“The bastards were right here watching us yesterday, weren’t they?” Emily said in shock. “Watching us scramble. The panic. All those poor souls having to be evacuated from the hospitals. They just stood here happily watching the results of what they’d done.”
“And by leaving the bodies right here, I guess they want us to know it,” I said.
“I’m really starting to not like these fellas, Mike,” Emily said as she kicked a broken kayak handle into the water. “I mean, not even a little bit.”
Chapter 43
Several hectic hours later that day, at ten to one, Emily and I waited in a narrow, crowded hallway before a set of double doors on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza.
On the other side of the doors, we could hear a voice droning on as we hastily went over the final details of the report we were about to give to the police commissioner and acting mayor and various and sundry other officials.
The door of the thunderdome opened after a minute, and Chief Fabretti was there.
“Mike, you ready?” he said.
The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment.
In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.
But before I could answer the chief’s question, Emily and I were inside, front and center.
There were about twenty or thirty people up on the amphitheater-style seats surrounding us, a lot of tense-looking NYPD and FBI brass, and the acting mayor. Also some suits from the White House, we’d been told.
If I needed any further indication of what was at stake, I saw it on the whiteboard that the last speaker had been using. Two words had been written with a Sharpie in large black letters.
EVACUATION PLAN
“Who the hell is this again?” said the acting mayor over the rim of her eyeglasses.
The tall, long-necked, white-haired woman’s name was Priscilla Atkinson, and I almost felt like asking the Park Avenue–raised grande dame the same question, as her only experience before being named deputy mayor was running public events for the Central Park Conservancy.
Instead I began.
“Hi. I’m Detective Bennett. This is Special Agent Parker, and we’d like to bring everybody up to date on what we have so far.”
An aide whispered in the acting mayor’s ear.
“One question,” Atkinson said, interrupting me. “What’s going on, Detective Bennett? Who’s doing this to us, and why the hell haven’t you found them yet?”
Instead of pointing out that she’d just asked, in fact, three questions, I continued.
“I’m here to answer everybody’s questions, Ms. Mayor, okay? I’ve been informed that everybody has already been briefed about the EMP device we discovered. What you may not be aware of is that last night, we were able to obtain video footage of men—two men—placing the object on the East Side building’s roof.”
“Are they the same two men seen on the video at the train bombing?” said the commissioner from the row beneath the mayor.
“No, they’re not, Mr. Commissioner,” said Emily. “They were different men.”
“Have you ID’d them? Who the hell are they?” demanded the mayor.
“We’ve located them, ma’am,” I said, “and we’ve actually just ID’d them as two recent NYU grads.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“We don’t know. We found them this morning in a Dumpster at a construction site on Roosevelt Island, both shot multiple times in the head.”
That got the murmuring going.
“The men ran a marketing firm. They’re local kids with no terrorist ties,” Emily said before the mayor could jump in with another stupid obvious question. “We think they were hired by the people behind this.”