“You weren’t even on the floor then.”
“They asked to take a look at your treatment notes on Patient X52. You didn’t make any.”
“Nobody made notes. This place was chaotic.”
“They asked if you knew that Patient X52 was really named Silas Nasar?”
“Silas who?”
“Certainly you did. That’s the name written on the discharge papers you signed.”
“That’s crazy. I never signed discharge papers.”
“You want to know what else?” Brown was trembling, the shaking that rage created. And Gabriel was trembling, too; it was the same rage. Brown said, “They took your personnel records.”
“Don’t tell me you let them do that?”
“Of course I did.”
“Those are private, really private.”
“So what?”
“Did they have a search warrant?”
“Search warrant?”
“They can’t just take my records.”
“Why not? What are you now? An ACLU lawyer and not just the Angel of Life?”
Gabriel stepped backwards, wanting to put enough distance between Brown and himself so that he didn’t follow through on the urge to punch or push him.
“Tell me, Brown, what is it about me that you hate?”
“Just about everything.”
“Why are you lying? Why did you tell a reporter that I refused to work on Sunday?”
“Why was the guy with the birthmark the guy you ran to first? Silas Nasar? The cops wanted to know that. Why was Silas Nasar so special to you?”
“What bullshit is that? He was the first hurt person I saw. Everyone else was dead.”
Brown, too, stepped back, widening the gap between them. He now had the familiar sardonic look. “I’m e-mailing the board of the hospital to ask for an immediate suspension of your privileges. I want you out of my hospital. Angel of Life. What unmitigated crap.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WHEN GINA CARBONE arrived at the gritty corner of East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, she saw that her orders had been carried out, as they always were. She had personally given the order one hour earlier, at three in the afternoon, to cordon off entirely a ten-block area from East 125th Street to East 135th Street and from Lexington to Second Avenues. That area was now entirely quarantined-no one was allowed to move into it and no one could leave it.
And that heady rush of anticipation came from the view, which she had last seen during the night before the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq in 1991, of hundreds of armed men and women massed quietly in green uniforms, helmets and body armor, and the lethal mobile equipment of warfare. As a soldier in the strange, starlit desert of Saudi Arabia, she had been awestruck and excited by the vision of an immense Army concentrated and ready to move, only awaiting orders. And now she was the person who would issue the orders.
Billy O’Connell, the smartest of her deputy commissioners, said, “They’re in Building 5 in Carver Towers.”
The George Washington Carver Towers were a bleak brick public housing project built in the 1940s or 1950s. Gina knew about the Carver Towers because they were constructed over the blocks where her father had been raised when East Harlem, in the 1930s and 1940s, was still an Italian neighborhood.
“What floor?” she asked.
“Parts of the fifth and sixth floor on the southwest side.”
“Do we still think there are six of them?”
“Not completely sure. Maybe more.”
“And what about the hostages?”
O’Connell said, “There may not be any. Our people are saying that they may be straw hostages. Fakes, members of the crew pretending to be hostages.”
“In the Army,” Gina said, “we used to complain about pain-in-the-ass civilians getting in the way.”
Billy O’Connell was cautious and quiet-spoken as usual. “Like I said, Commissioner, there could be hostages or not.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. As soon as Reilly says it’s a go, we’re going.”
“Are you sure? It could be just a street gang caught up in something they can’t understand.”
“Really, Billy? I’ve got enough information to see it otherwise. A street gang would just walk out the front door when they saw armed vehicles and hundreds of my people dressed up like ninja warriors. Gang guys are punks, not heroes.”
“It’s your call, Commissioner.”
“That’s right, Billy, it is.”
Three minutes later, Tom Reilly, an ex-Marine with three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and now the leader of a squad of twenty heavily armed and well-trained men, and one combat-trained woman, called Gina Carbone. He said, “The cat’s on the roof.” It was their code to signal that his crew was ready.
“Go,” she answered.
Almost immediately there was a deafening succession of detonations from stun grenades designed to be loud enough to disorient anyone within fifty yards of the explosions. During the concussions, six men and one woman in uniform raced across the housing project’s grassless, cheerless lawns. As they smashed through the service door on the ground floor of Building 5, they heard a three-second burst of shots from an M-16 several flights above them in the urine-stained and urine-smelling stairwell. On a receiver in his left ear as small as a hearing aid, Ike Tapscott heard Hank Carbornaro, the head of the squad of seven descending from the roof of the building, ask, “That you?”
“No,” Hank answered. “Motherfuckers are firing up the stairwell.”
A grenade bounced from side to side down the center of the stairwell, exploding only three flights above Harry Stonecipher, the point man of Ike Tapscott’s squad. As Stonecipher wailed through his excruciating pain, another man shouted, “I see the fucker who tossed the grenade!”
No one in Tapscott’s squad would shoot in the stairwell since an upward rising or downward fired bullet could strike one of his people or Carbonaro’s or any of the tenants who might be in the stairwell. As they had been trained to do, the disciplined members of his squad continued to run up the stairs. At the landing on the fourth floor Stonecipher lay on his back, his legs and arms sprawled in a pattern that only a corpse could make.
And then there was silence in the stairwell. They were at the door that led to the east entrance of the fifth floor. Carbonaro’s crew was now behind the door at the west entrance at the other end of the grimy hallway. There were sixteen apartments lining the cinder block walls of the fifth floor. Tapscott, glancing through the small porthole window in the metal door, saw that the hallway was cluttered with bicycles, baby carriages, and even a barbecue grill. The tenants used the hallway as a storage room.
Only Tapscott had been in close combat before. He glanced at the six remaining members of his crew. He saw in their faces the terror he had seen so often in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their green uniforms were soaked with sweat.
Tapscott waited for Reilly’s voice to speak in his earbud. The helicopter aloft around the tower had devices that could pinpoint the location of objects such as rifles and canisters that contained explosives. Tapscott knew that no technology that was supposed to work in this kind of chaos was perfect.
Reilly’s voice, small and intense, suddenly materialized in his ear. “Apartment 5G. To your left, seven doors down from where you are. There’s a dried-up Christmas wreath on the door. At least six people inside. It’s a very hot spot. The experts in the helicopter say they’re all hot. The place is filled with men with assault rifles, grenades, all kinds of shit like that.”
Tapscott flung the door open. “Move, move!” Crouching, he ran toward the door with the dried-out wreath. He vaulted like an Olympic steeplechase runner through the clutter of tricycles, baby carriages, and shopping carts.
He halted at the far side of the door to Apartment 5G, waiting for the other crew members. In that instant, in the din of shouting men, clattering objects, and the roar of blood in his own head, he saw two men leap into the hallway from an apartment five doors beyond Apartment 5G. In a frozen instant, he recognized that the men were identical to the Iraqi and Afghan fighters he had seen over the last seven years, except that they were dressed in civilian clothes. They had assault rifles.