“You gonna unlock me from this shit? It is unconstitutional. Right there in the Eighth Amendment. No cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Now you’re Alan Dershowitz?”
“At least stop shining that friggin’ light in my face.”
“Don’t worry. You’re still as good looking as ever.”
She kept the intense, single focus beam on his face. “You didn’t get away with it, you know?”
“I did, and you know it, babe, and you know why.”
“I have great forensics people. You’re too stupid to know that. They’re issuing a report to the world that the tape the little Indian put out was a forgery. He spliced it all together. It was phony-like you. You know those Indians? And those Indians, unlike a cheap bum like you, are geniuses when it comes to tech stuff.”
“You’re dreaming this all up, babe.”
“And the Indian reporter never laid eyes on Gabriel Hauser in his life. The guy on the bench was one of my people, a great actor and look-alike of a guy, the Angel of Life, Mr. Gandhi had only seen on TV.”
Garafalo laughed.
Gina Carbone laughed, too, the sardonic laugh, the mocking chuckle she had learned from her Gambino family uncle. It was, Tony realized, the chuckle he’d learned when an order was given from a family consigliere to do bad things to someone. This was the first time in his life he felt, and knew he felt, real fear.
“Babe,” he said, “we’ve fucked in a lot of different places. How about here? Nobody’s looking.”
“And those agents you talked to yesterday. Never happened. You know the drill. You never left your cell. Not yesterday, not today.”
“You know, Gina, you were always a crazy broad. I’m going to keep on talking. Maybe I’ll write a book. Make a million bucks.”
“With your heart condition? I don’t think so.”
Tony closed his eyes. But the membranes that were his eyelids could not stop the glare. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me all those good doctors at Supermax didn’t have all those long talks with you about how your heart valves were shot to hell? How they told you they would have you flown to that prison hospital in Texas for surgery to replace the valves? I just had all their reports e-mailed to me. I felt real bad for you. I never knew anything was wrong.”
“Gina, you’re full of shit. That fucking Usain Bolt guy wishes he had my heart.”
“That’s what you kept on telling the doctors. You said, and it’s in their notes, that you had the heart of Usain Bolt.”
“You should know that. I could pump you for two hours easy without breaking a sweat.”
“I got the notes, Tony. They’re the only notes, all copies are deleted.” She paused and turned off the intense flashlight. “You won’t be the first fifty-four-year-old inmate to die in the federal prison system of a heart attack. You were always a stubborn Wop who thought he knew everything.”
Two hours later, in the solitary confinement cell where John Gotti and other celebrity prisoners were held while awaiting trial, Tony Garafalo was dead of a heart attack. There was nothing the two new prison doctors could do to save him.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“I HAVE AN important announcement,” Gina Carbone, dressed in her customary black pants and shirt on which the traditional patch of the New York City Police Department was sewn with only the word commissioner on it to differentiate her from the 40,000 other cops who wore the patch, stood at the simple wooden podium in the small press room at One Police Plaza.
“We believe that we have eliminated, either through capture or deaths in firefights, all the significant terrorists who through the last several days created as much chaos and death as they could.
“Within the last half hour elite and courageous members of the NYPD have killed as many as eighteen of the fanatical jihadists who somehow gained access to the Holland Tunnel. These were the people who, in a despicable display of cowardice, burned to death Dr. Gabriel Hauser in a cage on top of the building that for years has served as the most visible part of the ventilation and emergency escape route of the tunnel.
“To anticipate a question one of you is likely to ask, and I will take some questions, we do not at this moment know when and how these eighteen members of what we believe to be ISIS gained access to the tunnel’s interior system. There is some evidence that they were members of a sleeper cell that in the three days before the attacks began had steadily gained access to the intricate and very large and almost never used or patrolled ventilation and escape system.”
Deftly, Gina adjusted the slender and flexible microphone. “We do not yet know why ISIS selected Dr. Hauser for this horrible display. In fact, to be completely direct, we are investigating how Dr. Hauser came to be in the tunnel in the first place. His presence may have been voluntary. It may have been involuntary. Let me say this as well. Although the doctor was originally praised for his courage, we have, as you know, developed and are investigating his possible involvement in the planning or prearrangement of the attacks. And his familiarity with some of the people who participated. All of this, of course, is not meant to detract from the horror of his murder.”
She stared into the camera’s glowing orange eye. “More important than anything else I’ve said is this: the president and the mayor will soon lead a march over one of the city’s bridges. Traffic will begin to flow into and out of Manhattan, all in an orderly way. No one will be hurt, no one injured. The lockdown which has inconvenienced so many of you has been a success. As difficult as it has been, the people of this city have sustained this hardship and it has allowed us to hunt down, isolate, and incapacitate murderers. Within hours the streets in all parts of the city will be clean, traffic will flow, bars and restaurants will be open, as will schools, hospitals, all those things that have made this city the vital center of the world.
“But for a time, and it will be a time that the president and the mayor will decide with me and my people’s assistance, there will be soldiers and armed NYPD officers on the streets and in the subways and in almost every public space. If a person means no harm, there will be no harm to you or to him or her. We are not vigilantes, we are not racists, we do not profile people because of their ethnic or religious status. We are law enforcement officers. But if you do mean harm, you will be stopped by any means necessary.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
IN ALL HIS forty-seven years of living in the Bronx and Manhattan, Roland Fortune had never walked on the Triboro Bridge. In the past, as he drove either on his own or, more recently, surrounded by black SUV police vehicles for his protection, he had always gazed out the window at the immense view of the island of Manhattan, that Emerald City, and its extraordinary skyline, as extraordinary in daylight or at night, in rain, fog, snow, or clear sunshine.
And in the three years he had lived in Gracie Mansion, with its unobstructed view of the bridge’s almost two mile long expanse, it had taken on an almost totemic significance for him, from the sunrises that seemed to originate from and through and under the bridge’s structure as he sat quietly for a few minutes on the flagstone outdoor patio to the nighttime views when thousands of lights etched the bridge’s fantastical curved outline.
Today, toward the center of the bridge with only the president of the United States, the day at noon was awash with full sunshine, as it had been since Sunday. Both Andrew Carter and Roland Fortune were in business suits. Carter wore a colorful tie. Roland’s white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.
Behind them, at a distance of thirty feet, were the symbols and objects of America’s awesome military power, tanks, armored personnel carriers, unsmiling Marines in full battle gear. On the long, bridge-spanning walkways that Roland had never seen anyone use, rows of New York City police officers, also completely armed, stood like the Praetorian Guard. Helicopters were suspended in midair over, above, below and at the sides of the bridge. The East River waters were dazzling.