. “It’s more toward the Middle East. I think it actually borders Iran.”
The room absorbed that in stunned silence.
“The Middle East? Iran?” said Brooklyn. “So we’re thinking terrorism? All this is Islamic terrorism?”
“Now, wait. Slow down,” I said. “We don’t know that. Terrorists take credit, usually, and there’s been nothing but silence, right? Plus we don’t even know if the two things are related yet. The assassination could have been a crime of sick opportunity. Like that nut who sent ricin-laced letters to politicians after nine eleven. We have to treat them as two separate crimes until further notice.”
There were some tentative nods, but even I was unsure about what I’d just said.
Like everybody else, I was freaking out and had no idea whatsoever what the hell was going on.
Chapter 27
On the eastern edge of the well-heeled Upper East Side in Manhattan, the crowded and busy neighborhood of Yorkville runs from 59th Street to 96th Street between Lexington Avenue and the East River.
Before 9/11, the neighborhood was the site of the largest disaster in New York City’s history: in 1904, just offshore of Ninetieth Street in the East River, the steamship General Slocum accidentally caught fire and sank, killing more than one thousand passengers.
And now, at exactly 8:15 a.m., Yorkville’s dark history began to repeat itself as a mechanical coughing started up in the two metal boxes that had been illegally positioned the day before at 421 East 81st and 401 East 66th.
The coughing, followed by a revving sound, came from small but quite powerful modified gasoline-powered generators contained inside each device’s metal housing. As the engine rose in pitch, the generator drove its steadily increasing electrical current through a four-foot-wide tightly wound coil of copper wire that was surrounded by a copper tube of equal length. The movement of the current through the copper cylinder instantly began to build an electromagnetic field. One that mounted and mounted as the engine pitched higher and higher, like an opera singer’s crescendo.
Then the explosives packed between the devices’ wire and tubing suddenly went off, sending a massive, invisible electromagnetic pulse in all directions at the speed of light.
The volume of the detonation inside the roof-positioned devices was negligible—a loud electrical pop, like a transformer blowing. But the sudden effect was anything but negligible.
The first official sign that something was wrong was the critical-failure alarm in the busy control room of the city’s Department of Transportation. The supervisor on duty dropped the Red Bull he’d just cracked open when he looked up and saw on the big board that every traffic light from 59th to 90th Street had just gone off-line, as though someone had hit a switch.
The traffic lights weren’t the only things in Yorkville to go off-line. At Gracie Mansion and Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Bloomingdale’s and the moneyed Chapin and Brearley schools and every other building within a hundred square blocks, all electrical activity instantly vanished, and every computer and light and elevator immediately ceased to work. It was like the return of the Stone Age.
People screamed and went flying as a packed southbound number 4 train coming into the 86th Street station jerked to a sudden stop. The same thing happened on a smaller but no less terrifying scale as the Roosevelt Island tram car coming out of its concrete berth over Second Avenue and 59th Street slammed to a halt and swung back and forth above the traffic.
It wasn’t just the buildings. In the side streets and avenues and even on the FDR Drive, alongside the East River, the morning rush-hour commute’s cars and delivery vans and taxis and dump trucks en masse began to coast out of control and plow into each other as their engines suddenly and inexplicably failed.
