Contained within this area are the blue-glass tower of the New York Health and Racquet Club; a large, twenty-story NYNEX building; and, across Water Street, a new forty-story office-building tower adorned with art deco ornamentation and built around a sizable plaza. This is One New York Plaza; beneath it is a shopping arcade, which can be entered at the corner of Water and Broad. On Pearl Street is the immense forty-story blue-glass tower called the Broad Financial Center, headquarters of the NASDAQ Financial Exchange. Across Whitehall is a pair of black forty-story towers, One State Street Plaza and Battery Park Plaza.
A team of twenty-two uniformed cops and FBI street agents was dispatched immediately to search the area for any building that contained a sign for the Greenwich Trust Bank.
A cell site is not a precise designation: there are areas of overlap, sections of streets that may be serviced by one of two or even three different cells. It was clear, however, that the cell site that was transmitting back and forth to Sarah’s Motorola phone was Cell Site 269. Jared was stationary, located within one building, so there was no handing-off between cell sites to complicate things.
Moreover, each NYNEX cell site is configured into three “phases,” which divide the area into three segments: alpha, beta, and gamma. If the cell site is a circular pattern, as it roughly is, each phase of each antenna serves one-third of the area of that circle.
From the carrier frequency signal, the FBI tech was soon able to determine that Jared was transmitting from the gamma phase of Cell Site 269, which narrowed the search down to no larger than a one-square-block area. This meant the area around Moore Street, between Pearl and Water.
One of the search team assigned to the Wall Street area, a rookie cop named Julio Seabra, turned right up Moore Street, which was narrow and paved in cobblestone. For some reason, there were security cameras on the second-floor level of the buildings here, trained on the street. And then he saw a gleaming new twenty-story structure of glass and steel. There, at street level, was a two-foot-square brass plaque indicating the presence of an office of the Greenwich Trust Bank.
Officer Seabra stared at the sign for a few seconds before he remembered to radio the command center.
“We got the address,” Pappas shouted.
“Oh, thank God,” Sarah said. “Where?”
“Not a skyscraper or anything. Some twenty-story building right off Water Street, on Moore.”
“What’s in it?”
“A Greenwich Trust office on the street level, which is how the street cop pegged it. Not a branch office or anything, but some administrative offices-”
His desk phone rang, and he picked it up before the first ring was finished. “Yep?” He listened for a few seconds, then his eyes became round. “Christ almighty.”
He hung up the phone. “On the mezzanine level of that building, unmarked and basically invisible to the public, is a huge data-processing center called the Network, which is-”
“All right,” Sarah interrupted. “Alex, I want you and two junior people to stay here. One is to man my phone in case Jared calls again. The other stays by the STU-III in case of direct contact from CIA or anyone else. You run the show here. Roth, you I want downtown with me, directing operations, being traffic cop. Everyone else reports immediately to NYO Command Center.”
“Right.”
“Okay, I need you to establish phone contact with whoever’s in charge of the Network. If there’s any way they can do it, I want them to shut down operations immediately. Notify all member banks to halt all funds transfers. And get us a cruiser immediately.”
“You got it.”
“I want the entire block evacuated, including all surrounding buildings.”
Roth snapped, “Are you crazy? You know how many huge motherfucker office buildings are down there? There’s New York Plaza, One State Street, Battery Park, a NYNEX building, the Broad Financial Center-”
“Do it,” Sarah said. “Notify the police commissioner-we’ve got the authority-and block off the streets with pylons and sawhorses and cruisers and patrolmen, whatever they’ve got. Block off sidewalks. I want every patrolman they can get down there. No one is to enter the area. I want every building evacuated.”
“Jesus,” Roth said. “If Baumann’s in the Network building and everyone rushes out of there at once, we’ll never find the guy.”
“Roth, my son is in there.”
“Sarah.” It was Pappas. “You’re both right. We have to empty the building at once, but at the same time we have to look over everyone who leaves.”
“Impossible, Alex!” Sarah said.
“No. It’s not impossible. Remember Mecca?”
“Mecca? What are you-”
“1979. The Grand Mosque in Mecca. A textbook example of this.”
“Alex, we don’t have any time for anything complicated.”
“Sarah! It’s not complicated. We need to round up some riot-control buses, that’s all.”
He explained quickly.
“Do it,” she said. “And somebody help me find my vest.”
The police car sped down Seventh Avenue, siren wailing and turret lights flashing, turned left onto Houston, then right onto Broadway.
In the backseat, as Roth made arrangements on his cell phone, Sarah watched Broadway go by in a blur.
Oh God oh God oh God, she thought.
Jared. Oh God.
If Baumann had taken Jared hostage, how had Jared managed to make phone calls undetected?
Where was he?
She heard Roth say, “A thousand pounds of C-4. Assume, worst case, the whole load is in the bomb.” He paused to listen, but only for a moment, and then he went on: “That’s enough to bring down the entire building, depending on placement of the device. Possibly kill everyone inside. Definitely do severe damage to neighboring buildings and pedestrians.”
Sarah’s mind raced, her body racked with tension. To save Jared was to stop the incident. This she repeated like a mantra, because she could think only of her son. She knew, but would never admit, that suddenly she didn’t care about the case, didn’t care about her work, didn’t even care about the incalculable damage the bomb was about to do.
The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast, the skies a metallic gray.
Would he kill Jared?
He had murdered-both wholesale and retail, as she thought of it. Retail murders were one-on-one, wholesale the acts of terrorism he’d engineered. In some ways, retail murders were the most chilling, and he was capable of snuffing out an individual life, face to face. Would he really hesitate to kill Jared if he deemed it necessary?
Well, perhaps. He hadn’t killed Jared yet, or so she hoped. Perhaps he planned to use him as a hostage, as insurance, as a human shield. She prayed Jared was still alive.
How had she been fooled so easily? How could she, so suspicious by profession and by training, have been taken in? Why had she been so willing to see him as a warm and likable man? How could he have concealed so well the essence of who he was?
He was a master of disguise, yes, but perhaps it wasn’t so hard to devise a disguise when your face was unknown. But it was his physical awkwardness that had deflected her suspicion. Had she not wanted to see the contradiction, really?
By the time the cruiser turned off Whitehall to Water and swung the wrong way up Moore Street, an immense crowd was already gathered in front of the building. Blue and red police lights were flashing; sirens were screaming from several different directions. Policemen were stopping and re-routing traffic on Water Street back down Whitehall or Broad. The area around Moore Street was blocked off with sawhorses marked POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS. Several fire trucks came barreling down Water Street, their sirens wailing. A couple of TV vans were already there, although how they’d been alerted so quickly, Sarah had no idea. So too was the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit.