Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (11 page)

“Or maybe it’s some ramped-up American nut job,” said Doyle. “A smart one with a real hard-on for the people of New York City.”

We all turned as a big NYPD Harbor Unit boat suddenly roared past out of the fog on the river, heading north.

“Whoever it is,” I said, “we need to find them. Fast.”

HALF A MILE
southeast of the FBI’s staging area, the wake of the speeding sixty-foot blue-and-white NYPD Harbor Unit boat washed up a broken neon-yellow kayak paddle and a Clorox bleach bottle covered in old fishing line onto the rocky shore of southern Roosevelt Island.

Sitting in the rain on an empty bench above the island’s garbage-strewn shoreline on West Loop Road, Mr. Joyce looked at the junk and then out at the water. New York was rarely thought of as a coastal city, but it actually had 520 miles of coastline, more than Miami, LA, and San Fran combined.

His reddish goatee was gone now, and he wore his hoodie up over a Knicks ball cap and a reflective orange traffic vest over his black denim construction coat. Beside him on the bench was some construction equipment as well as a fluorescent yellow construction tripod along with a surveyor’s graduated staff.

He turned as a car pulled up. It was a big, bulky old ’76 Cadillac Calais, a two-door hardtop that was nineteen feet long with a 7.7-liter V-8 and a curb weight of more than five thousand pounds.

Mr. Joyce did not have to look at who was behind the wheel to recognize it immediately as one of Mr. Beckett’s many cars. Mr. Beckett, who was a bit of a gearhead, was obsessed with American cars, with a particular and peculiar soft spot for Cadillacs from the 1970s.

“You’re late,” said Mr. Joyce as Mr. Beckett emerged from his metallic-brown barge, putting on his own traffic vest.

“How is that possible?” Mr. Beckett said, smiling, as he extended his hands playfully. “The boss is never late.”

“Was there trouble?” Mr. Joyce said, eyeing him.

“Please,” Mr. Beckett said, knocking on the trunk. “You’re the brains, I’m the muscle. You do your part, and I’ll do mine, okay? Is it time to do our little survey?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Joyce handed him the staff and a walkie-talkie as they walked north toward the base of the 59th Street Bridge.

“So they did use the abandoned helipad, as you anticipated,” Mr. Beckett said as he gazed across the water and saw the activity on the Manhattan shore of the channel.

Mr. Joyce shrugged.

“With the streets impassable, a dock with helicopter access is the most logical place.”

Mr. Joyce stayed back near the street with the tripod while Mr. Beckett walked off a bit with the staff and stood on a patch of muddy grass near the water.

“This is one big bitch of a bridge, eh?” Mr. Beckett said over the Motorola. “How old is it? Give me the tour. I know you want to.”

“It was built in 1909,” Mr. Joyce said. “Between 1930 and 1955, in that bridge pier behind you, they actually used to have a car elevator to bring people on and off Roosevelt Island.”

“A car elevator in a bridge? That’s incredible. What an amazing city this is. It’s almost a shame bringing it to its knees.”

“Emphasis on the almost,” Mr. Joyce replied. “Move to your left.”

“If I go any more left, I’ll be swimming.”

“Okay, stay there. Don’t move.”

Instead of a construction level on the yellow tripod, there was a Nikon camera fitted with a zoom lens. For the next twenty minutes, Mr. Joyce took photographs of the police and FBI agents. It was time in their campaign for reconnaissance. Time to assess the competition, as it were. The police could hardly be called competition, especially at this point, but one never knew. The two partners couldn’t get too cocky. Besides, information was like weaponry. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Mr. Joyce snapped a photo and sent it through Wi-Fi to the facial recognition software on his iPhone. Michael Bennett came up on the readout with an address on West End Avenue. Mr. Joyce nodded. Good to know.

“Foggy out here today,” commented Mr. Beckett when they were done and heading back for the car.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Mr. Joyce said, walking with the tripod on his shoulder like a soldier on parade. “And I have a funny feeling it’s going to get even foggier.”

“What do you think of this honey, Mr. Joyce?” said Mr. Beckett in the car as they did a broken U-turn. “Rides like a dream, doesn’t she?”

“Tell me, how many miles to the gallon does it get, Mr. Beckett?” asked Mr. Joyce.

“City or highway?” asked Mr. Beckett.

“City,” said Mr. Joyce.

“One,” said Mr. Beckett.

He stopped suddenly another hundred feet up, by an abandoned construction site. The huge car’s weight bounced low and soft in the springs.

“Well, what do you know?” Mr. Beckett said, looking around. “Opportunity knocks. Give me a hand, Mr. Joyce, and we’ll kill two birds with one stone.”

Mr. Beckett popped the trunk, and they got out. Mr. Joyce went to the back of the long car and stared down at the two NYU graduates they had hired to place the EMP devices. The young men stared back up with their empty eyes open and their hands and mouths bound in duct tape. They had multiple bullet holes in their heads.

“Would you look at this trunk, Mr. Joyce?” Mr. Beckett said proudly. “Just look at it. It’s bigger than most apartments in this city.”

“It is rather roomy,” said Mr. Joyce as he bent and lifted the first dead kid up to his shoulder and carried him to the Dumpster and dropped him in.

SEVERAL HOURS LATER,
Emily and the team and I were just east of East 78th Street and Cherokee Place, alongside John Jay Park.

I’d never been to the park before or even heard of it. The buildings that formed a kind of horseshoe around it were nice ones, I saw. The park and playground were empty, but I could easily see it on the weekends being packed with kids and nannies. It was an upscale leafy enclave that reminded me a little of the famous Gramercy Park.

What wasn’t looking very upscale was the silver Volvo SUV that had jumped the curb on 78th and plowed into a fire hydrant and utility box and the wrought-iron fence surrounding the park.

The Volvo was now just a crumpled mass of metal and broken glass. The air bags had all deployed, but the hydrant and a huge dislocated section of the fence had gone through the car all the way to the backseat. Everybody in the car had died in an unimaginably horrible way.

Three more dead, I thought, sickened and angry and getting angrier. I’d heard that an old woman being transported out of Sloan Kettering had gone into cardiac arrest, which made the body count at least four. I thought of all the stores we had passed in our search for the EMP devices. Block after block of owners standing there mute and devastated in front of the darkened doorways of their nail salons and dry cleaners and restaurants and grocery stores, their lives and livelihoods in tatters.

All these poor people. I suddenly felt incredibly tired. And what was more frustrating was that we couldn’t help them. We were supposed to prevent these things, protect people, save them. And we weren’t doing it. We weren’t doing a damn thing.

The search for the NNEMPs had come down to the most basic footwork—i.e., walking to every building in the devastated area and asking supers and staff if they had received any strange deliveries. We’d been doing it all day to the tune of nada progress. The needle was still hiding in the haystack. If there even was a needle.

Emily came over as I sat on the curb by the park’s entrance and cracked open a bottle of water.

“How many injured, you figure?” I said up at her after a long sip. “How many dead?”

I suddenly chucked the half-filled water bottle in my hand as hard as I could into the middle of the street.

“And why the hell is this happening?!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

I was losing it a little, I knew. Maybe more than a little. I was beyond frustrated, beyond worried. I’d been hitting it hard for the last couple of days. Watching the mayor get shot was alone enough to give anyone a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

This whole situation was just so freaking insane!

“I know you’re angry, Mike,” Emily said calmly, after a beat. “We all are, but unfortunately, anger will get us nowhere.”

“Yeah, well, neither is calm, cool, and collected, Emily, if you haven’t noticed,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to try raging pissed-off for a bit. Feel free to join me at any time.”

That’s when Doyle ran at me from across the street, hollering into his radio.

“That was from a uniform who knows the area,” Doyle cried. “He said some super said some kind of device was installed recently on the roof of his building on East Eighty-First, just two blocks from here. He said it’s a metal box that looks burned. That’s what we’re looking for, right?”

Emily and I exchanged a glance.

“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” she said as she offered me a hand.

SITUATED HALFWAY BETWEEN
York and First Avenues, 421 East 81st Street was a narrow six-story disco-era white-brick apartment building.

Waiting for us out in front of the building were agent Ashley Brook Clark, an intense FBI technical analyst, and Dr. Michael Aynard, a pudgy, aging hipster in a yellow-and-brown flannel shirt and big glasses who was a physics professor at NYU and one of the foremost experts on NNEMPs in the world.

There were a lot of mirrors in the building’s small, low-ceilinged lobby and even more tenants—a tense crowd of mostly older people and a few young moms with toddlers. Several had flashlights to ward off the dimness of the unlit lobby, and some had packed suitcases with them.

Everyone except for the children looked distraught and confused. I thought of the thousands upon thousands of people who lived and worked in the area and felt truly terrible for them. The power was out, and all arrows were pointing to it staying out for a long, long time.

This really was a disaster, I thought, not for the first time that day. Like a flood or a hurricane, it was affecting multiple thousands of random innocent people. It was what insurance companies used to call an act of God. I wondered if that was what this was. Someone who believed he was God.

I was snapped out of my wonderings by a wiry middle-aged woman in a ratty green bathrobe who began arguing loudly with the Filipino superintendent by the front door.

“What do you mean you
can’t?
” the woman cried. “Why do you think we bought the damn thing after Hurricane Sandy? As vice president of the board, I demand that you get that portable generator on now. My medication is going bad as we speak!”

“But I keep explaining. It’s broken, Mrs. Schaeffer,” the young, stocky super said soothingly. “Everything is broken. No one’s phones work, right? See, it’s not just the electricity. There must have been some kind of crazy surge or something. I talked to every super up and down the street. This isn’t a normal blackout.”

“But my medication!” Mrs. Schaeffer insisted.

“Your medication is toast, ma’am, unless you get out of here with it as soon as possible,” Dr. Aynard interrupted in a bored voice. “In fact, unless everyone here is interested in what it’s like to live in the Dark Ages, I recommend you pack up your valuables, pick a direction, and start walking until you find yourself in an area where there’s electricity.”

He cleared his throat.

“Ding-dong! It’s fact-facing time, people,” he said. “The power isn’t coming back on today, tomorrow, or probably for some six months at least, and sitting around here isn’t going to change it.”

“Way to sugarcoat things, Dr. Bedside Manner,” Brooklyn Kale mumbled behind me as we stepped up to the super.

THE SUPERINTENDENT’S NAME
was Lionel Cruz, and after we told him why we were there, he led us across the lobby and up six flights of stairs in a darkened stairwell and out in the rain onto the roof.

The device was in the southeast corner of the roof, on the other side of a dark, looming water tower. A strange, narrow, chest-height aluminum box about three feet wide. I thought it looked almost like a filing cabinet. One whose sides had been ripped open from a small bomb or explosive device that had gone off inside it.

“How did it get up here?” I said to Lionel.

“That’s just the thing,” the super said, shaking his head repeatedly. “I like to think I run a pretty tight ship here, but I have absolutely no idea. I’d check one of the security cameras at the front door or in the garage, but they’re both not working with the power loss. I’d call my staff about it, except the phones are down. I only came up to look around when Mrs. Willett, who lives on the top floor beneath here, said she thought she heard some kind of explosion.”

“Does this look like the device?” Emily said to Agent Clark, who was down on one knee on the tar paper, peering with a flashlight into the strange metal box’s blown-open gap.

“It has to be,” said Dr. Aynard, who was looking over the kneeling tech’s shoulder. “The remains of that metal cylinder there is the armature, and that segment of coiled copper is obviously the stator wiring.”

“And I’d say what’s left of the gas engine in there was the power source,” Agent Clark finished grimly. “This is a textbook flux compression generator bomb.”

“Brilliant, really,” said Aynard as he knocked on the metal housing with a knuckle. “Simple, efficient, not expensive, and highly effective.”

“Oh, it’s brilliant, all right,” said Arturo sarcastically. “Quick! Someone call the Nobel Prize people and nominate the terrorists for efficiently erasing civilization for a hundred square blocks.”

“So you’re saying this small box did the entire neighborhood?” Doyle said.

Aynard winced as he thought about it. He looked in again at the box’s burned remains.

“Maybe not,” he finally said. “Though this device definitely packed quite an electromagnetic punch, it does seem a little small. I’d say there’s probably at least one more somewhere, maybe even two.”