In some ways it’s a classic siege situation. They’ve been through the initial phase and are now in the more fluid negotiation, or standoff, phase. Conventional wisdom says that the longer a siege situation of this type goes on, the more likely it is to end peacefully, so the negotiators are probably dragging it out deliberately, employing various well-worn tactics. But it’s unclear so far what demands, if any, the Coadys are making. None of that information had trickled down from police sources to any of the reporters Ellen spoke to.
There was plenty of speculation, though, as more information became available about who they were, about the older brother’s previous activism, and about the circumstances surrounding their father’s death.
There was also plenty of speculation about the explosives-about whether or not they really had any, and about what kind these were most likely to be if they did.
Ellen figures that this is the key point on which the whole thing will turn.
She also figures there’ll have to be a development soon. It’s gone on long enough, and with Friday morning kicking into gear a four-block-radius shutdown of any part of the city is pretty much unsustainable.
She could turn on the TV for an update, but again, she decides not to.
Why?
Because on reflection she doesn’t really want to know. It’s not her story anymore.
If she turned on the TV now, it’d be as a civilian.
It’d be prurience.
So she keeps staring up at the ceiling, unable to stop running stuff through her mind, though.
It’s weird, the one person she feels particularly bad for is Frank Bishop. He was a nice guy, strangely guarded, or repressed or something, she doesn’t know, but what he must be going through at the moment is unimaginable.
Ellen eventually starts getting drowsy, and by a little after 9 A.M. she has fallen asleep.
Thanks to an endless supply of bad coffee and high-grade adrenaline, Frank has managed to stay awake all night and well into the next morning.
There’s a strange feel to the new day. All the fire escapes and shop signs on Orchard are glistening and sun-dappled in the early light. But simultaneously, at street level, a deathly stillness radiates from the deserted, locked-up bodegas and nail salons, the leather goods stores and discount boutiques.
Frank finds it disturbing and weirdly calming at the same time.
But really, he’s been through so many phases of this thing already that it’s hard to tell, from one moment to the next, just what he’s feeling.
Once he got past his own initial phase late the previous evening-pure terror eventually yielding to a slightly less intense cocktail of anxiety and confusion-he found that talking to people, the police officers, the FBI guys, the negotiators, anyone who’d engage with him, was as good a way of steadying his nerves as any. And these people did allow a certain amount of information to filter out. Initial phone contact, for example, revealed an apparent degree of confusion on the part of the Coady brothers. Seasoned negotiators regarded this as a positive, because it indicated amateur status-it meant the brothers didn’t really know what they were doing and would therefore be easier to manipulate. A long-and no doubt calculated-stand-off phase ensued, and during this time detailed profiles of the Coadys were drawn up, not just by the various law enforcement agencies involved but also by the media, with the online edition of the New York Times first out of the gate. And by this stage, too, late into the night, Frank and Deb were both glued to their respective devices, monitoring news and Twitter feeds, text messages and e-mails.
As a result, it wasn’t long before there was something approaching full disclosure on Alex and Julian Coady. Frank found this extremely difficult, even humiliating-hearing in detail, along with everyone else, about a boyfriend of his daughter’s he hadn’t known existed until yesterday.
It appears that the Coadys, originally from Florida, are a wealthy, well-respected family-or at least were until six years ago when old man Jeremy L. Coady slit his own throat in a Manhattan hotel room after being indicted by a federal grand jury on twenty counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering stemming from his alleged role in a $4.7 billion Ponzi scheme. In the subsequent trial of his business partner, it emerged, or was claimed, that Coady had been unaware of what was going on in the company and was driven to suicide by the shame and ignominy heaped on him after the charges were made public. This was the narrative that his family-certainly his two sons, and especially the older one-chose to embrace. Julian was “radicalized” by what had happened and embarked on a so-called crusade against the bankers and financiers of Wall Street-individuals and institutions he saw as being responsible for the culture of greed and excess that had ultimately destroyed his father. Younger brother Alex, the quiet, impressionable one, was perceived to have been led astray by Julian.
References to Elizabeth Bishop, the “girlfriend”-incorrectly assigned to Julian in some reports-were cursory and light on detail, a fact that Frank found irksome, as if they were somehow giving her short shrift. But at the same time it was a relief, and it also meant that no reference was made at this stage (early morning, first editions) to either him or Deb. This was almost an even bigger relief, as far as Frank was concerned, though he didn’t expect it to last.
At around 5 A.M. there was a second flurry of activity.
A phone call was made into the apartment.
As one of the cops, a Detective Lenny Byron, explained to Frank later, this was strategic, a very deliberate move, the idea being to disorient the Coadys after hours of silence, to shake them up, maybe even to wake them up.
But what nobody expected was that the negotiator would be greeted with a coherent shopping list of demands.
And that these would be delivered by the girlfriend.
It took both Frank and Deb a good while to bounce back from this. Lizzie was the difficult one of their two kids, the one who required inordinate amounts of cunning and guile to deal with, and who gave it all back in spades-so on one level this didn’t really come as a surprise…
But-
It still did.
Plus, it also led to an unfortunate and inevitable shift in focus. Because for the next editions, for the online news updates, for the TV breakfast shows, and for fucking Twitter, it was no longer a question of who are these geeky boys, and more a question of who is this nineteen-year-old girl?
America going, “Hey Nineteen.”
Skate a little lower now.
Frank’s heart bursting and ripping itself into bloody shreds inside his chest.
Then, by eight o’clock, on discussion panels all across the networks, professors of behavioral psychology were name-checking Patty Hearst and wondering if this mightn’t be another classic case of Stockholm syndrome. Deb was distraught at the very idea, as it seemed to bring home to her just what a circus the whole thing had become. She’d been fairly composed for most of the night and had spent a lot of it on the phone to her second husband, Lloyd, either out at the barrier or sitting in one of the NYPD trailers. She and Frank had been civil at first, united in their horror at what was happening, but they’d pretty quickly run out of things to say to each other. By morning, a combination of sheer physical exhaustion and the weirdness of this enforced proximity had led to a palpable tension between them, with contact soon limited to the occasional wordless look or cryptic shrug.
Now, just before ten o’clock, that tension escalates in a way that catches Frank off guard. Deb emerges from one of the trailers and comes toward him with her BlackBerry held up.
She looks great, as usual, elegantly dressed and with that commanding, lawyerly presence. She walks right up to him and waves the BlackBerry in his face. “You weren’t going to tell me?”