“I just want to sit here. This is fine.”
The storm was passing right overhead. The lightning streaks and thunderclaps were coming much closer together in time.
But only ninety seconds later, the door that Yolanda Figueroa had entered, one flight beneath us, burst open onto the catwalk.
From the angle at which I watched, I could see the figure of the young woman-gone almost limp, her head flopping against her chest-being pushed back out over the glass flooring by a young man dressed in camouflage clothes and assault boots.
I knelt beside Zoya and put my hand up to signal her to stay back.
Nik Blunt had Yolanda in his arms. It appeared from the blood on both her upper body and on Blunt’s clothing that he had already slit her throat.
I was helpless as I watched him drag her to the window he had opened over the concourse. “Hey, Scully! Commissioner!” Blunt screamed out into the poorly lit space.
Someone played the floods until they caught the two bodies-one alive, one probably dead-framed in the giant glass box so high above them.
“Hey, Scully! You looking for your officer?” Blunt screamed. “I told her to mind the gap, but she didn’t listen to me.”
I watched as Blunt threw Yolanda’s body to the concourse fifteen flights below. Before she hit the marble floor, snipers were firing at Blunt, bullets seemingly deflected by the thick panes of glass.
“I told her,” he yelled down, laughing as if he’d been seized by a demon, before he scurried back to the safety of the landing and let the door slam behind him. “I told her to mind the gap.”
FORTY-FIVE
“We’ve got to move,” I said, pulling Zoya Blunt to her feet.
“What happened to Yolanda?”
“She’s been hurt. We’ve got to go.”
“Nik? Was that Nik shooting?”
Maybe Zoya hadn’t heard his voice in the recess of the landing. “Probably. I think he’s on his way upstairs. I think Yolanda was right about his goal. We need to get out of this space as fast as we can.”
I knew that we couldn’t go downstairs. The risk of encountering Blunt on the way was too great. But he was headed in our direction and we had to change position as quickly as possible.
“Put out your cigarette, Zoya. Someone might see the light.”
“Attention, team.” There was a new voice on the bullhorn. It was Mike Chapman. He had undoubtedly seen Yolanda’s body splatter on the concourse floor and knew Zoya and I were in trouble. “Change of plans.”
Now he had to talk to us without giving Blunt any idea who or where we were.
“Okay, Zoya. That’s the detective who was working with us downstairs. We’re going to be fine. He’ll tell us what to do.”
“He doesn’t even know where we are.”
“I think he knows where Nik is, though.” I opened the door through which we had entered the landing. I knew Mike wasn’t going to send us across the glass catwalk and expose us to this maniac.
“My team needs to report immediately to Captain Poseidon’s son,” Mike said, choosing his words carefully. “Got that? To Poseidon’s son.”
This was not a time for Mike’s dark humor. If there was a Captain Poseidon, I didn’t know him. I took Zoya’s hand to lead her, but I wasn’t sure where to go. The beating of my heart seemed louder than the crashing thunder.
I kept repeating Poseidon’s name to myself and all that surfaced in my mind was Greek mythology, not an actual police captain. Of course, Poseidon. God of the sea. Did Mike want us to make our way downstairs to the Oyster Bar?
“Remember, men,” Mike called through the bullhorn. “The captain’s son has wings. Wings.”
“Did you and your brothers learn mythology when you were kids?” I asked Zoya.
“No. Not me. I never heard anybody talking about it. Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s great. Right now it’s great.” I couldn’t compete with Mike’s knowledge of the Greek and Roman warriors, but I’d learned a lot from listening to him over the years.
“Why is he calling us ‘men’? He’s not talking to you at all.”
“Oh, yes he is. He’s just trying to throw Nik off, not alert him to the presence of the two of us.”
Poseidon, god of the sea, was also the father of Pegasus. And Pegasus was the divine winged horse of Greek myth-and of the zodiac. The golden image of Pegasus was one of the larger figures in the mural of the celestial sky that stretched above us.
Of course it made more sense for Mike to direct us upward than to chance an encounter with Nik Blunt, who was at least one floor below when he encountered Yolanda Figueroa. One flight up and we would be in the corner of the building, directly below the painting of Pegasus.
“Repeating, gentlemen, that I will meet you by Captain Poseidon’s son. Not where his son actually is, but where he should be. Where his son should be,” Mike said. “As God is my witness.”
I stood still and repeated Mike’s last words. “As God is my witness?”
He was telling me something. Something he was convinced I knew. I got who Poseidon was and from that had figured Pegasus. What did God have to do with any of this?
I played the words over and over again in my mind, until the clues finally locked into place.
The celestial ceiling had been painted in reverse, we had learned in our tour. The information had seemed irrelevant at the time but satisfied my curiosity about the magnificent aqua sky. The artist had made a mistake in creating his great mural. I tried to remember everything we had learned such a short time ago.
And then I recalled what happened when Commodore Vanderbilt’s heirs had been informed about the mistake, the very week Grand Central had opened. They announced that the mural was not an error at all, but a view of the earth from the heavens. God’s view. God was their witness.
“Mike will meet us on the other side,” I said to Zoya. Not where Pegasus really is, but where he’s supposed to be. “On the top floor. Let’s retrace our steps and you can follow me across.”
I let the door to the landing close behind us, lighted the Bic to make sure the path ahead was clear, and started jogging to the far corner of the building. The winding corridor was the entire length of a city block, parallel to 42nd Street, taking us from the Lexington Avenue side of the terminal to the Vanderbilt Avenue side.
When we reached the opposite landing, both of us took thirty seconds to catch our breath. There were no sounds from the corridor behind us. No voices, no footsteps, no gunshots.
“Ready?”
“You think your detectives are out there?” Zoya asked.
“If not now, then any minute. It’s a lot of territory for them to have to cover quickly. Sixteen flights or more up the staircases, most of them locked.”
Who knew what kind of carnage they faced in the wake of Blunt’s maneuvers, and whether he had placed other obstacles in their way?
“How will you know when they get up here?”
“I’ll-I’ll take a look. I’ll open the door.” I was as anxious to see protection for us as she was.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?”
“As sure as I can be,” I said. “I’m going to open it now, okay?”
“Yeah.” She had her back flat against the wall, out of sight of anyone who would be in a position to see inside.
I cracked the door a couple of inches. The concourse was still bathed in darkness, but floodlights were panning the entire room. Some were running horizontally, along the walls and back and forth on the catwalks on both ends, while others were scanning from the top of the vaulted ceiling back to the floor. I figured I had less than ten seconds to stay out of the spotlight.
Mike still had the bullhorn and now he was talking to the fugitive. “We got your stash, Mr. Blunt. Whatever ammunition you don’t have with you, we’ve got most of it. So if you’re running low, you might want to rethink your plan.”