Banquo's Ghosts (47 page)

Information poured in from all over New York, hurriedly whispered by one aide or another around the large conference table. And orders were issued by one of the principals, the Police Commissioner, O’Hanlon, the Fire Commissioner—often by Banquo, even though he ran no
department or agency. Every person looked to him; every ego in the room willingly accepted his naturally assumed authority. When in doubt, go to the Answer Man.

“We’ve got reports of dogs dying in Union Square.”

“Chief, I suggest you cordon off Union Square from 18
^th
Street down to 12
^th
and from Irving Place to Fifth.”

“We’ve got a playground—hold on. Yeah, we’ve got a school playground on the Upper East Side, where a young Middle Eastern man was hanging around, acting weird. Don’t know if it’s anything, but . . . ”

“Don’t assume. Bring the school principal or whoever saw him down here. If the weirdo’s still there, arrest him. Find all the children who went home from school; say it’s a gas leak. Take names and addresses. And get a hazmat team over there.”

“Gentlemen, this is a call from Brooklyn, the King’s County Medical Center. A guy showed up in the emergency room, dizzy and disoriented in a crazy getup. He had painted pants and shoes. They thought he was suffering from fumes, but they think it might be radiation poisoning.”

At this Banquo’s eyes flashed. “
That’s
our first guy. Whatever they do, don’t let the bastard die. Get agents out there now, plus the best radiation specialist in the city we can find.” The Medical Examiner said, “Yessir!” and left the table.

From a nameless aide down the table: “This seems improbable, but we’ve got reports of an attempted suicide in the city’s reservoir. Someone jumping in and out of a rowboat. Homeowners up there are suspicious.”

“Which reservoir?”

“Titicus, in North Salem, Westchester.”

“So what are you saying? Someone trying to suicide-bomb the water supply? Doubtful. Does the Coast Guard have a dive team for the Croton Reservoir System?”

“The North Salem Sheriff has him in holding. And yes, he’s got a backpack.”

“Send another hazmat team. They may have one in White Plains. If not, use the NYPD helicopter.”

“Good news, they caught some guy napping. Literally napping at the Queens row . . . what should we call it? Safe house?”

“Well, that’s good news and bad news. Good news, because we can pump him on site, then drag him here. Bad news: he had three room-mates. And who knows how many houses like this we’re talking about?”

“There’s something bizarre. All the sinks were clogged with hair.
”

“It’s not bizarre. It’s ritualistic shaving—in case they die.”

Silence.

The breathless, nameless reservoir aide looked up from his cell phone, hurriedly whispering so everyone could hear:

“Forget the reservoir. The Sheriff called—a domestic dispute. Husband leaves the house in fury, steals a rowboat, and rows off, no backpack—an ‘asthma attack’ in the middle of the lake. Cell-phoned 911. We’ve recalled the chopper.”

The look from Banquo’s eyes could have turned Medusa herself to stone. The aide wisely vanished.

Farah Nasir—Junior Service Officer, Iranian Mission to the United Nations—lived in a prewar building on Second Avenue and 48
^th
Street, within walking distance of the UN. Wallets, together with Smith and Wesson fresh from the Garment District raid, double-parked the pistachio-shelled sedan by a hydrant. Wallets brushed down the seat and remarked, “When we’re done, Banquo & Duncan is getting you two a housekeeper.”

Four police cars trailed them, splitting off on either side of the street, doused their lights, and waited. A Manhattan street at night, street lamps shining down—easy to miss the curtain move at the window of Nasir’s seventh-floor apartment. From the trunk of the pistachio sedan Wallets and the two federal women slapped on tactical Kevlar vests, Velcroing the cinch tabs tight. “God, I hate these things,” one of the women said. Smith. Wesson made no remark. And Wallets knew what she meant; wearing the vest could save your life, but it was a clunky, movement-constricting extra ten pounds.

The three of them walked into the dark low-ceilinged lobby, where a part-time doorman asked who they were there to see. They waved him off with their badges and headed straight to the elevator. The box was old-school Otis Elevator Model B circa 1930. They had to wait three minutes—an age—for it to come down, then pull open the door and push aside the metal accordion-style gate to step inside. Only four of them could fit: the three Feds plus a cop, whose name was Carmine. The cab inched upward with groaning and whirring sounds. They watched the floors descend to meet them and disappear beneath their feet through the gate, as Wallets tapped his knuckle against metal: clack-clack-clack. Finally, the seventh floor, and they headed right down the hallway toward 7F. The cop lagged behind them watching their backs down the length of the hallway. Wesson knocked on the door, “Federal agents. Open up!”

They all heard an insistent beeping. A smoke alarm. Wesson pounded on the door again with the bottom of her clenched fist, then took a step back. She kicked the door with all her might. It was a thick dead-bolted door that didn’t budge. She glanced at Wallets, who tried his luck. Nope, just a thump and a bang. Then they all looked to Carmine the Cop.

“No way. I got a Mity Mouse down in the squad car.”

“Get it. And use the stairs.”

Carmine talked into his radio, “Bring the Mouse. Take the stairs.”

After two minutes Carmine the Cop’s partner, Doleful Duane, appeared, huffing and puffing after his seven-story workout. He handed the tactical entry device, the breaching ram, off to Wallets. Who slammed it into the door, releasing its internal thumper, and blew the door open. The acrid smell of burning plastic assaulted their nostrils. The smoke alarm kept on shrieking at them and then just as suddenly died. The silence rang in their ears.

Two steps in, the sound of a pistol cocking, the hammer clicking back cut through the smoke—an unmistakable sound—and everyone pasted themselves against the wall in the foyer. “Shit,” Wallets said to the others, “stay back. No matter what.” Clearly, Farah Nasir was no use to them dead.

He waited a beat and swung around into the main room, his gun in front of him. Black-burned plastic filaments floating in the air like dark snow. Light came in from the kitchen and that nauseating burning plastic smell. He inched his way around the barren room and into the kitchen. A kitchen devoid of food or cooking utensils. A kitchen nobody used. The burner on the gas stove blew full blast under the smoldering ruin of a laptop. The computer’s fire retardant plastic shell was refusing to ignite into a fireball but still put out a ton of smoke and a cloud of charred filaments floated across the kitchen. Something went
bang!
against his chest and knocked him to the floor.

Slumped up against the kitchen wall, it hurt to breathe, and Wallets could feel something really hot smoldering away in the Kevlar of his vest—his only thought, the supremely obvious,
Shit, I’ve been shot.
Hard to think about anything else, but anything else was about to intrude. Farah Nasir appeared around the edge of the refrigerator, a severe little woman with short, cropped hair and a mousey face. She still pointed the gun at him. Not a very big firearm, but did it matter? Wallets tried to lift his gun hand to point back, but it seemed a very futile gesture. And besides, neither of his arms felt like moving just then. He managed to croak, “Stay back!” Out the corner of his eye he caught the shapes of his backup moving through the smoke in the living room. He tried,
Stay back
again, but didn’t really have the breath for it. All he saw now were Farah Nasir’s face and her eyes. Eyes that stared at him with dead hate. The gun no longer pointed at his chest but under her own chin. He tried to tell her something, anything—to
stop, wait.
The eyes widened suddenly and once again—

Bang.
As Farah Nasir blew her brains out.

The body fell to the floor. Now both G-women were in the kitchen. “Shit,” Wesson said and kneeled over Wallets with a look of deep concern in her eyes. Smith reached over the dead body to turn off the stove. Neither FBI agent bothered touching the woman splayed across the floor.

Smith glanced down at the dead woman’s leaking head but used a pair of oven mitts to lift the smoldering laptop and dump it on the kitchen table. The oven grate came along with the melted plastic. And it started to scorch the tabletop. “Shit,” she said, very annoyed.

Last of all Carmine the Cop and Doleful Duane. The two policemen glanced silently at each other, masterfully controlling the urge to say, “Shit”; then Officer Duane spoke into the mike box attached to his shoulder.

“EMT! EMT! We got one man down and one black tag. And don’t wait for the elevator—use the friggin’ stairs.”

New York City’s Finest sealed off the two street openings to the Waldorf Limousine Entrance with blue wooden police barricades, stenciled over in white with the words “Police Line Do Not Cross,” then added some stretchy yellow barricade tape about chest high across the entrance for good measure. Wallets approached very gingerly, like he hurt all over, as though suddenly very fragile. Then with great effort he took a deep painful breath and straightened his gait. Three cops guarding the South Entrance were in the midst of an altercation with an entourage, apparently headed there for some sort of a party. A couple of tall glamorous women, but it was the comb-over he recognized immediately. “Do you know
who I am?
” he was badgering the cop. “I could have you fired. Do you hear me? You’re fired.
You’re fired!
” The cop was having none of it. Wallets pulled his ID, missed once, and winced—then got it. The policeman said, “Okay,” and lifted the yellow tape. Everyone had heard about the gunfight. And there were some long looks at Wallets on the order,
oh man, were you lucky.

“Try another entrance,” Wallets suggested to the comb-over and his beautiful ladies. Then past the barrier, to the cordon of policemen surrounding the paddy wagon, “Okay, let’s go.”

He walked deeper into the limo corridor, where the wagon was already backed into the internal delivery bay. The paddy doors slammed open. The cops yanked the Garment District suspects over the rubber-lipped transom onto the loading dock, then immediately surrounded them before the service elevator. The metal service door had seen better days: bumped and scratched, banged to hell by countless hand trucks and dollies, unloading food, flowers, laundered bedding, everything
imaginable, except—until now—Iranian agents. Wallets climbed a set of worn concrete steps with steel edges to the side of the delivery bay, joining the prisoners on the loading dock. Suddenly the dented metal door slammed open with a rattling cry, and the cops prodded the Garment District haul inside. The whole event taking less than eight seconds from paddy wagon to elevator.

Wallets and two NYPD cops rode the elevator silently with their manacled prisoners. The service door groaned open again on the eleventh floor of the Security Tower. Nothing much to see. Just three more cops and a service corridor brightly lit and painted taupe. The innocuous beige hallway to hell.

“After you,” Wallets said to his manacled friends.

The prisoners seemed anything but frightened. They were, after all, under diplomatic protection and seemed confident they’d be sprung in hours if not minutes. So none of them had any reason to cooperate. They chatted among themselves in Farsi, derisively, making a show of their contempt for the NYPD and Wallets, who hustled them into a large guest facility called the Astor Ballroom. The sneering smiles vanished. The ballroom was large, high-ceilinged, and fully prepped for interrogation. In the furthest corner of the room stood a ten-foot-by-ten-foot wire-mesh Cisco-Eagle Prisoner Holding Cell, with an L-shaped metal bench bolted along two of the holding cell’s walls. The benches had handcuff rails, ankle cuffs on the bench legs, and manacles on eyelets attached to the bench seat every three feet. You could throw the lot of them behind the wire mesh and lock them down hand and foot with room to spare. While they could still see everything else going on in the ballroom. Standing in the cage was a very pale and frightened looking Frenchie banker: Anton Anjou, his thin wrist handcuffed to one of the mesh walls.