Raj waited through the man’s odd laugh. And then the man said, “So yesterday morning this what-do-you-call-it elite group fanned out over the city and took down these Arabs and put them into cold storage.”
“Where?”
“The canary didn’t tell me that.”
“Who’s the canary?
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”
“Are you the canary?”
“Boy, Mr. Gandhi, you are a smart man, that’s a good question. Smart, that’s why I picked you for this call.”
“Can I meet you?”
“Now maybe you’re not so smart. No, you can’t meet me.”
“Can I call you?”
“My God, you’re thick. No fuckin’ way.”
“So what do I do if I need to reach you?”
“I’ll keep in touch. I’ll know what you’re doing.”
And then the screen on Raj’s cell phone flashed: Call Ended.
As he emerged from under the elevated FDR Drive into sunlight, Raj Gandhi noticed that the esplanade next to the shore of the East River was thronged with walkers, runners, rollerbladers, and bicyclists. There was light traffic on the drive. He wasn’t surprised by either the carefree runners or the ordinary traffic even though explosions at one of the world’s greatest museums had killed more than one thousand people just twenty-four hours earlier. Through his years in cities under attack and in war, he’d witnessed this almost immediate resurgence of the semblance of normal life even while fighting was underway nearby and often escalating. There had been open markets in Baghdad; men, women, and children on the dust-choked streets of Kabul; and even a soccer match in Aleppo as Assad’s warplanes streaked overhead. Often that surge toward the restoration of normal life had collapsed, but he had always seen it and was seeing it now in Manhattan. There were even people fishing, most with their poles leaning on the railing that separated the walkway from the East River as they sat on the nearby benches and on plastic lawn chairs.
He drove slowly on the rutted service road that ran along the side of the FDR. There were only five remaining piers, all abandoned. They were all huge, several stories high and several football fields long. Not one had windows, just vertical aluminum siding. Rusted chain-link fences surrounded all of them. The fences were topped by razor wire and the gates were locked. In the East River steel pilings rose over the surface of the water, blocking access to the loading areas. No one, not even homeless people, was inside the steel fencing. Under each pier were boulders and rocks that the excavators had left in place. In fact, all of the East River had rocky, uninhabitable outcroppings that were small islands, many of them with small towers and flashing beacons to warn river traffic.
Nothing here, Raj thought. He had followed false leads before and this one had taken far less of his time than most. It came with the territory of his work. As he approached Houston Street, he saw an exit leading up to the FDR from the service road. There were no more piers further uptown.
It was when he began the gradual turn toward the exit that he saw the black Ford sedan behind him. He was instantly alert. The Ford had normal license plates, not government or police plates and not the plates with the letter T that designated private hired cars or limousines. The Ford also had tinted windows behind which he saw the outlines of the driver and a passenger.
Raj had been followed while driving in foreign countries. Each time the tail was obvious. The Jeeps or Land Rovers were banged up and sometimes rifles were visible, even at times thrust out of open windows. The tailing vehicles sometimes pulled up alongside him or drove so close behind that there was a slight jolt on the rear bumper at red lights or stop signs.
But the black Ford behind him now slowed when he slowed and accelerated when he did, always maintaining the same distance. Raj thought about stopping, leaving his car, and walking over to the Ford to speak to the driver. But he was afraid. He drove rapidly up to the drive. The Ford followed.
Raj felt a slight surge of relief when he merged into the uptown traffic. There was protection in numbers. And there was the spectacular view. In the center of the river, a powerful fountain shot incandescent water at least thirty feet into the daylight. Further upriver, at the southern end of Roosevelt Island, were the skeletal remnants of a nineteenth-century asylum. It was an eerie, medieval structure, and Raj was intrigued by it. Why was it left standing? Along the eastern shore of the river the exterior of the United Nations Building, still looking futuristic almost seventy years after it was built, glinted in the sunlight.
Raj pulled his car over to the narrow shoulder of the elevated drive. He turned on the blinking warning lights, staring in the rear-view mirror as the black Ford, moving slowly, passed by. The men in it looked deliberately at him, as if to intimidate him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ROLAND FORTUNE WAS one of the few people in the world who knew how President Andrew Carter smelled when he was under pressure. In their basketball games in the White House gym, Roland usually played guard to cover the president. He still wore his Los Angeles Lakers shirt. “I never needed to wash it in the two seasons I played for the Lakers,” the president joked. “Because I never got off the damn bench.”
The president’s odor when he was sweating was acrid, distinct, and really unpleasant. Although Andrew Carter was sleek and tall, with carefully combed blond hair streaked with gray, his body was densely covered with darker hair that, when it wetly adhered to his body, emitted a sharp odor that trailed him wherever he moved on the court.
Now as they spoke on a secure speakerphone, Roland heard a tremor in the president’s voice. “It’s very complex, Roland, to get food into Manhattan.”
“It is? Why so? The entire West Side waterfront is open. There are piers at West 42nd Street where the big tour boats are moored along the Hudson. I’m no longshoreman, but the pier where the Intrepid is looks huge and very accessible. And the Queen Mary regularly comes and goes from the pier at 59th Street.”
Harlan Lazarus’ brittle voice spoke out in the background: “The quantities of food to feed one million people are beyond the capacity of the piers to handle.”
“Is that a reason,” Roland asked, “not to get some food and supplies in here? I’m sure the Parisians didn’t close down their fabled restaurants after the attacks there.”
“No, it isn’t,” Lazarus said, ignoring the remark about Paris. “I’m pointing out some of the reality of this.”
“My reality is that the supermarkets, the bodegas, the big drug store chains, the delis, the places where people in Manhattan buy food, paper napkins, baby wipes, beer, cigarettes, condoms, have empty shelves.”
The president asked, “Why wasn’t this adequately taken into account before?” It wasn’t clear whether the president was asking Roland or Harlan Lazarus or someone else this question. Roland refrained from answering.
“It was,” Lazarus said. “But we didn’t anticipate a series of attacks on Manhattan that would require more than a few hours of quarantine. We envisioned, frankly, a single hit, like 9/11. Even the attacks in Paris were separated by only a few coordinated minutes.”
Roland was standing restlessly in his huge City Hall office. Its walls were mahogany. The big windows overlooked the old leafy trees of City Hall Park, whose gates were locked. He said, “That’s not an acceptable answer, you know that.”
“Let’s look at this, Roland,” the president said. “What kind of problem, real-world problem, is the food shortage presenting? The food didn’t just vanish. It’s in people’s apartments, don’t you think? Are there any reports of people starving in the streets?”