“People died?” I asked.
“Fifteen. Most ever, to this day, in a train accident in Manhattan. The way the steam hissed and the smoke bellowed, the rest of the injured thought they’d be cooked alive,” Ledger said. “‘Harvest of death’-that’s what a reporter called it. A harvest of death under New York City streets. That’s why this building’s an accidental terminal.”
“Accidental?”
“Got built, Ms. Cooper, because of that accident. Your colleagues indicted the engineer for manslaughter. The very next year, the plans for this building began. When the terminal opened in 1913, Grand Central was the highest-value piece of property in New York City. And then the entire center of gravity began to shift to this neighborhood. It’s this colossus of a train station that made this part of the city ‘Midtown.’”
“So tell us about crime, Don,” Mike said. “You can’t have an attraction like this without bringing in all kinds of crime. You must know stories that never reach the street.”
“I can’t think of any murders, till this one today. There’ve been robberies over the years, of course. But that could happen anywhere, mind you. And the stuff that you do, Ms. Cooper,” Ledger said, twirling the end of his mustache, reluctant like many others of his generation to use the word “rape.” “When the terminal was at its lowest ebb, back in the eighties, we had some bad cases out of here.”
I remembered as a young prosecutor when one of my colleagues had handled a case of a man who waited in prey for tourists getting off trains, offering to help them with luggage and taking them instead to remote platforms where he sexually assaulted them.
“Those crimes happen much more frequently in subway stations,” I said, respecting the man’s great pride in his terminal. We’d had cases that took place on moving trains, in deserted cars, as well as on platforms late at night when women alone were easy targets.
“What else, Don?” Mike asked.
“Over the years we’ve had more than our share of ransom demands. Are you old enough to remember when there used to be banks of lockers in the terminal?”
We all nodded. In one of my favorite novels, The Catcher in the Rye, the character named Holden Caulfield stored his belongings in one of the coin-operated lockers while he slept on a waiting-room bench.
“Used to be you could rent one for hours or days to store your things in. So the lockers were often designated drop spots in kidnappings. But that all changed after 9/11. No more temporary storage. You know about that better than I do. And mail train robberies. Looking back on things, we sure had a lot of those.”
“Of course,” Mike said.
“One day it’s a funeral cortege with some head of state, or war heroes shipping out, or kids going off to college or a summer vacation,” Ledger said. “Next thing you know it’s a Code Black.”
“Code Black?”
Don Ledger looked to Bruce Gleeson before he answered. “That’s what the emergency system is called for our stationmasters.”
“What system?” Mike said.
“Well, for terrorists and things like that.”
“Tell me.”
“Go ahead, Don,” Gleeson said. “It’s okay.”
“From the stationmaster’s office and several other locations in the terminal, there are surveillance cameras that can zoom in on any part of the building-theoretically-if they’re alerted to a problem.”
“Theoretically,” Mike said. “If there isn’t any visual obstruction-pillar, staircase, ticket booth.”
“Best we can do, Detective. This lets them direct emergency responders to the exact spot, as well as shut down exhaust fans to stop the spread of contaminants.”
“We’ll need to see this equipment,” Mike said, straightening up and brushing back his hair with his hand. “Make sure it’s working. You’ve had a terrorist bomb in here before.”
Gleeson looked quizzically at Mike. He seemed as surprised to hear the news as I did.
Don Ledger nodded. “Way before your time. All of you.”
“A cop died,” Mike said. “Back when my father was on the job. 1976. You grow up in a blue household, you hear those stories instead of fairy tales.”
“Terrorists?” I asked. “1976?”
“The Croatian National Resistance. Wanted to be freed from Yugoslavian control. A group of them hijacked a TWA flight from New York, bound for Chicago. Made their demands and got a plane full of passengers to Paris.”
I didn’t know the story at all.
“And the threat,” Ledger said, “was a bomb in a locker.”
“Here?” I asked.
“A locker right here in the belly of Grand Central Terminal. Could have taken out half of the five-fifteen to Greenwich.”
“So the negotiators met the demands of the terrorists,” Mike said, “who told them exactly where the bomb was. The Bomb Squad retrieved it and took it to be detonated at Rodman’s Neck.”
The NYPD Firing Range in the Bronx was a training ground where officers learned to shoot for operations, including the emergency response on September 11, 2001, and-in a large crater on the southernmost tip of the neck of land that juts out into Eastchester Bay-the place where the elite Bomb Squad took deadly explosives to be detonated. The Pit, as the crater was called, was the spot in which the bombs were rendered harmless. From crude to sophisticated devices, they’d been the handiwork of every radical group from the Weathermen to the Black Panthers to George Metesky-the Mad Bomber-and even Al-Qaeda.
“Only thing wrong was that when the squad tried to detonate the device by remote control, it didn’t go off. So a young cop named Brian Murray was sent out to the Pit to find the problem,” Mike said. “The damn thing exploded and killed him.”
No one spoke.
“RIP,” Mike said.
“I get your point, Detective,” Bruce Gleeson said. “I got the call this evening, and I assumed we had a sexual predator on the prowl. You think it’s bigger than that.”
“I think you can’t make any assumptions. Transportation hubs are a natural target for terrorists. They’ve been here before, and someday they’re going to be back.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“That’s the very place I made my movie debut, Ms. Cooper,” Ledger said.
It was after 8:00 P.M. on Thursday evening, and Mike had asked Ledger and Gleeson to take us through some of the physical plant, to explain to us the size and scope of the terminal. It was a good time to do it, with rush hour crowds already dispersed to their homes.
“Maybe that’s why you look so familiar to me,” I said, smiling back at him.
“You think I’m kidding, do you? Are you a Hitchcock fan?”
“My favorite.”
“North by Northwest? It was the first movie ever shot in Grand Central. 1959. My boss wanted a walk-on in a frame with Cary Grant, who was jumping on the Twentieth Century ’cause he was suspected of murder, so I tagged along in the shot.”
We were standing at the iconic information booth, which was crowned by an opalescent four-faced Seth Thomas clock, a priceless golden ball that had kept perfect time for a century.
“Good flick. Almost makes sleeping in the sleeping car of a train look sexy,” Mike said. “What are we looking at, Don?”
“The main concourse, all thirty-six thousand square feet of it. Larger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral.”
I remember, as a kid, thinking this was the largest indoor space I’d ever seen. That still held true.
“Nowhere to hide out here,” Mike said. “Wide-open.”
The room was enormous, with only the round information booth obstructing its center. The south side of the great hall, broken by the walkway to the old waiting room, was lined with ticket booths, most closed for the evening. Each one of them-if breached-could be a cubbyhole for someone looking to do evil.