Manhattan Lockdown (3 page)

She made her way to a classroom on the northern side of the building. She was able to look down 82
^nd
Street toward the museum. Through the leafy trees she had a glimpse of Fifth Avenue and a portion of the museum's steps. Using binoculars, she saw uniformed officers setting up barriers and beyond them what at first looked like multiple cigarette butts scattered on the steps.

They were charred bodies.

Gina Carbone had served in the Gulf War and from helicopters had seen the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers scattered on the desert.
She had no sense of connection with them. But now she realized that the smoking smudges were people just recently killed by shrapnel and fire. Part of her reputation was built on the perception that she was cool, unflappable, and tough, but she found herself audibly inhaling as though she was on the brink of screaming.
These fuckers
, she thought,
how did they get here?

Donna Thompson, a black police captain, was waiting for her. Crisp and efficient, she had a sheet of paper on which she had written the information she knew Gina needed.

“How many dead people have I got?”

“Fifty at least,” Thompson calmly said. “We've only just now started letting EMT people through the barrier.”

“Why so long?”

“We had reports that there might be more bombers inside the museum itself.”

“How many wounded?”

“Not many so far. Ten. There are more likely more dead than wounded.”

Gina was an NYPD sergeant on 9/11. She had arrived in lower Manhattan six hours after the towers fell. At old St. Paul's Church on lower Broadway, a church surrounded by a cemetery with gravestones from the 1600s and 1700s, doctors and medics were waiting to care for the wounded. It became chillingly obvious as the hours passed that there were very few wounded, just as there were very few intact bodies. Doctors and nurses stood around uselessly. Soon the church became a rest station with water and food for the people working at the scorched place where the towers had collapsed.

“What do we know about how many people were at the museum when this happened?”

“One of the security guards was at a coffee shop on a break. He said that on a pretty summer day they could have as many as
three hundred people on the steps, sitting on the benches on the plaza, looking at the pictures and other stuff in the outdoor stalls, just hanging around. Not to mention tourists on the buses, those double-decker kinds. There were five tour buses lined up on the avenue.”

Gina was making notes on a pad of paper. She wrote columns of numbers as she listened.

“How about inside?”

“This guy is a guard in the Temple of Dendur on the northern end of the museum. Part of his job is to count as best he can the number of visitors in the area on one of those old-fashioned handheld clickers. He had a headcount of 350 when he left for his break. Pretty primitive, but at least it's some info.”

Gina thought about the slanting expanses of panes of glass that encased the Temple of Dendur where Egyptian tombs and statues were displayed. The shattered glass would have been hurled to the sloping lawn at unimaginable velocity. There must have been sun-bathers on a gorgeous day there. Even a fragment of glass could maim or kill. When she wrote down the number 350 on her pad the lead point of her pencil broke. She was that tense.

“And what about the rest of the museum?”

“At any one time on a Sunday there are as many as a thousand people inside, more on a rainy day.”

“Anything else?”

“Sure. Every window facing Fifth Avenue in all the big apartment buildings was blown out from 86
^th
Street down to 79
^th
. All of the glass blown inward. There are dead and injured people there. We don't have easy access. They're Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, after all. The security system in every one of these rich people's buildings is better than the Pentagon. Besides, God knows how many of them were at their houses in the Hamptons on the weekend.”

Some of the most famous people in the world lived in those buildings, the most desirable in Manhattan, with unobstructed views of the museum and all of Central Park. For the first time that morning, Gina gave some thought to the type of mind that could envision and execute all this. These were people who knew that large concentrations of vulnerable men, women, and children would be clustered together on a day of the week when the city was relaxed and festive, the numbers of police at reduced levels, and vigilance taken down a notch.

And whoever had done this knew the city especially well for another reason: not only would the massacre kill and maim many tourists from around the country and the world, but it was bound to kill and maim rich and famous people in the most expensive buildings in the world. Jackie Onassis had lived for years in a building directly across the avenue from the Met. The bombings on 9/11 killed thousands of innocent people but very few famous ones. The World Trade Center was a place where most of the people worked as clerks and technicians for big brokerage firms and government agencies. Although it was a huge, spectacular target of opportunity, it was not the place where members of the power elite were likely to be killed.

“And what about the roof garden?”

“Not sure, no word.”

“I know there were people up there for a party.”

“There are trees and plants up there,” Captain Thompson said. “It's all still burning, like a forest fire.”

Gina Carbone didn't like pretty boys, but Roland Fortune was more than a pretty boy. She first met him three days after he was elected mayor. He had campaigned in part on the need to replace the top people in the police department. She was at least three rungs below that level. He interviewed several men and two women
who ranked higher than Gina and who were better educated and with more years of service. But he had responded well to her and five days later he held a televised press conference announcing her appointment in which he described her as a gritty, streetwise, brilliant officer who had vision, integrity, and drive. In private he never tried to charm her. He was a patient listener, often, but not always, endorsing anything she recommended. She admired him. The thought that he was blown to shreds or burned to death unnerved her.

She was on the verge of asking about the physical damage to the museum. But a hand touched her shoulder. “The president's on the line.”

She took the secure cell phone. She covered her left ear to avoid any distractions and turned to stare at the elementary school's undersized basketball court. There was an odor of varnish and scuffed sneakers. The gym was hot. There was no air conditioning in early summer and there were too many people in the room. The grimy windows were reinforced with steel mesh.

“Commissioner?” The voice was easily recognizable. Andrew Carter was the most famous person in the world.

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me what's going on. Like everybody else on the planet I only know as much as what I see on CNN.”

She wanted to sound authoritative and controlled. “We have as many as three hundred people dead. An unknown number of wounded. I gave the order a minute ago to let our emergency people enter the secure area. We were concerned that additional bombers might still be on the scene. I don't want a situation like 9/11 when the rescuers blindly go running in to help the victims only to become victims themselves.”

“Understood.”

“The city's locked down, the subways are stopped, tunnels and bridges are closed, police boats are in the rivers, and airports in lockdown.”

“What about the air?”

“At least ten police helicopters are up. They haven't been challenged.”

“There's a contingent of fighter jets five minutes from the city.”

Fighter jets?
She restrained the impulse to tell the President of the United States that fighter jets were about as useful as camels. She needed real troops on every corner. This was guerilla war, not Star Wars.

He asked, “Are there other places up there where large groups congregate on the weekends?”

The president, she remembered, was from Los Angeles. Obviously he knew nothing about Manhattan on a summer weekend.

“We have huge concentrations of people on days like this at Battery Park, Riverside Park, Washington Square Park, Times Square. I have units at or en route to all those places and others.”

“Do you folks have any information as to who's responsible for this?”

“At the moment, sir, the blunt truth is we have no idea. There was no more chatter or negative information than we have had for years, just the usual low and sustained hum of danger. Do your people have anything?”

“I'm getting information on that.”

Gina thought about all the billions of dollars spent on the worldwide apparatus of national security since 9/11, and the president didn't have any information as to the men who carried out this devastating attack. In fact, she knew more than he did. Suddenly she felt impatient, eager to get back to her work, and annoyed that the president was distracting her from the real things she had to accomplish.

She said, “This is a huge failure. I have hundreds of people,
maybe more, dead and wounded on my turf and on my watch. I'm going to find out why my people, the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, all those security honchos, had no clue this was coming. But right now, sir, I need to organize relief efforts, make sure hospitals all over this island are ready to accept the wounded, and guard against the possibility that there are other lunatics out there right now about to carry out more attacks.”

“I appreciate, Commissioner, that you have work to do. We all have work to do.”

“Is there anything else I can tell you right now?” She knew she could be abrasive. She detected the impatience in her voice.

“I understand something might have happened to the mayor. We tried to reach him. We were told he may be a victim.”

“He was at a party on the roof garden of the museum when the explosions happened. I've had a report from one of our helicopters that there are many dead people on the roof. There are fires still burning up there. There's a lot of foliage up there, plantings of rare trees and shrubs. We've got no information as to whether the mayor was one of the victims.”

“That leaves you with a huge responsibility, Commissioner. You're now in charge, at least for the time being. You can't let too much time pass before you have a press conference to reassure the public.”

“I'm more interested in telling the public what is going on, what the facts are, what needs to be done. All of that is not necessarily reassuring.”

The president was impatient, too, not pleased with the brusque local Italian girl.

“Do your best.”

The man is a candy-ass
, Gina thought. “Sure thing,” she said.

And she hit the “end” button on the cell phone before he did on his.

“I'
M NOT STAYING,”
Roland Fortune said. “Let's get that IV out right now.”

The excruciating pain in his shoulder and back had lessened since the moment he walked through the emergency room door at Mount Sinai, the hospital nearest the museum. He was surrounded by policemen, some of whom had guns drawn. He was the first wounded person to arrive at the hospital, at exactly 1:45 p.m. Covered in blood and grass stains and dirt from the ground where he had fallen at the rear of the museum, he had regained consciousness in the ambulance that raced through Central Park. As he lay on the stretcher in the rocking vehicle, he'd felt the initial surge of relief from pain when one of the medics injected him with morphine.

“Mr. Mayor, you've lost significant quantities of blood,” Dr. David Edelstein, a sober man with the weight and presence of a rabbi, told Roland. “Your hemoglobin is low, you're so impaired by painkillers that you'll have trouble walking on your own, and you aren't likely to be able to hold any press conferences or to act in a coherent, focused way. There's a significant risk of infection. You need to be treated.”

“Listen: I was hit by a stone, not shrapnel. I was cut, not shot. You run a hospital. I run a city. I can't lie down in a hospital because my shoulder hurts when there is complete chaos out there. There are thousands of people who think I'm dead. Unless they can see me
and see that I'm alive and functioning, there will still be this alarming distraction that the leader of the City of New York is dead.”

Edelstein's expression didn't change. “I can't worry about that. You and you alone are my patient right now, not the population of the City of New York.” He paused. “If you leave, you'll be doing that against medical advice and you will have to sign a form that says precisely that, just like anybody else who walks out of here without the approval of a doctor.”

“I genuinely appreciate the concern, but I feel strong and alert enough to step up to do the things I'm supposed to do. I can't live with myself secluded in a hospital bed while there are fires still burning ten blocks downtown from here and the dead are still being counted.”

At a signal from Edelstein, two male nurses expertly disassembled the tubes of the IVs to which Roland Fortune was attached. They then placed his damaged shoulder and arm in a sling, fastening it to the fresh clothes that had been brought to him from Gracie Mansion, the spacious Georgian mansion overlooking the East River in which New York City mayors lived during their terms. As they worked on him, he felt a resurgence of the pain and asked for another Vicodin. One of the male nurses placed the pill in his mouth, like a priest giving communion, and he swallowed it without water. Just the act of taking the pill brought him increasing levels of relief from the pain. Like a drug addict worried about not having enough, he put a handful of Vicodin in his pocket.

He watched the television set affixed to the wall just below the ceiling as Gina Carbone began to speak to the world. She stood in bright sunlight on the sidewalk in front of PS 6. “We now know that six hundred thirty-six people are dead,” she announced. “There are at least ninety-five men, women, and children in hospitals throughout the city who are wounded in varying degrees, most with burns, many in life-threatening condition.”