Alert: (Michael Bennett 8), page 22
“Yevdokimov’s the link. We needed to find him yesterday,” I said as I almost knocked over my china coffee cup while fumbling out my phone to call New York. “He’s the only one who knows who the real bombers are.”
CHAPTER 94
THE LINE OF massive steel pylons forming the truck-bomb barrier were built directly into the asphalt across the width of Broad Street. They glinted dully in the morning sun as we pulled up in front of them eight hours later.
Beyond them to the north, up the man-made slot canyon of Broad Street, you could see the reason for all the security—the iconic columned edifice of the New York Stock Exchange.
We were down here in lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes territory not for a ticker-tape parade or to engage in insider trading but to head into the new FBI headquarters across the street from the exchange, at 23 Broad.
The whole block around the exchange already had incredible security, so it was a no-brainer after the fall of 26 Federal Plaza for the FBI to rent out space at what had to be one of the safest blocks in the entire city, if not the planet. Still, as we waited for our turn at the checkpoint, I frowned at the oak-trunk-thick steel rods that formed a line across the street. There was something depressing and barbaric about them, something medieval.
“You know you’re living in some interesting times,” I said to Emily, riding shotgun, “when they’ve actually brought back the drawbridge.”
The pylons retracted into the street after we showed our creds to federal cops manning the checkpoint, and we drove up and parked in 23 Broad’s underground lot. We’d been able to catch some sleep and actually shower on the mayor’s incredible plane, so we weren’t looking too bad as we rode the fancy financial building’s mirrored elevator up to the thirty-first floor.
I looked down at my suddenly vibrating phone to see that Fabretti was trying to call me. He’d texted me earlier to try to coordinate a media strategy, of all things. The raid on the island had been leaked to the press, apparently, and they wanted details.
Leaked by whom? I wondered. I hadn’t texted him back, nor did I answer his call. He didn’t seem to understand that we were still very much in the middle of this. It wasn’t mission-accomplished time.
Emily smiled at me in the elevator mirror as I looked up. We held eyes for a moment. Then two moments. Her eyes were nice to look at.
“What?” I finally said.
“Your kids,” she said.
“Oh, them,” I said, smiling back.
After we’d gotten off the plane, we’d been by my apartment to squeeze in a happy-reunion-slash-power-breakfast with my kids. Seamus had done God’s work by having piles of scrambled eggs and toast and Irish sausages hot and ready for us. As we devoured them, the gang had regaled us about their incredible failed Escape from New York odyssey in the van. I laughed the hardest when they said they had to practically carry poor Martin, completely exhausted, into his dorm room back at Manhattan College.
He was probably still sleeping, I thought. Or looking for a new job.
“What about my little tykes?” I said to Emily as we ascended. “What did they do this time? Was it Eddie?”
She shook her head and smiled. “They’re just terrific. All of them. So alive and funny and happy and good. They actually care about each other. No one even has kids anymore, and you have ten. Ten! That’s a lot of love. They’re so lucky.”
“I’m the lucky one,” I said. “They practically take care of me now.”
Off the elevator in the hall on thirty-one, there was an incredibly stunning airplane-like view of the city. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass on the east side, you could see the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, and down the corridor was a clear shot of the gleaming Freedom Tower and Lady Liberty out in the harbor.
“This city doesn’t quit, does it?” Emily said, walking over and pressing her forehead to the glass like a little kid.
“All the people and motion and money and work and art and history. Dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper after dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper everywhere you turn. I mean, look at it. It’s…a wonder.”
“It sure is,” I said, looking down with her at the slants of light on the buildings and the ant-size people on Broadway. Out in the wide, sparkling bay, a bath-toy tugboat was drawing alongside Liberty Island, chugging earnestly toward Bayonne.
“But you know what the bigger wonder is?” I said after a beat.
“What’s that?”
“Why all these losers keep lining up to destroy it.”
CHAPTER 95
I FOLLOWED EMILY around a corner, where she pressed some buttons on an electronic keypad beside an unmarked door. On the other side of it was a huge busy bull pen of desks and cubicles with phones ringing and FBI agents tapping at computers and running around.
Without saying anything to anyone, Emily guided me through the office maze and around another corner to another unmarked door beside another keypad. She typed in another combo, and then we were in a cramped, too-bright windowless room where there were rows of servers on shelves and wires on racks and eight or nine people typing at computer terminals.
Emily introduced me around to the agents of the FBI New York office cyber investigative squad. CIS supervisory agent Chuck Jordan was a young, intense, clean-cut guy who, in his sharp Tiffany-blue button-down dress shirt and gray slacks, looked more like a young finance guy than a cop.
Jordan had called Emily as we were finishing breakfast. He said he might have found a possible lead on Yevdokimov’s whereabouts.
“So you think you have something for us, Chuck?” said Emily.
Instead of saying anything, Chuck handed us a photograph. It was a shot of a cluttered table with papers and books piled on it. There was a pair of glasses, a magenta Sharpie, and a crumpled napkin on an egg-crusted paper plate. Beyond the messy table was a room with bare, paint-chipped plaster walls and dirty hardwood floors. The space struck me as vaguely industrial.
In the top left-hand corner of the photo, you could see a shadeless window. In the window was the stone edifice of an old office building on the other side of a narrow street.
“This is the PC where the ransom demand originated from,” Chuck said. “This shot is from the PC’s webcam.”
“Where is it?” I said.
“That’s the rub,” Chuck said. “We don’t know. They sent the signal through Tor, the underground computer network. It bounces things around so you don’t know the actual physical location or owner of a particular computer. Basically, we can find the original computer. Unfortunately, we just don’t know whose it is or where it is. That’s why we turned on the PC’s camera to get a clue from the room.”
“You turned on the camera on the bad guy’s computer? How?”
“After the judge gave us a warrant, we sent in our Trojan horse,” Chuck said.
“Trojan horses are the investigative malware we use,” Emily explained. “It looks like a regular program on the surface, but behind the scenes, it’s secretly able to contact the PC’s internal controller to allow backdoor access to the target PC.”
“Like a virus or something?” I said.
“Technically, no,” said Chuck. “Technically, a virus attempts to inject itself into other files. A Trojan is its own file.”
“But how do you get in?” I said. “What about firewalls and stuff?”
“Most people have one or two popular antivirus programs, so we usually send the Trojan through a pretend update to one of them,” Chuck said. “But in this case, the target didn’t seem to have an antivirus program on the list, so we used an exploit in their browser’s PDF parser.”
“A what in the what?” I said.
Emily rolled her eyes.
“Does it matter, Mike? They went around it with some computer stuff. Bottom line, we can look at a bad guy’s files, even turn on his webcam and microphone, which is what they did here.”
“And you searched their files?” I said to Chuck. “Did you find the ransom video?”
“No, it’s not there. They must have removed it,” he said, squinting.
“What about encryption? This guy is a hacker himself,” I said. “He has to use encryption, right?”
“He had layers upon layers of it, but we looked at the PC’s recorded keystrokes and got the passwords to the encryption software he used.”
“Got it,” I said, gazing at the picture again.
I concentrated on the building beyond the window. It had setbacks and some fairly elaborate ornamentation in the stonework. Some stone wreaths and a lot of fleurs-de-lis. Where was this building? It definitely seemed familiar.
“Hey, wait. Did you get any audio?” Emily said.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Chuck said with a mischievous smile as he clicked a terminal’s button.
“We picked this up just three minutes ago,” he said. “This is a live feed. Listen carefully.”
We did. There were sirens and traffic, and then we heard it. A soft, rhythmic buzzing sound.
“No,” I said. “That’s not what it sounds like, is it?”
“Oh, yes, it is,” said Chuck, rubbing his hands together. “Someone is close to that computer, and they’re snoring. We heard a door open ten minutes ago, then somebody creaking down onto what has to be a bed or something.”
“Yevdokimov! Has to be!” Emily said. “He’s there right now!”
“Wherever the hell ‘there’ is,” I said as I gazed at the photo again. “This building in the window here. I feel like I know it. I just can’t place it.”
“It’s definitely in Manhattan, definitely somewhere below Ninety-Sixth Street,” Chuck offered.
“Old, dirty, once-grand office buildings. Where in the city do you have these old, dirty buildings? Basically all over the damn place,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Tribeca, maybe?” Chuck said. “Or SoHo?”
“Yes, kind of,” I said. “But in SoHo, the buildings are usually older and have elaborate fire escapes and all that painted castiron cladding. With all these setbacks, this building is prewar—classic-Superman era.”
“It looks huge,” said Emily.
“It also looks high up,” Chuck said. “Ten or twelve stories, maybe.”
“Wait. I got it!” I said, violently shaking the photograph. “The fleurs-de-lis!”
“The what?” said Chuck.
“The fleurs-de-lis. The intricate stonework design here under the windows. And the setbacks. I used to work in Midtown South. I know where this is!”
“You know the building?” Emily said.
“No, but I know the neighborhood. It’s the garment district. The West Side below Times Square,” I said, ushering Emily to the door. “Tell your buddies downstairs to lower the drawbridge, because we need to get uptown and pop this Russian clown before he wakes up and we lose him again.”
CHAPTER 96
SIREN CRANKING, WE raced up the West Side Highway all the way to midtown. I got off at 34th and gunned it five blocks to Macy’s. The light was red on Eighth Avenue, but there were no cars coming from the east or south, so I hooked a shrieking, fishtailing left around a shocked-looking DOT parking-ticket lady standing in the intersection.
I’d turned off the siren by the time we arrived to a skidding stop six blocks north, at 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. If Yevdokimov was in the area and still sleeping, the one thing I didn’t want to do was wake him up.
We parked by the southeast corner of the intersection, where the statues were. One was a bronze eight-foot structure called The Garment Worker that depicted a sad, old-looking, wrinkly guy in a yarmulke bent over a sewing machine, working on some fabric. Next to him was a gigantic button with a needle stuck through it. Between the two sculptures stood a dozen NYPD uniforms from the Midtown South task force, whom I’d called for help in finding Yevdokimov’s hideout.
We rushed over to them, and I quickly took a radio from the task force sergeant, Rowe, before handing out photographs of both Yevdokimov and the building in his window.
“Remember, guys. You need to look up,” I said. “This fleur-de-lis architectural design on the building we’re looking for is going to be on the tenth floor or so.”
We sectored out the district and split up on foot into two-person teams. Emily and I walked south down the east side of Seventh Avenue. We passed a gimcrack tourist gift place and a seedy-looking barbershop with a sign that said it bought gold. Fifth Avenue this was not.
As we walked, we looked east and west, up and down the side streets. Every one of them was extremely congested. Double-parked delivery trucks in the streets, loading and unloading. Guys on sidewalks pushing racks of plastic-wrapped clothes. It was coming on the lunch rush now, and clusters of workers were spilling out of the old buildings and jamming up the already crowded dirty sidewalks.
“These buildings are tremendous,” Emily said as we walked with our necks craned and eyes up, like Iowa tourists fresh off the farm. “They almost look like a cross between art deco skyscrapers and factories.”
“That’s exactly what they used to be,” I said. “All these buildings are mostly offices now, but back in the old days, they were vertical clothing factories. The art deco–like setbacks were required so workers on the upper stories would have light and air.
“It’s hard to believe, but before manufacturing went to Asia, New York City was an industrial powerhouse. In the thirties and forties, seventy-five percent of women’s clothes in the country were made right here between Sixth and Ninth Avenues, from Forty-Second down to Thirtieth. They were stitched up and put on racks and then rolled over to Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth for sale. Everything was centered around Penn Station, so people from out of town could come in and shop. The garment district here is why New York’s fashion industry still leads the world and Seventh Avenue means fashion.”
“But if these were just factories, why so elaborate? Why all the architectural stuff, especially on the upper floors? You can’t even really see it from down here,” Emily said.
“The people who built them were poor Lower East Side Jews who came up out of the sweatshops and made good,” I said, remembering something I’d read. “They wanted to make their mark by building factories that had over-the-top class. Also, they had a heart and wanted the mostly female workers stuck in the buildings all day to have something pretty to look at out the window, hence the stringcourses and volutes and egg-and-dart molding on the upper floors.”
“How do you know so much about all this?” Emily said, giving me a baffled look.
“I’m not all brawn. I actually have a library card,” I said with a shrug. “I also used to walk an evening beat here when I was fresh out of the academy, and I used to wonder about the buildings, so I did some homework. You quickly run out of things to look at after all the pretty secretaries go home.”
We were at 36th Street, staring up at the setbacks of an old telephone-company building, when Chuck Jordan called.
“Mike, we’ve been monitoring the room, and it sounds like the person snoring just woke up and left.”
“Is the laptop still there?”
“Yes,” Chuck said. “No change with that. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe he just went out to get something to eat.”
I’d just hung up with Chuck when one of the uniforms hailed me on the radio.
“Hey, Detective. This is Sergeant Rowe,” he said. “I think you should head over here to Thirty-Seventh Street near Eighth. I’m not positive, but I think I found that doodad you’re looking for on a building about a quarter of the way toward Seventh.”
“Good job, Rowe,” I said as I grabbed Emily’s arm and immediately started hustling her west toward Eighth Avenue. “We’re about a block away. Don’t leave yet, and try to stay out of sight. Keep your eyes peeled for Yevdokimov coming out of the building across the street. It looks like he’s on the move.”
We heard the yelling right as we made it to the corner of Eighth.
A block to the north, at the intersection of 37th, there was some kind of commotion in the street between a guy in a car and some guys on a motorcycle.
The car was a silver Mercedes double-parked beside a sidewalk construction shed, its bald driver half out of its window as he yelled. The two guys on the motorcycle beside him were dressed in black and wearing black full-face helmets. The big glossy orange Japanese motorcycle they sat on was so close to the Benz it seemed to be leaning on its left rear quarter panel.
Had the bike tapped the Benz? I thought, staring, as I started crossing 36th. A fender bender?
As I reached the other corner of 36th, the motorcycle’s engine suddenly screamed as it roared away from the Benz like a rocket east up 37th.
East up westbound 37th! I thought as the driver threw open his door.
“Down!” I yelled as I dove to the ground.
I was just able to pull Emily down on top of me on the sidewalk when the Mercedes exploded with a blast of light and a deafening boom.
CHAPTER 97
I GOT UP off my knees a disoriented moment later. I stood there with my hands over my ears, waiting for them to stop ringing, before I realized the ringing was the piercing blare of a stuck car horn.
I looked north and saw that the sound was coming from the half-blown-apart Mercedes. Through what looked like billowing white smoke, I could see the car up on the sidewalk, its front end wedged under the wreckage of the now-collapsed sidewalk shed.
I called in the description of the motorcycle over the radio as I ran toward the wreckage, pushing through an already clustering crowd on the sidewalk and street. I squinted against the nasty tang of burned metal as I began pulling away the aluminum poles and wooden sheets of the destroyed construction shed, trying to get access to the car.
As I peeled away the last couple of splintered plywood sheets, I saw that some type of tarp from the shed had fallen perfectly over the side of the car, like a showroom cover. Then I pulled the cover away, and I got my first good look at the damage.
