“Oh, I’m sorry, I almost forgot. There’s also a little matter of a deadline you missed.
“Did you think I had forgotten about that? Well, I didn’t forget about the deadline. Or the insult in your missing it. Now, watch what I can do.”
Chapter 56
AT 3:40 IN THE MORNING, following instructions, the Weasel took up a position on a bench in the riverfront park on Sutton Place and Fifty-seventh Street. There was a great deal that bothered him about this job, but the problems were balanced by two large positives: he was being paid a lot of money, and he was in the middle of the action again. Jesus, am I ever in the middle of the shit.
He stared down on the East River’s dark, swift-moving currents. A red tugboat marked MCALLISTER BROTHERS was assisting a containership on its way. The city that never sleeps, right? Hell, the bars on First and Second Avenues were just getting down to their last call. A little earlier he’d passed an animal medical center that was still open for late-night pet emergencies. Pet emergencies? Jesus, what a city, what a messed-up country America had become.
A lot of New Yorkers would be wide-awake soon, and they would find it exceedingly difficult to get back to sleep. There would be weeping and the gnashing of teeth. The Wolf was going to make certain of that in a minute or so.
Shafer watched the seconds on his watch tick down to 3:43, but he was also keeping an eye on the river and the Queensboro Bridge.
Cars and cabs and quite a few trucks were whizzing along up there, even at this hour. Easily a hundred vehicles were crossing the bridge right now, probably more than that. The poor wankers!
At 3:43 Shafer pressed a button on his cell phone.
This transmitted a simple coded squirt to a small antenna on the Manhattan side of the bridge. A circuit began to close. . . .
A primer fired. . . .
Microseconds later, a message straight from hell was delivered to the people of New York City, and the rest of the world.
A symbolic message.
Another wake-up call.
A massive explosion ripped through the girders and trusses of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Joints were severed instantly, shockingly, terminally. The old steel structures snapped like peanut brittle. Huge rivets popped out and plummeted toward the East River. Tarmac crumbled. Reinforced concrete fractured like paper being shredded.
The upper roadbed cracked in two, then enormous sections dropped like bombs onto the lower deck, which was breaking up as well, peeling away, twisting and twirling toward the water below.
Cars were falling into the water. A delivery truck carrying a full load of newspapers from a plant in Queens rolled backward down the inverted roadway and then pirouetted into the East River. It was followed by more cars and trucks, dropping like lead weights. Electric lines drooped and sparked along the entire length of the bridge. More cars, dozens of them, plummeted from the bridge, fell into the river, then disappeared beneath the surface.
Some people were exiting their cars, then jumping to their death in the river. Shafer could hear their terrifying screams all the way across the river.
And in every apartment building lights began to blink on, then TVs and computers, as the people of New York heard the first reports about a terrible disaster that was impossible to believe and that would have been unthinkable until a few years ago.
His work for the night done, Geoffrey Shafer finally rose from his park bench and went to get some sleep. If he could sleep. He understood this much: things were just getting started. He was on his way to London.
London Bridge, he thought. All the bridges of the world, falling, crashing down. Modern society coming apart at the seams. The sodding Wolf may be a madman, but he is a brilliant bugger at being bad. A bloody brilliant madman!
Part Three
WOLF TRACKS
Chapter 57
THE WOLF SLOWED his powerful black Lotus to just over a hundred miles an hour while he talked on his mobile phone, one of six he had with him in the car. He was headed toward Montauk on the tip of Long Island, but he had important business to attend to on the way, even at one in the morning. He had the American president, the German chancellor, and the British prime minister on the line. Top to top. What could beat that?
“This call can’t be traced, so don’t waste your time trying. My tech people are better than your people,” he informed them. “Now, what’s on everybody’s mind? We’re eight hours past the deadline. And?”
“We need more time,” the English prime minister spoke up for the group. Good for him. Was he the real leader of the three? That would be a surprise. The Wolf had thought of him more as a follower.
“You have no idea —,” the American president started to say, but he was cut off by the Wolf, smiling to himself, relishing the show of disrespect toward the powerful world leader.
“Stop. I don’t want to hear any more lies!” he yelled into the phone.
“You have to listen to what we have to say,” the German chancellor interjected. “Give us the opportunity —”