Badge of Evil (3 page)

When Brock crossed the threshold and moved inside, the warm, stale air hit him immediately. He had his MP5 locked on the two men in the living room as he scanned the surroundings. The third bunker team was now also in the living room. Just as the cops reached one of the bedrooms in the back, where three more suspects were holed up, the words rang out like a piercing siren.

“Gun! Gun! I got a fuckin' gun!” Everything suddenly moved at hyperspeed, like a souped-up video game. The deafening bursts of MP5 gunfire filled the small space with as much noise as a jet engine. Flashes of flame-hot blue and red from the gun barrels lit up the dark space like strobe lights. As Brock pointed his weapon and squeezed his trigger, he saw one of the young Muslims reflexively lift up his empty right hand like he was trying to stop the bullets. Almost instantly his hand seemed to explode in midair—bits of bone and flesh and a quick spray of red in every direction.

The two bedroom doors in the back were kicked in and there was more gunfire. Then, suddenly, it all just stopped. The apartment was smoky now and Brock could taste the gunpowder. The blood was pounding in his ears and he was breathing too fast. He could feel the sweat under his Kevlar helmet. “Living room and kitchen secure,” he yelled, catching his breath.

“Bedrooms and bathroom secure,” came the response.

“Give me a count. Everybody up front's okay. I got two suspects down. Neither's breathing.”

“Thumbs-up here too. Three perps down, one of the motherfuckers's still breathing. I need a bus.
Now.
Get 'em up here.”

Pennetta came into the apartment, followed by the EMTs, who were directed straight to one of the back bedrooms. The commander scanned the carnage in the living room. It was a mess. “The hell happened?” he asked no one in particular.

“They were supposed to be sleeping, Captain,” one of Pennetta's guys said to him. “But these bastards were up. I don't know, maybe they heard us coming.”

Pennetta was skeptical but kept quiet.
No way they heard them coming,
he thought. He made a mental note to look into this later. “Start securing the rest of the building,” he told his second in command. “I'm sure we managed to wake up the whole fuckin' neighborhood. Keep everybody in their apartments, got it? I don't want this turning into any more of a circus than it already is.”

Then he turned toward the commissioner. “I'm fine,” Brock said, fighting to suppress his excitement. “Thanks for asking. Rest of the guys are okay too.”

“I don't want anything touched,” Pennetta said tensely. “Not a goddamned dust ball. Everybody got that? I want this done absolutely straight up. No bullshit. Let Crime Scene and Internal Affairs do their job.”

Looking at Brock, Pennetta said, “There's gonna be a major shitstorm and I don't want any of it coming back on my guys. You wanted some attention, Commissioner? Well, you're gonna get it.”

Before Brock could respond, the EMTs came through with the lone survivor on a gurney. “What's his status?” Brock asked, noticing how young the suspect looked. He guessed he couldn't be more than twenty-one or twenty-two.

“Touch and go,” said a short black woman with a stethoscope around her neck. “He's pretty torn up. We'll see if he makes it to the hospital.”

Brock turned his attention back to Pennetta. He was too pumped to let the captain bring him down. “You're a terrific cop, Zito, but you got no fuckin' imagination. No creativity. No sense of the big picture.”

Brock took a deep breath and started to smile as he felt the smoke in his nostrils and the back of his throat. He had the look of a man who'd just tasted a fantastic dish in a restaurant. “You're not gonna get anywhere with that narrow view of the world, Zito,” he said to his commander. “You need to open up your mind, to develop a more global view of things, man. Shitstorm? Are you kidding? They're gonna throw me a freakin' ticker-tape parade. I'm gonna be a hero. These dead Muslims are
my
ticket to paradise.”

“DAD.
DAAAAAD.
TELEPHONE!”

A. J. Ross was in the kitchen working on his third cup of coffee when he heard his fourteen-year-old daughter, Annie, yelling from her bedroom that he had a phone call. For a long moment, A. J. didn't move. He just sat there, staring blankly at the newspapers and listening to the radio. Actually, he wasn't really listening. A. J. had kind of zoned out until he was startled by his daughter's voice. “
Believe me
,” he now heard morning talk-show jock Don Imus ranting about some poor slob, “
that bucktoothed, beady-eyed, rodent-lookin' little weasel is gonna be sorry
 .  .  .” It was seven forty-five a.m.
Fuck
, A. J. thought, feeling as cranky as Imus sounded,
no good ever comes from a phone call before breakfast.

A. J. was having a more or less typical morning. He'd gotten up at six fifteen a.m., showered, shaved, and dressed. Then he'd checked his daughter's homework and read the news. It was one of those mornings when the big stories were breaking online and the printed editions of the newspapers were irrelevant before they even rolled off the presses.
BROCK LEADS RAID ON SUSPECTED TERROR CELL
was the headline stretched across the top of the
New York Times
website.
CELL DAMAGE: COMMISH SHOOTS TERRORISTS
, screamed the
Daily News
across its entire online front page. But it was the
Post
, as usual, that nailed it:
BROCK KICKS ASS: COMMISH 4, TERRORISTS 0.

A. J. had more than a passing interest in the morning's stunning news story. In the media capital of the world, he was a franchise player, one of the best-known, best-connected journalists in the city. In ten years at
New York
, the thirty-eight-year-old had written seventy-five cover stories, won two National Magazine Awards, and always managed to score the big interview. Even with the decline in print sales in the digital era, his byline could still sell magazines, and it definitely generated page views. Though it was harder for any writer to have real impact, A. J. still produced work people talked about and people in power paid attention to.

“Daaaaaaaad. Daaaaa-aaaaaad!”

“Okay, okay,” A. J. yelled to his daughter as he moved away from the table. “Hey,” he said in a doleful tone of voice when he picked up the cordless.

“Morning, boss. Hope you didn't pull anything rushing to get the phone. Have you seen the headlines?” his assistant, Lucy, asked in her irresistibly throaty voice.

“I live in the suburbs, not Siberia. Of course I have. What'd you do, sleep in the office?”

“I was restless last night. I don't know, it was like I just couldn't get comfortable. So I got out early this morning, went to the gym, had a little breakfast, and got here around seven.”

“I'm starting to worry about you, Luce. You need to have a little fun, relax a little, you know? There's not much more than headlines right now anyway. Everything happened too late. I haven't made any calls yet. Whaddaya hear from downtown?” A. J. asked as Annie came into the kitchen, dressed and dragging her school backpack across the floor. She pointed to her watch, indicating she needed to go. A. J. nodded, held up a couple of fingers, and silently mouthed the words “two minutes.”

“So far nothing. There's a press conference at One Police Plaza at ten. Brock, the mayor, and Pennetta are supposed to be there,” Lucy said.

“Zito? Man, they must've held a gun to his head. Well, they can make him show up but they can't make him talk. Actually, they'd never let him talk even if he suddenly wanted to. They're not sharing face time with anybody.”

“Are you leaving now?” Lucy gently prodded.

“I'll get going right after I drive Annie to school. I'll meet you at One PP. I know it's early, but start making some phone calls on the suspects. Especially the one that's still breathing. And we need to find out where the hell the intelligence came from. Who tipped the cops about these guys?”

“I'll see what I can come up with. Listen, A. J., I don't want to overstep here, but can't Nikki drive Annie today?” Lucy asked, referring to his wife. “I mean, even if you leave now, with the traffic, you still probably won't make it.”

Lucy Chapin had been A. J.'s assistant for about a year and a half. They'd met while she was a grad student at the Columbia School of Journalism. He delivered a guest lecture in one of her classes about how to develop sources. She was already an admirer, but once she heard him speak, she was determined to find a way to work for him. Not only was he enthusiastic, articulate, and smart, he seemed like a really decent guy. Lucy thought he was kind of cute, too, which didn't hurt.

She talked to him after his lecture, started e-mailing him at the magazine, and by the time she completed her master's, they'd developed enough of a relationship that it just seemed natural that she'd go to work for him. A. J. joked that Lucy was a good example of how unfair life can be. She was smart, funny, determined, and beautiful enough—five feet eight inches; thick, dark hair; light green eyes—to have paid her way through school by modeling.

Even her attitude was practically perfect. She was cynical and sarcastic—which A. J. loved—but never when it mattered, when there was something important at stake. She didn't take herself too seriously, but she was almost pathological about the work. You could argue, of course, that it's easy to be comfortable in your own skin when you've won the genetic equivalent of the Powerball lottery. But A. J. was often amazed by how many sore winners he ran into.

“Nikki is gonna drive Jack,” A. J. said, referring to his nine-year-old son. “She also has an important meeting this morning and she can't be late. I, on the other hand, have no such critical obligation. The earth will not tip on its axis if I miss half an hour of Brock and the mayor blowing smoke up my ass. Besides—”

“A. J.,” Lucy cut him off, “this is like the biggest—”

“Lucy, relax. You'll be fine and I won't be late.”

It took A. J. about ten minutes to drive Annie to school. When he got back, he opened the garage, where he parked the minivan next to his three motorcycles. The black BMW R1200RT was the world's best all-around touring bike, equipped with GPS, stereo, ABS, and heated grips; A. J. only took it out on trips that lasted a week or more. Then there was the graphite-and-red MV Augusta F4, an exotic Italian racing bike he rode every once in a while at the track. Finally, there was the high-gloss midnight-blue Ducati Monster S4R S Testastretta, with a white racing stripe and a visible trellis frame that made A. J. smile every time he looked at it. The Monster was a bike he could ride anywhere, but it was especially ideal for scooting around the city and dealing with heavy traffic. It was light, easy to maneuver (flickable, gearheads called it), and blazingly fast. All of which made it ideal for lane-splitting—riding in between lanes to avoid sitting in stop-and-go traffic. A. J. wasn't sure if lane-splitting was legal in New York and New Jersey, but he didn't really care. It saved him too much time to give it up. And if he ever did get stopped, he had buddies in the police department who'd take care of the ticket.

He pulled his helmet on, secured the chin strap, lifted the face shield, and threw his right leg over the custom-made saddle. Sitting on the bike, he used his feet to push off and roll out of the garage. On the driveway, he turned the key and pressed the starter button, and the bike came to life with a roar. This unique, sweet rumble was Ducati's signature as much as the polo pony was Ralph Lauren's.

A. J. closed the Velcro on his gloves and checked his mirrors. He squeezed the clutch with his left hand, tapped the shifter into first gear with his left foot, and began to give the Monster some gas by twisting the throttle with his right hand. At the same time he let the clutch out slowly and he was off, the garage door closing automatically behind him.

Every time he rode, the first few minutes were always the same. Take it easy, get comfortable, and just enjoy the enormous fluid power under him. He leaned lightly into the first few turns, letting the tires warm up. This was critical. Cold tires on a bike have very little stick.

The satisfaction of riding a bike for A. J. really had two parts. First, of course, were the sensations: the thrill of pure speed, the exhilaration of hurtling through space on something so seemingly flimsy, and the tactile fulfillment of using both hands and both feet to operate the machine. There was also a physical pleasure, as there was in skiing, that came from linking turns together and developing a natural rhythm while riding. There is no steering wheel on a motorcycle. You don't actually turn it the way you do a car or a bicycle. To go left or right, you have to lean the bike in that direction rather than turn it. The sharper the turn, the more dramatic the lean, and the greater the rush.

The other key element that made riding so appealing for A. J. was the focus required. Writers spend a lot of time inside their own heads. They're always thinking, rethinking, examining, and analyzing their interactions, as well as replaying conversations. On the bike, however, A. J. had to turn all of that off. He had to clear his head. Riding demanded his full and complete attention. It was all about the machine and negotiating the environment around him. There was no margin for error. Sometimes he treated it like being inside a big video game. He rode like every car was out to kill him, which wasn't much of an exaggeration.

A. J. comfortably maneuvered the bike toward lower Manhattan, weaving in and out between cars, picking his line and leaning into the turns like a confident skier negotiating the gates on a slalom course. He glanced at the clock on the dash. It was 9:05. He'd make the press conference with ten or fifteen minutes to spare. In the distance he could see the brake lights where the backup began for the Holland Tunnel. With a small stretch of open road in front of him, A. J. gave the throttle a hard twist. The front tire lifted about six inches off the ground and he was gone in the blink of an eye.