Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SHE WAS LARGER and older than most of the women runners who even on this day, three hours after the assault in the George Washington Carver Houses, flowed uptown and downtown on the narrow esplanade along the shoreline of the East River as if this were a holiday on a lucid day in early summer. Gina had changed into running clothes in the back of an unmarked van parked near the seaport piers that had long ago replaced the seedy, mob-dominated Fulton Fish Market and that now had the feel of a suburban shopping mall. She slipped into the crowds of young runners. Moving gracefully, she made her way uptown to Pier 37.

The narrowest possible slit was open in the rusty, rundown chain-link fence that ringed the front of Pier 37. Unobtrusively she veered out of the stream of other runners, the innumerable slim blond girls in running shorts and tops and baseball caps out of which their ponytails hung, the tall young men, even a team of Sikh runners with their turbans in place, and slid through the slit in the fence. She was followed by the three muscular men, also in running gear, all carrying weapons in pouches in Nike belts-her bodyguards.

Raj Gandhi stood directly in front of the pier. He had been stung by the odd caller’s criticism that he hadn’t done enough shoe leather work. After Raj had reserved one of the plain unmarked Fords owned by the Times, he drove crosstown and parked the car near a cluster of several abandoned piers south of Houston Street.

The numbers assigned to the piers were random, inexplicable. Pier 63 was followed by Pier 71 and then Pier 37. All of them were massive, abandoned for decades, relics of the 1940s and the 1950s. Like prison camps, they were surrounded by chain-link fences, some with razor wire on top.

Before he saw Gina Carbone slip like a phantom through a gap in the fence, Raj was baffled as to why he had acted on the eccentric direction of a man who could be, and probably was, deranged. Raj felt if he had been a savvy New Yorker rather than a newcomer and outsider he would have seen through the caller to the crank and recognized that it was just a guy who entertained himself with the fun of sending a New York Times reporter on a pointless frolic.

But Raj had the reporter’s imperious urge to act, the sense that he and he alone was learning something remarkable. And suddenly he was rewarded by the sight of the raven-haired and disguised police commissioner of the largest city in America, a woman who was the leading general of a police force bigger than the armies of most countries, slipping through a slit in the fence and jogging in runner’s gear toward a derelict warehouse. He used his iPhone to create a video of the scene.

Raj was a small man. He was also frail. When he had been taunted at Oxford for his accent, his clothes, and his diminutive parents the two times they visited their scholarship-endowed son, he stood still, shaking with fear, and took whatever abuse, punch or push was inflicted on him. During his years as a young journalist in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, he always cringed at the sound of gunfire or explosions. There was a time in Iraq when he was essentially confined to the fortress known as the Green Zone, living in such anxious fear that he used Valium and Xanax so often that he was afraid he would become addicted. He never drank alcohol.

But now he walked deliberately and steadily to the slit in the chain-link fence through which Gina Carbone and her guards had passed, as if into another world because they had disappeared quickly into one of the warehouse doors. There had been reporters in Iraq who thought of themselves as swashbucklers and who in fact acted that way. Although Raj was not one of them, he felt energized and fearless as he approached the same gap, the only non-runner on the chipped concrete pathway in front of the fence.

His sleeve caught on the exposed point of one of the torn links of the fence. That tug, that slight tear in the fabric of his shirt, also ripped his courage away. He jerked back from the fence as if it were a lick of fire. Once inside the perimeter of the fence, alone on the rutted pavement, he had a sense that he was vulnerable and exposed to danger. And then he had what he knew was an absurd thought: I’m invulnerable, I’m a reporter for the New York Times. As a student at Oxford he was obsessed with Shakespeare’s plays. Now he focused on the line in The Tempest where a powerful, invulnerable spirit says of his companions, My ministers are alike invulnerable.

Trembling, expecting to be hurt by someone or something, Raj stood in front of the big roll-up door. He tugged on the rusted chain that controlled the door. The chain rattled. Rust covered the palms of his hands. He hit the door with his fists, a feeble gesture. He shouted as loudly as he could, “Anybody home? Anybody home?”

He had the cell number of Commissioner Carbone’s gregarious press secretary, Charlie Brancato. He touched the screen of his cell phone and as he waited for the call to connect, he continued to stare at the massive front of the pier.

Like any good press secretary, Charlie had Raj Gandhi’s name and address in the memory index of his phone. When he saw Raj’s name on the screen of his iPhone, he took the call. “Mr. Gandhi, what can I do for you?”

“I’m interested in speaking to the commissioner.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“I do.”

“You do? How can that be? Her movements and whereabouts are classified for security reasons.”

“She’s inside Pier 37 on the East River. Just a few feet from where I am.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I need to speak to her. She’s twenty yards from me at the most.”

After a pause in which Charlie seemed to inhale on a cigarette, he said, “Maybe I can pass your questions along to her?”

“This is urgent. Tell her I need to hear from her in fifteen minutes. First, I have information that there is a dark prison inside Pier 37. I need to know whether men were secretly picked up. Extrajudicial arrests.”

“Say that again, Mr. Gandhi.”

“Extrajudicial arrests.”

“Meaning?”

“They were hijacked from their homes in Queens and Washington Heights and not taken to jail or before a judge. They’re hidden.”

“That’s off the wall, Mr. Gandhi. Who’s telling you this shit?”

“I also want her comment on the fact that there was a survivor among the men who were attacked at the Carver projects.”

“Mr. Gandhi, I’m going to contact Sandy Ellenbogen. These questions are completely out of line. You’re out of your freaking gourd. Unmoored from reality.”

Sandy Ellenbogen was the new managing editor of the Times. Raj had met him only once. Like other reporters at the paper, Raj had reservations about him. Sandy Ellenbogen was in his thirties, the youngest person ever to hold the exalted job of managing editor. Not long before his appointment, he had served as the editor of the Style section and credited with jazzing up the stories so that many of them became the most e-mailed articles of the entire paper every Sunday. Raj said, “That’s your prerogative.”

“The days of the Pentagon Papers are long gone, Mr. Gandhi. And Edward Snowden is going to rot in Moscow. You’re playing a losing game. Dangerous game, Mr. Gandhi.”