But nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He’d listened to briefings from the Midwestern men and women who appeared to dominate the Homeland Security department. They always struck him as fanatics, the zealots of security, men and women who were building an empire by disseminating fear. All that Roland remembered from those briefings, which they insisted on holding in the secret, antiseptic structure below the basement of the 1970s-style disco on West 14th Street, was the term Code Apache, a silly name that Roland saw as a movie title, like Operation Just Cause, the designation of the invasion of Iraq, as if war were a video game. Silly shit, Roland had once remarked to Sarah Hewitt-Gordan, would be a better name than Code Apache.
He had to shake himself out of the fear or at least appear to do that. “Talk to me, Gina. The Three Stooges can’t hear us. Assume we’re on our own. What do we do to stop the killing?”
“We need to take down as many men as possible and interrogate them. It’s almost impossible to find weapons or explosives. There are millions of apartments in this city. Any one of them can have an arsenal.”
“So, tell me how you find these people.”
“We do sweeps and pick up as many Arab street vendors, deli operators, and mosque-goers as we can. We talk to them. Not one of them is coming forward. So we go find them. Any random guy might give us a clue.”
Roland gazed at her. “Gina, these people have civil rights.”
“They can decide to talk to us or not. We have a right to ask questions. They have a right not to answer. My people don’t break legs.” Roland did not know that Gina was lying.
“Then we have a problem with racial profiling,” he continued.
Gina paused and then said quietly but intently, “We can’t really care about that, can we? When this is all over, they can sue us.”
“What else? Do you have another plan?”
“We have a very thin network of informants, but so far nothing has surfaced. I can bring in more police assets from other parts of the city. We have hundreds of cruisers stationed outside Manhattan. We also have armored personnel carriers and armored trucks. I can keep them moving around Manhattan. Shock and awe. But nothing will work as effectively as intelligence and information. And nothing will get that as fast as confrontation, as in I’ll beat the shit out of you unless you talk.”
Roland held a blank piece of paper in his hands and tore it into pieces as small as confetti. “You do what you think is best. And if nothing happens by tomorrow morning, I’m opening up the city.”
“Can you do that?” she asked.
It was the Vicodin coursing through his body that spoke, “I can do any fucking thing I want.”
So, Gina thought, can I.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
OLIVER WAS A heavily muscled dog. Beneath the silken fur his flesh was densely packed. Gabriel wrapped Oliver in a multicolored quilt. Only his head was visible. Although the body was heavy, Gabriel, who had often lifted patients, was strong. Gabriel made his way down the carpeted stairwell and pushed the door open. Suddenly aroused from the long vigil of waiting for him, the reporters scrambled to attention.
He walked among them. “I’m Gabriel Hauser. I have something to tell you.”
He paused while the reporters from television stations, newspapers, magazines, and the social media sources suddenly scrambled to attention and activity from their long lethargy of waiting. There were CNN, WNBC, and CBS panel trucks on the street with huge, Martian-like broadcast saucers on their roofs. The reporters with microphones, notepads, and tape recorders were immediately ready to hear the elusive Gabriel Hauser, the Angel of Life, speak publicly for the first time.
The blanket in which Oliver was wrapped was stained with blood. Rather than stand at a distance as if holding a press conference, Gabriel walked among the reporters and cameramen. They formed a tight cluster around him, like football players in a huddle.
“I’m carrying my eight-year-old dog. Armed men from the NYPD, the FBI, and Homeland Security shot him five minutes ago.”
Gabriel saw the looks of surprise in the faces around him. He also recognized their excitement. They were the first to hear news that was far beyond anything they had expected.
The first reporter to react was a young woman from CNN whom Gabriel had seen during the few times he watched television. “What were the agents doing in your apartment?”
“Doing? They were ransacking it. And shooting and wounding this loving, innocent dog.”
“How do you know they were law enforcement?”
“Law enforcement? That’s a strange expression. They were thugs.”
Another voice asked, “How do you know they were with the FBI and Homeland Security?”
“Three of them wore windbreakers with those words on them. So I assume they were agents. But they’re the kinds of jackets you could buy on the street, just as you can buy baseball caps with logos from the police department, the fire department, Vietnam Veterans.”
The same voice asked, “Well, did they say where they were from?”
“No one showed any badges.”
Someone at the outer perimeter of the group asked, “What else did they say?”
“That they had a search warrant.”
The CNN reporter reclaimed the questioning. She held the microphone within inches of Gabriel’s face. Over her left shoulder a camera was trained on him, adjusting to every movement he made. “What did the search warrant say?”
“As far as I know, nothing. They never showed it to me.”
“What were they looking for?”
“They ransacked everything, they took nothing.”
“How was it that the dog was injured? Was he attacking them?”
“I’m sure they will tell you that. I can hear them claiming they were lawfully in our home, and that we unleashed this vicious beast on them. This is a gentle, sweet animal.”
“What,” she asked, “do you plan to do?”
“Look for the truth. I want to know why these horrific people invaded our home, trashed our belongings, and shot an innocent animal. And by bringing this to you, I want to prompt you to ask questions. What exactly is the government doing to protect us from the government itself? Who are the terrorists here?”
“But, Dr. Hauser, you must have done something that led the agents to get a warrant and search your home.”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing. I refuse to let outrageous conduct like this pass without a challenge. No one can shift blame to me. I did not do this.”
Still holding Oliver’s increasingly heavy, blood-soaked body, Gabriel turned to the five steps that led to the door of the brown-stone. Just as he pulled the heavy door shut, he heard the question, “Can you tell us why you were thrown out of the Army?”
Raj Gandhi watched the handsome, stricken, angry doctor on the screen of one of the big monitors suspended throughout the newsroom at the Times. He had been placing calls to every possible source to get more details, any details, about the phantom detention center on the East River. He was still wary of the information the weird caller had given him. But he was also certain that the Ford that had tailed him, which was so much like those eight-cylinder cars in decades-old movies such as Bullitt and The French Connection, meant something. The tailing scared him; it had also made him angry. He prized the old-fashioned detachment he brought to his work as a journalist, and he wanted to embrace it now. But he understood the meaning of that tough-guy bluster: This isn’t business, it’s personal.