The helicopter suddenly dropped hundreds of feet as it approached the glimmering green tower of the United Nations Building at the far end of East 42nd Street. The president had been told that for security reasons the ungainly craft would descend straight down to the UN helicopter launch pad on the East River. The sudden descent frightened him; it was like a free fall, as if the engines suddenly and unexpectedly failed. He gripped the rails of the steel bench on which he sat. His scrotum tightened, the universal reaction of men dropped by helicopter into dangerous landing zones.
Once the helicopter had settled on the floating UN heliport, its rotors still turning and throbbing, Andrew Carter deftly jumped down the three feet from the open door. Fitton and the general needed the outstretched hand of a burly Secret Service agent to guide their jumps. Soldiers with M-16s formed a straight alley down which Carter jogged from the heliport to the plaza that surrounded the still modern-looking UN building constructed in 1947, several years before he was born. At the end of the long cordon of soldiers were iron-plated black SUVs and a limousine. As often happened, he slipped into one of the SUVs and a stand-in who closely resembled him sat behind the tinted windows of the black Lincoln limousine in which the president of the United States was always expected to ride. He was a decoy.
The convoy sped uptown on First Avenue. Startled people on the sidewalk stopped to stare at the convoy. Not only were there SUVs and the gleaming limousines there were also two dozen helmeted soldiers in Hells Angels-style helmets on Harley Davidson motorcycles both leading the convoy and following behind it.
First Avenue was, even on a cloudless day, dreary. The street-level shops were primarily nail salons, stationery stores, bodegas, a McDonald’s, three Dunkin’ Donuts outlets, retail banking offices with ATMs, and bleak concrete plazas surrounding equally bleak high-rise apartment buildings. The Secret Service had picked First Avenue as the convoy’s route because it was the most direct way to Gracie Mansion from the UN building. The ride would take twenty minutes. The avenue was closed to all other traffic.
And then it happened: the stunning sound and the incandescent flash on the sidewalk next to the urban children’s playground that ran from 65th to 68th Streets. Andrew Carter, feeling the wrenching jolt of the SUV, glanced out the tinted window to his left, the direction of the explosion and the startling starburst of fire. Before he was shoved to the floor of the SUV by three Secret Service agents who covered his body, like players in a rugby scrum, Carter saw several of the Marines on motorcycles blown down, already drenched in their own blood while the motorcycles, on their own momentum, continued forward for yards as they wobbled crazily like spinning tops and finally fell.
Andrew Carter, his face pressed against the SUV’s floor, his large athlete’s body entirely covered with the tense bodies of Secret Service agents, was groaning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“DO YOU WANT to know, Mr. President, why you’re still alive?”
Andrew Carter arrived at Gracie Mansion exactly four minutes after the explosion. Within that time, dozens of armed men and women, some of them Army soldiers, some New York City police officers, some Secret Service agents, some in uniforms that were unrecognizable because they bore no insignias, had swarmed over the ordinarily peaceful streets of the neighborhood. Gracie Mansion had first been built in the 1800s, when most of Manhattan above 14th Street was farmland. The mansion, originally a farmhouse, was a security nightmare. Its main entrance was less than thirty feet from the edge of East End Avenue. A tasteful brick wall and a tall wooden fence surrounded the mansion on all sides. No barbed wires, no electrified fences, no concrete barriers. The mansion was in effect part of Carl Schurz Park and of the quiet neighborhood.
Roland Fortune had learned within seconds about the explosion on First Avenue. But he had only learned a few minutes before that the President of the United States had landed, unannounced to anyone in Roland’s administration, at the UN building and that a fast-moving motorcade was speeding uptown to Gracie Mansion. Roland believed he had sensed or felt or intuited the explosion, just as some people believe they felt, sensed, or intuited the first tectonic shift of an earthquake.
In that four-minute interval, no one had told him definitively that the president’s damaged motorcade was speeding to Gracie Mansion. He simply knew that dozens of armed men and women had suddenly materialized on the quiet nearby streets and in the usually bucolic park. Gina Carbone had ordered him to sit in the only space in the old building that did not have windows. That was the colonial-style foyer at the main entrance to the Mansion.
Andrew Carter was uninjured. He didn’t have any visible bruises. By the time his SUV had stopped five feet from the mansion’s main door, a female Secret Service agent had given Carter several slightly astringent baby wipes and said, “Sir, you need to wash your face with these.” She held her makeup mirror to his face. Long experienced with the politician’s skill at cleaning and freshening up, Carter used all the wipes to remove grime from his forehead and the dirty streaks on his cheeks.
Repeating the first words he spoke to Carter when the president walked through the front door, Roland asked, “Do you know why you’re still alive?”
Carter’s expression was not just puzzled, it was angry. He said nothing.
“Commissioner,” Roland suddenly called out.
As if appearing on cue through a side door on a stage, Gina Carbone entered the hallway. Roland knew that Carter had only seen newspaper, magazine, and television images of Gina. He’d be impressed by how tall and striking she was in person.
The foyer in the mansion was small. It was crowded: Andrew Carter and Roland Fortune, both large and powerfully built men; slender and malevolent-looking Harlan Lazarus with at least two of his aides, both wizened men who resembled their boss; and four bulky, pumped-up Secret Service agents, all of them black and with the size of comic book characters.
Yet Gina Carbone, the only woman, dominated the narrow space. She projected absolute confidence and calm.
“This,” Roland said, “is Gina Carbone.”
She said nothing. Likewise, President Carter didn’t speak to her although he glanced at her.
“Why is she here? What was it,” the president icily asked Roland, “about my message to fire her that was unclear?”
Roland was close enough to Carter in this densely packed space to detect, faintly, that distinctively acrid odor of sweat the president shed on the basketball court during those times Roland had been invited to play in the White House gym-which was constructed over the old pool that was legendary for years as the place where President Kennedy used to swim in the nude every afternoon cavorting with secretaries, actresses, socialites, and prostitutes. Unlike Kennedy, Carter was a happily married man with no need for afternoon trysts with hundreds of women. One of his first orders as president was to have the long-neglected fetid pool ripped out and replaced with the basketball court.
“And what is it,” Roland asked, “about my question that you won’t answer?” He paused, calmly defiant. “Do you know why you’re alive?” he repeated.
Harlan Lazarus interrupted, “Do you know who you’re talking to, Mr. Fortune? Does the word respect mean anything to you?”
There were at least ten seconds of utter silence. The only sound was the faint sibilance emanating from the earpieces the Secret Service agents each wore.