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“Hey, Chief. Just got off the plane,” I said.
“Good. Get over to City Hall as fast as you can. They just called.”
“Who just called?” I said.
“The bombers. They just called the acting mayor. We have first contact. Get over here now.”
Chapter 69
I took the West Side Highway and drove all the way south, until it turned into West Street.
Half a block east of our exit, we had to stop abruptly at a checkpoint where a massive Bradley Fighting Vehicle was parked sideways in the intersection. After we showed our ID, a young bespectacled National Guardsman in khaki camo mirror-checked the underside of my cop car for a bomb.
We’d heard that there were similar National Guard units at Times Square and in Rockefeller Center. The whole borough of Manhattan was suddenly in lockdown, apparently.
Coming up onto Broadway, we saw heavy dump trucks and front-end loaders were still sweeping up what was left of 26 Federal Plaza. There was even more security around City Hall’s little fenced-in park off Broadway. I counted at least twenty cops and National Guard guys as we slowed alongside the bomb-shield concrete planters by the gate.
As we were ID’d again and finally let in through the wrought iron, I remembered the last time I was here. It was in 2009, and I was with the kids at the ticker-tape parade along the Canyon of Heroes, where the Yankees were being honored by the mayor. It had been a great day: Chrissy was up on my shoulders, laughing and swatting at the shredded business-paper confetti as the Yankees went by on a flatbed truck.
Way back in the days when ticker tape wasn’t paper raining down from blown-up buildings.
FBI technical analyst Ashley Brook Clark and Dr. Michael Aynard, the NYU physics professor, who’d both helped us on the EMP portion of this case, were already inside City Hall’s grand foyer.
“You can cool your heels, guys,” the ever-acerbic Aynard said with an epic eye roll as he looked up from his iPad mini. “They said we’d be granted an audience with Her Honor in ten minutes—oh, I’d say almost half an hour ago. I’m so glad I’m volunteering my time here. It’s not like I have a life or anything.”
Instead of responding, I decided to take a peek around. Through a threshold, I could see a massive life-size oil portrait of George Washington on the wall of a darkened room. A brass plaque on the wall said that the museumlike building was the oldest city hall in the country that’s still being used as a city hall.
“Hey, Mike, you want to check out the upstairs?” Emily said, reading another plaque. “It says Lincoln lay in state up there after his assassination.”
“Nah, I’m good,” I said, glancing at the unlit landing beneath the rotunda. “I find history much less interesting when it starts to repeat itself before my very eyes.”
Chief Fabretti appeared about ten minutes later and led us through a wood-paneled space that once might have been a chapel. The pews had been replaced with a warren of cubicles and desks, and at them, half a dozen wiped-out-looking mayor’s deputies and staff were mumbling among themselves, trying to stay awake.
Three more staffers were conferring quietly by a corner desk when we finally made it to the mayor’s office. Acting mayor Priscilla Atkinson, in yoga clothes and with her sneakers off, sat in a club chair beside a huge stone fireplace talking on her cell phone. Though she was dressed casually, the heavy concern on her tired face was anything but.
“Would you like anything? We don’t have coffee, but there’s green tea,” said one of her slim majordomos as he came over.
The mayor got off her cell and stood before we could answer.
“Thank you for coming, everyone,” she said, padding over to her desk in her No-See-Um socks.
“This came in about a half an hour ago,” she said, opening an audio file on a laptop.
“We are the ones who bombed the subway and killed the mayor,” said an electronically disguised voice. “We are the ones who set off the EMPs and blew up Twenty-Six Federal Plaza. Do we have your attention? On the northwest corner of Thirty-First Street and Dyer Avenue is a mailbox. Inside the mailbox, you will find a FedEx envelope that will prove we are who we say. We will call back tomorrow with what you are to do next.”
“We grabbed the package half an hour ago,” said Fabretti as he handed out a short stack of papers. “There were no prints on the package or the papers. This is a copy of what was in it.”
“What’s the drop site looking like?” I said.
“We’re canvassing, but it’s just old office buildings and warehouses around the drop.”
I shuffled through the stack of papers. There were blueprints, technical schematics on the cube robots, some computer programming stuff, and a diagram that looked like one of the EMPs next to a series of mathematical equations.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, really. Neither, apparently, could anyone else, as all eyes were on Dr. Aynard. He licked his thumb and flipped quickly through the papers, mumbling from time to time. We all stood and stared and waited as he rattled through page after page.
“This is fascinating,” he whispered to himself.
“Screw fascinating,” said Fabretti sharply. “Is it real? Are these the people?”
