I was halfway there, a hundred feet to go. I didn’t look up at the cop. I just kept walking.
I could see Katherine clearly now. Her tan pants were stained with dirt and grease, her hair was matted from sweat, and her eyes were red, puffy, and filled with dread.
When I got thirty feet away, I stopped and unmuted my cell phone. “This is as far as I go, Chukov,” I said.
I put the phone down, unlatched the medical bag, tipped it forward, scooped up a fistful of rhinestones, and let them trickle through my fingers and run back into the bag.
A smile spread across his jowly mug, and I knew that the worthless glass had passed for the real thing. I closed the bag and picked up the phone.
“You wanted to see them?” I said. “You’ve seen them. Now send one of your men over here with Katherine and he can have the diamonds.”
Chukov hesitated.
“Don’t take too long,” I said. “There’s a cop on the west balcony who is starting to get interested in this little tableau, and I think we all should get out of here before he decides to ask embarrassing questions.”
Chukov looked up at the cop who was standing on the balcony. He turned to one of his men: a big, burly, stoop-shouldered Eastern European.
“Grigor,” he said. That was all I understood. The rest was in Russian.
Chukov let go of Katherine’s arm. Grigor stepped in, gently tapped her shoulder, and said, “We go. Please.”
They walked toward me and stopped less than two feet away. I could feel the fear coming off Katherine’s body.
“Take the bag,” I said to Grigor. “Take it back to Chukov and get the hell out of our lives.”
I waited for him to bend down and pick it up. He didn’t. Instead, he nudged it into position with his foot, then kicked it hard. It skittered across the floor and stopped directly at Chukov’s feet.
It would take Chukov less than ten seconds to open the bag and realize the diamonds were fake. Grigor stood silently, one hand on his gun, the other on Katherine.
I tilted my head down toward my lapel.
“Release the rabbit,” I said.
Chapter 88
THE BEST WAY to get a greyhound to race around a track is to give him a mechanical rabbit to chase.
Our rabbit was an olive-drab rucksack packed with smoke grenades like the ones I had thrown the night I found the diamonds. As soon as Zach pushed the remote detonator, it exploded outside the prestigious Yale Club at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue, across the street from the terminal.
Our mission was to create chaos outside Grand Central before all hell broke loose inside.
It worked like gangbusters.
The explosion was not much more than noise and smoke, but the earsplitting boom was enough to cause a coronary a block away, and the billowing acrid cloud of smoke could have blanketed a football field.
The blast was far enough away that down on the main concourse it sounded like a muffled car backfiring. Those who heard it waved it off — a classic case of This is New York. I have my own problems. That noise ain’t one of them.
Not so with the cops at the door. For them, standing around hour after hour, day after day, night after night, this was a holy shit moment. The shoe they had been waiting to hear drop.
And despite the fact that the streets of New York are the sole jurisdiction of the NYPD, the MTA state cops bolted out the door like a pack of greyhounds from the starting gate, racing to nail the exploding rabbit.
Katherine heard it, too. If she could be any more petrified than she already was, the noise pushed her to the edge. After her body twitched from being startled, fresh tears made tracks over the ones already dried on her dirty cheeks. I desperately wanted to wrap my arms around her and apologize for the pain and suffering I had caused, and vow to spend the rest of my life making amends for it. But all I could do now was make that promise to myself. I turned my attention back to Chukov.
The noise didn’t faze him. He was too busy opening the bag. He reached in and grabbed a handful of the glittering stones. A second later his head snapped around and he screamed at me. The words were in Russian, but I needed no translation. It was the cry of a man who had just come up with a fistful of worthless glass.
“Light it up,” I yelled into the wireless.
Chukov flung the rhinestones to the floor and went for his gun. I reached for Katherine and screamed, “Close your eyes! Cover your ears!” as I shielded her with my body.
She was too dumbfounded to follow through with my instructions. I pressed her face to my chest, covered her ears with my arm, and braced myself.
Unlike the benign smoke grenades that had drawn the cops onto the street, the ALST471 magnum ultra-flash grenade produces a brilliant flash, a deafening concussive blast, and a shower of white-hot sparks. It’s the military’s nonlethal version of shock and awe — developed as a stun device for a variety of tactical operations, including hostage rescue. Launch one into a crowd and it leaves everyone temporarily blind, deaf, and totally disoriented. Adam and Ty launched two.
The flash grenades hit their marks and rocked the place. Even with my eyes closed and my ears covered, the white light and the thunderous noise were like a lightning strike.
The shrieks and cries of the throng who were caught by surprise bounced off the marble walls and echoed from the domed ceiling.
I screamed into my wireless for Zach, opened my eyes, and saw him running toward me.
“You’re safe, you’re safe,” I yelled at Katherine as I passed her over to Zach. “Zach, don’t let her out of your sight. Go, go, go!”
Chapter 89
ZACH PUT HIS arm around Katherine and half dragged, half carried her toward the stairway to the north balcony, our designated safe zone.
The rest of us had six incensed Russians to deal with. Like everyone around them, they were still stunned, unable to fight back.
First, Grigor. He was flailing, still blinded, trying to get his bearings. I gave him a vicious chop to the larynx with the blade of my hand. The blow drove quantities of blood into his lungs. He dropped to his knees, gasping for air and coughing up thick red puddles. I grabbed his jaw with one hand, put my other hand behind his neck, and twisted. Hard. Harder than I would if I were trying to get a stuck lug nut off a wheel.
Even over the screams echoing through the cavernous train station, with its high ceilings, I was close enough to hear the wet pop, and I let him fall to the floor.
“Tango down,” I told my team.
A volley of gunfire reverberated through Grand Central. It was coming from above. Adam and Ty had raced up the stairs into Michael Jordan’s Steak House. They’d taken positions on the north balcony.
One of Chukov’s young punks had parked himself under the New Haven line departures board. He was still dazed from the flash grenade when Adam fired. The man’s chest tore open like a pumpkin that’s been hurled off a rooftop. His shirt turned red and he dropped in a heap.
“Tango three is on the west balcony,” I said.
Ty came back. “I don’t see him.”
“He hit the ground when the grenades went off. He’s hiding behind the marble balustrades.”
Ty kept talking. “Chickenshit bastard is socked in good. I can see a sliver of his punk ass between the sixth and seventh column.”
The balustrades were only inches apart, and Ty was at least two hundred feet away. Hitting the target would be like driving a golf ball through a chain-link fence.