Manhattan Lockdown (24 page)

“I believe I know where he is.”

“Where?”

“There's a dark prison in an old pier on the East River. In it are about two dozen Islamic men who were secretly arrested within minutes or hours after the first explosions yesterday.”

“I'm going down there. I have a bike in the basement of my building. Where is it?”

“A derelict pier just below Houston Street. I've tried to get in a few times. Haven't succeeded. Pier 37.”

Two casually dressed men, both Sunni Muslims, stood at the iron fence surrounding the Cooper-Hewitt Museum just across 90
^th
Street on the east side of Fifth Avenue. Behind the ornate fence the museum itself was shrouded, as it had been for two years, by gauzy, translucent veils that protected the museum and passersby from construction debris during the long course of the museum's reconstruction. Using slender, essentially invisible equipment that Silas Nasar had given them, they, too, listened to the conversation between Raj Gandhi and Gabriel Hauser. They could have been the tourists they appeared to be.

“Mr. Gandhi, I have no confidence in reporters, their newspapers, CNN, the
New York Times
. I made every effort I could when I was hustled and bundled out of my hospital in Afghanistan, where I loved my work as a doctor, and then out of the Army, where I planned to stay for years. No one, no one, in your business paid any attention to me. I felt like a leper.”

Quietly Raj said, “I'm sorry. But now
Don't ask, don't tell
has been eliminated.”

“Too late, not to mention the twenty years it was in effect and all the years and years before that when openly gay people could not serve. I'm one of thousands and thousands of people with what the Army still calls less-than-honorable discharges.”

“You can ask to have that changed.”

“I'm not interested in
asking
. I have a thing about
asking
the Army or the government for anything.”

“That must be painful.”

Gabriel leaned closer to Raj. “Why haven't
you
done anything, Mr. Gandhi? It's been many, many hours since you learned important things, things that need to be exposed. But here you are, on a bench, talking to me about what you know.” Gabriel paused, continuing to gaze at Raj's delicate face. “What are
you
going to do?”

“I work for a paper with an opaque hierarchy. Layers of editors. Their watchword is verification, corroboration.”

“You have your source.”

“I don't know who he is.”

“You have me. You know my life partner has disappeared and is under arrest. I see stories from the
Times
on my cell phone about our courageous mayor, the extraordinarily brave police commissioner, garbage on the streets, the count of the dead, lists of names of the dead. But I don't see anything about the underside of all this.”

Raj Gandhi spoke slowly. “You're wrong, Dr. Hauser. I have a blog and access to YouTube. I have the secret caller on tape. I have a video I took of Gina Carbone slipping into Pier 37. I even have a video of her going in and out of the Regency. And I have a source on the service staff at the Regency who tells me that Gina Carbone has a different kind of captive at the Regency, a lover. I even have his name. Tony Garafalo. And like the rest of the world I have Google. It took me ten minutes of a Google search to find out that this Tony Garafalo served at least eight years in a federal prison, the worst one, in fact, the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, where the Unabomber and the shoe-bomber are held, where John Gotti was once a prisoner. Mr. Garafalo was an associate of the Gambino family. And that Garafalo was convicted of using force to silence witnesses who were about to testify about the Gambino family.”

“And the people you work for have no interest in that?”

“Not yet.”

“When will
yet
come? After Cam is dead? After the pier is empty? After I'm arrested?” Gabriel stood up. “You're wasting my time, Mr. Gandhi.”

“Don't leave.” Gandhi's delicate voice was as loud, as definitive as it could be. “In two hours I am putting everything I know, corroborated or not, on my blog. On YouTube, on Snapchat, on Twitter, on all those instantaneous social media devices. The pier and its dark prison. The movements of the police commissioner. You, your injured dog, your lover. Even this interview.”

“I don't believe you, Mr. Gandhi. You don't have the inner strength to do that. It's not in your DNA. The
Times
will fire you. You're the only Indian there. You have all that prestige, that loyalty. You're Gunga Din, loyal to the British, to the powers that be.”

“Are you a racist, Dr. Hauser?”

“Far from it. I'm a realist.”

Gabriel Hauser turned off his cell phone. “I'll take care of this myself,” he said. He stood and disappeared around the corner on East 90
^th
Street. His beloved apartment was only eight blocks away. He cried all the way to the home he loved.

R
AJ GANDHI'S WALK
east from Fifth Avenue and the Church of the Heavenly Rest took him, once he crossed Lexington Avenue, through the dreary streets filled with decaying brownstones in which multiple small apartments, some of them only the size of a small living room, had been partitioned with thin walls. Garbage cans and wooden bins, most of them overflowing with the ordinary debris of human life, stood next to each fluorescent lobby.

Now, so many hours after the bombings and the lockdown started, there were mountain ranges of huge black plastic bags on the curbstones. In the gathering dark Raj Gandhi saw rats on the sidewalks. They reminded him not only of his early years in his native Mumbai but the fictional rats that suddenly proliferated at the start of Camus's novel
The Plague
. Oran in that novel had been quarantined, a whole population confined by the presence and fear of a disease that was a modern Black Death. The noblest characters in the book, doctors and journalists, had died as the epidemic progressed and before it came to its natural, miraculous end. Raj had read the novel often. He felt he was now living it.

His own building was constructed ten years ago. It looked to him as if a refugee Soviet-era architect had designed it. At thirty-three stories, it was one of dozens of anonymous new apartment buildings lining cheerless York Avenue. It had a comfortable lobby and friendly uniformed doormen who knew his name.

His own apartment, a studio, was on a high floor with a view of the East River. For a curtain on the single large window he had tacked up a burlap fabric which he never opened and so never looked at the majestic expanse of the river and its legendary bridges. The apartment was replete with gadgets, laptop computers, iPads, a variety of cell phones, four television sets that had access to every available news and cable station, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, even the Weather Channel. He spent almost all of his income on these technological marvels. He had a pull-out sofa on which he slept, as uncomfortable as a plank, and three small tables he had assembled from IKEA for his equipment. There were three folding wooden chairs. No carpets.

As soon as he unlocked the door to the apartment, the voice he heard was shockingly familiar. “Jesus, Gandhi, you live like a college freshman at a bad school. Look at all of this crap.”

Fear seized Raj. “How did you get in here?”

“Don't worry. This isn't exactly a first-class building. And a quadriplegic with a blindfold could open your door.”

As Raj saw in the glare from the two unshaded lights, the man in the wooden chair was exceptionally good-looking, obviously Italian. He was large, not at all fat, but tall and muscular. His powerful appearance was for Raj entirely different from the voice he had heard in the calls from the unknown source. The man Raj had envisioned from the sound of the voice was scrawny, bald, furtive.

Still seated, the man said, “I thought it was time we should meet. I'm losing my patience.” No accent. A clear voice Raj couldn't place, easily the voice of a man who was literate and persuasive. But this man was obviously a great mimic, able to sound like a crank from Queens or Brooklyn whenever he wanted to.

“What do you want?” Raj asked. His own voice, as he recognized, had a tremor.

Standing, the man gestured at all the technological devices on the desks. “I've seen your blogs and Twitter feeds, Mr. Gandhi. You have an impressive audience. Hundreds of thousands of followers. More than your namesake, the great Mahatma. And you work for people at that godawful newspaper of yours who will not let you write the information I give you. It's time for you, Mr. Gandhi, to get the word I've been giving you out to the world all on your own. I decided to help you write it.”

“I'm not sure,” Raj said. “Who are you? What's your name?”

“Linda Lovelace. Deep Throat.”

Raj recognized the names, but had never seen Lovelace's movies. He had never in fact despite all the gadgetry even glanced at porn. He said, “I still haven't quite finished my work.”

“You have. Let's get on the computer. We'll write it together.”

Raj sat at the table with the laptop computer at which he ordinarily wrote his blog and Twitter feeds. Almost daily he used his blog to summarize or elaborate on his stories as they had appeared in the
Times
. Some of those blogs were written in his native language, Hindi. Far more were in English.

The well-dressed man pulled one of the folding chairs next to Raj.

“Let's start, Mr. Gandhi. Listen to me and start typing. Write this down:
In the midst of violence on the streets, officials in the government, particularly members of an elite, highly secretive unit of the New York Police Department, have unleashed a campaign involving secret arrests, kidnappings, torture and assassinations of dozens of men, some of them United States citizens, all of them of Middle East and African descent
.”

Raj rapidly typed those words. Whoever this man was, his voice, the way he was able to put together words, phrases, and sentences, were so different from the crude, mocking voice Raj had heard on those strange phone calls.

As if sensing Raj's surprise, the man reverted to the accented tone of the caller. “Listen carefully, Mr. Gandhi. Here are your next sentences.
Sources who have spoken on condition of anonymity because of fears of reprisals have disclosed that, within minutes of the devastating explosions that began with the murders of more than a thousand people at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art two days ago, the secretive unit made a sweep of almost two dozen men who were taken to a dark prison on an abandoned New York pier on the East River.'

The man paused and had Raj scroll through the words that he had merely transcribed. “You're a good typist, Mr. Gandhi. At least there's something you can do right.” It was again the sardonic, sarcastic voice of the man on the cell phone.

And then the voice changed again, surprisingly literate, sounding like a broadcaster, the voice of someone who had done a great deal of reading.

He dictated,
Sources reveal that the unit was conceived and implemented by Gina Carbone, the first female commissioner of the police department and a veteran of the Gulf War of the early 1990s. It is known as the Black Unit and consists almost entirely of former CIA and NSA officers who for several years have been nominally assigned to the NYPD with innocuous titles such as ‘community liaison representatives.' They are, according to the sources, primarily men and two women responsible for extraordinary renditions, torture, and murder in the Iraq and Afghan conflicts. Commissioner Carbone recruited them for their unique talents. Some are veterans of discredited mercenary organizations such as Blackwater
.

During a pause, Raj looked at the muscular man in the chair beside him. “How do I know you haven't made this all up?”

So quickly that the movement of his hand was almost invisible, the man punched Raj's left cheek. The pain was immediate, intense, and excruciating. Raj's dark skin almost instantly turned purple, a bruise.

“Don't you wiseass with me, you fucking dothead.” Once again it was the tone of the loony caller.

His fingers trembling over the keyboard, Raj wrote as he listened.
Commissioner Carbone has not divulged the existence of this death cadre to anyone except its ten to twenty members. Publicly she is credited with coordinating the assault several hours ago on the George Washington Carver Towers in East Harlem where, it is believed, as many as several members, one of them a woman, of actual and known members of the Counterterrorism Unit of the NYPD were killed in intense, close, virtually hand-to-hand combat with men said to be ISIS or Boko Haram veterans, all of whom, with what is believed to be one exception, were killed. Thirteen members of the NYPD counterterrorism unit that conducted the assault survived
.

Staring at the bright screen, his virtually black eye sockets sunk deeply into his face despite the screen's otherworldly glow, still afraid, Raj asked, “How do you know these things? This is my blog. I'm expected to write the truth.”

“You're a Hindu, right, Mr. Gandhi?”

“No. I was born into a Hindu family. But no, I'm not.”

“Did you ever read our Bible?”

“No.”

“If you had, you'd know that Jesus was always being asked,
What is truth?
And he always answered,
What I tell you is truth
.”

Raj had no reaction other than to stare at the screen, even more afraid.

“What I tell you, Mr. Gandhi, is the truth. Don't worry. Your readers will believe you.”

Raj glanced at him. Despite his bruise and his pain, he wanted to remember the face.

“You can stare at me as long as you want. But we're not finished. And you'll never remember me, anyhow.”

Raj turned again to the keyboard. Listening in the barren room, he wrote what was said to him.
Sources have also said that one man was taken alive from the shattered apartment at the Carver Houses. Known to the secret squad and Commissioner Carbone as Silas Nasar, but also utilizing the name Hakim Khomani, the survivor is said to be a naturalized U.S. citizen with a degree from MIT and a specialist in the use of highly sophisticated communications devices. It is believed, the sources have disclosed, that he is one of the people who conceived and implemented the initial attacks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
.