Banquo's Ghosts (50 page)

Smith barked orders to the cops: “Quarantine this platform and corridor above. No one leaves the station.” Officers Carmine and Doleful Duane jumped on it, passing their orders to the other policemen on the platform, and within fifteen seconds they established a rough cordon in the pedestrian corridor above, and began to process straphangers, scanning their clothes with Geiger counters. Getting names and addresses. Most were cooperative, but there’s always one or two knuckleheads, and these mooks soon found themselves nose to dirty subway stanchions in plastic cuffs.

Smith was still barking orders: “No one leaves the station. Get a hazmat team here ASAP, and get under that train!” She crouched down and looked under the cars. No sign of her partner.

“
Wesson!
”

She died on the tracks from loss of blood before they could get her out. The backpacker on the platform, dead too. The other one, badly beaten but alive. The worst-contaminated—along with Wesson’s body—were taken to NYU Medical Center and given total decontamination and iodine shots.

There was another guest of the hospital. Walid from Union Square. Someone had called an ambulance for him when he had been weaving and having trouble standing near the New Utrecht Avenue-62
^nd
Street subway stop back in Brooklyn. He arrived at the Kings County Medical Center wearing tights under jeans that had been coated with lead-based paint on the inside, tennis shoes that were painted outside with the same paint, and a pair of grey Ultex rubber radiation-reducing gloves. The clothes dissolving.

Kings County Emergency in Brooklyn took one look at him and transferred the kid and all his disintegrating clothes locked in a hazmat container immediately to NYU Med Center—sending him right back
to the Manhattan he had been so desperate to escape. Radiation cases were all to be handled at a central location as long as possible. Decontaminating the facilities in one hospital seemed better than decontaminating dozens across the city. Now the ambulance personnel who had picked him up in the first place were getting treated for radiation poisoning, right at NYU, while the Kings County ambulance was parked under the East Side Drive behind some chain-link fencing.

Walid wore a green hospital gown, propped up on a bed, with black hairs sprinkled over his shoulders. He had been losing his hair for an hour. He grimaced in pain in between muttering incoherently in response to questioning from Smith. She wore a hazmat suit now. His arms were cuffed to either side of his bed. A cop at the door and a doctor at the back of the room also wore hazmat suits. The kid had tested for radiation off the charts, “a walking Nagasaki,” as the doctor had put it to the agents when they arrived.

“Why did you do this?” Smith asked. “Who helped you do this? Tell us—it’s not too late. You can help.”

His eyes were pleading, asking for forgiveness or understanding. And he mumbled something that sounded like, “Onion Square. I’m sorry.”

News filtered back in from the street—and Johnson marveled at the change in the Waldorf since Banquo’s arrival, from the Mad Hatter’s tea party to an oiled machine. The phones rang, people answered them, properly dispatched, issues resolved. Ready for the next.

A backpacker stopped outside the Metropolitan Opera.

An entire cell cornered in their row house in Jersey City, a standoff, and then a shoot out—four Jihadis dead.

A car with two backpackers—the one that had been coming from Queens—tailed by a police helicopter over the Bronx-Queens Expressway, then forced to stop at the ramp to the George Washington Bridge by two squad cars. Traffic backed up to Greenwich, Connecticut, as a tow truck was called in and the Jihadis brought into custody in the Fort Apache Precinct in the Bronx.

Matters obviously had gotten beyond the point where they could be kept under wraps. Or where doing so served the people of the city. The Mayor, the Deputy Mayor, and the Police Commissioner’s faces had taken on a grayish tinge as the hours progressed. Phone calls coming into City Hall from newspapers and the rest of the media. Drudge had posted a headline, linking to stories of a few of the discrete incidents:

With a siren flashing. Immediately, his site bent and nearly crashed under the weight of the traffic.

At last, after an eon of press-gagging, and hiding under a very large desk, those at the Waldorf conference table resolved that the Mayor must go downstairs to deliver a statement and take some limited questions from reporters—although his avail would surely occasion a melee from journalists frenzied by the cocktail drug of a world-changing story about which they as yet knew next to nothing. They’d talked to the White House, which wanted the Mayor out first—as the highest political authority on the ground—before the Feds took over. They had word the president would be making his own preliminary statement within the hour.

The Mayor would enlist the help of the general public, urging them not to flee the city, which would potentially expand exposure, but please stay inside, and make their way home on foot while authorities handled “a manageable security situation with potential public health consequences.” Then, the most ticklish bit: “Young men with backpacks have been implicated in this situation. If you see someone acting suspiciously, do not engage that person, but call authorities immediately.” How much more could he say? Should he mention they were of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, or would that risk opening to retaliation every young Middle Eastern man in the city? They decided to keep it vague.

As he and the Deputy Mayor pored over the brief text one more time, word came in about what had happened at Grand Central and the loss
of Wesson. O’Hanlon got up to leave for NYU Medical, but Banquo grabbed him from his chair, placed a hand up around his neck, and whispered something in his ear. O’Hanlon stayed at his battle station, his eyes glassy. Plans to house the Westchester Metro North commuters and the Long Island Railroad commuters were quickly formulated with the city’s major hotels. Car traffic would not be restricted out of the city—as a safety valve—but no one could drive in. Subway and bus service suspended. All major hotel chains ordered to give stranded commuters such hospitality as available. The Mayor went downstairs, holding a printed text with scribbling on it in two different color pens.

After his brief prepared remarks, he took a few questions, then listed badly under his own inability or unwillingness to give precise answers to the shouted follow-ups.

“Is it biological? Chemical? What’s this substance?”

“Anthrax? Is it anthrax?”

“How do you define ‘acting suspiciously’?”

“What do these ‘young men’ look like and act like? And how do you define ‘young’?”

“How many are there? Is this the beginning or the end?”

Every channel in America not devoted to sports, cooking, old feature films, or TV movies about women hooked on questionable men showed the same live images of the Mayor ducking back into the Waldorf, surrounded by boom mikes, frantic, pushing reporters, and a blue line of cops trying to maintain order. They didn’t have TVs in the interrogation room, but someone opened the door to tell Banquo, assuming he’d want to know, “The Mayor’s blowing it.”

Banquo registered no surprise, nor did he feel any. He’d seen the Mayor’s mettle earlier and had pegged him as a man without a chest. After this, the urban solon should go back to Hizzoner’s prior obsession with transferring the entire cab fleet into hybrids and banning McDonald’s as a public health risk—that is, if he survived this.

Banquo turned to O’Hanlon: “Make sure someone from DOJ gets out there to clean this up. We can’t have a general melee out in the streets.”

Banquo asked for a cup of coffee and braced himself for what would be a bow wave of reports of suspected Jihadis in the wake of the Mayor’s
presser. It would be like the aftermath of the famous radio broadcast of
War of the Worlds
—except some of the panicked calls would be reporting genuine aliens in their midst. He asked the Police Commissioner what surge capacity they had for 911 operators, and he said he’d see about diverting the operators from 311—the city’s nonemergency information line—to handling emergency calls. To no one in particular and everyone, Banquo announced, “Let’s buckle down, ladies and gentlemen. This is only the end of the beginning.”

O’Hanlon and a team he dragooned from FBI-NYC headed out to the intersection Yasmine had given them, DeGraw and Bond, in Brooklyn. An up-and-coming neighborhood, which is an optimist’s way of saying still down-at-the-heels. DeGraw dead-ended at the northern-most part of the Gowanus Canal. The barrier that the canal made to foot and other traffic meant that the half block abutting it would always be relatively blighted.

O’Hanlon didn’t know what exactly he was looking for, but suspected an abandoned warehouse with red, peeling paint and the fading words “McSweeney’s Machine Tools” emblazoned on this side might be it. The machine shop was chained and padlocked at every entrance, except one at the back, nearest the canal, where few people would ever have any occasion to walk.

The fetid smell of the oily, greenish-tinged water reeked especially powerfully back there. A beat-up Honda Accord was parked close to the canal, and O’Hanlon and his boys circled warily around it, unholstering their handguns. Quietly, one of the men pushed at the steel rimmed, dented security door of the warehouse, and five G-Men rushed through. In the gloom of the factory floor two more Workbench Boys looked up in surprise. They were fumbling with cumbersome industrial-strength work suits. Stunned as though caught with their pants down, they panicked. They dropped the heavy outfits and ran toward the far end of the warehouse, toward some sort of wall. As O’Hanlon’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he got the impression of an empty
dank vaulted room with a bare concrete floor—a metal partition toward the back, blocking their way. His G-Men took off in pursuit, when something told O’Hanlon to yell, “No! No! No!” allowing his quarry to hide behind the barrier.