Roland knew John Hewitt-Gordan was cerebral, a tactician, a retired high-ranking officer who had commanded several support and intelligence divisions, including the British recapture of the Falkland Islands. Sarah, too, had some of these qualities. One of the senior partners at Goldman Sachs had told Roland that the key to her success was her ability to visualize big strategies, not her skills with numbers.
Roland knew that John’s use of sentences sometimes masked his anxieties or fenced away subjects he wanted to evade. Roland said, “I don’t have the answer to that, John. I was never in a war. I never saw people die in front of me until now. I was there. I can tell you that it was sudden, overwhelming.”
“How are you, Roland? The first news reports were that you were gone, too. Now the reports are that you were injured.”
“Thanks for asking. Just a scratch.” At that moment, as the deliciously smothering effects of the last Vicodin receded, he felt that pulse of acute pain that came with each surge of blood in his system. What he had on his shoulder and back was in fact a deep gash. It was becoming infected.
“What,” John asked, “is happening to her now?”
Roland was disoriented by the question. All he knew at that moment was that Sarah was on a floor in a cool former auditorium in an abandoned hospital in the West Village. There were at least one hundred other bodies there, assembled in straight rows under identical blue sheets, like the orderliness of military cemeteries. “The simple truth, John, is that I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Understood, Roland. Your only concern now is with the living.”
This man, Roland thought, has that high-minded style of a colonial general in India in the 1800s. Roland admired that. He said. “I have a suggestion, John. The airport in Boston is now operating. Why don’t you fly there and then drive to Connecticut or New Jersey?”
John chuckled, “The gates of Carthage.” That literate British humor.
But Roland’s complete attention was arrested by that. For the last two days the words Carthago delenda est had been fixed in his mind, Carthage must be destroyed, like a phrase of music, Cato the Elder’s words about the Roman army’s destruction of Carthage on the shores of North Africa. Carthage has been destroyed evolved in his mind to New York delenda est.
Roland said, “I expect the lockdown to be lifted gradually in the next twenty-four hours. As soon as I can, I will have one of my helicopters pick you up and bring you here when you reach Connecticut or Westchester County. We’ll go to the morgue together and we can figure out a way to give her to you.” He paused. “To take her home.”
“That would be very consoling, Roland. But wouldn’t that lay you open to criticism? Certainly the media will pick it up. Preferential treatment, that type of issue.”
“I’m at a point where that doesn’t matter to me. I’m surrounded by death and killing, John.”
“You’re a brave man, Roland. Very few people act well under catastrophic circumstances. Wasn’t it Hemingway who defined courage as grace under pressure?”
For a moment Roland wanted to tell his lover’s father that he was consumed and totally preoccupied by dread, fear, and uncertainty, not courage or grace. He was angry. He was in pain. And he was worried about his own mortality. He was aware of his vulnerability. Somehow he had survived three deadly explosions, any one of which could have killed him. It could have been that one of them, the first as his birthday party unfolded, was calculated to do just that. He had never in his life had to deal with deadly, anonymous people who had the will and the ability to kill. And Gina Carbone and others had treated him as if he were a target, and he believed he was.
He said, “Thanks for the kind words, John. Let me know when and where you arrive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
GINA CARBONE DIDN’T change out of her running clothes. Almost at a jog, she passed through the security checkpoints inside Pier 37. Rocco Barbiglia led her to the far eastern corner of the pier to what was called the Supermax wing of the pier, isolated and austere.
Silas Nasar sat in an aluminum chair. There was no other furniture in the cell. He was naked. The birthmark on the left side of his face-shaped like a seahorse-was even more distinct than in the pictures she had seen of him.
“Mr. Nasar,” she said, “we’ve been waiting for you.”
His eyes, profoundly black, were alert. He was fully conscious, almost brazen, defiant. She was surprised and impressed to see this. His left arm was wrapped from shoulder to wrist in tight, bloodstained bandages. There was, as she had been told there would be, an untreated gash across his hairy chest inflicted as he was dragged across the glass-strewn floor in the smashed apartment from one of the rooms at the Carver Towers.
“Who were the people in the apartment with you?”
No answer.
“I don’t have time, Mr. Nasar. I don’t have time to wait for you. You are going to talk to me.”
He stared at her. She recognized instantly that he was a special man. He was seriously wounded. He was naked. Just hours earlier he had been in a room of unimaginable chaos: thunderous noise from guns and rifles and grenades; the stench of cordite; and the sight of dead bodies, blood and torn flesh, some of it smeared on and clinging to the walls and ceiling. He had been dragged from that room. He had been blindfolded. He had been bound up for two hours in a slow-moving ambulance. He was now in an unknown place with strange people capable of torturing him and killing him. He was face to face with an unusually beautiful woman who was plainly in total command of the men who had seized and held him.
Gina said, “Many, many men, women, and children have died in the last day, Mr. Nasar. Hundreds of children. I know you have children. You’re a good family man, sir.”
Gina was unsettled by the impassive silence and solidity of the man. Roger Davidson, the former Secret Service officer who was one of the chief architects of this off-the-books program and this dark, undocumented prison just half a mile from the United Nations building, stood behind her. He had the reputation of a stone cold killer. She resisted the impulse to cede the field and have him take over the unnerving contest with Silas Nasar.
“You’re a seriously religious man, Mr. Nasar. We’ve known about you for a long time. We’re surprised that you let yourself become involved in all this carnage. It’s not in your character.”
Davidson stirred behind her. He was an impatient and explosive man. She held up her right hand, signaling him to remain quiet.
“I need you to tell me where your other people are, Mr. Nasar. You know where they are. You are the electronics expert, you know in real time where these men are. You even have that information in the bracelet you gave to your doctor friend. And I want to hear from you everything you know about the doctor, too. No secrets, no holding back.”
No answer.
“If you don’t talk to me and tell me what you know, let me tell you what’s going to happen. We are going to arrest your wife, your children, your son-in-law. I know they moved the day before the bombing. Do you think we’re stupid? We know where they are.”
He listened but didn’t respond in any way. Bulletproof, she thought, this man is bulletproof.
“Do you know where you are? No one else does. You belong to me. I have the power to let you live and to let you die.”
After ten seconds of utter silence, Gina said, “Do you see the men behind me? They have spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. They do things that I don’t know how to do. That I don’t even want to think about. We’re the only people who know you’re here. In a way, you’re already dead. We left your body in the apartment with your friends. Do you understand?”