Quietly Cam spoke out from the background in which he had been soothing Oliver. “Gabriel, what’s wrong?”
McDonough glanced from Cam to Gabriel. “We saw you take something from him and put it in your pocket. I’ll give you this boost for your memory. It wasn’t his wallet.”
Gabriel remembered the thick chain-like bracelet that he had slipped off the man’s wounded left wrist and then, hours later in the squalid ER at Mount Sinai, fastened to the man’s right wrist.
“That didn’t happen.”
“Now, that’s interesting. The video shows that it did.”
“Listen to me again: that didn’t happen.”
“Where is it? We need that bracelet. You have it.”
“Get out.”
McDonough, passing by Gabriel, approached Cam. He handed Cam his business card, saying, “Tell your girlfriend that when he needs our help, he can call or you can. We’re not the only guys who want to get to know him.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SUN RISING over the East River was always dazzling. Its rays appearing on the horizon sent spears of light that sparkled over the surface of the river. The Triboro Bridge’s outlines appeared for seconds to be on fire as the new sunlight flooded the river and the sky.
In a loose-fitting bathrobe, Roland stood behind the French doors that overlooked the flagstone terrace and the river. He was alone and knew this would be the only time during the long day when he would have complete privacy. The glare from the new sun and the river was almost blinding, as it often was at this time of the day. During the last three years he had repeatedly come to this terrace at dawn, dazzled not only by the light but by the exhilarating strangeness of his life, the change from the dirty and cracked streets of the South Bronx to this colonial mansion in a beautiful park on the river.
Roland was in yet another new world this morning, and it frightened him. He had slept for five hours, the painkillers not only easing the ache in his shoulder and back but putting him down to a deep level of sleep well beyond the realm of dreaming. But at the moment he woke, thoughts about the wounded city flooded his mind. He didn’t for a second think he had emerged from a nightmare in which the events of the last day were all make-believe. It also struck him at that moment of first alertness that he was completely unprepared for this, even though he had regularly met over the last three years with the odd people from Homeland Security to listen to disaster plans. They were like the Stepford Wives of the security world, that new, sprawling industry that, Roland often thought, manufactured fear, not security. They spoke in rapid rote about assets, security perimeters, insurgents, good guys, bad guys. They never varied from a script. They never fully grasped or responded to a question. The plans all seemed like the war games of young boys at play, except that many of those game players were girls, not just boys. And now reality presented something completely different.
On most early mornings, except on the coldest winter days, there were rowers in racing sculls moving steadily downriver and upriver. He was always fascinated by them. The rowers gathered in the predawn on the shores of the Spuyten Duyvil on the northern tip of Manhattan and were already on the river when dawn came. Where did that Spartan drive come from? He’d always admired people who took on things that were hard to do. The serious marathon runner, the long-distance swimmers, the people who worked sixteen-hour shifts in hospitals. He had heard an ultra-marathoner say in an interview, “I do this not because it’s fun but because it’s hard.”
There were no rowers on the river this morning. There were no barges bearing the city’s garbage. No tugboats, no pleasure craft. No ordinary river traffic at all. Just the brightly painted Coast Guard vessels bristling with spinning radar devices and black weaponry. Drab-green Army helicopters, drifting slowly, hovered over the water, lower than he ever imagined they could safely fly. He could feel the pulses from the rotors as they flashed like thousands of swords in the brilliant early light. For a moment he told himself that he would do what he had done at this moment every early morning for the last 365 days. He would walk into the bedroom where Sarah Gordan-Hewitt still slept, arouse her, make love to her, and then, utterly refreshed, go about his day.
But, as it suddenly overwhelmed him, she was dead. That sweet, fulfilling phase of his life was gone.
It was time now, he thought, to suit up and show up.
Just an hour after his time on the terrace, Roland was in an underground conference room at the disaster command center on West 14th Street. There were twelve other people in the room, among them Gina Carbone and Al Ritter, who was Harlan Lazarus’ deputy director of Homeland Security, and Constance Garner, the regional director of the FBI. On a large video monitor suspended over the circular conference table appeared the secretary of defense, Roger Fitton, and, on the right side of the split screen, General Malcolm Foster, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who looked like a West Virginia coal miner suffering from black lung disease. He was in full dress uniform. Roland knew Roger Fitton, the defense secretary, a former senator from Montana who was only two years older than Roland and who sometimes played, and played well, in those once monthly, much coveted basketball matches in the White House gym.
Roland abruptly started the meeting. “I have to give a press conference at eight thirty this morning on where we stand at. People need information. So I need to know from you folks what developments there have been overnight, what the real risks are, what condition the city is in, when we can ease the lockdown, and what arrests have been made. I want facts, not fantasies. I like the way Commissioner Carbone handled this yesterday. Remember the old Jack Webb line? Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts. I’m not going in front of the world with any bullshit.”
Always congenial, Roger Fitton, an inveterate politician, said, “And good morning to you, Mr. Mayor.”
Roland gave that engaging smile with which he’d been endowed, like a genetic birthright, in his early childhood. “Morning, Roger. Good to see you.” And Roland nodded at the general, who barely nodded in return.
“First,” Roland said, “let me hear about risk. Commissioner Carbone? Mr. Ritter? General? Who wants to go first?”
Gina said, “I will.” This didn’t surprise Roland. He had long ago detected her contempt for the federal agencies that were supposed to have expertise in defending the city. He once heard her say they were “space cadets.” She believed her more focused plans for detecting and deterring threats, dealing with actual crises, and finding and punishing the responsible people were far more effective than any confection that Homeland Security, Defense, the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA had put together. She relished the image of herself as the grunt besting all the West Point and Ivy League grads.
“Go ahead, Commissioner,” Roland said.
“The level of risk remains high. Forget color codes. We have identified people on the streets who are still out there with the capacity and the intention of doing more harm. I authorized six raids during the night, and they have yielded ten arrests. The raids were concentrated in the East Village, in what we call Alphabet City, Avenues A, B and C.”
Harlan Lazarus’ deputy, Al Ritter, asked, “Who was arrested?”
“Primarily Syrian and Sudanese Muslims.”
“Were any of them the names we gave you?” Ritter asked.
“No, those names were useless.”
“What do you mean?” Ritter looked hurt, not angry. Roland and Gina both recognized that he was a stalking horse for the haughty and offended Harlan Lazarus, who was said to be in Washington talking to the president. Roland knew that Lazarus, within minutes of angrily walking out of PS 6 the day before, had called the president to complain. Roland knew, too, that the president had told Lazarus to control himself.