He shrugged.
“What else is there, after all?”
Chapter 28
After the conference ended, my team and I set up shop at a couple of desks in a far corner of the crowded, kinetic Intelligence Division bull pen.
Although it was early in the morning, everyone already seemed a little haggard. The cops around me were doing their best to hide it, but it was obvious that people were getting scared. A bombing and an assassination were insane even by New York’s standards.
An hour later, I was still on the horn with the department public relations office trying to disseminate stills of the Washington Heights bombers to the news outlets when it started.
I had just tucked the desk phone receiver under my chin when I suddenly noticed the rhythmic, low-toned, almost subliminal buzzing that had invaded the sterile white office space. When my hip vibrated, I realized that the sound was everyone’s cell phones vibrating.
But why would everyone’s phones be going off at once? I thought, hanging up my desk phone and snatching up my cell.
“Mike, did you hear?” It was Miriam Schwartz on the other end.
“No. What?” I said frantically.
“We’re getting reports of a massive blackout on the East Side of Manhattan. But it’s not just that. The cars have stopped. All the cars are in the streets. They’ve stopped working.”
“The cars have stopped?” I repeated stupidly.
“We just got nuked!” someone called out behind me.
My eyes popped wide open. That couldn’t be true. How could that be true? I thought. Yet I remembered from a late-night History channel show that one of the side effects of a nuclear bomb is frozen cars — the bomb fries all their electronics.
A strange numbness invaded my face, my brain. It was a weird sensation that I’d felt only twice before.
The day the doctor told us that my wife, Maeve, had inoperable terminal cancer.
And on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Dear God, my kids! Where are the kids? I thought as Miriam tried to tell me something. The damn bridge! I need to get over the bridge back to Manhattan, then get to Holy Name. But Brian went to school in the Bronx. I needed to figure out how I was going to get him.
“Mike! Damn it, listen to me!” Miriam said loudly. “It’s not a nuke. That’s what everybody is assuming, but it’s not true.”
I let out a breath and did my best to refocus.
“I’m listening, Miriam.”
“ESU reports on scene at the affected region state that there is no radiation being detected anywhere. Though it does look like a nonnuclear EMP-type weapon or something might have been set off. The power is out for a hundred square blocks, and New York State ISO — the organization that manages the electrical grid — said it isn’t a blackout. At eight fifteen, just bam! Everything went off in Yorkville like someone blew out a candle. The FBI’s JTTF is heading up to a staging area near the base of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. I already said you’d meet up with them there.”
“On my way,” I said, and I waved at Doyle and the crew to follow me as I hit the door.
Chapter 29
It wasn’t on the radio news yet as I sped out of Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge. Traffic was completely screwed up from almost the moment we arrived in Manhattan. We made it only as far as 44th Street and Second Avenue, a little past the United Nations, when the traffic became literally impassable.
I pulled the car over and double-parked and stood on the unmarked’s hood and stared north to see what was going on.
And continued to stand there, frozen and silent and blinking, in the cold falling rain.
It was a sight to behold. Something right out of a disaster movie. Second Avenue was stopped dead as far as the eye could see. On the sidewalks and between the utterly still cars, people were walking south, away from the area.
There were office workers, a lot of schoolkids. The worst were the doctors and nurses in medical scrubs pushing people in wheelchairs. A frantic and confused-looking churning multitude of scared New Yorkers was heading straight toward us.
“How’s it looking, Mike?” said Robertson as he got out of the car.
“Not good,” I said, hopping down. “Get the others. We need to walk from here.”
At Second Avenue and 59th Street, two empty NYPD cruisers and an empty FDNY ambulance stood in the middle of the entrance to the 59th Street Bridge on-ramp ominously silent with their flashers on.
I was silent, too, as I stood and stared above the emergency vehicles at the red trailer-size Roosevelt Island tram car, lightless, with its window broken open, swinging back and forth in the rain like a hanging victim.
We walked east, toward the FBI staging area, along the stone base of the bridge. There were a lot of frozen empty cars in the streets and an exodus of freaked-out people heading quickly past them and us.
At First Avenue, on the other side of the bridge underpass, I could see that a city bus had sideswiped half a dozen parked cars and was turned sideways up on the sidewalk. A crushed moped appeared to be stuck under its front bumper.
“Not good,” Arturo commented.
“At all,” Doyle concurred.
The worst sight of all was a block east, on York Avenue. In the distance, in the area known as Hospital Land, a large crowd of emergency personnel beside a line of ambulances appeared to be in the process of evacuating Sloan Kettering and Weill Cornell Medical Center.
“What are they doing?” said Arturo. “Don’t they just need to get all these cars out of here so they can get in some temporary generators?”
“To power what?” said Brooklyn. “Everything is fried. This isn’t just a blackout, Lopez. Everything electronic is broken. Everything. Every water pump to flush a toilet. Every fridge and stove is going to have to be fixed or replaced. They’re going to have to evacuate the area for who knows how long.”
“You’re right,” Doyle said. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
The FBI’s staging area turned out to be at the site of an old concrete dock and helipad jutting out into the East River almost beneath the bridge. A dozen agents, six of them in olive-drab tactical fatigues, had set up tents and tables and a gasoline-powered generator.
We’d just reached the first tent when there was a low, thumping hum, and a helicopter appeared from the fog under the 59th Street Bridge. We stopped and stared at the dark navy-blue Bell 407 with no markings as it slowed and banked and swung around and did a steady, controlled landing despite the wind.
Its rolling door snapped open, and out came four men and a woman in FBI Windbreakers carrying large kit bags. I kept looking at the copper-haired female agent as the whining helicopter lifted off again immediately and headed back the way it came.
I was either hallucinating or the woman was my old pal Emily Parker. With New York City under siege, I could have definitely been hallucinating, but it turned out I was right.
“Mike,” Emily said, giving me a grim half smile as I approached. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”
Chapter 30
“Here, give me a hand with these radios,” she said, pulling some out of her bag. “We’re definitely going to need them with all the cell sites fried.”
“What brings you here?” I said to Emily after I introduced her to my guys. “I thought you were back down in DC.” Emily worked there for the Bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and lived in suburban Virginia with her daughter, Olivia.