Alert: (Michael Bennett 8), page 11
“What is this crazy place, Mike? Roosevelt Island, I mean,” Emily said as we rolled south under several varieties of train and car underpasses and finally swung onto the small, two-lane Roosevelt Island Bridge.
“Oh, just another one of the bizarre real estate situations you find in this crazy city,” I said. “I think it used to be the site of a mental asylum in the early 1900s, and then they put up some kind of rent-subsidized housing complex. I guess its claim to fame is that it has its very own ski chalet–like cable car you can take to get into Manhattan.”
“A Euro ski tram in New York City?” said Emily, her midwestern face scrunching. “Is it a heavily Swiss immigrant neighborhood or something?”
“Like I said, this is Queens, Emily.” I nodded out at the water. “What happens in Queens stays in Queens.”
The crime scene was at the base of the 59th Street Bridge, toward the south end of the small, narrow island.
I could see that the contingent of cops already waiting for us was definitely much larger than what you’d see at a regular homicide scene. In addition to at least four blue-and-whites from the island’s public safety people, there was a wagon circle of various unmarked detective cars, FDNY ambulances, the medical examiner’s mobile command center, and even an NYPD Emergency Services Unit truck.
Walking through the flashing blue and red lights toward the tape, I spotted Lieutenant Bryce Miller standing with his ESU intelligence commando cowboys. Even before the crack of dawn, the tall and polished pretty boy, looking like a soap opera actor, was in his power suit, ready for his close-up.
“Hey, Bennett. Glad you could make it,” Bryce said sarcastically as we went past him.
He must be a pretty good intel guy after all, I thought, nodding at him. It seemed that he, too, had heard the rumors about my upcoming demise as case lead.
I was coming around the back of the buslike medical examiner’s mobile command center when I saw the ME himself, Tom Durham, helping one of his assistants slide the first of the two stretchers with the already body-bagged suspects on them up a ramp to the vehicle’s back door.
“Hold it there, Tom,” I said to the NBA-tall medical examiner, whom I’d worked with a few times about a decade earlier, when I was in Homicide.
“Mike Bennett,” Durham said, peeling off his rubber glove to shake my hand over the corpse. “Well, well, out of the mists of time. You’ve put on weight.”
“Ah, c’mon, Tom,” I said. “You know how these blue and red lights always put on ten pounds. This is my partner, Emily. Any chance you find any ID on these two?”
“Nope. Not a thing. We already printed them, too, for that guy in the suit over there. No help there, either, apparently.”
“You mind if we take a quick peek at them?” I said.
“Nope,” Tom said, grabbing the body-bag zipper. “And neither will they, I imagine.”
I placed the video still of the darker kid next to the kid on the gurney. The kid’s head was grotesquely deformed from several gunshot wounds, but I thought the picture looked like him.
“What do you think?” I said to Emily.
“I think it’s him,” she said.
Tom looked over her shoulder.
“Me, too,” the ME said with a nod.
We quickly ID’d the other suspect as the second guy who dropped off the EMP device. We needed names, though. Somehow. There was no way I was going to allow this to be yet another dead end.
I thanked Tom, but instead of heading back to the car, I pocketed my phone and walked with Emily away from the police lights to the rocky edge of the island’s dark shore.
“Wait a second,” I said after a minute of looking out over the water. “Look.”
Across the quick current of choppy water, not too far away at the Manhattan base of the bridge, were the lights of our crisis post for the Yorkville disaster.
“The bastards were right here watching us yesterday, weren’t they?” Emily said in shock. “Watching us scramble. The panic. All those poor souls having to be evacuated from the hospitals. They just stood here happily watching the results of what they’d done.”
“And by leaving the bodies right here, I guess they want us to know it,” I said.
“I’m really starting to not like these fellas, Mike,” Emily said as she kicked a broken kayak handle into the water. “I mean, not even a little bit.”
CHAPTER 43
SEVERAL HECTIC HOURS later that day, at ten to one, Emily and I waited in a narrow, crowded hallway before a set of double doors on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza.
On the other side of the doors, we could hear a voice droning on as we hastily went over the final details of the report we were about to give to the police commissioner and acting mayor and various and sundry other officials.
The door of the thunderdome opened after a minute, and Chief Fabretti was there.
“Mike, you ready?” he said.
The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment.
In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.
But before I could answer the chief’s question, Emily and I were inside, front and center.
There were about twenty or thirty people up on the amphitheater-style seats surrounding us, a lot of tense-looking NYPD and FBI brass, and the acting mayor. Also some suits from the White House, we’d been told.
If I needed any further indication of what was at stake, I saw it on the whiteboard that the last speaker had been using. Two words had been written with a Sharpie in large black letters.
EVACUATION PLAN
“Who the hell is this again?” said the acting mayor over the rim of her eyeglasses.
The tall, long-necked, white-haired woman’s name was Priscilla Atkinson, and I almost felt like asking the Park Avenue–raised grande dame the same question, as her only experience before being named deputy mayor was running public events for the Central Park Conservancy.
Instead I began.
“Hi. I’m Detective Bennett. This is Special Agent Parker, and we’d like to bring everybody up to date on what we have so far.”
An aide whispered in the acting mayor’s ear.
“One question,” Atkinson said, interrupting me. “What’s going on, Detective Bennett? Who’s doing this to us, and why the hell haven’t you found them yet?”
Instead of pointing out that she’d just asked, in fact, three questions, I continued.
“I’m here to answer everybody’s questions, Ms. Mayor, okay? I’ve been informed that everybody has already been briefed about the EMP device we discovered. What you may not be aware of is that last night, we were able to obtain video footage of men—two men—placing the object on the East Side building’s roof.”
“Are they the same two men seen on the video at the train bombing?” said the commissioner from the row beneath the mayor.
“No, they’re not, Mr. Commissioner,” said Emily. “They were different men.”
“Have you ID’d them? Who the hell are they?” demanded the mayor.
“We’ve located them, ma’am,” I said, “and we’ve actually just ID’d them as two recent NYU grads.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“We don’t know. We found them this morning in a Dumpster at a construction site on Roosevelt Island, both shot multiple times in the head.”
That got the murmuring going.
“The men ran a marketing firm. They’re local kids with no terrorist ties,” Emily said before the mayor could jump in with another stupid obvious question. “We think they were hired by the people behind this.”
“So we’re still in the dark?” said Ms. Atkinson.
“Not entirely,” I said. “We scoured their Internet and phone records and discovered that both were paid large sums of money over the Internet through what seems to be the same PayPal account. With the help of federal authorities, we are in the process of tracking down the owner of the account.”
“Get to it, Bennett,” the commissioner said after a beat. “Keep us apprised.”
I nodded at him and at Lieutenant Bryce Miller sitting below the commissioner like the good little doggie he was.
Guess I’m still on the case after all, Brycey, I mentally texted him.
As Fabretti showed us the door, I saw one of the White House suits start BlackBerrying like crazy; I hoped they were putting some pressure on PayPal to cough up a name. The mayor nodded at us before she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Seeing the obvious great concern and worry in her suddenly old-seeming face, I felt bad for her. She was just as strained and concerned and tired as the rest of us. And that was saying a lot.
CHAPTER 44
THAT NIGHT AT around 9:30, approximately fifty-five miles due north of New York City, Emily turned off her phone as I pulled my unmarked off a backcountry road into a remote campground at Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, on the border between Putnam and Dutchess Counties.
Unfortunately, we weren’t at the state park for a midnight weenie roast. There were at least a dozen New York state trooper vehicles already in the large parking lot, along with the same number of unmarked FBI Crown Victorias. Beyond a trooper command bus were two matte-black BearCat troop trucks, and at the end of the lot, in a muddy clearing, sat a bulky olive-drab Black Hawk helicopter with military markings.
We were finally on the hunt now. At around five that afternoon, PayPal had revealed the name of the person who had sent funds to both the mayor’s shooter and the dead EMP guys, and it was a doozy.
The name on the PayPal transfer was Jamil al Gharsi. Al Gharsi was a Yemeni-born Muslim cleric who was already on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist, suspected of running a militant and potentially violent Islamic group on a grubby cattle farm five miles due east of Fahnestock State Park.
Al Gharsi’s two dozen–strong group had a website that billed them as a kind of Muslim Cub Scouts, though they were anything but. The FBI had been following them closely since their inception six months ago, and they had been observed training with weapons.
The group also had ties to al Qaeda in Yemen, which boggled my mind. Why hadn’t they been shut down already? No one knew, or at least no one would say. If al Gharsi’s group turned out to be responsible for the bombings and for the assassination in New York, I was truly going to kick somebody’s ass. If Homeland Security had let yet another Islamic terrorist attack occur, I was going to be the first to propose its disbanding.
Emily and I passed a bunch of troopers wearing their Smokey the Bear hats and climbed onto the crowded bus, where the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had already started its briefing.
A flat screen behind the driver’s seat showed a series of photographs from reconnaissance that had already been done.
The pictures featured a cluster of buildings in the center of a large hilly field near the bottom of a ridge. There was an old farmhouse—a low concrete building that almost looked like a school—and a large dilapidated barn that was listing so far to the left it looked as if some magic spell had frozen it in the midst of collapse.
“This is al Gharsi,” the HRT leader, Terry Musa, said as he handed out a printout showing a mean-looking bald guy with a beard that would make any of the Boston Red Sox’s starting lineup green with envy.
“He is six foot three,” Musa said as he tightened a strap on his helmet. “He is also a mixed martial artist and one tough bastard, apparently. We don’t know what kind of weapons or explosives we’re going to encounter. I wouldn’t even recommend going in on the bird with this EMP shit, but there’s no other way. So bottom line, be very, very fucking careful, okay, folks? Paying these assholes back won’t be any fun if you’re dead.”
CHAPTER 45
AT THE END of the briefing, Emily and I, along with two trooper teams, were assigned to watch a back road up on the ridge behind the farm.
Fifteen minutes later, with our headlights off, we coasted to a stop on a tree-lined gravel road beside a barred cattle gate. Beyond the gate was another gravel road that curved down to the left, out of sight through some trees. Down below the trees were the fields and farm.
When the other two teams radioed that they were in position a hundred feet back down the road behind us, I turned off the car and rolled down the window.
I looked down at the farm’s rugged, unkempt fields. It was some desolate-looking country, all right. An almost constant wind whistled in the creaking roadside pines and white birches around us, like something out of The Blair Witch Project. Like most born-and-bred New York cops, the country at night always scared the hell out of me.
“Did you know they say Rip Van Winkle fell asleep around these parts?” I said after a minute to fill the creepy silence.
“I thought that was the Catskills,” Emily said.
“You’re right. Maybe I’m thinking of the Headless Horseman,” I said as I heard a low thumping.
I looked up as the FBI’s Black Hawk swung over the ridge above the car.
“Here we go,” I said, turning up the radio.
The world went green as I peered through the night-vision telescope we’d been supplied with. As I got the farmhouse below in focus, I could see the chopper hovering over its roof and the FBI commandos already fast-roping into the front yard. Blasts of green-tinged light blazed at the house’s front windows as the FBI guys tossed flashbangs.
That’s when I heard a sound up on the wooded hill beside the car. I heard it again. Something crackling, something moving through the trees and underbrush to our left.
“A deer?” Emily whispered beside me as I swung the night-vision scope.
She was wrong.
At the top of a small hill through the trees, I could see three men coming directly at us. I made out that they were large and in camo and had long beards before I tossed the night scope and swung around for the backseat.
“Shit! It’s them! Get behind the car!” I hissed at Emily as I turned and grabbed my M4 off the backseat.
I double-clicked it from safe to full auto and flung the door open. Wet mud sucked at my knees as I rolled beside the car into a prone shooting position.
The men, who must have finally seen the car, stopped suddenly halfway down the hill.
My heart bashing a hole in my chest, I managed to sight on the first man as I yelled, “Police! Down! All of you! Now!”
They looked at each other, then started whispering as they stayed on their feet. One of them was taller than the other two, I saw. Was it al Gharsi? Damn it, what were they doing? Did they have guns? Suicide vests? I wondered.
They definitely weren’t listening. I decided I needed to change that.
The silence of the night shattered into a million pieces as I went ahead and squeezed off a long burst of about a dozen or so .223 rounds up the hill. Wood splinters and leaves flew as I raked lead all over the trees and forest floor in front of them.
“We give up! Please don’t shoot!” one of them said as all three of them dropped into the fetal position.
I stood with the gun to my shoulder and my finger still on the trigger as I heard the sweet sound of the first trooper car screaming up the gravel road.
CHAPTER 46
“THIS IS TOTAL bullshit! This is racism! I know my rights. How dare you shoot at me on my own property?” said the large and broad-shouldered al Gharsi as he glared hatefully at me in the back of his crumbling farmhouse a tense twenty minutes later.
“Hey, I’m not the daring one, Al,” I said, kicking a cardboard box of double-aught shotgun shells across his dirty, scuffed floor. “Running a jihadist camp in New York State sixty miles from Ground Zero? Talk about chutzpah.”
And talk about living off the grid, I thought, shaking my head at the surroundings. The house was barely habitable. There was no phone, and what little electricity there was, was provided by a small propane generator. I couldn’t decide which part of the decor was more charming—the little room off the kitchen, where a roughly butchered deer lay on a homemade plywood table, or the upstairs bedrooms, where Arabic graffiti covered the walls above sleeping bags.
Handcuffed behind his back, al Gharsi shifted uncomfortably on a ratty, faded orange couch, where he sat bookended by two standing FBI commandos. The only other furniture was a massive green metal gun locker in a far corner and twelve pale immaculate prayer mats set in a disturbingly precise four-by-three rectangle in the center of the room.
The locker had kicked out some good news for a change. Several of the semiautomatic AK-47s inside had been illegally converted to fully automatic. A felony federal weapons violation would be a good start at gaining some leverage to find out just what in the hell was going on.
“This is not a jihadist camp,” al Gharsi said through yellow gritted teeth. “We are woodsmen, hunters.”
“Woodsmen,” I said with a laugh. “I guess that Arabic on the walls up there says, ‘Give a hoot, don’t pollute.’ You’re not woodsmen, but I’ll concede that you are hunters. It’s what you’re hunting that’s the problem.”
I walked behind al Gharsi and took the photographs Emily was holding. The black-and-white blown-up stills showed the two men from the subway tunnel bombing.
“Who are they?” I said, flapping the photographs in front of al Gharsi’s face.
He shrugged as he studiously refused to look at them.
“Who are they?” I said again, patiently.
“Wait. I know them. Yes,” he said, nodding, as he finally glanced at the pictures. “The one on the left, his name is…let’s see…Fuck. That’s it. His name is Fuck, and the one on the right is…um…You, I believe. There they are together, Fuck and You, my dear old friends.”
