He sprinted for the ambulance, slammed its rear doors shut and leaped into the driver’s seat. The engine was running. The siren, he thought, where’s the siren? I’ve got to have the siren to make it work. Frantically, his eyes swept the dashboard looking for the unfamiliar knob of the instrument that would guarantee his passage through the police lines.
Behind him, he heard angry shouts. He glanced in the sideview mirror. The blue-jacketed ambulance driver was running toward him, gesticulating wildly. On the tenement doorstep the intern in white had the end of the stretcher in one hand, a bottle of intravenous solution held over his dying patient in the other, a look of total disbelief affixed to his face. The siren, Kamal almost screamed out loud, where’s the siren? He turned. The attendant was only a few yards away, ready to leap for the door. No time left to look. Kamal threw the ambulance into gear and raced down the street. As he did, he heard the outraged ambulance driver shouting to a spectator, “Get nine-eleven!”
Kamal turned left at Ninth Avenue, finding at last the red knob that activated the ambulance’s siren. Sweating profusely, he rushed down Ninth to Fourteenth Street, then started to swing across the traffic toward the blockaded entry to Hudson Street. As he did, he almost screamed with joy at the sight before his rain-spattered windshield. A patrolman leaped into his squad car and pulled it out of line, opening a hole in the police cordon through which a second policeman was frantically waving him.
I made it, he thought, shooting through the gap in the cars, I’m inside!
Angelo, less than ten blocks away, was so concentrated on what he was going to say at the Sixth Precinct that he barely heard the dispatcher on his radio: “West Midtown and Lower Manhattan cars. Just stolen in vicinity 362 West Nineteenth Street, St. Vincent’s Ambulance Number 435, white with orange side markings.”
The driver of the ambulance, struggling for breath, ran up to the police barrier at Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Knowing the bureaucracy of his employers at the Emergency Medical Service, he had decided that the only way to save his dying patient was to run back to the hospital for a second ambulance himself.
“Hey,” one of the patrolmen at the barricade called out to him, “where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Son of a bitch!” the driver exploded, gesturing at the police all around.
“Where the fuck were all you guys when my bus got stolen?”
“Oh, yeah,” the cop said. “We got that on the radio. That was your ambulance? You see the guy?”
“Yeah, I seen him. Almost had my hands on him.”
“Come here a second,” the cop said, leading the driver to one of the patrol cars in the cordon. He handed him Kamal’s picture. “He look like this?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Christi” The patrolman leaned into the car and grabbed the speaker of his radio. “Central,” he shouted. “This is Car Six Able, Fourteenth and Eighth.
I have the complainant on the stolen Saint Vmny’s ambulance and he indicates the man who stole his ambulance may be the subject we’re looking for.”
Angelo heard the call as he was preparing to park his car at the Sixth Precinct station house on West Tenth Street. This time the words registered instantly on his mind. “Shit!” he exclaimed. “He’s inside!”
Damn it, he thought, why didn’t I think of that? I figured it was some drunk, some kid getting himself a tendollar ride. The guy must have known the cops would wave the ambulance through. Who’d figure?
“Where are you going?” Rand asked as Angelo spun his car into the broad alley paralleling the Sixth Precinct station house.
“To Charles and then Barrow to run a fast check on your ideal”
He rocketed along Charles leaning on his horn all the way. It was a quiet, mixed street of tenements, garages, private homes, a sidewalk cafe, trailing off as it neared the river into lofts, garages and half-empty warehouses. Crossing Greenwich Street, Angelo gasped. Parked down almost at the end of the street, close to the river’s edge, its interior lights still burning, he could see the white bulk of an ambulance. As soon as he saw it, Angelo switched off his headlights so that the car could glide silently up behind the ambulance. He picked out its orange stripes and, in the glow of its interior lights, he could read the words “St. Vincent’s Hospital” and its number, 435, on its white rear doors.
“It’s himI” he whispered to Rand. The ambulance was parked in front of a kind of a warehouse-loft, three stories high, a double garage fronting onto the street. The garage doors were closed, but beside them a door into the building was ajar. “He’s in there.”
He grabbed his radio mike, squinting as he did to read the numbers on the building across the street. He was proud of the fact he still had twenty-twenty vision and, as he liked to joke, could read upside down particularly well — so that he could read the papers on a guy’s desk.
“Ten-thirteen,” he called, “199 Charles. By the river.” There may have been an atomic bomb in New York, but Angelo knew that nothing was going to get help to the scene quicker than that “Assist patrolman” call. “The suspect we’re looking for is here,” he added.
“Come on, kid,” he said. “If he’s fooling around with a bomb that can blow up half the city in there, we can’t wait for help. We got to take him ourselves.” He gestured to the half-open door. “You stay there and give me backup.”
The street was silent and deserted. Off in the distance, Rand and Angelo could hear the rising wail of sirens, probably the first cars responding to their 10.13. They slipped out of the car, leaving its doors open to minimi7p noise, and headed for the warehouse. Its door gave onto a long, dingy corridor. At the far end they could see a flickering, uneven glow of light falling against the wall. Probably, Angelo guessed, a flashlight moving in a room just off the corridor. He pointed to it.
“There he is,” he whispered.
He peered down the corridor. He couldn’t see a thing, just the wavering light in the distance, and barely, just barely, he thought he heard noise at the end of the corridor. He stepped inside, moving quickly as he did behind the half-open door so that he was concealed by the shadow it cast and not silhouetted by the lights of the street outside. The detective stared down the corridor ahead of him. It was perhaps twenty-five, thirty feet long, but to Angelo it seemed interminable. He took a half-breath and slowly, deliberately, began to work his way along its length.
Inside Kamal Dajani squatted behind the black cylindrical form of his brother’s bomb on the loading ramp at the back of the garage. He spread his checklist onto the cement floor beside the blue metallic case containing the bomb’s firing mechanisms. Methodically, in the glare of his flashlight, he reviewed exactly what he had to do to reopen the case. First he had to punch the INIT button. When the green light glowed “IDENTIFICATION,” he would tap “OIC2” on the keyboard. Then, when the word “CORRECT” appeared he could tap the code 2F47 which would allow him to open the case and switch cassettes.
He rubbed his hands nervously, feeling the sweat greasing his palms, thinking. Maybe he should just take the chance of kicking it, of doing something violent to the box to trigger its protective devices. Kamal was too distrusting for that. Suppose his brother had somehow altered those systems? Then he might damage the entire package. There was no question of failing now. He glanced at his codes again and turned to the box.