The patients who had arrived with no names, no wallets, no handbags, no knapsacks, and no passports were identified by numbers and letters written in magic markers on their foreheads. Someone had handwritten Patient X52 on the dark man’s forehead.
“You’ll be all right,” Gabriel said. “I promise.”
Patient X52 squeezed Gabriel’s hand powerfully. Gabriel, who was not certain he knew Patient X52’s name, didn’t erase the magic marker lettering and replace it with the words Silas Nasar.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GINA CARBONE GAVE the order for the eighteen arrests. Most of the men were in Queens. Four were in Washington Heights in Manhattan. They were selected from the secret Hit List that the police department had covertly maintained during the three years she had served as commissioner. No one outside the department knew that there was a Hit List, and only ten other officers in the department knew about it. Gina hadn’t asked for any legal opinion from the staff lawyers assigned to the department for one simple reason: she was certain that any legal opinion would conclude that the creation and maintenance of the list was illegal, that it involved racial profiling, and that it entailed violations of Fourth Amendment rights since the homes and apartments of these men had been secretly examined without search warrants and sophisticated surveillance devices installed in them without any judge’s authorization. Roland Fortune knew nothing about it. She had created the Hit List so that she could act quickly if something catastrophic happened in the city she loved, the only city she really knew. She had an innate distrust of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Defense Department, and the CIA. Even of Roland Fortune when it came to this kind of issue. He was in no way a warrior.
The men who were arrested were not brought to Central Booking in Manhattan or the police precincts or Rikers Island for processing and arraignment, the standard routine after any arrest. There was no plan to bring them before judges or assigned lawyers or told what charges they faced. They were all taken in unmarked police vehicles to a detention center embedded in one of the vast, abandoned piers that extended into the East River. The cops who made the arrests had been trained for swift seizure of the men on the list, which was constantly revised as new information developed, and her special secret unit consistently monitored the men on the list to be certain where they were in the event they had to be taken down.
“Any of them cooperating?” Gina asked Roger Davidson.
She and Davidson were in the small girls’ locker room in PS 6. The entrance to the room, which smelled of disinfectant, was closed and two sergeants stood outside. There was no way anyone could hear the conversation between Davidson and her. Davidson was a retired CIA agent who was nominally the head of the NYPD’s Operation Outreach, the benign name Gina created for the Hit List unit. Like every other member of the unit, Davidson posed as a civilian employee of the department. He was designated as a community liaison officer, an absurd title for a man who in his long career had killed fifty-five people.
“Not yet. But one of them seems to be having second thoughts.”
“Which one?”
“The guy who owns the food wagons.”
Gina already knew that it was not suicide bombers in civilian clothes who detonated the explosions. The sources of the explosions were three food wagons in front of the museum. One of the department’s forensics investigators had reported to her that the wagons were crammed with explosives; even the metal poles that supported the festival-like umbrellas were stuffed with explosives. Someone using a remote device had triggered them-one, two, three. Mohammed Butt owned a business in Queens that provided hundreds of food wagons to street vendors. He had become rich.
“What is he saying?”
“He must be a make-believe lawyer. So far he’s saying he wants to get a lawyer, make a plea deal and get immunity.”
Gina rolled her eyes. “What a fucking world we live in. A plea deal? Immunity? The fucker must spend his time watching lawyer television shows when he isn’t planning jihad and making millions off of no-bid city contracts.”
Although Davidson had spent many hours in windowless conference rooms with Gina Carbone, he had never once heard her swear. It added a new and welcome dimension to her.
“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.
“Pull his balls off and make him eat them unless he talks. At least pull his balls off.”
Davidson returned her taut smile. Imitating a line Richard Nixon once spoke, he said, “That would be wrong.” Like Nixon, he didn’t mean it.
Gina laughed, her first laugh since the sunny hours on the patio on Staten Island with her family so many hours ago.
“Promise him anything and everything,” she said. “Write it down for him so that he thinks he has a contract. See whether that works.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Be creative.”
Davidson gave her a knowing look. He had a license from her to use the skills he had developed during his years in the CIA interrogating Arab men in secret dark prisons around the world. He said, “Creativity is the lifeblood of this business.”
“Did you pick up everybody on the Hit List?”
“Except one.”
“Who?”
“Silas Nasar. He’s a U.S. citizen. In fact, he was born in Bayonne. Only native-born on the list.”
“Why is he on the list?”
“I told you a month ago. Don’t you remember? He’s traveled to Pakistan six times, five times after 9/11, once before. He claimed to have long-lost family members there.”
“Remind me. We had to have some other reason to put him on the list. Takes a lot to qualify.”
“He owns a big electronics store in Queens. He has a fixation on communication equipment. Not just cell phones and pagers, but GPS systems and tracking devices. He loves innovative stuff, like tracking devices in candy bars. Things that send and get messages and let people know where you are. Jewelry, watches with tiny communicating devices. Even bracelets; my ex-wife would love to be a customer.”
“Which one is he?” she asked.
Davidson took out his iPad and delicately touched the illuminated screen. For a large man who had killed people with his own hands, he had unusually long fingers as graceful as a pianist’s. His fingers floated over the bright graphics. A picture as vivid as life appeared. It was Silas Nasar. It was a far clearer, better-defined picture than the one on Gabriel Hauser’s cell phone.
“Hell of a birthmark,” Gina said when she saw the seahorse-shaped blemish.
Davidson said, “He shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“Then go fucking find him,” Gina said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SILENCE WAS strange. Six hours earlier, as he was carried to the blasted rear windows of the museum, there were sounds everywhere-piercing screams, otherworldly moans, out-of-control fire alarms, the crunching of glass and stone under foot. Flowing cataracts of water from the fire prevention system, useless in the chaos. He remembered that he had felt submerged in noise, as if he were drowning.
Now the museum was quiet. There was still beautiful sunlight on its scarred, ochre-colored surfaces at five in the afternoon. The early summer air was gentle. The trees in Central Park were lush. Above the upper edge of the museum a vivid half-moon shined in the blue daylight sky.
Roland Fortune had given thousands of press conferences, he was gifted with the ability to be fluid and informative, often funny, and he experienced some of that hit of anticipation as he walked toward the microphones at the podium at the base of the museum’s front steps. He knew this was the most important press conference of his life. Ever since he had joined Gina Carbone and Harlan Lazarus, the Secretary of Homeland Security who had arrived by helicopter just fifteen minutes before Roland reached PS 6, he’d been in increasing levels of pain but hadn’t taken any more Vicodin. He didn’t want to talk to the world with any slurring or hesitation in his voice or sluggishness in his appearance. He would rather have an edge of pain to keep himself alert. He was in a fresh, beautifully tailored suit.