Shock Warning

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“There something I don’t like, boss,” said Lannie Saleh to Captain Francis X. Byrne. Byrne was the commander of the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department and Aslan Saleh was his subordinate, but he didn’t act much like it. Which was one of the things Frankie Byrne liked about him.

“Haven’t you Arabs caused enough trouble around here already?” replied Byrne. They were in CTU command headquarters in Chelsea, still picking up the pieces of the assault on Times Square.

“Iranians aren’t Arabs, remember? Shiites aren’t Sunnis.”

“But you all look alike,” said Byrne. “What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference between Orangemen and Catholics in Londonderry, Northern Ireland?”

“You mean Derry, Ulster.”

“I rest my case.”

“Then take your case and shove it up your ass. Don’t you realize that the Irish are the only people on the planet with legitimate grievances?”

“What about the Jews, boss?” sang out Sid Sheinberg. “We’ve got plenty of legitimate grievances.”

“That’s all you got, Sheinberg,” cracked Lannie. “Grievances. Comin’ out your ears.”

Byrne let them go. That was the way it used to be in the old days, when he and Sy Sheinberg, and Matt White had all been young, before the lawyers and the politicians had infected everything with their sophistry, corrupted everything with their relativism, blocked everything with their protocols, outlawed both thought and deed, word and action, and criminalized emotions in the name of… well, superior emotion.

Police work was so much easier in the old days. Law in one hand, nightstick in the other. That was how New York had been tamed of the likes of Happy Jack and Owney Madden, back in the days when the Irish ruled the roost, on Fourteenth Street, at Tammany Hall, and on the wild West Side, on Battle Row and in the sanctuary at St. Mike’s, and in the Gopher hidey-holes under the docks and under the streets and up your arse if you weren’t careful. Law of the jungle, when you stopped to think about it, worked every time it was tried.

Only cowards and lawyers feared the law of the jungle. And now they, along with the women and the eunuchs, were running the show. Today, it was like 1984, with Big Brother on every corner, CCTV everywhere, revenue and citizen control directed straight from Gracie Mansion, for your safety and protection. Fascism could be fun, if only you would shut up and let it have its way.

What had happened to his country?

No time to worry about that now. Saving the world was not part of his job description. Keeping Matt White happy was.

Frankie looked at his men. And yes, they were all men. It was a good thing the names of all the members of the CTU were secret, just as their location was secret, or else the bowtied bed-wetters at The New York Times would have a conniption, railing from the anonymous safety of their homes in Riverdale and Bronxville and Scarsdale about the unfairness of it all and exposing his men’s identities for all to read. Everyone single one of Byrne’s men lived within the five boroughs of the City of New York, joined since 1898, fifteen years after the Brooklyn Bridge and the father-and-son team of John and Washington Roebling had transformed a small island into the capital city of the country, in deed if not in word.

New York needed fewer lawyers, and more men like the Roeblings, if it ever wanted to get anything done again. One look at the hole downtown, where the World Trade Center had once stood, told you everything you needed to know about the state of America these days. Sue everybody, accomplish nothing, and have the Times cheer your uselessness on. And on and on and on…

Until the next attack.

Until the next deaths.

Until the next opportunity for grief counselors and shrinks and candlelight vigils and makeshift memorials and weeping, as if the dead were just so many John Lennons writ small, never-were celebrities made briefly less anonymous by the arbitrary hand of the Reaper and the tabloids and the network news shows’ crocodile tears in the pursuit of transient ratings.

What was their motto? “We don’t have to be right. We just have to be right today.”

Byrne’s shoulder had pretty much healed, but Sid Sheinberg’s broken leg was never going to be the same: he was looking at a lifetime of desk duty. But the gunshot wound that Byrne had sustained in his duel with Ben Addison, Jr., otherwise known as the late Ismail bin-Abdul al-Amriki, was the least of his problems. Arash Kohanloo’s coordinated attack had been a very near thing: their electronic eyes blinded; their computers crashed; billions of dollars worth of damage to Forty-second Street, Times Square itself, the subway lines, the surrounding buildings…

He was lucky he hadn’t lost his job. His personal heroism that day had won him yet another medal from the mayor, but he was acutely aware of how signally they had failed their city. After 9/11, the NYPD had adopted the Israelis’ motto of “never again,” but again it was, 9/11 all over again, this time perhaps even worse. Because all their equipment and their independence and their courage had been defeated by a denial-of-service attack from somewhere thousands of miles away. Just a few minutes was all it took to render them eyeless in Gaza, for the bad guys to smuggle in the weapons through the same old riverside tunnels and hidey-holes the Gopher Gang was probably using back when Madden was a pup.

The worst of it was that they had recruited so many Americans — not just Ben Addison, Jr., a converted con, but hillbillies like the kid they found with his head blown off in the pump house under the Central Park Reservoir. They’d probably never get a firm ID on him, since whoever killed him had made damn sure there no prints, teeth, or any other identifying characteristics. Sure, they could grab some DNA, but unless the punk was in the database — which he wasn’t — he would molder forever in an unmarked grave, unclaimed and unmourned — just another stiff in the ongoing history of the island of the Manhattoes.

Byrne had promised himself that he would find the man’s killer. Not necessarily to bring him to justice, or to shake his hand and thank him for a job well done, but to come face-to-face with a man he very much wanted to meet. The man who had saved him from Ben Addison, Jr., the man who had cleaned his gunshot wound and left him safe in the maelstrom of Forty-second Street. The man who had guided him to the chopper, to the shooter, and to the final confrontation with Kohanloo on the East River.

“We shoulda struck back, right away, hard,” said Sid, still walking with a cane. Sid was the nephew of Frankie’s old friend, rabbi, and mentor, Sy Sheinberg. That was back in the day when medical examiners were hard-drinking standup comics, not civil servants as bloodless as the corpses they dissected for fun and profit at the taxpayers’ expense.

“At who?” snapped Lannie. He was that rarity, a real street Arab turned American, a Palestinian kid whose grandparents had come over during the first oil shock to run first one gas station, then two, then ten, then fifty in Brooklyn. He had money but he didn’t act like it, which Byrne admired, and he had street cred, which Byrne prized. The country needed more people like Lannie Saleh. Especially when they spoke both Arabic and Farsi.

“I dunno,” said Sid, sitting down. There were computer terminals at every workstation, and Sid’s hands unconsciously flew over the keys, bringing the instrument to life. Both he and Lannie were virtuosi, and their rivalry was intense. So was their friendship. “Anywhere in the Middle East, ex—”

“Except Israel. Right,” said Lannie. “Anyway, Boss, as I was saying, there’s something I don’t like, and I don’t just mean Sheinberg here. What I don’t like is—”

At that moment the door opened and everybody shot to their feet. For the figure in the door was none other than J. Arness White, commissioner of police, otherwise known as Matt to the troops. He was the capo di tutti capi of the NYPD, he was big, he was black, and he was Frankie Byrne’s best friend in the whole world. He was also the only thing that stood between Byrne and forced retirement.

“What I don’t like,” said White in his booming Texas voice, “what I cannot stand, is failure. You want failure, you work for some other city department. They’ll show you failure. You want failure, you try your hand at teaching in the public schools, or collecting the garbage in a snowstorm, or passing laws against smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk or at Coney Island or in some Mafia social club on Mulberry Street where the goombahs got more firepower than we do. That, my friends, is failure — baked in the cake.

“You want failure, I will happily shove it up your rear end, like Tiny on his wedding night with a Rikers Island virgin, but not that much fun. You want failure, I will give it to you like a gambler about to have his kneecaps broken by a baseball bat on account of nonpayment. You want failure, I will show it to you, the way Patton showed the krauts failure at the Battle of the Bulge. We are talking epic fail here, people, and it cannot and will not be repeated. Are we clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Without another word, White chose a seat — Frankie’s seat. Everybody got the message. The Big Dog was in the house.

“What I don’t like,” continued White, “is a bunch of screwups, accountable to nobody, who let my beloved city suffer an even worse indignity than 9/11. Even worse, a bunch of unaccountable screwups responsible only to my sorry black behind. Is my meaning clear?”

Matt was glowering. Not a pretty sight. Nobody liked it when Matt was glowering. Least of all Byrne. They might be old friends, they might even have something or two on each other, but that didn’t mean White couldn’t fire him any time he chose. And that Frankie wouldn’t accept his fate quietly. That was their unspoken deal, and Byrne would be damned if he’d be the one to break it.

“What the commissioner is saying,” Byrne began, “is that failure of any kind is no longer an option. And this failure, when you get right down to it, was mine.”

Byrne moved toward the front of the room. “Lads,” he began, “Commissioner White and I have been friends and partners for nearly twenty years. We’ve been through a lot together — and I don’t think I have to explain to you what ‘a lot’ means in this day and age. There is no space between us, zip, zero, nada — you want to speak to Matt, you speak to me. I love this man like a brother — no, belay that. I love this man like I love myself, and you bastards all know in what a high regard I keep myself and my family.”

Well, that was a lie and everybody who worked for him knew it.

“What about your real brother, Captain?” came a voice from the back of the room. Byrne knew who it was, but didn’t feel like making a fuss. Besides, the guy was right. What about his real brother?

His goddamned brother. The deputy director of the FBI. And the sonofabitch who now had President Tyler’s ear. That was the one question he didn’t want to answer. The one question he’d never wanted to answer.

Frankie didn’t want to have to think about the variegated ways his brother had him over the proverbial barrel. Misprision of felony, for starters. And so much else. You couldn’t do time for things that happened when you were kids, but if you could do time, Frankie knew, either he or his brother would be in the slammer simply for imagining what was coming down the line.

In the future, everybody would be a criminal for at least fifteen minutes, whether they wanted to be or not. Which meant that everybody would be a victim, too.

“With the exception of my brother, Tom,” he said with a smile. “But he has a job to do, just like I have a job to do, just like we all have a job to do, and sometimes those jobs are going to come into conflict with each other. But we can’t worry about that. So let’s do our jobs. Sid, what have we got? Make it snappy, because Matt doesn’t have all day.”

Sid Sheinberg turned away from his ranks of computers to address the group. “We took a hit, no question. A good part of Forty-second Street was destroyed, along with much of the Times Square subway station, which took out a good deal of the MTA’s capacity until a work-around was found. That necessitated opening up some of the disused stations, and it’s been wonderful what we’ve found, but that’s just about the only silver lining in the transportation cloud for the nonce.

“We’re still finding bits of bodies around the Times Square area, including pieces of bone and teeth embedded in buildings six stories up from the force of the blasts. This was a very sophisticated operation, far worse than Bombay, and if the ringleader had not been so quickly identified and taken out…”

Everybody looked at Frankie. They all knew that it was he who’d fired the shots that killed Arash Kohanloo, the Iranian operative whose name, miraculously, had not yet found its way into the papers or the blogosphere, and with luck, never would.

“Right,” said Frankie. “Thanks, Sid. Lannie?”

Lannie gave Sid’s curly hair a tousle as he rose and walked to the front of the room. In the heat of the battle, he had saved Sid’s life, and forged a bond that could never be broken. He signaled to Sid for the start of the AV presentation.

“Arash Kohanloo was a real piece of work,” he began, as a picture of Kohanloo flashed on one of the main monitors. “A favorite of the regime, he was able to move freely between the dar al-Harb and the dar al-Islam, between the world of War, which is where we live, and the world of the perfect peace of Islam — which is where everyone will live when the final triumph of Islam is wrought by the sword and by submission.

“The mullahs liked Kohanloo because of his business interests. He brought a lot of hard currency into a country that’s basically broke. An oil-exporter that has to import gasoline. A no-fun society brimming with hormonal young people. A country with some of the most beautiful women in the world, walking around in body bags. A great urban culture that was conquered by a desert civilization and forced to adopt its religion and its mores. Was forced to renounce and destroy its representative art, its music, its former religion — everything.”

“Which means what, Lannie?” asked Frankie.

“Which means that Iran is doomed and it knows it’s doomed. Unless… and this is where I admit it gets pretty crazy — unless it can bring on the end times and effect the final triumph of Islam. After that, it doesn’t care what happens, since its job is to prove the superiority of Shiite Islam over the Arabs and their Sunni form of the faith, and to bring about the coming of the Mahdi, the Expected One.”

“And how do they do that?” asked someone.

“By creating as much chaos as possible. The Mahdi can only emerge from the holy well in Qom—”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” came another voice.

“Belay that,” barked Matt.

“… the holy well in Qom when the world is torn by strife. Then, according to Shiite belief, he will arrive with Jesus by his side, to proclaim the final triumph of Islam.”

“And then what happens?” asked Byrne.

“A whole lot of people die, boss,” said Lannie.

“The end times,” said Matt White. “My pappy used to whup us real good when we was growin’ up back home in Houston, Texas,” he mused; Matt often slipped into homespun speech whenever he thought of home. “Said it was getting us ready for the end times.”

“Christians have the same thing,” added Byrne. “Death and destruction and a big fat sorting-out at the end. Isn’t that what those prophecies at Fatima were all about? You know, the ones that everybody was afraid were going to signal the end of the world?”

Lannie chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“You guys really crack me up,” he said. “I’ve heard about this Fatima stuff for years. Do you know who ‘Fatimah’ was?”

Byrne smiled. “A town in Portugal, where little shepherd kids — wait a minute, I think I can even remember their names… yeah, Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta… saw the BVM. That’s the Blessed Virgin Mary to you, infidel.”

Lannie was still smiling. “I didn’t ask where it was, boss. I asked who.” When nobody replied, Lannie continued. “Fatimah was Mohammed’s daughter, the most perfect of women. Mohammed said of her: ‘She has the highest place in heaven after the Virgin Mary.’ That place in Portugal is named after her. Because the Muslims conquered the Iberian peninsula… or did you forget?”

They had wandered far afield from the purpose of this meeting, and Byrne was about to bring it back to order when a phone call came through the secure switchboard. “What is it?” barked Byrne.

“Call from Mount Sinai Hospital,” said the disembodied voice of the operator. “For Detective Saleh.”

“Put it through,” said Byrne. He spoke to Sheinberg. “Put it up so we can all hear it.”

A nervous woman came on the line. “Detective Saleh?” she inquired.

“This is Lannie Saleh, yes,” said Lannie.

“Are we speaking privately, Detective?”

“Of course we are. What can I do for you?”

Celina Selena swallowed hard. “This is Celina S. Gomez at Mount Sinai Hospital. We got a phone call that I thought you should know about,” she began. “At first, I thought he was asking for a Dr. Saleh, and I told him there were no doctors in radiology by that name.”

Radiology? Everybody went on full alert. Byrne nodded to Lannie—

“You work in the department of radiology?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, in nuclear medicine.” This was getting worse by the second. “Then the man corrected himself and said he had misdialed, that he really had been trying to call the New York City Police Department’s Counter-Terrorism Unit. So, naturally, I…”

“What did he say, Ms. Gomez?”

“He said he had an urgent message for you. I have it right here. Right here somewhere… oh yes, here it is: ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ ”

Nobody breathed. Lannie had the ball and Frankie was letting him run with it. “Your sure that’s all he said?”

“Oh yes, Officer — excuse me, Detective. I wrote it down. In fact, I even asked him to repeat it.”

“And did he? Repeat it?”

“Yes, well that’s the funny part. I could kick myself, but I should have turned on the voice recorder much sooner than I did. Forgot all about it. So…”

Lannie tried to control the excitement in his voice. “So you have him on tape?”

“Well, it’s not really tape, but we call it tape, even though these machines don’t use tape anymore. I don’t know how they—”

“Can you play it for me, please, Ms. Gomez?”

“Yes, sir. Of course. Just give me a minute…”

The wait was agonizing.

Then came the voice.

“Can you play that back to me again, please?” asked Lannie, and again came the voice: low, guttural to American ears. “Thank you, Ms. Gomez. Please preserve that recording and play it for no one else. Do you understand? That recording is now property of the NYPD, and someone will be along to collect it from you and take an official statement shortly. Are we clear on this?”

“Oh yes, Detective. I thought he sounded a little funny.”

“Thank you, Ms. Gomez.”

“Just trying to do my duty as a New Yorker, Detective,” she said, and rang off.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then—

“What the hell was that, Lannie?” said Byrne.

“Farsi. The language of Iran.”

“Fuck,” said Byrne. “But Kohanloo is dead. I killed him myself, on the East River…. So who… what did he say?”

Lannie took a deep breath. This was not going to be easy, or fun. “Well, you heard the first message in English. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but—”

“It’s a line from Have His Carcase,” said Sid, who had already Googled it. “It’s the clear text of some sort of code. ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ ”

“So our man’s a lover of thirties English mysteries,” said Matt, who was, too. “And an aficionado of the Playfair cipher.” Byrne looked admiringly at his old friend, who never ceased to amaze him. “But what did he say in Farsi? The same thing?”

“Actually,” began Lannie, “he only said one thing. But he said it three times. ‘Taubeh kon! Taubeh kon! Taubeh kon!’ It means: Repent. And it’s not a suggestion — it’s a command.”

Byrne thought for a moment, putting the pieces together. Radiology. Nuclear Medicine. An order to repent. He thought they had cleaned up all the loose ends after the battle of Times Square, but did they miss something? “I never realized Our Lady spoke Farsi,” he said. “I thought she spoke Aramaic. Or Irish.”

The bulk of the attack had come along Forty-second Street and the rest in the square. But there was that one outlier, that dead kid under the Central Park Reservoir, who was the gunman behind the attack on the Ninety-second Street Y. Which was not far from…

Mount Sinai Hospital.

They missed something. Something whoever was behind the attack — not Kohanloo, he was as dead as Darius — wanted them to know about. Something he had to taunt them about. Something the NYPD couldn’t do anything about.

Unless they were smarter than him.

That was a bet Byrne was willing to take.

“Lannie, call the bomb squad and meet me uptown. Sid, I want that stiff we found under the Reservoir dug up and positively ID’d and I don’t care how the M.E. does it — your uncle would have that boy whistling ‘Dixie’ on the autopsy table, because I’ve seen him do it, so let’s hope his successor is up to the job. The rest of you, I want all systems on stun, I want a flyover of Mount Sinai — use a chopper — with our best radiation-detection equipment, and I want it all done before Lannie and I get there. Capisce?”

Everybody capisced. Matt blocked his way as he headed out the door. “I don’t have to tell you to be careful, Irish. ’Cause I know you won’t be. But we can’t afford to lose this one, pardner. If there’s something there — you take it out. By any means necessary. You got me on that? By any means necessary.”

“I got you, Matt,” said Frankie, “just as long as you’ve got my back.”

“When haven’t I had your back?” said Matt, but Byrne was already out the door.