Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

ROLAND FORTUNE WAS one of the few people in the world who knew how President Andrew Carter smelled when he was under pressure. In their basketball games in the White House gym, Roland usually played guard to cover the president. He still wore his Los Angeles Lakers shirt. “I never needed to wash it in the two seasons I played for the Lakers,” the president joked. “Because I never got off the damn bench.”

The president’s odor when he was sweating was acrid, distinct, and really unpleasant. Although Andrew Carter was sleek and tall, with carefully combed blond hair streaked with gray, his body was densely covered with darker hair that, when it wetly adhered to his body, emitted a sharp odor that trailed him wherever he moved on the court.

Now as they spoke on a secure speakerphone, Roland heard a tremor in the president’s voice. “It’s very complex, Roland, to get food into Manhattan.”

“It is? Why so? The entire West Side waterfront is open. There are piers at West 42^nd Street where the big tour boats are moored along the Hudson. I’m no longshoreman, but the pier where the Intrepid is looks huge and very accessible. And the Queen Mary regularly comes and goes from the pier at 59^th Street.”

Harlan Lazarus’ brittle voice spoke out in the background: “The quantities of food to feed one million people are beyond the capacity of the piers to handle.”

“Is that a reason,” Roland asked, “not to get some food and supplies in here? I’m sure the Parisians didn’t close down their fabled restaurants after the attacks there.”

“No, it isn’t,” Lazarus said, ignoring the remark about Paris. “I’m pointing out some of the reality of this.”

“My reality is that the supermarkets, the bodegas, the big drug store chains, the delis, the places where people in Manhattan buy food, paper napkins, baby wipes, beer, cigarettes, condoms, have empty shelves.”

The president asked, “Why wasn’t this adequately taken into account before?” It wasn’t clear whether the president was asking Roland or Harlan Lazarus or someone else this question. Roland refrained from answering.

“It was,” Lazarus said. “But we didn’t anticipate a series of attacks on Manhattan that would require more than a few hours of quarantine. We envisioned, frankly, a single hit, like 9/11. Even the attacks in Paris were separated by only a few coordinated minutes.”

Roland was standing restlessly in his huge City Hall office. Its walls were mahogany. The big windows overlooked the old leafy trees of City Hall Park, whose gates were locked. He said, “That’s not an acceptable answer, you know that.”

“Let’s look at this, Roland,” the president said. “What kind of problem, real-world problem, is the food shortage presenting? The food didn’t just vanish. It’s in people’s apartments, don’t you think? Are there any reports of people starving in the streets?”

For Roland there was something liberating about the fact that this was not a video conference; it was on speakerphone only. He was annoyed, focused yet again on Harlan Lazarus’ presence in the room with Andrew Carter in Washington. He had the sense that Lazarus passed that question along to the president. Roland glanced around the office at the other people he had assembled for the conference. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He said, “Hans Richter is here. He oversees much that happens on the streets. His people are out there. They have eyes. And there is less waste being picked up at supermarket sites, because the stores have been swept clean by customers. Is that right, Commissioner Richter?”

“It is.”

“Are you saying,” Andrew Carter asked, “that the amount of trash waiting on the streets in front of supermarkets indicates something significant?”

Roland made an effort not to show contempt for the questions Andrew Carter, obviously prompted by signals or notes from someone in the Oval Office with him, was asking. Roland said, “Let’s be clear, Commissioner Richter, so that President Carter and Mr. Lazarus understand. We don’t want to alarm them unnecessarily. Are there any bodies in the streets of people who have died from starvation?”

“Of course not,” Hans answered.

“And that’s because you followed the plan and dumped them in the East River as soon as you found them, right?”

Hans, who was modest, methodical, and business-like, was startled by the sarcastic question. This was not the well-organized and cordial Roland Fortune with whom he’d spent many hours at highly structured meetings. Hans thought of saying the plans were “to dump the bodies in the Hudson River, not the East River” but instead said nothing. Hans knew he had no sense of humor. He was a nice man who never made anyone laugh or smile.

Roland was exasperated, persistent. “But you heard the president, didn’t you? Are there any bodies in the streets dead from starvation?”

“No,” Hans said again.

In pain for the last hour, Roland picked up one of the blue pentagon-shaped Vicodin pills on his desk.

Without appearing to notice, Gina counted that as the third Vicodin he’d taken in the last half hour. She had been told by people on the regular security team assigned to Roland Fortune that he was a drug user, with prescription pills as his drug of choice. She genuinely admired Roland and had no intention of doing anything about his drug use. But now she was concerned that he was entering the cozy, yummy, cottony world of Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, and Percocet. She knew about addictions. Her brother Victor, at one time a heroin user, had in the end become dangerously addicted to prescription pills, and they eventually killed him. She let the cops who served on the mayor’s security detail, more loyal by far to her than to the mayor, know that she wanted to be kept informed about the mayor’s drug use and that they had to keep it a secret from everyone else.

After Roland swallowed the pill, a look of anticipatory relief spread over his face. He said quietly, “Mr. President, let me tell you what I need. I need some symbol at least that the cavalry is coming to town. So far there’s a smattering of Marines on the streets. That’s not enough. We have a city where even on ordinary days people call the 911 and 311 emergency lines to ask questions and just to plead and just to complain and moan. This is New York, after all. So please have food delivered by helicopter drop into Central Park if you have to.”

“You can’t mean that, Roland.” The president’s tone was skeptical, his words almost a rebuke.

In the background, Lazarus said, “Helicopter? I think the public associates helicopters with the ones on the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as the last Americans were leaving Vietnam.”

“That was 1975, Mr. Lazarus. Ninety percent of the people in the city weren’t even born then. Nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.”

Andrew Carter, by nature a conciliator, said, “Let’s not get distracted by the history of 1975 or the Vietnam War.”

“Mr. President,” Roland said, “I’m a politician, not a military strategist. Why don’t you come up here today?”

There was an interlude of dead silence. Roland and the other people in his office looked at each other, exchanging glances as though the speakerphone connection might have been lost.

Then Andrew Carter said, “We’ve given that some thought, too. After all, Bush was in New York the day after 9/11.”

“I was here then,” Roland said. “No matter what you thought of him, that was reassuring. I was a new city council member at the time, and I was nearby, and it was a striking image watching him speak through a bullhorn with the towers still smoldering behind him.”

A new voice spoke. It was Gloria Reynolds, the head of the Secret Service. “This is different. We knew then that no further attacks were probable. Today we don’t know that.”

Roland knew that they would have anticipated that he would raise this issue and that they had choreographed this response. They planned to have the authoritative head of the Secret Service rule out a visit on the ground that the president would not be safe. Andrew Carter himself did not want to say that.

“Let me tell you, then, what I’m going to do,” Roland said.

He was speaking too loudly. Gina, who knew something about the impact of opiates, also knew that magical thoughts could almost instantly flourish in the mind of a user. Anything and everything seemed possible when an opiate was in the blood.

Suddenly the line went silent, a void with a barely perceptible hum. Roland and Gina glanced at each other. Roland paused for five seconds. “Mr. President?”

No answer. Hans Richter, a master of technical data as well as a master of logistics, touched the laptop computer on the edge of the mayor’s desk. His adroit fingers glided over some keys. He said confidently, “No problem on our end. They put us on mute.”

“I guess we wait,” Roland said.

“This is sick,” Gina said. “Are we on our own here?”

“Let’s be careful, Commissioner,” Roland said. “You never know when they’ll open the line again.”

“Funny,” Gina said, “that didn’t seem to bother you a minute ago.”

“We can mute our end,” Hans said.

Still standing but increasingly relaxed as the soothing web of Vicodin took deeper hold, Roland said, “Hans, I know you love to demonstrate the beauty of the technology, but let’s just wait.” He smiled.

As he waited, Roland gazed out of the eastern-facing windows. The mayor’s grand office was on the second floor of the three-story building. Barely changed over the years, it had been the office of more than twenty mayors: Theodore Roosevelt, LaGuardia, John Lindsay, and Rudy Giuliani. And Roland Fortune’s favorite, Jimmy Walker, flamboyant and racy. Through the tall windows he could see the Brooklyn Bridge, its myriad suspension wires dazzling in the brilliant sunlight. He’d often looked at the bridge. In the daytime on typical days he could see colorful streams of traffic flowing into and away from Manhattan like unfurling ribbons. Today the bridge was empty.

A resonant sound filled the room. The connection was reestablished. The president’s voice rang out, “Roland, we need to suspend this. Our embassies in Nairobi, Dar Es Salaam, and Zaire have all just been attacked.”

And the connection went dead.

“Who gives a fuck about Dar Es Salaam?” Gina said.

Roland felt the onslaught of fear and confusion. He was, he realized, the leader of a city of millions of people, a place larger than many countries. But what did he really know about a crisis? He’d spent his adult life as a law student, a deputy commissioner when he was in his mid-twenties at the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, a member of the squabbling city council in his early thirties, a young congressman, and now the Mayor. He saw himself as a conscientious man with the flair of an actor and the ability to attract hundreds of thousands of votes, and the skills to keep the largest city in America running.

But nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He’d listened to briefings from the Midwestern men and women who appeared to dominate the Homeland Security department. They always struck him as fanatics, the zealots of security, men and women who were building an empire by disseminating fear. All that Roland remembered from those briefings, which they insisted on holding in the secret, antiseptic structure below the basement of the 1970s-style disco on West 14^th Street, was the term Code Apache, a silly name that Roland saw as a movie title, like Operation Just Cause, the designation of the invasion of Iraq, as if war were a video game. Silly shit, Roland had once remarked to Sarah Hewitt-Gordan, would be a better name than Code Apache.

He had to shake himself out of the fear or at least appear to do that. “Talk to me, Gina. The Three Stooges can’t hear us. Assume we’re on our own. What do we do to stop the killing?”

“We need to take down as many men as possible and interrogate them. It’s almost impossible to find weapons or explosives. There are millions of apartments in this city. Any one of them can have an arsenal.”

“So, tell me how you find these people.”

“We do sweeps and pick up as many Arab street vendors, deli operators, and mosque-goers as we can. We talk to them. Not one of them is coming forward. So we go find them. Any random guy might give us a clue.”

Roland gazed at her. “Gina, these people have civil rights.”

“They can decide to talk to us or not. We have a right to ask questions. They have a right not to answer. My people don’t break legs.” Roland did not know that Gina was lying.

“Then we have a problem with racial profiling,” he continued.

Gina paused and then said quietly but intently, “We can’t really care about that, can we? When this is all over, they can sue us.”

“What else? Do you have another plan?”

“We have a very thin network of informants, but so far nothing has surfaced. I can bring in more police assets from other parts of the city. We have hundreds of cruisers stationed outside Manhattan. We also have armored personnel carriers and armored trucks. I can keep them moving around Manhattan. Shock and awe. But nothing will work as effectively as intelligence and information. And nothing will get that as fast as confrontation, as in I’ll beat the shit out of you unless you talk.”

Roland held a blank piece of paper in his hands and tore it into pieces as small as confetti. “You do what you think is best. And if nothing happens by tomorrow morning, I’m opening up the city.”

“Can you do that?” she asked.

It was the Vicodin coursing through his body that spoke, “I can do any fucking thing I want.”

So, Gina thought, can I.