Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“CHAOS, PURE UNADULTERATED chaos.”

If sober, methodical and detail-oriented Hans Richter described what he was seeing at the complex roadways that converged on the entryways leading up to the Triboro Bridge out of Manhattan as chaos, Roland Fortune accepted that. He had never known Hans to exaggerate or minimize anything. He was always calm, laconic, and accurate. That was rare in the world through which Roland moved. As he stood on the flagstone terrace of Gracie Mansion overlooking the East River and gazed at the arc of the bridge, its rows of lights beginning to glimmer in the oncoming slow summer dusk, he could see distant signs of that chaos. He saw wild concentrations of swirling police lights. Helicopters were suspended over the bridge. One of them even flew under it.

Roland asked, “What do you see?”

He didn’t want to hear the answer. He was alone for the first time since dawn, his body pulsated with pain, and his exhausted mind dwelled on the image of Sarah’s face and destroyed head on the concrete floor. He wanted to call her father, wanted to take more Vicodin, wanted most of all to sleep for hours and wake to the normal world of the city on the day before it was mutilated.

But efficient Hans Richter, of course, answered his question. “Traffic is backed up from the ramps and all the way back to Lexington Avenue along 125^th Street. Horns honking. Hundreds of people out of their cars. Trash cans on fire. There’s a cordon of soldiers with rifles at each ramp to the bridge. There are guys screaming at them.”

“Soldiers?”

“Yes.”

“Not our cops?”

“Army soldiers, no cops.”

“I see emergency vehicle lights from here.”

“All Army.”

“When did they replace our people?”

“Not sure. They were here when I got here an hour ago.”

“Where are our people?”

“Nowhere in sight.”

A cool wind blew over the darkening terrace, as if miraculously created atop the glimmering waters of the East River to soothe him. He sat on a wrought-iron chair. “Hans, this stupid Code Apache plan: How long would it take to open the city?”

“You mean lift the lockdown?”

While he couldn’t be certain of it, Roland believed his calls were being monitored and recorded by Homeland Security. He hoped they were. “You know what, Hans? I hate the word lockdown. Every time somebody makes a loud noise in the mall, or some obvious crank calls a school, everything goes into lockdown. Lockdown this, lockdown that. When these clowns from Homeland Security started having these bullshit confidential meetings with me about attacks and responses and talked about lockdowns, I rolled my eyes. This is Manhattan. Only some jerk from Kansas could imagine that you could close off this island. These plans were made by comic book action figures.”

Roland rubbed his eyes, still detecting that uncomfortable sensation that a film of grit covered his corneas. He waited for Richter to speak. Finally Hans said, “Who can lift it?”

“I can,” Roland said.

“I’m not sure of that.”

Roland wasn’t certain either but was convinced there were things he could do, such as a press conference or a speech, to force it to happen. “Hans, get back to me as soon as you can with a plan for what needs to be done to get services, like trash pickup, street cleaning, back up and in place.”

“I’ll get it done right away,” Hans said.

And Roland knew he would.

Irv Rothstein rapped with the edge of a coin on the glass of one of the tall French doors that opened onto the terrace. Roland genuinely liked Irv, a gregarious man in his late fifties who had the style of an earlier generation that led him to quick jokes as continuously as Walter Matthau and Rodney Dangerfield. But Roland held a hand up to wave him off. Roland knew that Irv had something important to tell him because, even in ordinary times, Irv was careful not to waste Roland’s attention on distracting or trivial issues. Roland had to make finally the call he’d put off for more than a day.

Although it was the middle of the night in England, John Hewitt-Gordan picked up his cell phone on the first ring. His voice was as clear as if he were answering a roll call in the British army. “Roland, thank you for calling.”

“I wanted to call you earlier, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. I know you’re busy. I am listening to everything.”

“John, I found Sarah.”

“Very well.”

Roland had spent enough time with Sarah, John, and other British people to know that “very well” meant “oh.” It was just a remark, a punctuation, an invitation for Roland to say more. “I saw her, John. She died instantly.”

John said, “That is often said to be a solace. But, Roland, I’ve never been certain of that. In my many years in the service I was never in combat so I can’t say that I’ve had experience with sudden death in combat. But it has to be, don’t you think, that there is an instant, however brief, when a person has that moment when the thought, the reaction, the imprint on the mind is I die now.”

Roland knew John Hewitt-Gordan was cerebral, a tactician, a retired high-ranking officer who had commanded several support and intelligence divisions, including the British recapture of the Falkland Islands. Sarah, too, had some of these qualities. One of the senior partners at Goldman Sachs had told Roland that the key to her success was her ability to visualize big strategies, not her skills with numbers.

Roland knew that John’s use of sentences sometimes masked his anxieties or fenced away subjects he wanted to evade. Roland said, “I don’t have the answer to that, John. I was never in a war. I never saw people die in front of me until now. I was there. I can tell you that it was sudden, overwhelming.”

“How are you, Roland? The first news reports were that you were gone, too. Now the reports are that you were injured.”

“Thanks for asking. Just a scratch.” At that moment, as the deliciously smothering effects of the last Vicodin receded, he felt that pulse of acute pain that came with each surge of blood in his system. What he had on his shoulder and back was in fact a deep gash. It was becoming infected.

“What,” John asked, “is happening to her now?”

Roland was disoriented by the question. All he knew at that moment was that Sarah was on a floor in a cool former auditorium in an abandoned hospital in the West Village. There were at least one hundred other bodies there, assembled in straight rows under identical blue sheets, like the orderliness of military cemeteries. “The simple truth, John, is that I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Understood, Roland. Your only concern now is with the living.”

This man, Roland thought, has that high-minded style of a colonial general in India in the 1800s. Roland admired that. He said. “I have a suggestion, John. The airport in Boston is now operating. Why don’t you fly there and then drive to Connecticut or New Jersey?”

John chuckled, “The gates of Carthage.” That literate British humor.

But Roland’s complete attention was arrested by that. For the last two days the words Carthago delenda est had been fixed in his mind, Carthage must be destroyed, like a phrase of music, Cato the Elder’s words about the Roman army’s destruction of Carthage on the shores of North Africa. Carthage has been destroyed evolved in his mind to New York delenda est.

Roland said, “I expect the lockdown to be lifted gradually in the next twenty-four hours. As soon as I can, I will have one of my helicopters pick you up and bring you here when you reach Connecticut or Westchester County. We’ll go to the morgue together and we can figure out a way to give her to you.” He paused. “To take her home.”

“That would be very consoling, Roland. But wouldn’t that lay you open to criticism? Certainly the media will pick it up. Preferential treatment, that type of issue.”

“I’m at a point where that doesn’t matter to me. I’m surrounded by death and killing, John.”

“You’re a brave man, Roland. Very few people act well under catastrophic circumstances. Wasn’t it Hemingway who defined courage as grace under pressure?”

For a moment Roland wanted to tell his lover’s father that he was consumed and totally preoccupied by dread, fear, and uncertainty, not courage or grace. He was angry. He was in pain. And he was worried about his own mortality. He was aware of his vulnerability. Somehow he had survived three deadly explosions, any one of which could have killed him. It could have been that one of them, the first as his birthday party unfolded, was calculated to do just that. He had never in his life had to deal with deadly, anonymous people who had the will and the ability to kill. And Gina Carbone and others had treated him as if he were a target, and he believed he was.

He said, “Thanks for the kind words, John. Let me know when and where you arrive.”