Bad blood

7

I could barely keep up with Mercer’s long strides as we hustled to his unmarked car, parked on Sixty-fourth Street, for the short ride uptown to my apartment.

Pedestrians seemed oblivious to the parade of emergency vehicles heading south, but customers were flowing out of bars, where televisions were undoubtedly flashing the same news alert that we could hear on the radio.

New Yorkers were being urged to stay calm by the all-news-station announcer, who was waiting for specific reports to broadcast. Police helicopters were circling overhead, engines droning and searchlights sweeping the streets below, put in the air almost immediately as if to guard the northern rim of the midtown perimeter.

“What do you think it is?” I asked Mercer.

He glanced over at me and smiled. “You know I don’t like to be critical, girl. Just pretend Mike’s here and imagine what his answer would be.”

“He’d start with a derogatory remark about how stupid my question was, tell me to stop thinking worst-case scenario, and remind me of how much he admired the way the Brits handled themselves during the Blitz, the years of IRA attacks, and the Al Qaeda subway bombs.”

Mercer parked in the far end of the driveway of my high-rise building and stuck his laminated police identification plate in the windshield.

“Aren’t you going home?” I asked. Mercer lived in Queens with his wife, who was also a detective, and their baby son.

“Vickee’s got Logan down in Georgia, visiting her folks for the first week of her vacation. Let’s hang till we hear from Mike.”

The doorman opened up for us as we approached. “Hey, Ms. Cooper. We got a call from the management company. Just thought you’d like to know, the city’s terror alert has been raised to orange. Something happened about an hour ago.”

“Thanks, Vinny.” We walked to the elevator and I hit the button for the twentieth floor.

Mercer went into the den and turned on the television. I followed him, poured us each a drink to replace the ones we’d left behind, and we settled in to watch the news.

“…reporting live to you, this is Julie Kirsch,” the chic young reporter said, with plumes of smoke rising into the night sky from the scene behind her. “We’ll be back in a few minutes with an important message from the mayor of New York City.”

Julie clapped a white plastic mask over her mouth as toxic-looking fumes swirled around her head, and the station went to commercial break to fill the airtime. Mercer flipped the channels, but each network had taken the same opportunity while the politicians readied themselves to speak.

When the live feed resumed, Kirsch shouted into her handheld mike over the commotion of men yelling orders at each other and vehicles continuing to stream into the general area, with revolving red lights flashing on their hoods. “We’re back on West Thirtieth Street, just off Tenth Avenue,” she said, pointing to the phalanx of fire trucks in the distance, “about half a block from the site of this enormous blast.”

The network anchor spoke. “Who’s in charge of the operation now, Julie?”

“The police commissioner is the top official here, but we’ve also got Fire and Emergency Medical Services. You may recall that after the terrible events of 2001, and the confusion about which agency should be supervising the mission, it’s the NYPD that was given the lead position in these situations.”

“Any word on possible loss of life yet?”

Kirsch pursed her lips and shook her head. “The fire was still raging when the first responders got here. It will only be after they contain the flames that they can get down inside and assess the damage. We’re hoping that the time of night will be in our favor on that issue-not as many workers around the area.”

“Down inside what?” I asked.

Mercer was sitting on the edge of his seat, his glass on the floor between his legs, trying to pick up the background conversation and looking for faces of his colleagues. “Must be the tunnel.”

The cameraman found the public officials setting up on a platform in the middle of the street, which had been blocked off by fire trucks.

“Which tunnel?”

Manhattan sat above a maze of underground connectors. Roadways stretched beneath the Hudson River across to New Jersey in the Holland and Lincoln tunnels; Brooklyn was linked by the Battery Tunnel; Long Island by the Queens Midtown Tunnel; and more than fourteen underwater tubes comprised the network of subway tunnels that were the vital infrastructure of New York City.

“Right there. Thirtieth Street,” Mercer said, hushing me with a finger over his lips.

I didn’t recognize the mayor until Mercer pointed him out to me. He was dressed in a yellow slicker, with a bright green plastic hard hat, and heavy rubber rain boots that covered his trousers up to his knees. The police commissioner mounted the podium next to the mayor, and the fire commissioner, clearly unhappy to be second banana, was grim-faced as he stepped to the rear.

“Good evening, my fellow New Yorkers. The commissioner and I are here together at the mouth of Water Tunnel Number Three. As most of you know, almost two hours ago, shortly before nine o’clock this evening, an explosion was reported inside the underground entrance at this site, a place unknown to many of you, even though it will play an essential part in every one of your lives.

“There is absolutely no cause for panic or alarm,” the mayor said, giving what had become the traditional post-9/11 exhortation for calm and equanimity in the face of the unknown.

Five minutes of reassurance were followed by introductions of all the parties who were playing a role in this crisis. The mayor was clearly stalling for time, for someone to give him a better understanding of the potential danger to the city.

“As of now, there is no reason to believe this event is the result of a terrorist act. The brave men who have worked underground since this project began its development almost forty years ago-in 1969-have faced death in ways most of us have never contemplated. This subterranean world that provides New York with all the water it uses daily has been created out of sheer bedrock by dynamite. We expect that tonight’s blast and the resultant damage will prove to be simply a terrible accident, not an intentional act-not part of a scheme intended to cripple our city.

“But,” the mayor went on, summoning the man he’d appointed to lead the NYPD to step forward beside him, “but I’d like Commissioner Scully to tell you what precautions we’ve taken to keep you and your families safe.”

“It’s the damn buts I hate so much,” Mercer said. “Give us the bad news.”

The commissioner was a head taller than the mayor. He removed his hard hat and handed it to an aide, then leaned over to speak into the mike. I had known Keith Scully when he had been chief of detectives more than five years ago, and I had watched his hair whiten and fine lines become etched in his brow since the time of his appointment two years earlier.

“We have been keenly aware of the vulnerability of our tunnel systems in this city since the tragedies of September eleventh. Our counterterrorism plans have included increased manpower at all entrances and exits, upgraded with video monitors and intercoms,” Scully began, then referenced additional sophisticated techniques adapted and improved after Moscow’s subway explosions in 2004, the Madrid commuter train bombings that same year, and London’s 2005 coordinated Tube attacks.

“One of the repeated threats we’ve picked up from international surveillance and through the Department of Homeland Security,” Scully went on, wiping sweat from both sides of his face, “has been to the aging system providing water to the five boroughs of this city. The original structures-Water Tunnels Number One and Two-have been in service for more than a century. They are”-he paused for emphasis-“they are extremely antiquated and terribly fragile.”

Scully turned his head to the mayor, who gave him the nod he was looking for to be the bearer of bad news. “If one of the old tunnels is breached, if one is damaged in any substantial way, then the collapse of the system will be catastrophic.”

We could hear reporters calling out to Scully from behind the wooden barricade, asking what he meant. Clearly, he was not ready to take questions from them.

“In cooperation with the Department of Environmental Protection, we have dispatched teams to every site throughout the five boroughs of the city in this monumental construction project. We are urging you at this time, however, to conserve your water usage in every way possible.” Scully went on to list how households and businesses could do that, encouraging people to stock up on bottled water as well.

The reporters were rowdy now, trying to get an explanation that would make sense to their viewers.

The mayor elbowed Commissioner Scully aside and regained the mike, speaking in his folksy way, as if his more relaxed manner would do anything to downplay the possible dangers.

“If you ladies and gents don’t remember your history, then perhaps you may not understand that New York is a great city-but it simply doesn’t have the one element we all need to survive. We can live without a lot of things, but water is not one of them. And on this island, we don’t have any source of fresh water. None at all.”

“Better learn to drink your Scotch neat,” Mercer said, leaning back and sipping his vodka. “People open their faucets every morning and never even think about where the water comes from. That’s the goddamn but about it-but, if the old tunnel system that is literally our lifeline blows up or implodes anytime soon, the NYPD has a one-word plan for the island of Manhattan.”

“And what’s that?” I asked him.

“Evacuate.”