Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

RAJ GANDHI’S WALK east from Fifth Avenue and the Church of the Heavenly Rest took him, once he crossed Lexington Avenue, through the dreary streets filled with decaying brownstones in which multiple small apartments, some of them only the size of a small living room, had been partitioned with thin walls. Garbage cans and wooden bins, most of them overflowing with the ordinary debris of human life, stood next to each fluorescent lobby.

Now, so many hours after the bombings and the lockdown started, there were mountain ranges of huge black plastic bags on the curbstones. In the gathering dark Raj Gandhi saw rats on the sidewalks. They reminded him not only of his early years in his native Mumbai but the fictional rats that suddenly proliferated at the start of Camus’s novel The Plague. Oran in that novel had been quarantined, a whole population confined by the presence and fear of a disease that was a modern Black Death. The noblest characters in the book, doctors and journalists, had died as the epidemic progressed and before it came to its natural, miraculous end. Raj had read the novel often. He felt he was now living it.

His own building was constructed ten years ago. It looked to him as if a refugee Soviet-era architect had designed it. At thirty-three stories, it was one of dozens of anonymous new apartment buildings lining cheerless York Avenue. It had a comfortable lobby and friendly uniformed doormen who knew his name.

His own apartment, a studio, was on a high floor with a view of the East River. For a curtain on the single large window he had tacked up a burlap fabric which he never opened and so never looked at the majestic expanse of the river and its legendary bridges. The apartment was replete with gadgets, laptop computers, iPads, a variety of cell phones, four television sets that had access to every available news and cable station, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, even the Weather Channel. He spent almost all of his income on these technological marvels. He had a pull-out sofa on which he slept, as uncomfortable as a plank, and three small tables he had assembled from IKEA for his equipment. There were three folding wooden chairs. No carpets.

As soon as he unlocked the door to the apartment, the voice he heard was shockingly familiar. “Jesus, Gandhi, you live like a college freshman at a bad school. Look at all of this crap.”

Fear seized Raj. “How did you get in here?”

“Don’t worry. This isn’t exactly a first-class building. And a quadriplegic with a blindfold could open your door.”

As Raj saw in the glare from the two unshaded lights, the man in the wooden chair was exceptionally good-looking, obviously Italian. He was large, not at all fat, but tall and muscular. His powerful appearance was for Raj entirely different from the voice he had heard in the calls from the unknown source. The man Raj had envisioned from the sound of the voice was scrawny, bald, furtive.

Still seated, the man said, “I thought it was time we should meet. I’m losing my patience.” No accent. A clear voice Raj couldn’t place, easily the voice of a man who was literate and persuasive. But this man was obviously a great mimic, able to sound like a crank from Queens or Brooklyn whenever he wanted to.

“What do you want?” Raj asked. His own voice, as he recognized, had a tremor.

Standing, the man gestured at all the technological devices on the desks. “I’ve seen your blogs and Twitter feeds, Mr. Gandhi. You have an impressive audience. Hundreds of thousands of followers. More than your namesake, the great Mahatma. And you work for people at that godawful newspaper of yours who will not let you write the information I give you. It’s time for you, Mr. Gandhi, to get the word I’ve been giving you out to the world all on your own. I decided to help you write it.”

“I’m not sure,” Raj said. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Linda Lovelace. Deep Throat.”

Raj recognized the names, but had never seen Lovelace’s movies. He had never in fact despite all the gadgetry even glanced at porn. He said, “I still haven’t quite finished my work.”

“You have. Let’s get on the computer. We’ll write it together.”

Raj sat at the table with the laptop computer at which he ordinarily wrote his blog and Twitter feeds. Almost daily he used his blog to summarize or elaborate on his stories as they had appeared in the Times. Some of those blogs were written in his native language, Hindi. Far more were in English.

The well-dressed man pulled one of the folding chairs next to Raj.

“Let’s start, Mr. Gandhi. Listen to me and start typing. Write this down: In the midst of violence on the streets, officials in the government, particularly members of an elite, highly secretive unit of the New York Police Department, have unleashed a campaign involving secret arrests, kidnappings, torture and assassinations of dozens of men, some of them United States citizens, all of them of Middle East and African descent.”

Raj rapidly typed those words. Whoever this man was, his voice, the way he was able to put together words, phrases, and sentences, were so different from the crude, mocking voice Raj had heard on those strange phone calls.

As if sensing Raj’s surprise, the man reverted to the accented tone of the caller. “Listen carefully, Mr. Gandhi. Here are your next sentences. Sources who have spoken on condition of anonymity because of fears of reprisals have disclosed that, within minutes of the devastating explosions that began with the murders of more than a thousand people at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art two days ago, the secretive unit made a sweep of almost two dozen men who were taken to a dark prison on an abandoned New York pier on the East River.’

The man paused and had Raj scroll through the words that he had merely transcribed. “You’re a good typist, Mr. Gandhi. At least there’s something you can do right.” It was again the sardonic, sarcastic voice of the man on the cell phone.

And then the voice changed again, surprisingly literate, sounding like a broadcaster, the voice of someone who had done a great deal of reading.

He dictated, Sources reveal that the unit was conceived and implemented by Gina Carbone, the first female commissioner of the police department and a veteran of the Gulf War of the early 1990s. It is known as the Black Unit and consists almost entirely of former CIA and NSA officers who for several years have been nominally assigned to the NYPD with innocuous titles such as ‘community liaison representatives.’ They are, according to the sources, primarily men and two women responsible for extraordinary renditions, torture, and murder in the Iraq and Afghan conflicts. Commissioner Carbone recruited them for their unique talents. Some are veterans of discredited mercenary organizations such as Blackwater.

During a pause, Raj looked at the muscular man in the chair beside him. “How do I know you haven’t made this all up?”

So quickly that the movement of his hand was almost invisible, the man punched Raj’s left cheek. The pain was immediate, intense, and excruciating. Raj’s dark skin almost instantly turned purple, a bruise.

“Don’t you wiseass with me, you fucking dothead.” Once again it was the tone of the loony caller.

His fingers trembling over the keyboard, Raj wrote as he listened. Commissioner Carbone has not divulged the existence of this death cadre to anyone except its ten to twenty members. Publicly she is credited with coordinating the assault several hours ago on the George Washington Carver Towers in East Harlem where, it is believed, as many as several members, one of them a woman, of actual and known members of the Counterterrorism Unit of the NYPD were killed in intense, close, virtually hand-to-hand combat with men said to be ISIS or Boko Haram veterans, all of whom, with what is believed to be one exception, were killed. Thirteen members of the NYPD counterterrorism unit that conducted the assault survived.

Staring at the bright screen, his virtually black eye sockets sunk deeply into his face despite the screen’s otherworldly glow, still afraid, Raj asked, “How do you know these things? This is my blog. I’m expected to write the truth.”

“You’re a Hindu, right, Mr. Gandhi?”

“No. I was born into a Hindu family. But no, I’m not.”

“Did you ever read our Bible?”

“No.”

“If you had, you’d know that Jesus was always being asked, What is truth? And he always answered, What I tell you is truth.”

Raj had no reaction other than to stare at the screen, even more afraid.

“What I tell you, Mr. Gandhi, is the truth. Don’t worry. Your readers will believe you.”

Raj glanced at him. Despite his bruise and his pain, he wanted to remember the face.

“You can stare at me as long as you want. But we’re not finished. And you’ll never remember me, anyhow.”

Raj turned again to the keyboard. Listening in the barren room, he wrote what was said to him. Sources have also said that one man was taken alive from the shattered apartment at the Carver Houses. Known to the secret squad and Commissioner Carbone as Silas Nasar, but also utilizing the name Hakim Khomani, the survivor is said to be a naturalized U.S. citizen with a degree from MIT and a specialist in the use of highly sophisticated communications devices. It is believed, the sources have disclosed, that he is one of the people who conceived and implemented the initial attacks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Raj said, “I know that name. Those names: Silas Nasar and Hakim Khomani.”

“That’s no surprise to me, Mr. Gandhi. I know what you know. Now listen again. Dr. Gabriel Hauser, hailed over the last thirty hours as the Angel of Life, is and for some time has been a ‘special friend’ of Silas Nasar. It is not clear to Commissioner Carbone or her elite group whether the Angel of Life knew of the plans for the initial attacks, but his presence at the scene of the first explosion was, according to the sources, no random coincidence. He and Silas Nasar had prearranged their encounter.”

Raj Gandhi, still afraid of another hit from this man who was completely unlike anyone he’d ever known, stopped typing and glanced over his shoulder. This time the man simply reached into one of the inner pockets of his well-tailored blue jacket, pulled out his cell phone, and put it on the table next to Raj.

For ten minutes, his expression utterly impassive, Raj watched on the stranger’s own cell phone the interview he had just conducted with Gabriel Hauser on the bench at the Church of the Heavenly Rest.

“How did you get this?” Raj asked.

“It doesn’t fucking matter, Mr. Gandhi. It just doesn’t matter.” Raj said nothing.

“Now, Mr. Gandhi, let’s make believe I’m your editor. Print out a copy of what you just wrote.”

“I didn’t write anything. You did.”

For a furtive moment Raj glanced at an object he kept on the table, a letter opener shaped like a dagger. It was a relic from another era. Raj lived completely in the modern cyber world. He never received ordinary snail mail, he had no use for a letter opener. But he kept this like a sacred object because his father, a civil servant in the city then known as Bombay, had given it to him as a present when the intellectually gifted but shy and awkward Raj left for Oxford at the age of sixteen.

When he was in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Raj knew that from time to time journalists and photographers were kidnapped. While he was in those distant countries, he had thought about strategies for evading a kidnapping. His main strategy was running. As a kid, barefooted, he had loved to run. He was fleet, light, evasive. But here there was nowhere to run. His speed didn’t matter in this small room.

But the letter opener, for just a second, offered another strategy to Raj. He made the mistake of twice glancing at it. Raj had no way of knowing that he was in this tight and cluttered room with a man who since he was twelve had learned all the dirty arts of hurting others and protecting himself.

Deftly, Tony Garafalo picked up the nineteenth-century, ornate letter opener. He threw it to a far corner of the room. “I’m a mind reader, Mr. Gandhi. I didn’t like what was on your mind.”

Again not speaking, Raj turned to the computer, like a secretary waiting for instructions.

The instructions came. “I want you,” Tony Garafalo said, “to post this interview on your blog with what you’ve just typed up. And I also want you to post the scene you taped on your cell phone of Gina Carbone running through the fence and into Pier 37.”

Raj said, “Why do you want to do that? She’s your lover.”

“My, my, Mr. Gandhi.” It was the voice of the odd caller. The man, Raj thought, was Janus-like. He had two attached faces staring in opposite directions. “See, I was right about you all along. You do good work as an investigator. Sure, she is one of my girlfriends. But there is something you don’t know. She was one of the undercover cops eight years ago who worked on the crew that put me in prison. We grew up in the same neighborhood on Staten Island. My family knew hers. You know what? She should have given me a heads-up, not have helped to take me down. I learned a lot about payback, and she has a side of her that’s reckless. I got to know her again when I came out of prison, at a family get-together not long after she became the top cop. And she got to like me again. And she loves a good fuck. And so do I. Now I’m giving her the fuck of her life.”

More than anything else he had ever wanted, Raj Gandhi wanted this man to leave his apartment. He fed the scenes in his cell phone into the computer that contained his blog. The process took only seconds.

“Now,” Tony Garafalo said, “send it out into the wide, wide world.”

On his own cell phone he quickly found Raj’s blog. As Raj continued to sit in absolute silence, Tony Garafalo read on his cell phone the script he had dictated and watched the scenes of Gina Carbone and Gabriel Hauser.

“Mr. Gandhi, it says here that you have 253,673 followers. You’re already a celebrity.” It was the voice of the caller. “Now you’re going to be even more famous. I’m telling you, Mr. Gandhi, I see a fucking Pulitzer Prize for you. And when you give your acceptance speech, you’ll give me credit, won’t you?”

Raj simply continued to stare at the screen. He sensed that Tony Garafalo was moving toward the door.

“Mr. Gandhi, I want you to look at me and say thank you.”

When Raj turned to look, he saw that the handsome, well-dressed man held a pistol. The single shot entered the center of Raj’s forehead. It was a clean, red, small hole.

“The dothead” Tony Garafalo said aloud just before he opened the door. Now he really is a dothead.