He cleared his throat.
“Ding-dong! It’s fact-facing time, people,” he said. “The power isn’t coming back on today, tomorrow, or probably for some six months at least, and sitting around here isn’t going to change it.”
“Way to sugarcoat things, Dr. Bedside Manner,” Brooklyn Kale mumbled behind me as we stepped up to the super.
Chapter 34
The superintendent’s name was Lionel Cruz, and after we told him why we were there, he led us across the lobby and up six flights of stairs in a darkened stairwell and out in the rain onto the roof.
The device was in the southeast corner of the roof, on the other side of a dark, looming water tower. A strange, narrow, chest-height aluminum box about three feet wide. I thought it looked almost like a filing cabinet. One whose sides had been ripped open from a small bomb or explosive device that had gone off inside it.
“How did it get up here?” I said to Lionel.
“That’s just the thing,” the super said, shaking his head repeatedly. “I like to think I run a pretty tight ship here, but I have absolutely no idea. I’d check one of the security cameras at the front door or in the garage, but they’re both not working with the power loss. I’d call my staff about it, except the phones are down. I only came up to look around when Mrs. Willett, who lives on the top floor beneath here, said she thought she heard some kind of explosion.”
“Does this look like the device?” Emily said to Agent Clark, who was down on one knee on the tar paper, peering with a flashlight into the strange metal box’s blown-open gap.
“It has to be,” said Dr. Aynard, who was looking over the kneeling tech’s shoulder. “The remains of that metal cylinder there is the armature, and that segment of coiled copper is obviously the stator wiring.”
“And I’d say what’s left of the gas engine in there was the power source,” Agent Clark finished grimly. “This is a textbook flux compression generator bomb.”
“Brilliant, really,” said Aynard as he knocked on the metal housing with a knuckle. “Simple, efficient, not expensive, and highly effective.”
“Oh, it’s brilliant, all right,” said Arturo sarcastically. “Quick! Someone call the Nobel Prize people and nominate the terrorists for efficiently erasing civilization for a hundred square blocks.”
“So you’re saying this small box did the entire neighborhood?” Doyle said.
Aynard winced as he thought about it. He looked in again at the box’s burned remains.
“Maybe not,” he finally said. “Though this device definitely packed quite an electromagnetic punch, it does seem a little small. I’d say there’s probably at least one more somewhere, maybe even two.”
I thought about that. How a box as small as the one before us could do such unbelievable, unheard-of damage. I also thought about how there could be dozens more ready to go off at any moment.
I lifted my radio and called Miriam Schwartz, who was coordinating from the law enforcement staging area by the bridge.
“Miriam, we found the NNEMP,” I said. “But it’s small, and the experts on scene say there are probably more. We’re going to need search teams. Boots on the ground inspecting rooftops.”
“Search teams? For where? The affected area?” she radioed back.
I stared out at the wilderness of buildings in every direction.
“No—for everywhere,” I said. “There could be more of these things all over the city. I think it’s time to assume that there are.”
Chapter 35
The 59th Street Bridge staging area had turned into a full-fledged carnival of trailers and tents by the time we got back to it an hour or so later. To the constant hammering of temporary generators, twenty or thirty FBI agents and double that number of NYPD officers were busy setting up a crisis command post.
We had a meeting under a rain-soaked tent, where we got some of the brass up to speed. As per my recommendation, it was needle-in-the-haystack time all over the city. Cops and firemen everywhere were now in the process of searching rooftops.
At the end of the meeting, Chief Fabretti and Bob Madsen, the New York office’s assistant special agent in charge, who were now jointly running the show, named Emily and me the case’s investigative coordinators.
I was definitely pleased to be getting the case lead but even more psyched about officially working with Emily again. We worked well together. We’d stopped a psychopath who was kidnapping and killing rich kids a few years before, and more recently we helped take down a Mexican drug cartel head. Not only was she particularly adept at appeasing the government pen pushers, she also probably had better back-channel contacts in the Bureau’s various investigative support units than the director. She was all about results.
Emily grabbed us a couple of coffees from another tent after the meeting.
“C’mon, Mike. The rain’s falling off a bit. I want to stretch my legs.”
Emily said this casually, but I noticed her expression was pensive, a little standoffish. Her mental gears were spinning up to speed, I knew. Her investigative approach was like mine, one of ebb and flow. The idea was to gather as much info as possible and then back off of it in order to let things sink in. Give one’s initial and intuitive impressions a little time to set, so that after a while, a telltale pattern could be detected. You couldn’t talk things to death. Especially in the beginning.