Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

GINA CARBONE DIDN’T change out of her running clothes. Almost at a jog, she passed through the security checkpoints inside Pier 37. Rocco Barbiglia led her to the far eastern corner of the pier to what was called the Supermax wing of the pier, isolated and austere.

Silas Nasar sat in an aluminum chair. There was no other furniture in the cell. He was naked. The birthmark on the left side of his face-shaped like a seahorse-was even more distinct than in the pictures she had seen of him.

“Mr. Nasar,” she said, “we’ve been waiting for you.”

His eyes, profoundly black, were alert. He was fully conscious, almost brazen, defiant. She was surprised and impressed to see this. His left arm was wrapped from shoulder to wrist in tight, bloodstained bandages. There was, as she had been told there would be, an untreated gash across his hairy chest inflicted as he was dragged across the glass-strewn floor in the smashed apartment from one of the rooms at the Carver Towers.

“Who were the people in the apartment with you?”

No answer.

“I don’t have time, Mr. Nasar. I don’t have time to wait for you. You are going to talk to me.”

He stared at her. She recognized instantly that he was a special man. He was seriously wounded. He was naked. Just hours earlier he had been in a room of unimaginable chaos: thunderous noise from guns and rifles and grenades; the stench of cordite; and the sight of dead bodies, blood and torn flesh, some of it smeared on and clinging to the walls and ceiling. He had been dragged from that room. He had been blindfolded. He had been bound up for two hours in a slow-moving ambulance. He was now in an unknown place with strange people capable of torturing him and killing him. He was face to face with an unusually beautiful woman who was plainly in total command of the men who had seized and held him.

Gina said, “Many, many men, women, and children have died in the last day, Mr. Nasar. Hundreds of children. I know you have children. You’re a good family man, sir.”

Gina was unsettled by the impassive silence and solidity of the man. Roger Davidson, the former Secret Service officer who was one of the chief architects of this off-the-books program and this dark, undocumented prison just half a mile from the United Nations building, stood behind her. He had the reputation of a stone cold killer. She resisted the impulse to cede the field and have him take over the unnerving contest with Silas Nasar.

“You’re a seriously religious man, Mr. Nasar. We’ve known about you for a long time. We’re surprised that you let yourself become involved in all this carnage. It’s not in your character.”

Davidson stirred behind her. He was an impatient and explosive man. She held up her right hand, signaling him to remain quiet.

“I need you to tell me where your other people are, Mr. Nasar. You know where they are. You are the electronics expert, you know in real time where these men are. You even have that information in the bracelet you gave to your doctor friend. And I want to hear from you everything you know about the doctor, too. No secrets, no holding back.”

No answer.

“If you don’t talk to me and tell me what you know, let me tell you what’s going to happen. We are going to arrest your wife, your children, your son-in-law. I know they moved the day before the bombing. Do you think we’re stupid? We know where they are.”

He listened but didn’t respond in any way. Bulletproof, she thought, this man is bulletproof.

“Do you know where you are? No one else does. You belong to me. I have the power to let you live and to let you die.”

After ten seconds of utter silence, Gina said, “Do you see the men behind me? They have spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. They do things that I don’t know how to do. That I don’t even want to think about. We’re the only people who know you’re here. In a way, you’re already dead. We left your body in the apartment with your friends. Do you understand?”

When Davidson stirred again, she didn’t raise her hand to quiet him. “Commissioner,” he said, “we can help you.”

If Silas Nasar flinched at all, if he had any kind of reaction, Gina Carbone didn’t see it. “You’re not a very smart man, Mr. Nasar.”

Roger Davidson nodded politely at her as she left the cell. Terrible things, she knew, were about to happen here.

The Olympic Tower, at 51^st Street and Fifth Avenue, was all black. It was built in the late 1970s directly across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The construction was financed by Greek shipping magnates, rivals of Aristotle Onassis, hence the name Olympic Tower. Greeks, in fact, had lived on its top floors until the early 1990s when the rich from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait began to supplant them, but the building still retained the Olympic name.

Within minutes after Roger Davidson reported to the commissioner, and that was only half an hour after she had left Pier 37, that nine men in black combat uniforms, body armor, and weapons entered the towering granite lobby. Ambient sound filled the lobby from the waterfall that shimmered perpetually down the surface of a three-story wall.

There were two elevator banks. One was for the commercial tenants on the first ten floors, which were law firms, public relations companies, a charitable foundation. The other elevator bank was for the private apartments on the upper forty-one floors, each of them larger and more opulent as they ascended: the two apartments on the two highest floors had Olympic-size swimming pools.

One of the armed men shouted at the doormen: “On the ground, on the ground.” The nine men moving rapidly through the lobby all wore jackets on which the words NYPD Counterterrorism Unit were stitched in big letters. Like most of the people who lived in the building, the two doormen were Saudis. They were stunned by what they saw and fell first to their knees and then to the floor, as if praying.

The team divided into two squads. Roger Davidson, who was steeped in the rare ability to command with the absolute certainty that his orders would be obeyed, signaled the first squad into one of the elevators. When that elevator reached the eleventh floor, Davidson led his squad, three large men and Cynthia Chambliss, a slender and gorgeous black woman with a knowledge of weapons almost as skillful as his own, into the elevator. They rose in total silence to the fifty-first floor.

As soon as Davidson emerged from the elevator, he knew the information he had was accurate. Despite what all the politicians and television experts said, torture, especially extreme torture of men like Silas Nasar, in his experience, was a fast and efficient way of extracting very reliable information.

The wide church-like double doors to the top-floor apartment, once owned by Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer who in the 1980s had helped to manage the Iran-Contra exchange of weapons for cash, were already blasted open. Just as he had been told by the now broken-armed Silas Nasar in the total privacy of the Supermax cell, an orderly row of six RPG launchers stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the world famous cathedral. The RPGs were locked and loaded, that expression Davidson had first heard at the transformative moment when, at the Marine base at Quantico, he had for the first time pushed a full magazine into an M-16 and disengaged the safety switch. The RPGs were, as he had known for the last forty-five minutes, smuggled into the apartment piece by piece over the last three weeks by men posing as guests of the current owner, Ahmed Khalife, and as electricians, a pool cleaner, cooks. The doormen now kneeling in the lobby had played to perfection the roles of the “hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil” cartoon characters.

Precisely cut holes had been excised from the row of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the immense roof of the cathedral. On the floor three black-haired men in business suits were already bound up in plastic sheathing from their upper chests to their feet. One moaned just as Davidson had been told to expect. The others were quiet.

“How close were we?” he asked Jorge Ortega, the squad leader.

“Close, sir. Motherfuckers had just engaged the rocket grenades.”

“Any resistance?”

“They’re pussies. Nothing. They were all crying, ‘Please don’t hurt me, please.’ One of them is still crying like a baby.”

Davidson raised his hand to silence the room. In that hand was his secure cell phone. Almost instantly he heard Gina Carbone’s strong voice: “What’s the story?” she asked

Roger Davidson respected her. She was steady, calm, no nonsense. She wanted the scene described in the way it happened.

“The story is good, Commissioner. We stopped them in their tracks. The RPGs were fully engaged and set to go. They would have blown St. Patrick’s to kingdom come. The room is secure. Three arrests here. The two doormen are under arrest, too. They must have known who was bringing the elements of the weapons up here.”

“What fucking condition are the three of them in? Don’t tell me they’re wasted. I have enough dead Arabs on my hands already.”

“They’re all alive. Not a scratch on them. One of them seems to be suffering a damn emotional issue. He’s crying like a baby and wants his mama. I’m going to give him a hug soon and tell him everything will be just fine.”

“Don’t,” Gina said, “let anything happen to them. I want them clean, presentable, and charming. The Kingston Trio. Don’t bring them to the river. I want them at Central Booking downtown just like anybody else who’s been arrested. I’m making arrangements with a judge to get them charged and with cameras in the courtroom. I also want the weapons down here so that I can show them to the press. Get pictures of the RPGs pointed at the cathedral. The mayor will have a press conference. I’ll be there. Nobody sees your face anywhere.”

“What face?” Davidson asked. “I’m not even sure what my name is any more.”

Gina spoke evenly. “You did a great job getting this stuff out of Mr. Nasar. He had a reputation for stamina.”

“Really? I didn’t see that once I got to know him a little better. He found his voice, so to speak.”

“And one other thing.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“That Indian reporter.”

“Is he bothering you?”

“I don’t think his presence is very helpful.”