She took the secure cell phone. She covered her left ear to avoid any distractions and turned to stare at the elementary school’s undersized basketball court. There was an odor of varnish and scuffed sneakers. The gym was hot. There was no air conditioning in early summer and there were too many people in the room. The grimy windows were reinforced with steel mesh.
“Commissioner?” The voice was easily recognizable. Andrew Carter was the most famous person in the world.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me what’s going on. Like everybody else on the planet I only know as much as what I see on CNN.”
She wanted to sound authoritative and controlled. “We have as many as three hundred people dead. An unknown number of wounded. I gave the order a minute ago to let our emergency people enter the secure area. We were concerned that additional bombers might still be on the scene. I don’t want a situation like 9/11 when the rescuers blindly go running in to help the victims only to become victims themselves.”
“Understood.”
“The city’s locked down, the subways are stopped, tunnels and bridges are closed, police boats are in the rivers, and airports in lockdown.”
“What about the air?”
“At least ten police helicopters are up. They haven’t been challenged.”
“There’s a contingent of fighter jets five minutes from the city.”
Fighter jets? She restrained the impulse to tell the President of the United States that fighter jets were about as useful as camels. She needed real troops on every corner. This was guerilla war, not Star Wars.
He asked, “Are there other places up there where large groups congregate on the weekends?”
The president, she remembered, was from Los Angeles. Obviously he knew nothing about Manhattan on a summer weekend.
“We have huge concentrations of people on days like this at Battery Park, Riverside Park, Washington Square Park, Times Square. I have units at or en route to all those places and others.”
“Do you folks have any information as to who’s responsible for this?”
“At the moment, sir, the blunt truth is we have no idea. There was no more chatter or negative information than we have had for years, just the usual low and sustained hum of danger. Do your people have anything?”
“I’m getting information on that.”
Gina thought about all the billions of dollars spent on the worldwide apparatus of national security since 9/11, and the president didn’t have any information as to the men who carried out this devastating attack. In fact, she knew more than he did. Suddenly she felt impatient, eager to get back to her work, and annoyed that the president was distracting her from the real things she had to accomplish.
She said, “This is a huge failure. I have hundreds of people, maybe more, dead and wounded on my turf and on my watch. I’m going to find out why my people, the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, all those security honchos, had no clue this was coming. But right now, sir, I need to organize relief efforts, make sure hospitals all over this island are ready to accept the wounded, and guard against the possibility that there are other lunatics out there right now about to carry out more attacks.”
“I appreciate, Commissioner, that you have work to do. We all have work to do.”
“Is there anything else I can tell you right now?” She knew she could be abrasive. She detected the impatience in her voice.
“I understand something might have happened to the mayor. We tried to reach him. We were told he may be a victim.”
“He was at a party on the roof garden of the museum when the explosions happened. I’ve had a report from one of our helicopters that there are many dead people on the roof. There are fires still burning up there. There’s a lot of foliage up there, plantings of rare trees and shrubs. We’ve got no information as to whether the mayor was one of the victims.”
“That leaves you with a huge responsibility, Commissioner. You’re now in charge, at least for the time being. You can’t let too much time pass before you have a press conference to reassure the public.”
“I’m more interested in telling the public what is going on, what the facts are, what needs to be done. All of that is not necessarily reassuring.”
The president was impatient, too, not pleased with the brusque local Italian girl.
“Do your best.”
The man is a candy-ass, Gina thought. “Sure thing,” she said.
And she hit the “end” button on the cell phone before he did on his.
CHAPTER FIVE
“I’M NOT STAYING,” Roland Fortune said. “Let’s get that IV out right now.”
The excruciating pain in his shoulder and back had lessened since the moment he walked through the emergency room door at Mount Sinai, the hospital nearest the museum. He was surrounded by policemen, some of whom had guns drawn. He was the first wounded person to arrive at the hospital, at exactly 1:45 p.m. Covered in blood and grass stains and dirt from the ground where he had fallen at the rear of the museum, he had regained consciousness in the ambulance that raced through Central Park. As he lay on the stretcher in the rocking vehicle, he’d felt the initial surge of relief from pain when one of the medics injected him with morphine.
“Mr. Mayor, you’ve lost significant quantities of blood,” Dr. David Edelstein, a sober man with the weight and presence of a rabbi, told Roland. “Your hemoglobin is low, you’re so impaired by painkillers that you’ll have trouble walking on your own, and you aren’t likely to be able to hold any press conferences or to act in a coherent, focused way. There’s a significant risk of infection. You need to be treated.”
“Listen: I was hit by a stone, not shrapnel. I was cut, not shot. You run a hospital. I run a city. I can’t lie down in a hospital because my shoulder hurts when there is complete chaos out there. There are thousands of people who think I’m dead. Unless they can see me and see that I’m alive and functioning, there will still be this alarming distraction that the leader of the City of New York is dead.”
Edelstein’s expression didn’t change. “I can’t worry about that. You and you alone are my patient right now, not the population of the City of New York.” He paused. “If you leave, you’ll be doing that against medical advice and you will have to sign a form that says precisely that, just like anybody else who walks out of here without the approval of a doctor.”
“I genuinely appreciate the concern, but I feel strong and alert enough to step up to do the things I’m supposed to do. I can’t live with myself secluded in a hospital bed while there are fires still burning ten blocks downtown from here and the dead are still being counted.”
At a signal from Edelstein, two male nurses expertly disassembled the tubes of the IVs to which Roland Fortune was attached. They then placed his damaged shoulder and arm in a sling, fastening it to the fresh clothes that had been brought to him from Gracie Mansion, the spacious Georgian mansion overlooking the East River in which New York City mayors lived during their terms. As they worked on him, he felt a resurgence of the pain and asked for another Vicodin. One of the male nurses placed the pill in his mouth, like a priest giving communion, and he swallowed it without water. Just the act of taking the pill brought him increasing levels of relief from the pain. Like a drug addict worried about not having enough, he put a handful of Vicodin in his pocket.
He watched the television set affixed to the wall just below the ceiling as Gina Carbone began to speak to the world. She stood in bright sunlight on the sidewalk in front of PS 6. “We now know that six hundred thirty-six people are dead,” she announced. “There are at least ninety-five men, women, and children in hospitals throughout the city who are wounded in varying degrees, most with burns, many in life-threatening condition.”