He yawned, rolled his shoulders, stretched. As if that mattered. He didn’t need to know about all that. He only had to make sure his own part worked so he could get the rest of the money.
The instructions couldn’t have been simpler. He just needed to do it, leave the apartment, get into the rental car parked in the lot on Broadway, and head straight back to Florida.
He glanced at his watch. Three minutes. Hot damn! Three! he thought. Then he went back to staring at the tablet again.
He was trying to keep his mind blank, stay serene. But as the clock ticked down, it became exceedingly difficult.
He kept thinking about the craziest, most screwed-up shit he’d ever done in his life. How he’d broken into houses when people were home sleeping. How he’d knifed that kid who tried to take his shit that time when he was living on the beach in Key West. In the back of the neck, too. He had to have killed him. He sure hadn’t stuck around to find out.
The worst was in the midnineties, when, during a Christmas visit to his little brother Kenny’s house, he up and flat-out stole his brother’s new Toyota Echo, which had his two nieces’ car seats in the back and a woman’s new winter coat in the trunk that couldn’t have been anything but Kenny’s Christmas present to his wife.
But all that put together, thought the man as he rubbed his sweating palms on the soft, threadbare thighs of his Levi’s, couldn’t hold a candle to the act of certifiable insanity he was about to commit.
Literally, no one had ever done anything like this. No one. It was going to rearrange people’s minds.
Did he re
ally want to be part of that? He didn’t know. Half of him was afraid, of course, especially about getting caught. That would not be good. But he really didn’t think he would. The plan was pretty much foolproof.
The other half of him was excited about it. Not just about the $150K he was due but also because it was so big-time. Monumental. Wasn’t like he was winning any Nobel Prizes anytime soon, so what he was about to do would definitely leave a mark.
The alarm on his cheap watch suddenly went off. The tinny blip-blip, pause, blip-blip was like an electronic amplification of his racing heart.
It was time.
He flipped over the iPad and propped it in his lap and pressed an app and the screen suddenly showed a live shot of upper Manhattan, to the east. Small buildings could be seen far below with Matchbox-like cars between them moving slowly in the congested streets.
It was the view from the camera he’d already mounted on the high-rise building’s roof that was connected to the iPad through Wi-Fi. In the corner of the screen, numbers showed the camera’s satellite GPS coordinates to the second decimal point and that its elevation was at 326.8 feet.
On the iPad screen, the tiny buildings began to grow in size as he remotely activated the camera’s zoom lens.
Zooming and meticulously searching and zooming again, the man swiped at the screen with his long fingers, zeroing in on the target.
Chapter 17
A sudden frantic call from Chief Fabretti redirected me immediately from the Saint Nicholas Avenue bomb site back to the command center at the precinct.
I was told that the mayor was about to speak for the first time about the attack to the press, and to the world, and I was needed to deliver an up-to-date briefing to him in person before he went on.
As I turned the corner of Broadway onto 170th, I could see that a portable stage and flag-flanked podium had been set up outside on the street in front of the Thirty-Third Precinct’s front door. Standing in the blocked-off street around the stage was a large crowd of FBI people and cops and mayor’s-office guys playing cops with coplike EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT Windbreakers over their shiny suits.
And still they were outnumbered by media people. Everywhere there were camera guys in plaid flannel shirts playing with light meters and tripods while their metrosexual news-producer bosses did that one-finger-in-the-ear thing as they gabbed into their cell phones.
In addition to regular news vans, I spotted a massive trailer-size national news satellite truck, like the ones you see outside events like the Super Bowl. I did a double take as I drove past a startlingly good-looking, tall brunette—a name-network reporter—with her head back, getting her eyeliner touched up by her assistant.
There’s a real buzz in the air, isn’t there? I thought as I parked and got out. Like we were at a red-carpet event.
I didn’t like it. I knew people were freaking out and needed to know what was happening, but this was nuts. It never failed. Every time these things happened, the circus atmosphere seemed to get worse. Less thought and emphasis seemed to be placed on the incredible human pain inflicted on the victims and their families and more on the hysterical contagious excitement generated by the knowledge that Something Big Is Happening.
I found Chief Fabretti with Lieutenant Bryce Miller on the sidewalk near the precinct’s front door.
“Just about to call you, Mike,” Fabretti said. “The mayor changed his mind about the briefing. He’s going on any second now, and he needs to, and I quote, wrap things up with his speech people.”
“His speech people, of course,” I said, nodding, as I looked out at the media horde. “You think this is the right approach here, Chief? Little on the splashy side, isn’t it?”
The mayor’s buddy, Bryce Miller, jumped in. “Mayor insisted it be outside,” he said. “Not holed up in a bunker somewhere. There’s a lot of scared folks out there. We need to project calm. It’s important people understand that everything’s okay. That we’re in control of things.”
In control of things? I thought, cocking my head. We are? I wanted to say.