The elevator rose, ascending slowly through the narrow shaft. It seemed to take forever. The men stood absolutely still. There was no room for words inside the cab. The air would not accommodate them. The jukebox — with its dozens of CDs, hundreds of songs and thousands of notes and lyrics — sat strangely silent on the gurney. The elevator rose and rose, marking the numbers off. They winked. It was unbearably cold. They flashed. The reverse countdown decomposed. The elevator slowed. It hesitated, then stopped at the eightieth floor. The door retracted with a groan. The corridor was black.
Mohammed Qashir and Ali Singh began to push the gurney from the elevator. The first two wheels slipped with a crisp click over the crack, and then they heard a hissing sound and something fell onto the floor, right at their feet.
It started to shake and give off smoke. A canister. It hissed and slithered like a startled snake. Ali Singh lifted his weapon and sprayed the corridor with gunfire.
He was hit directly in the forehead. He fell but his Uzi kept on firing. Bullets lanced the walls and ceiling. Plastic shattered. Metal shrieked. Bin Basra stumbled to the floor. Mohammed Qashir coughed and sputtered as smoke began to fill the elevator. A bullet pierced his throat, and he went down. Salim Moussa tried to hide behind the jukebox. He screamed and raised his weapon and another soundless shot abandoned a small hole in his left hand, a drop of blood, and then the eyeholes of his mask seemed to explode, to pop as a bullet pierced his face, right through one temple and out the other, and he unrolled across the floor. His body shook. The elevator door began to close, then bounced against his leg. It opened and closed. It opened and closed.
Light beams transfixed the darkness. Men with night vision goggles, gas masks, body armor and small-caliber handguns appeared like cyborgs out of the dark. They approached the elevator cautiously, their weapons trained upon the lifeless occupants within. Blood started pooling, massing up, until it drained into the crack between the elevator and the floor, within the doorframe, and dribbled down the elevator shaft.
SAC Johnson appeared in a nimbus of white light. He was holding a gas mask over his face. He looked down at the bodies. Then he turned and motioned, seemingly toward nothing, at the shadows. The counter-terrorist squad checked the bodies for signs of life and pushed them roughly to the side. Then, with agonizing care, they rolled the gurney out into the hall. A figure appeared out of the shadows, wearing a reinforced body suit, breastplate and mask. The soldiers carefully removed the frame from around the jukebox. The man in the body suit knelt down, and pushed a clip, and opened the front side panel of the jukebox containing a clear plastic cylinder. The cylinder slipped out. He turned on a tiny flashlight and looked inside. Something silver twinkled back. He reached into the opening and removed an aluminum attaché case. He set it gently on the ground, studying the latches carefully. In one smooth movement, he released them and lifted the lid.
The device lay still within. It was lifeless, dead. Turned off. Or, not yet on. The man in the mask moved his gloved hand across the bulging ball of steel, and pressed a button in the console. The fuel case popped up with a click. Everyone in the corridor seemed to take a breath at once. He eased the chamber open carefully. Slowly. A small wrist Geiger counter chattered like frigid teeth. The soldiers and agents unconsciously stepped back. Some moved intentionally away.
The housing was empty. Not a trace of fuel. They were reading residual radioactivity.
Warhaftig hovered next to Jerry Johnson. He looked down at the jukebox, then back up at Johnson once again. The SAC felt his eyes burn a hole in the side of his neck. Somebody flipped a switch and the lights burst on. “Go on, say it,” Johnson spat.
“Say what, sir?”
Johnson raised his shirt cuff to his mouth. “Eighty is secure,” he said. “Close in on the vehicle. I repeat. Close in.” Then he stepped into the elevator, adding, “Well, come on. Doesn’t the Agency want to interface?”
Warhaftig followed the SAC into the elevator. He found it difficult to keep from laughing.
As soon as they got downstairs, they slipped through an emergency exit and hovered in the shadows only a dozen yards away from the loading dock. The ambulance was still parked in front. The engine was still running, sending a white cloud of exhaust aloft into the snow-filled air.
Johnson watched as a homeless man, dressed in a dirty black jacket and torn blue jeans, staggered up the street. He approached the loading zone casually, oblivious. The vehicle’s engine roared as Hammel gunned the accelerator. But the ambulance didn’t move. It was in neutral still. And the stranger didn’t turn. He continued to saunter over, not even looking at the ambulance. He crossed directly in front, and swung his arms, and pointed his weapon at the windshield, directly at Hammel. “Raise your hands,” he screamed. “Now!”
Hammel ducked, the agent fired, and the ambulance jumped forward, pitching the man high into the air like a matador on the horns of a bull. A moment later the agent fell and struck the pavement with a nauseating crack, and rolled into the street. The ambulance banked right, then left, almost as if the driver were aiming at the figure rolling in the road. The vehicle bumped over him. The body wriggled for a moment, strangely inverted, and grew still. The ambulance roared on.
Johnson discharged his weapon but it appeared to have no effect. The vehicle rattled through a phalanx of policemen, by special agents, by counter terrorist SWAT teams and marksmen on the roof. Somehow, miraculously, despite the shower of lead, Hammel remained unscathed. The cab seemed reinforced. The ambulance burned west on Thirty-fourth, as a pair of police cars closed the block. They came together, nose to nose, but Ali Hammel never slowed. He charged right through the narrow gap. There was a loud crash as he struck the cars, punched them aside, and kept on going.
Johnson ran to his car with Warhaftig close behind. He started her up. With a squeal, the car peeled out into the street… followed by a second, a third, and then a fourth police car. Sirens wailed. Lights flashed. Within minutes, the Cabrini ambulance had made it to the West Side Highway. There was no traffic and Hammel had little trouble swinging north. The police cars hurtled close behind, their cherries flashing — bright crimson and turquoise bubbles floating through the falling snow. Their sirens howled against the night. One minute the ambulance was charging up the highway, the next it swerved against the steel divider, showering sparks. A helicopter dropped out of the sky. It struck the ambulance. Hammel continued to swerve and weave along the highway, trying to avoid the helicopter skids. Suddenly, a blazing spotlight illuminated the ambulance from above. “Pull over,” a voice boomed through a loudspeaker. “Pull over now!”
Without warning, Hammel jammed on the breaks, and the ambulance slalomed on the snow. The helicopter over-shot the road. It banked and climbed. It looped around. The police cars skidded in behind. One crashed into the rear right fender of the ambulance. The ambulance was blasted up the road. It turned. It spun about. It bounced against the outer guardrail and somehow ended facing uptown once again.
The rear wheels screamed. The ambulance exploded forward, barely avoiding SAC Johnson’s car, barely avoiding the guardrail as it shimmied to the left on Forty-sixth Street, then off the West Side Highway. It was heading for The Intrepid — Sea, Air and Space Museum.
The ambulance crashed through the metal gate. Sparks flew up all around it like a fireworks display. The massive light gray flank of the great aircraft carrier was suddenly illuminated. The ambulance kept going. A piece of the fencing was stuck under the axel. The ambulance kept showering sparks the entire length of the museum pier, as it paralleled the aircraft carrier, from prow to stern, as it kept churning up the night, with Hammel still at the wheel, still clutching it with all his might, until it ruptured through the wooden fence at the far end of the pier, and rose into the snowy air, and flew above the dark and inky waters of the Hudson River. It seemed to hang against the cloudy sky, against the bright face of New Jersey — with its train-set-sized high-rises — seemed to hover for a moment longer, before plunging with a mighty crash into the waves.