Early Warning (26 page)

There was a long pause at the other end of the line—of course, there was no line, only the infidel’s technology, which Kohanloo and his countrymen, although unable to duplicate, were only too happy to employ against the enemy—and what sounded like a clicking noise.

“Go ahead please,” came a female voice.

Now it was a male voice that spoke: “Target located. Sherry-Netherland Hotel.”

“Stand by,” said the infidel woman.

Then silence.

Arash Kohanloo tried to control his breathing. His heart rate was up, that he knew. The doctors had told him to keep it down, keep it calm, keep it within the target range lest he find himself in trouble. Damn that Skorzeny and his wily ways. Here he was, in a situation he should never have been in, and his heart rate was rising along with his blood pressure. He tried to stay calm and listen for whatever came next. There was nothing to worry about.

The fools! They had no idea he was not in the Sherry-Netherland.

“Shall I send a UAV?”

A few more crackles, then—

“Put the bird in the air and stand by.”

“The bird is in the air.”

Kohanloo couldn’t believe his ears. Surely they would not deploy a UAV—Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, more commonly known as a drone—to blast away an entire floor of an expensive hotel in midtown Manhattan. The Americans didn’t do things like that. They were always more concerned about collateral damage than they were about the success of a mission; why, a single snail darter could not only bring down a dam in Alaska, it could probably stop a convoy of Abrams tanks as well.

“Stand by to fire on my orders.”

It was a bluff. It had to be. His eyes stole toward the window of his luxury suite; the curtains were drawn. With the cell phone still pressed up hard against his ear, he moved slowly and quietly toward the window.

Now another voice came on the line. He couldn’t swear to it—and a good Muslim never took an oath except in a religious context—but it sounded awfully like that of the man he had spoken to earlier. In fluent Farsi, he said: “Go to the window.”

He hesitated a moment.

“Go to the window now.”

He went to the window.

“Now, open the curtains.”

How did they know he even had a window where he was? Or that there were curtains?

“Open them.” He didn’t like the man’s tone of voice, his peremptory way. An unbeliever should never talk to one of the Faithful like that. “Go ahead…”

He took a deep breath and opened the curtains, trying not to flinch—

“What do you see?”

The panorama of New York City. No hint of the sun yet, but on this summer morning, it would be up soon. Just the gleam of the lights and, to the southwest, smoke reflected in the wasteful glare.

He slowly exhaled. “I see exactly what I expect to see, and nothing more.”

“Do you see me?”

He was feeling a little braver now, more like his old self. “Of course not. Now who are you? What do you want?”

“Do you see me now?”

Was that the sun? The sky had brightened a bit, or perhaps his eyes were simply getting used to the darkness. He switched off the nearest floor lamp in order to see better.

“Do you know who I am?”

Still nothing. It was all a bluff. Somehow they had managed to trace the Brother’s cell signal. A cheap trick, and one that any Palestinian kid with a Bulgarian computer could manage. Nothing to—

“Smile, asshole.” That was in English.

A blinding flash. For a moment, Arash Kohanloo was sure he was dead, and that he would soon be entering paradise. He cursed himself for a fool, that he had not had time to perform his ritual ablutions in preparation for martyrdom, and then remembered he was not expecting to be martyred this time out.

He was still alive. He could see.

The drone was right outside his window. It had him on video, and was transmitting his picture somewhere. Operational security was blown. It was time to regroup. He started to turn away—

“Stop. Don’t move or you’re a dead man.”

Kohanloo froze.

“Look on the wall across from you.”

Kohanloo looked.

A video image danced across the plaster and the reproduction of a Monet cathedral. It was the image of a man. “Look upon me,” said the voice at the other end of the cell phone. Funny; he had forgotten he was still holding it.

“Do you know who I am now?”

“No. I do not.”

“I am Azra’il. Malak al-Maut. He Whom God Helps.”

The name sent shivers down Kohanloo’s spine.
Azra’il
, the Arabic version of the Biblical
Azrael
, was not to be found in the Holy Koran, but
Malak al-Maut
was. Another of his names. It meant the Angel of Death.

“And you,” the voice said, “are now mine.”

The Upper East Side—morning

The dawn was breaking as Principessa Stanley cautiously made her way around the corner from Park Avenue and turned left on 92nd Street, where some of the shooting had been yesterday. It wasn’t that she was afraid, exactly; indeed, she moved with the supreme confidence of a cable-network star. Nothing ever happened to cable-network stars. In fact, with the occasional and unfortunate exception of that poor girl back in St. Louis, or wherever it was last year—you know, the one they gave that posthumous award to a couple of months ago—journalists were free to come and go as they pleased in the United States of America. This was not some kind of Third World shithole, where you had to wear a sign around your neck that blared “PRENSA” in various wog tongues, none of which she happened to know. Principessa Stanley was firmly of the opinion that if information could not be expressed in English it was of no use to her, since none of her viewers would be able to understand it any better than she could.

And to think she had almost missed this “terrorist” attack by fooling around in New Orleans, wasting her time with her boyfriend of the moment after covering that useless RAND meeting—none of which she could use anyway. It had been a real trick to find a flight into New York after they shut the airports down, and so she had hopped aboard a military plane from the Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base about twenty minutes south of the city. It had taken her to the old Stewart AFB, where the New York Air National Guard was still operational, and from there a car service had brought her down to the city. Her press credentials had gotten her through the blockade last night and so she’d be able to freshen up in her own apartment on Carnegie Hill before tackling her latest assignment. If she played her cards right, this was an Emmy for sure.

The trick was to go where everybody else wasn’t. The shootings at the Y had already been written off as isolated incidents, perhaps copycat killings. The real action was still at Times Square, where gunmen were still active, but this area had been quiet for hours. Besides, the police cordon was slowly constricting around 42nd and Seventh, and the 92nd Street Y now lay outside the zone.

Which suited her journalistic purposes just fine. The gunman—whoever he or she was—was still on the loose. She’d find him, if it was the last thing she did, and bring him in for an exclusive interview. The cops and the military, whoever, would wax the other schmucks, but she could talk a cat out of a tree, and surely she’d be able to talk this guy down and into her custody. She’d have him on the air fifteen minutes later, depending on traffic.

Raymond Crankheit woke up and stretched. He’d spent the night under a copse near the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, all things considered, felt quite refreshed. This was one of the first spots in New York City he’d visited when he first arrived, the place where Robert Chambers, the “Preppie Killer” had strangled Jennifer Levin to death during what Chamber had called “rough sex.” Raymond had never had sex, so he wasn’t quite sure what, exactly, was the distinction between rough sex and garden-variety sex, but he hoped to find out someday, and today was as good a day as any. As soon as he’d finished what he came here to do, he’d find a girl and give it a try. Maybe he too could get lucky at Dorrian’s Red Hand, but that was fairly far away, over on Second Avenue, and he didn’t have time for the trek just now. He’d had have to find somebody closer and more available.

He was only a little surprised the cops had not found him, but then they weren’t really looking for him. The main action was with the Brothers; a few dead Jews far away from ground zero would have to wait. Unless he did something stupid, he could spend the entire day picking off whomever he chose.

He peeked out from under some bushes. Even on a normal day, there wouldn’t have been many people stirring, just the custodial staff at the Museum, which he really should visit someday except that he’d heard it was boring. His extra ammo was still here, right where he’d buried it, and so he’d reloaded before he’d gone to sleep and was now ready to go.

He’d had a chance to think a lot of things over last night, and come to several conclusions. One was that he didn’t mind killing people at all. Upstate, during training, he’d been deemed a little squeamish, and he found he really didn’t enjoy it when he had to saw that guy’s head off with a kukri knife. They never told him exactly whose head was being sawed off, just that the man was an Infidel and an Enemy and that no one would miss him. To Raymond, the poor schmo looked like just another homeless black guy, probably some bum from nearby Hancock or, better yet, Callicoon. Anyway, he didn’t struggle much, but it was still gross.

The second thing he’d discovered was that he didn’t mind killing women. He’d been raised never to hit a girl, but when he saw that broad outside the Y something had just gone off inside his head or his heart or whichever, and he’d taken her out without so much as a second thought. She probably wouldn’t have gone to bed with him, either, just like every other girl he’d ever met, and so she’d had to pay the price for the crimes of her sisters. And then the rest of them followed.

So, now that he was over that hump, he knew that sex couldn’t be far behind. At last, it was going to happen, because—thanks to the Brothers and their endless talk about the virgins and
houris
and all the pleasures of the flesh that would be available to him in the afterlife, pleasures that may or may not be denied to him in this life—he could
make it happen
. All it required was the Will.

And then his cell phone rang—that special ring that came only from the commander of the Brothers. Good: more fun.

Principessa Stanley decided to use her head, instead of the rest of her, which is pretty much what had gotten her on the air in the first place. The days when on-air female journalists earned their face time thanks to the force of their personalities, the cogency of their reports, and the reliability of their sources was long gone. Fox News had blazed that trail, rediscovering, as if rediscovery were needed, the old adages that sex sold and that everybody, male and female, loved a pretty girl. Short skirts and a law degree didn’t hurt, either.

So, instead of heading toward the Y, where there was very likely nothing to be seen anyway except a lot of police-line tape, she decided to wander into Central Park. From her youthful days at the University of Michigan’s journalism school, she’d been taught the old police reporter’s motto, that to catch a criminal, you had to think like a criminal. One of the reasons she was such a good reporter, in her opinion, was that it was easy for her to put herself in a psycho killer’s shoes; in fact, she prided herself on thinking that she would have made quite a good psycho killer had she chosen to go into that particular line of work.

Which is why she found herself at this moment crossing Fifth Avenue. Sure, it was obvious that the park was where to hide, which is why it made such a brilliant hiding place. In her opinion, police work had become far too sophisticated, too dependent on computers; the shortest way between two points was still a straight line, and that was exactly what she making at this point as she triangulated in her mind between a possible hideout and the scene of the crime, which so happened took her at a diagonal from the Y to the Museum and thence to the infamous copse of bushes behind the Met. Like the Empire State Building, they were there for all to see, but if you lived in New York, somehow you never actually visited them yourself.

So this was the famous spot. Like every other famous crime scene she had visited—and, truth to tell, there weren’t all that many, since Principessa Stanley’s reporting career had been almost entirely confined to the classroom at Michigan and the news desk of a couple of low-and medium-rent boondock TV stations until the Show had finally called—this one was fairly unprepossessing in person. Like Dealey Plaza in Dallas, it seemed unworthy of such a crime.

She loved New York at this hour. Many was the time she’d gone for a run around the Reservoir in the morning, sharing the well-pounded path with a few other celebrities and some of the hoi polloi who were either decent enough not to invade her sunglassed-and baseball-capped privacy, or else too stupid to know who she was. Even at the height of summer, which was approaching, the air at least pretended to be fresh before the smell of the uncollected garbage could perfume it, before the effluence of the subways could poison it, and before the body odors of the two million people who called Manhattan home, not to mention the millions of commuters, could foul it.

“Hello, Miss,” came a voice behind her.

He was not that bad-looking, for a geek or a homeless person. From the looks of him, he had spent the night in the park but had somehow remained relatively clean. True, there was dirt on both his hands, black dirt, and had she had time to think about its provenance, she might have realized that there was no black dirt in Central Park. But firearms training, like logic, languages, history, comparative religion, culture, and literature, was one of the things they didn’t teach you in journalism school, and so she remained innocent in her knowledge of all those arcane and most likely dangerous subjects. She was, however, proud of her ability to craft a lede and should the occasion ever present itself again, she could no doubt develop a fine inverted-pyramid of a news story.

“Hello.”

Raymond Crankheit just stood there, not sure what to do next. This fine-looking woman standing before him had caught him completely by surprise, and he was suddenly as deep into a conversation with a woman as he’d been in years. He had to think of something to say next, something that wouldn’t scare her away, and send her running, perhaps to the cops. He couldn’t cope with cops just now.

“I was wondering…do you have the time?”

Principessa Stanley unholstered her BlackBerry and consulted it. “Nearly seven,” she said.

“Thank you.” Raymond hoped he hadn’t exhausted all his conversational gambits in one fell swoop. “I was wondering—could you tell me…is this Central Park?” It was lame, but it was also the only thing he could think of. He was a little agitated by what the commander had just told him…

Principessa looked at him with a bemused smile. Of all the lame lines she’d ever heard, and she had pretty much heard them all, this was one of the lamest. This was the kind of line a guy might use in the early afternoon on Fifth Avenue, or when he caught her coming out of her office on Sixth. In fact, it was so dumb that it just might be genuine. “What do you think it is—Coney Island?” she replied with a laugh.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the correct answer. A real New Yorker—which Principessa had tried so hard to become—would have recognized it at once as a stock reply, the kind of answer one gave to the hapless tourists standing at the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, wondering if that tall building in front of them was the Empire State Building or, worse, the World Trade Center. It was the kind of response that said subtextually, what do you take me for, a fool? A fellow tourist? And the joke would have been on the interlocutor, not the respondent. But these were not normal circumstances. And Raymond Crankheit was not a normal person.

As Principessa realized as soon as she saw the look on his face. What she had hoped would be taken as a joke had obviously fallen flat. This hour of the morning was no time for an argument so she immediately decided to backfill. She gave him her best coquettish laugh. “Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course it is. I didn’t realize you were from out of town.” For a tourist or a bridge-and-tunnel guy, he wasn’t that bad, and she felt a stab of compassion for him. All her life she’d been accused of being a bitch on wheels, and now here was her chance to change that image, even if it was only with a guy she’d just met.

Raymond Crankheit, however, heard the backtrack quite differently. “From out of town.” What the hell did she mean by that? Had she made him? The Brothers had warned him about women like her, the temptresses who would use you and then mock you, the way the women in the United States Army had done to the
fedayeen
in Iraq. The tanks and the Humvees that had entered Baghdad had played recordings over loudspeakers, taunting the Brothers over the size of their members, insulting them in a woman’s voice that Believers had little dicks. This of course had enraged the Holy Warriors and out they charged, screaming and thirsting for vengeance and prepared to put the lie to the libel with a glorious martyr’s death. Unfortunately, that was exactly what they had received, as the diabolical followers of Satan had expected just such a manly reaction and shot them down as they poked their heads from windows and doorways.

Women were never to be trusted. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before, Miss?” he asked as politely as he could, trying to conceal his anger and his contempt. “You’re that Princess girl, right?”

Principessa smiled. Getting recognized was one of the hazards of the profession, but it irked her when a young male of a certain age did
not
recognize her, and she took the implied insult personally. What, she wasn’t famous enough? She wasn’t pretty enough? She wasn’t successful enough? She would show this twerp.

“Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all, “but I don’t have time for an autograph right now. But I was wondering whether a homeless guy like yourself might be able to tell me something about what’s going on around here. Were you here yesterday? Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

So he was right after all: she was on to him. She was asking questions like a cop. That tore it. For the first time in his life, he was being nice to a girl and she was being nice back at him, but something had gone wrong—something always went wrong—and now here she was, grilling him the way some of the others did, asking him questions designed to make him look stupid.

In the old days, he would have run away. He would have endured the humiliation of being bested by a twist and being unable to do anything about it. But now he didn’t have to, not any longer. As he discovered yesterday, he could do something about it. In fact, here, on this hallowed spot, he could do a couple of things, and then come back for more.