“Judge, do you have any idea how fundamentally off base you are?” Carter stared at him. “And what is this about indicting the mayor? Where did you get that idea? Is it against the law to be so good-looking?”
“Mr. President, the mayor is a drug addict. Garafalo on his cell phone had dozens of YouTube-style films secretly taken by Fortune’s security detail of Fortune taking and paying for deliveries of banned opiate substances from known drug dealers during all the years he has been in office. The security detail gave the live recordings to Carbone, to whom the detail members are extraordinarily loyal. The recordings were transferred to her cell phone. She either transferred them to Garafalo for the love of the game-maybe they learned those kinds of games when they were kids in the same neighborhood on Staten Island long before Steve Jobs gave the world cell phones-or he just roamed through her cell phone for the fun of it when she was sleeping. Whatever the way, he has the images. And now I do.”
Lazarus removed his iPhone from the internal pocket of the loose fitting suit he wore and held it up before the president. Lazarus said, “They’re both criminals. She has no respect for the Constitution. And she spends all of her spare time with Garafalo, who is a walking crime wave. And the mayor has enough banned substances to open a warehouse.”
Andrew Carter reached out and took Lazarus’ cell phone from him. Lazarus said, “I’ll cue up some more of the images for you. You can see for yourself.”
And then Carter deliberately let Lazarus’ cell phone drop from his hand. It hit the old stone of the basement floor, which was cobbled together two centuries ago. The phone was intact. Thinking that Carter had inadvertently lost his grip on the sleek silver object, Lazarus, in an uncommon gesture of cooperation, began to lean over to pick up the phone.
And it was then that the heel of Andrew Carter’s two-thousand-dollar shoes covered Lazarus’ cell phone and ground it into splinters.
“Here is what you’ll do, Judge, beginning immediately. First, if a grand jury is already sitting, disband it. Make sure if it is sitting that all of the people on it are told to disregard whatever they’ve heard so far and have them reminded that grand jurors are bound by law to total secrecy. If they’ve heard anything at all from the government lawyers or the agents they will be indicted themselves if they repeat anything they heard.
“Second, if any of the government lawyers have any of the tapes that were on this phone they are to turn them over to your people immediately and then your people are to bring them to my Secret Service agents. I will tell my agents to give me any of those devices.”
Lazarus was utterly motionless, like a medical school skeleton suspended in midair. He didn’t say a word.
“Finally, and most important, you are to fly back to Washington and stay in that little bachelor apartment you have in Anacostia and not leave it until I tell you to, and at that point I’ll have my press secretary announce I’ve received your resignation and accepted it with deep regret. And you will remember forever that before you took the job you signed an agreement never to write about or speak about anything you ever learned while serving as Director of Homeland Security. If you do I’ll have you indicted, since you seem to get such pleasure from indictments.”
Carter turned and began walking up the creaking stairs. “And don’t ever let me see your face or hear your voice again.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THERE WAS NO need for Gina Carbone and Roger Davidson to speak again since they had many times, in the isolation of her office at One Police Plaza, spoken about strategies to follow depending on how what they called “war games” developed. One of the endgames had now happened in the Holland Tunnel. This was one of the possible scenarios they had discussed. They had known that if they ever had to seize the men on the hit list it might be necessary to move them from Pier 37 to another secure location. One of those was the never-used labyrinth, built in the Depression, that connected the tunnel to the huge, eerie complex that was designed as a “safe” place in the event of a disaster in the tunnel. Davidson and his crew had taken the prisoners in sealed NYPD vans to the tunnel complex as soon as Davidson learned that Harlan Lazarus had ordered a cadre of Homeland Security agents to invade and search Pier 37.
Gina had given Davidson-a name she knew was not his real one although she knew everything about his background from the time he first landed as a United States advisor in Afghanistan to train local Afghan fighters during the failed Soviet invasion in the 1980s-the power to use Plan A, Plan B, or Plan C of Code Apache. He was to decide when the end game had been reached and that there was no longer a need for the eighteen or so men on the hit list who had been taken down in the immediate aftermath of the first bombings at the Met.
Plan A was simply to return the men to the small houses and apartments where they had been when they were seized in the first hours of Code Apache. Of course the men would be likely to speak out if Davidson put Plan A in place, but he and the commissioner were certain no one would believe or care about their stories.
Plan B was to bring them into the standard criminal justice system, booking them at several different precincts in Manhattan, as if they had been separately arrested on weapons charges, putting them in holding cells, and then several hours later bringing them in front of different judges for arraignment; they would all be denied bail and then held in separate cells at the sprawling Rikers Island prison complex. And, Gina and Davidson also agreed, no one would believe their stories.
But both of them tacitly knew Davidson would opt for Plan C, the “Charlie plan.” And that when the Charlie plan ended Davidson and his corps of ten men whom he had recruited over the last two years and the only men, all with fake names, who knew the essence of Code Apache’s details, would themselves just disappear to different places around the planet.
Plan C began as soon as Gabriel Hauser became a black, utterly misshapen skeleton at the bottom of the cage in glimmering light over the Hudson River. Davidson addressed the members of his team who had been with him on the roof of the blockhouse, the men who had filmed Mohammad speaking and then Gabriel Houser in flames. “Throw the equipment into the river and let’s get downstairs fast. Keep the masks on.” More gently he told Mohammad, “Good work. Come down with us.”
They raced down the iron stairwell, ripping off their black masks now that they were out of the sight of the outside world. On the factory-like floor of the blockhouse the prisoners were still in clusters of five or six, each cluster guarded by other members of Davidson’s crew armed with M-16s and various German-manufactured pistols. “Let’s get them all back in the tunnel,” Davidson ordered. The sullen men moved, some of them reluctantly, responding to the commands of the three men in his group who spoke Arabic.
Once inside the tunnel the prisoners were again separated into small groups spaced about thirty feet from one another. “This,” Davidson said, “is Plan C. Let’s get it on.”
At those words from Davidson, volleys of rifle and pistol shots resonated through the inside of the tunnel. Davidson, too, was shooting. He and all of his team wore bulletproof vests and lay prone on the tunnel’s floor to minimize the risks of ricocheting bullets. Within thirty seconds all eighteen men who had been on the hit list were riddled with bullet holes. All were dead. Mohammed, too, was dead.