Roland said, “Listen to me carefully. Commissioner Carbone learned that a man and a woman were on the sidewalks near the city playground your convoy was about to pass. She was informed they were suicide bombers with enough explosives to take down a building. One, a woman, was on the east side of 62nd Street and First Avenue, and the other, a man, directly across the avenue. There must have been dozens of children and young parents there who were killed or hurt in that playground. Within three minutes of learning about the suicide bombers, and about your sudden, miraculous arrival and route, the commissioner had two sharpshooters in place. The woman was hit in the head and died before she could do whatever these people do to detonate themselves. Your convoy was less than half a block away. The other sharpshooter was slightly off target. The male suicide bomber was struck in the middle of the chest. Hence the explosion. But had that explosion happened at the same time as Mata Hari was supposed to explode five seconds later, as these people had planned, you would have been the first assassinated president since 1963.”
Andrew Carter’s face was impassive.
Shrilly, Lazarus said, “Why wasn’t I told about this?”
Roland turned to him. They were two feet from each other. “And why the fuck, after four days of begging this man to come to New York, weren’t we told he was on his way here? You know how the commissioner found out? Can you guess? She had taken down a suspect half an hour earlier who, after a few minutes of very uncomfortable hesitation, found it necessary to tell her people that the President of the United States was in an Army helicopter over Manhattan and about to land next to the UN building and get into a convoy to drive up First Avenue to see me to tell me to fire her. There wasn’t any fucking time to waste.”
Roland had a powerful voice. His shouting resonated in the hallway. And then in a whisper he said, “So there was no time to tell you, Mr. Lazarus. There was only time for the commissioner to let me know what her people had learned and for me to tell her to do whatever she needed to do to save this man’s life. If I’d been spending my time firing her, on your say-so, the president would be dead.” He stopped. “Do you get that, you fucking jerk?”
President Cater raised his hand, signaling Lazarus not to respond. “Everyone leave this room, except the agents. My friend the mayor and I need to have a heart-to-heart, locker-room kind of talk.”
CHAPTER FORTY
THE BLACK, ANONYMOUS Impala stopped in the middle of the Holland Tunnel. Except for officers dressed in riot gear-men and women in bulletproof vests, combat helmets and all carrying M-16s, the black weapon that even as a doctor in Iraq and Afghanistan Gabriel knew so well and had from time to time carried-the tiled, yellow-illuminated interior of the tunnel was empty. As soon as the rear door of the car opened, Gabriel, still in the painful plastic handcuffs, was pulled from the back seat. He was led up a narrow flight of steps into a cage-like structure, similar to the kind of booths in the subway system in which clerks once sold tokens and now sold shiny plastic MetroCards. He had seen these booths many dozens of times over the years in which he had driven through the tunnel. He assumed the booths were small stations where traffic was monitored. He spent fewer than two seconds in the booth before he was pushed through a rear door and into a long, brightly lit corridor. It smelled of urine and ammonia, like a bathroom at the Port Authority bus terminal.
The level of fear he felt was far more intense than the fear he experienced in the several times he was under fire in Afghanistan and Iraq. At those times he knew his exposure to danger was only momentary, even if those moments lasted ten to twenty minutes. He was, after all, a doctor, not an infantryman, and he was a healer whom other soldiers were trained to protect and serve.
But now, in this long and utterly unfamiliar corridor under the Hudson River, he had no reason to believe the strange men who were pushing and pulling him had any interest in protecting him. To them he was not a healer with the special skills needed to save wounded people. He was something else, or some other type of person, to these men. They all looked like superbly trained infantry soldiers.
Gabriel knew from all of the years in which he’d lived in New York that both the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel were linked by underwater corridors to blocky stone structures that rose out of the Hudson River. Most people had no real idea what they were. They were anomalies. The stone structures were odd. They were ugly. As a boy, Gabriel learned they served both as air vents for the long tunnels and as escape destinations for people trapped in the tunnels. But there had never once been a disaster in either tunnel.
At the end of the corridor was an open space that resembled the innards of a towering factory floor. It was filled with dark men chained to one another, all sitting on the damp concrete floor. Some glanced at him. He was, after all, a white man, as were all the guards. But there was something different about him. He was a white man in handcuffs.
Disoriented, in pain, Gabriel Hauser heard a man with a Midwestern accent say, “Take the cuffs off him.”
A small key in the hand of a woman officer unerringly entered the lock, which clicked like the sound of two marbles gently striking each other, and the plastic cuffs fell off his wrists. Freed, his hands and arms were momentarily useless, filled with that feeling of innumerable pins and needles that he knew was the result of blood suddenly freed to flow into constrained muscles. Involuntarily, his arms rose upward because of the sudden free flow of fresh blood, as if he were a puppet.
Still in the blue blazer, blue button-down shirt, and red-and-black regimental tie he had worn for several days, Roger Davidson stepped in front of Gabriel. “Do you want to know who I am?”
Gabriel quietly said, “Not really.”
“Doesn’t matter. Because you’ll never know.”
Regaining his focus as the pain subsided, Gabriel asked, “Who are these men?”
“What men? I don’t see any men here. I see lying animals.”
Gabriel was a brave man. He stared into Davidson’s eyes. It was Davidson who finally disengaged, glancing to his left. Gabriel said, “Raj Gandhi was right, then. You stole these men.”
“Come on, Dr. Hauser, I want you to see an old friend of yours.”
Gabriel followed Davidson to a far side of the chilly concrete floor. Lying face up, utterly motionless, almost naked except for a dirty towel spread like a loincloth, was Silas Nasar. He was dead. Gabriel calculated that he had seen more than two thousand dead people, most of them men, in his life. This was the first time he shuddered.
“This,” Davidson said, “is a shame. I really wanted you to be able to talk to him, Dr. Hauser. He was a friend of yours. You cared for him. But the poor fucker had a heart attack before we could get you here. It’s a shame.”
“Bullshit. You killed him. Those are dried bullet holes on the side of his torso.”
“Make my life easier, Dr. Hauser. Who is this man?”
“He was a patient of mine. Patient X52. There’s no reason he should be dead. Certainly not from the wounds I treated.”
“Let me tell you something,” Davidson said. “I get to decide who lives and who dies. His name was Silas Nasar. You know that.”
Unblinking, Gabriel stared at him. “You’re just a simple butcher. Why are people like you even born?”
Davidson didn’t react. “Let me ask you something. The very first time you saw this man was when, as the Angel of Life, you ran to the museum steps on Sunday to begin saving lives, right?”
Gabriel said, “What planet are you from? I’m a doctor.”
“I want to show you something. Maybe it will give you your last chance to tell the truth and save your own life.” He reached into an interior pocket of his sports jacket. He held his cell phone to Gabriel’s face. “We took this information from your laptop. We found this selfie of Mr. Nasar taken three weeks ago. He sent it to you. And you sent this selfie of yourself back, with the text message, Can’t wait to meet you tomorrow. Your words, not ours.”