Resolved (40 page)

“In the pool? You're betting I'm going to get canned?”

“No, I'm running the pool. I'm taking the bets. The line is fifteen to one you won't last the year, and forty to one you won't win election if you run.”

“I'll take some of that action,” said Guma and laughed, and then Murrow joined him and finally Karp, who said, “Tell me, does Jack Keegan have any money in the pool?”

“Yeah, but he's picking up some of my risk. Like me, he thinks you'll hang in there.”

“That's a surprise.”

“No it ain't,” said Guma confidently. “Keegan knows he's a twisty, ambitious prick, but he also knows that you're the closest thing to a reincarnation of Francis Phillip Garrahy that he's likely to see in this life. And he loved Phil. As long as it doesn't hurt his ambitions he'd like to see one like him in the DA. Which is why he's kept you around all these years, and protected you, when it would've been a lot better for him to have given you the boot. And why he used a bunch of chips with the party of evil to get you the appointment. You didn't realize this?”

“It's particle physics to him,” said Murrow and Karp was about to come back with a rejoinder when the phone rang. He listened for a moment or two, and Murrow, observing his face, asked, “Bad news?” Karp held up a shushing hand and continued to listen. He said, “I understand” several times and hung up.

“What?” asked Murrow.

“Bomb threat,” said Karp.

“Here?”

“Yeah, it sounded like the real thing, too. They said they're going to take down this building unless we release Feisal ibn-Salemeh.”

 

Rashid clicked off his cell phone, put his car in gear, and drove carefully away. It was his supreme moment, giving orders to Karp in that way. He felt for the first time in his life entirely in control. Except for the car.

He had never driven in this kind of snow before, and the tension of driving racked his nerves. But besides that, he felt everything had worked out remarkably well, a tribute to his organizing genius: the gigantic coup was now fact, all the layers of deception jerked away to reveal the perfection of their plan, nearly six years in the making: assembling the papers and the money, infiltrating the sleepers, buying the necessary firms, gaining the skills. Then those morons had blown up the World Trade Center and suddenly no Arab could move freely around the country and they had had to recruit Felix. A mistake as it turned out, but he had brilliantly compensated for it, and no real harm done, because of the depth, the intricacy of the plan. The bidding for the contract to supply two boilers for the building, which, of course, they won. Everyone knew that Americans thought only of money, so in order to gain access to any place all you had to do is become the low-bid contractor. He had seen that the boilers were put in place, he had led the quick violent action that neutralized the few outside workmen. His troops were completely in charge of the courthouse basement. Rashid had wired the blasting cap to a cell phone ring circuit, and left the construction site and driven a few streets away and made his call. All that was needed now was for Carlos and Felípe to arrive from the Inwood site with a plastic pipe full of acetone peroxide crystals. They would insert the pipe into a hollow drilled into the seventeen thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate that filled one of the boilers. Placing the initiator charge was the trickiest part of the operation, but ibn-Salemeh had been adamant about doing it that way. You had to have a good burn to bring down a prewar building of solid masonry and steel, and the initiator was essential to a good burn. But the peroxide was sensitive stuff and it had to be made fresh before use.

Rashid checked his watch. At this moment Carlos would be installing the initiator into the heart of the great bomb.

He drew the car to the curb, or at any rate out of the middle of the street. He had not counted on the snow, but it seemed to be letting up and would make no difference to the success of the plan. He had to keep moving because they would be trying to pinpoint the location of the cell phone from which the calls originated. He sat for a moment with the heater running full blast, enjoying the quiet of the blanketed city. Then his cell phone warbled. That would be Carlos giving the coded message that the bomb was ready for detonation, that the booby traps guarding it were in place, and that the whole crew was out of the building. He answered the phone and waited. But it wasn't the coded message.

 

“They're not answering at the courthouse,” said Lucy, hanging up the phone.

“It's probably crazy there, with the snow and the governor and the ceremony,” said Marlene. “Let's just go.”

“Can't we finish this game?” asked Zak.

“No,” answered his mother, tossing in her cards, “you'll have your whole life to play hearts. Get your coats!”

So they bid Dan good-bye and bundled up in their warmest and hit the frozen streets. It was the kind of day when not people who love people, but people who own four-by-four high-bed pickup trucks with knobby tires, feel like the luckiest people in the world.

“It seems to be letting up,” observed Marlene as she steered east on a nearly empty Grand Street.

“Yeah, from a total white-out blizzard,” said Lucy, sitting next to her. “I'm glad it's you driving.” In the family, Marlene was famous for her winter driving skills. As she passed Baxter, Marlene found that the sole lane down the center of the snowy road was blocked by a plumbing company van. The driver had skidded sideways and was now doing the worst possible thing, gunning his engine, spinning his wheels, and digging himself in even deeper.

“That moron!” said Marlene and rolled down her window. “Don't do that!” she yelled, “Rock it!” The engine up ahead continued to roar, however, and sent up blue clouds of stinking smoke.

“Can you back up?” asked Lucy.

“No, there's a big tow truck behind me,” said Marlene, after checking her side mirrors. “Crap!” The tow truck honked its air horn helpfully.

Then the passenger-side door of the van opened and a man jumped out. He walked back to the rear of his truck and examined the situation, which was that the rear wheels were sunk to the hubs and spinning on solid ice. He yelled to the driver, who stuck his head out of the window and yelled back. The wheels stopped spinning. The man opened the double rear doors of the van and yelled something else. The driver stepped down from the van.

“That's Tamazight,” said Lucy.

“What?”

“Those guys are speaking Tamazight, like the guy we saw…” She rolled her window down and looked out at the man behind the plumber's van, who was now talking into a cell phone.

“That's him,” said Lucy. “That's Maybe Gonzales. What're they doing out here? Should we call the cops? Mom?”

 

Marlene doesn't answer. She is staring at the man, who has put his cell phone away and is now removing a short length of three-inch plastic pipe from the rear of the van. The tow truck honks again. Marlene understands what she's seeing, and understands what she has to do. She hands Lucy her cell phone.

“Yeah, call the cops. Tell them we've spotted people who are probably members of the Manbomber gang, right next to the courthouse. They've got what looks like big pipe bombs. Give them the details on the guys, and remind them that the governor is in the courthouse right now. Then call Dad and tell him the same thing.”

“What are you going to do?” Lucy asks. She doesn't like the look on her mother's face.

“Call,” says Marlene and slips from the cab of the truck. She goes to the rear and pops the camper door.

Zak asks, “What's going on, Mom? Why did we stop?”

“A little problem. Look, both of you, it's real important that you stay here with Lucy. I have to go and check on something.”

She takes a key ring out of her bag and uses a cylinder key to open a steel lock box bolted to the bed of the truck. The can suppressor is still screwed to the barrel of the Beretta nine-millimeter from the night she used it on Cherry and her dealer.

“What's going on, Mom?” asks Giancarlo. The guide dog whimpers.

She has not cleaned the pistol, has not wanted to think about the pistol at all. Now here it is in her hand again, with her non-blind son staring at it and her with a mix of horror and fascination she cannot bear seeing. She slams the camper door on his protesting cry.

She runs forward. The two men are trudging through the drifts, two men in black coveralls, each one carrying a short length of gray, three-inch pipe capped on each end. She shouts to them to stop. They turn and see her and her gun. They start to run, slipping and sliding in the snow.

 

Karp is closeted in the DA's office with the DA and the governor of New York and all the senior NYPD people on the premises, and the governor's security chief.

“He was real clear,” said Karp, and not for the first time. “There's a bomb in the basement big enough to destroy the entire building and he'll set it off unless he hears from ibn-Salemeh that his release is under way. He said we're not to bring in the feds, not to inform the press, and not to bring any additional police onto the scene. He said they're observing the building and if any move is made to evacuate it, or to move cops in, they'll blow it up. He gave us two hours.”

Everyone looked at the governor. The governor looked at Karp. “Are we sure this isn't a bluff?”

“Well, I can't say from the conversation I had with him, Governor, but the connect between ibn-Salemeh and the Manbomber is fairly explicit by now. We shouldn't be in any doubt that these people can build, deliver, and explode bombs. And they don't care about killing people one bit.”

The state police security man, a fellow named Lambert, said, “Governor, the limo is waiting right outside the DA entrance on Leonard Street. I can't see how they could learn you're moving, give the order, and explode the bomb before we had you safe and away.”

The governor ignored this. “What about the other people in the building? How many are there, Jack?”

Keegan said, “Usually about fifteen hundred, and we have more than the usual number of kids in the day-care center. It's the big day for judicial staff Christmas parties and people like to bring family. There's usually well over a hundred. Do you want an exact count?”

“No, it's more than enough. We're staying.” He turned to an aide. “Get Auburn on the phone. I want to talk to the warden.”

While this was being done, they heard the sounds of a scuffle outside, a loud male voice and a higher female one, indignant. Karp stood up and walked to the door. Outside in the narrow corridor, his secretary was facing off with a state trooper twice her size.

Flynn met Karp's eye. “It's your daughter. She says it's an emergency and this lummox wouldn't let me by to tell you.”

 

There is an excavation on the Baxter Street side of the courthouse. Half the street and all of the sidewalk have been taken up and replaced by a pit shored up on three sides by raw two-by-eights. On the fourth side is a ramp faced with perforated steel plates and large enough for a five-ton truck. This is how they moved material for the cooling and heating renovations down into the basement. Marlene sees the two men disappear down the ramp and she follows. A hole has been cut in the side of the building and shored with steel girders. Past that is the basement proper. Marlene sees them enter a hallway. Crouching slightly, she pursues them. She is thinking, These are the people who killed Pete, and Nora and those others, and all the self-pitying feelings of the day and the previous days are gone, and she is focused on the passing instant only, in full predator mode.

She is in a hallway, painted pale green. There are black bloodstains on the floor and two bodies, both of men in construction worker clothing. A man steps from a doorway holding a Skorpion submachine gun. He fires a burst at Marlene but he doesn't aim low enough and she hears the rounds snapping over her head and whining down the hall. She raises her pistol and without breaking her stride shoots him in the chest and face. He falls in the doorway and she trots forward and steps over him.

Marlene is on a small landing. Steel steps lead down to the floor of the main boiler room. Six men are on the floor of the room. Two of them are the men in coveralls she has chased here and the other four are wearing construction gear. Of these, three are armed with pistols or submachine guns. The scene is very clear and sharp to her, almost unnaturally so, like a museum diorama showing how the Indians made pemmican. There is a rough table in the center of the group, on which lie the two plastic tubes. One of them has been opened and wires emerge from it. These wires are wrapped around others coming from a cellular phone with its case removed. The man wrapping the wires looks up like a high school teacher interrupted at a demonstration of some elementary physics fact. It is Maybe Gonzales, the Berber. Because Marlene has a silenced weapon, they don't realize that she is killing them for a few seconds and so she takes out Gonzales and two of the armed ones and then there is a return fusillade from the floor and she has to retreat.

 

Lucy's 911 call got a lot of attention. The 911 system has been trained to take bomb threats very seriously, and after the operator had determined that Lucy Karp was a real person, and responsible, and the daughter of the soon-to-be DA, and that the threat was lodged in the courthouse, the governor also being onsite, things moved with dispatch. The recent events in New York had caused to be created several specialized Emergency Service Units to deal with terrorists. One of these teams was lodged in police headquarters, a few hundred yards from the courthouse. Three minutes after being scrambled, two extremely costly specialized black, four wheel-drive vehicles were racing up Baxter Street, loaded with enthusiastic, heavily armed men.