Shock Warning

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The sun rose, clear and bright. The October sky had kicked away the clouds and left the heavens azure — the perfect setting for a great miracle.

She appeared over Manhattan, nearer the East River than the Hudson, but visible from Queens and Brooklyn and Jersey, too, hovering with that same ineffable look of sadness on her face. It was the same vision the children at Garabandal had seen, the Muslims and Christians and Jews and the international news media at Zeitoun had seen. The same image that the poor Nigerians had seen, before they went at each other with weapons, before the long-standing conflicts of East and West, of the dar al-Islam and the dar al-Harb, had finally come into irrevocable conflict. Before war broke out in the Philippines.

And now she was here, floating above the capital city of the infidels.

It wasn’t like in the movies. Taxis did not suddenly slam on the brakes and cause multiple-car pileups. Women did not start screaming on the sidewalk. Whole office buildings did not suddenly empty and people did not rush into the streets or to the tops of tall buildings. Instead, they looked out their windows, or up at the sky, and wondered.

Many, maybe most, did not credit their senses. It had to be some kind of hoax, an optical illusion. Others blessed themselves and prayed. The city’s large Hispanic community was especially devotional. Someone set up a makeshift altar in the middle of Flatbush Avenue, and thousands of devout Haitians attended Mass on the spot.

The cardinal archbishop of New York took to the Fifth Avenue steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and urged calm. So did the mayor, from his private island in the Caribbean, where he was vacationing with his mistress. The cable channels put the vision in a box and kept it on the screen at all times. Live cams streamed the image via the blogosphere across the globe.

The image took shape high in the sky in the early morning. At first it looked like nothing, mere light among light in the sky. Gradually, however, it began to assume human form. It took a while for everyone to realize that slowly, imperceptibly, it was gradually moving toward the earth, growing larger as it came into view. The progress was very slow, but it was steady. The Virgin was descending toward the earth.

Lannie Saleh, Celina Selena, and Alonzo Schmidt saw none of this. Dr. Leopold had given them carte blanche to inspect the hospital and had assigned a few trusted people to act as point men. They had to tear the place apart without alarming anybody.

“It needs a power source,” Lannie was explaining. “These things can’t work without electricity, without something to act as the trigger. The good news is, it doesn’t seem to be attached to one. The bad news is, it may not need to be. Some of the Russian designs have a transmitter that signals when its internal battery runs low and it’s thought — remember, until today, we had no proof that such devices even existed, except for the testimony of a Russian defector — that it can somehow be powered externally—”

“It can.”

Everyone turned to see the speaker. It was Tom Byrne, accompanied by Principessa Stanley.

Tom moved to the front with the ease of a natural leader. “Thanks, Lannie,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.”

“What’s she doing here?” objected Lannie.

“She’s getting the story,” replied Tom. “You got a problem with that?” He turned to the group. “We know that a psychopath named Raymond Crankheit left some sort of device in the hospital during the attack on New York. We also know that this same psychopath attacked Ms. Stanley here, buried her alive behind the Metropolitan Museum, and damn near scalped her. If anybody deserves to be in on the finish, it’s she. So that’s the last I want to hear about it.”

“Who are you?” asked Celina.

“I am Thomas Byrne, deputy director of the FBI. And these are my people.” Into the room came a dozen special agents, each one looking exactly (as Celina Selena admitted to herself later) the way everyone pictured an FBI special agent looking. “These men and women are trained in this, and they’ll find the bomb. That’s not my worry. My worry is that the bomb will find us first.”

“But what about the trigger?” asked Lannie.

“Come with me, please,” said Tom. Then, turning to his team: “Get started. From the rate of descent, it looks like we have five, maybe six hours.”

He left Principessa behind with the bomb squad and led Lannie, Celina, and Alonzo out onto the street and pointed to the sky. Celina gasped and crossed herself. “Damn,” muttered Alonzo. Lannie didn’t know what to say.

“She may look like the Virgin freaking Mary,” said Tom, “but she’s our trigger. She’s a holographic laser projection coming from the surface of the moon — no, it’s not originating there, little green men aren’t attacking. It’s a relay from the reflector shields the Apollo astronauts left behind, back in the days when this country actually got a bang for its buck, instead of just spreading the wealth around and pissing it away. She’s coming not to save humanity but to blow the shit out of the city of New York. And that’s just not going to fucking happen.”

“How do we stop it?” asked Lannie.

“We don’t.”

“What?” said Celina.

At that moment, a car pulled up in front of the hospital. A man and a woman got out. Celina recognized the man right away.

The man walked right up to the group, like he was used to being in charge.

“Hello, boss,” said Lannie.

“Hello, Frankie,” said Tom Byrne. “Keeping that temper of yours in check?”

“Cut the crap, Tom,” said Francis Byrne. “We’re only working together because we have to. Because you fucked me and turned one of my best men against me. Because you ran out on our city and took your fancy job in Washington while I’ve stayed here, year in and year out.”

“Great job you did last year,” said Tom. “How many people died again?”

And then he was on the seat of his pants on the sidewalk, his jaw smarting from the blow his younger brother had just delivered. “Say that again and I’ll shoot you myself, right here, in front all these witnesses. I’ll go to jail for murder, because I won’t miss and you know I won’t miss. And not even your boy Saleh here will try and stop me.”

Frankie turned to Lannie. His eyes reflected the pain of betrayal. “I knew it was you, Lannie. What I don’t know is why.”

“I was just… just trying…” He looked over to Tom to help him out. “He’s your brother isn’t he? They’re threatening my family, Frankie.”

“We’re your family, too, Lannie,” said Frankie. “That’s what I’ve been trying to make you understand. That’s why I took your ass off the streets of Brooklyn and made a detective out of you. I saw me in you, kid — this is New York, and we all need a rabbi. We’re all tribes here in New York, but the thing that made this city great is that the tribes learned to work with each other, learned to embrace each other — they realized that tribes are just like individuals, and that while you can’t choose your tribe, you can choose to make a new family. That’s what we all did, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians. It’s why Sy Sheinberg was a father to me, after my father — our father, Tommy — was shot down from behind in cold blood and they never found the killers. I’ve been looking for those fucking dirtbags all my life and you know what? I’m never going to find them, but I’m going to die trying. I thought I was a father to you, Lannie, just the way Sy Sheinberg was my father. Ethnicity doesn’t mean shit. Somebody’s threatening you or your family, then they’re threatening my family, too, and in New York that means I have a license to fuck them up two times — once because they’ve got it coming and twice just for laughs. Because this is my town, and I’m still the sheriff.”

He looked at Hope. “We’re going to get them. All of them. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Gardner?”

Everyone turned to look at the woman who had arrived with Byrne. Behind her, still high in the sky, floated the Virgin Mary, slowly coming down to earth.

“Right now,” she said, “my… husband… and another man are in the Middle East. What they’re doing is very dangerous. We don’t know if they’ll come back alive. But they’re there to get to the source of all this, and to put an end to it — once and for all. And we have to help them. So please don’t fight. Please, everybody, let’s work together.”

Frankie held out his hand to Tom and helped him to his feet. “Peace?” he asked.

Tom dusted himself off. “No peace,” he said. “Truce.”

“Good enough,” said Frankie. He took a reading of the apparition’s location in the sky and turned to Hope. “Relay these coordinates to your… husband. Even if we find the bomb, we might not be able to disarm it in time, so this is the mission timer. If they don’t get the job done… then my city dies.”

“I won’t let you down,” said Hope.

Byrne put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get to work, people.”