Roland, squeezing with both index fingers the corners of his eyes so as not to cry, said, “Just four days ago I wanted to meet this man to thank him for his bravery.”
“The gods of fortune,” Lazarus said to Roland, “were on your side that that meeting never took place. The Angel of Life worked with the people who just torched him.”
Carter, who had no visible reaction to the video, said, “And, Mr. Mayor, this just happened in the very city you now want to open, is that right?”
“You don’t know very much,” Roland answered. “What you just so calmly saw didn’t take place in Manhattan. This island’s borders are broken. These men took this doctor to a blockhouse in the Hudson River hundreds of yards from the Manhattan waterfront. It’s equally accessible from New Jersey. You’ve never lived here, so you’ve never noticed those blockhouses in the river near the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel.”
“At the moment, Mr. Mayor, I’m more concerned about my authority to act. I will not let you take that away from me.”
“That’s crap, Mr. President. People are dying. What are you going to have General Foster’s soldiers do when hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children begin to walk and drive to the exits at the Triboro Bridge, the 59th Street Bridge, the Queens Midtown Tunnel? Push them back? Fire warning shots? Use tear gas? Why not just shoot some? Hosni Mubarak thought that was good strategy.”
At that moment, Lazarus held his iPad aloft between the two angry men. “Are you two worried about authority? Take a look at this. We have a rogue woman who is showing the world she has more authority than either of you.”
The iPad’s screen displayed Gina Carbone while she spoke, standing at the curved iron railing that ran along the high edge of the esplanade of Carl Schurz Park. Behind her was the gleaming light on the surface of the East River. Much further beyond her were the dense, dark, low-lying expanses of the Queens waterfront.
Surrounded by high-ranking uniformed NYPD police officers, she said to the dozens of reporters who were kept behind an impenetrable barricade ten feet in front of her, “The first point and most important by far is that the president of the United States is alive and completely unharmed. For obvious reasons he is at an undisclosed location in Manhattan.”
Even though her face was in intense sunlight, Gina neither blinked nor squinted. She spoke and bore herself steadily with the utter repose of a news broadcaster.
“Elite snipers of this great police department were put in place on First Avenue as soon as Mayor Fortune and I learned that terrorists had information that President Carter was making an unannounced visit to Manhattan to witness firsthand the steady, lethal degradation of the evil forces that have terrorized this besieged city since Sunday.”
“I want to arrest this woman,” Lazarus said to Carter and Fortune as he steadily held the iPad for them, “right now.” Gina was speaking no more than one hundred yards from where they stood in the foyer. “This,” Lazarus said, “is treason. Who does she think she is?”
Gina continued, “What I can tell you at this moment is that suicide bombers, a man and a woman who we believe were experienced U.S.-grown ISIS terrorists, stood directly opposite each other on First Avenue waiting for the decisive moment when the unmarked presidential convoy was to pass between them. At that point, at that moment, their tactical plan was to detonate enough explosives strapped to their ankles, legs, stomachs, and chests to create an inferno.
“One of our snipers, when the convoy was just a block away, dispatched a single round that struck the female in the head, killing her instantly and without igniting the weapons of mass destruction she wore. Our second sniper, who as a Navy SEAL in Iraq had made at least ninety long distance kills, fired at the male suicide bomber on the east side of First Avenue. For reasons that are not entirely clear to us, that kill shot also hit the bomber, delivering a mortal round, but the remarkable quantity of explosives he wore somehow detonated.”
A shrill voice rang out from beyond the barrier: “When will we see the president?”
“That is the president’s decision.”
The same insistent voice called out: “Then, Commissioner, how do you know what you’ve just told us?”
“I saw him. He’s a remarkable man. Calm, determined, undisturbed. He’s a consummate leader.”
Gina paused. Confidence and beauty radiated from her, a powerful presence. “I have more information for you, for the world. But first, as a former soldier myself, and because at the outset of these awful days I promised you only truth, I do have to report that at least four brave men who were part of the motorcade were killed. We know who they are and will give you that information when their families are notified.
“And there are other truths I’ll share with you. When the second suicide bomber, a human death machine, exploded, there were also severe losses in a popular playground near where these animals were standing. Dozens of innocent children and their parents were killed and maimed. I will have more information for you on that when, as I’ve assured you from the start, I have the truth about this unspeakable, cowardly brutality.”
Gina then gripped the stem of the microphone as if it were a weapon. “Cowards make mistakes. You all witnessed the brutal immolation of Dr. Gabriel Hauser just minutes ago. Immensely brave elements of the NYPD’s Special Forces know who these killers are and are incapacitating them even as we speak. This is not Syria. This is not Iraq. This is not Yemen, Libya, Nigeria. We now have these people in our sights. They will face swift and certain justice. The nightmare is coming to an end.”
She paused. The cameras tightened on her powerful face.
“That is the truth I promised you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE CONFERENCE ROOMS inside the ugly, Soviet-style brick U.S. attorney’s office at One Saint Andrew’s Plaza in downtown Manhattan were utilitarian and windowless. There were many of them. There were no water containers in any of them, no wastebaskets, no coffee, no pens, no pencils, no paper. They each had identical furniture: long laminated tables whose surfaces were lacquered to resemble dark wood and seven or eight lightly upholstered chairs on four ball-bearing shaped wheels.
Yet despite the identity of the rooms, Tony Garafalo had the sensation that this was precisely the same one he had sat in seven years earlier when he was first arrested before he was convicted and sent to jail. Just as now, he was placed in the chair at the head of the table, but then, unlike now, separate handcuffs affixed his wrists, hands, ankles, and arms to the frame of the chair. This time, for some reason, he had complete freedom of movement. He could roll the chair backwards or forwards. He could lean into the table or away from it. He could make gestures. The one thing he was not allowed to do was stand and walk around.
And then, as now, there were at least eight other people in the room. Two of them were assistant U.S. attorneys, the lawyers who were just assigned to lead the investigations of Gina Carbone and Tony Garafalo. Seven years earlier, the assistants were both men in their mid-thirties. Like almost all assistant U.S. attorneys in Manhattan, they were graduates of Ivy League law schools. They had then spent two or three years as law clerks to federal judges, and then another three or four years with huge New York City law firms before moving for another four or five years to assignments as assistant United States attorneys: a standardized sequence of credentials that each of the assistants hoped would end in the ultimate lifetime prize-partnerships in their early forties in one of the legendary New York City law firms.