Shock Warning

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The Virgin was still sinking in the sky. They didn’t have much time left.

Wherever that son of a bitch Crankheit had put the suitcase nuke, they couldn’t find it. They had torn the hospital apart, disrupted the routine, probably cost a couple of terminal patients their lives. Byrne certainly hoped not, but there was no way to tell.

There was a chapel in the hospital, one of those spare, nondenominational places where you could “worship” in some peace and quiet. He would have preferred a church — St. Malachy, in the Times Square area, would have been his choice, or St. Mike’s over on Thirty-fourth Street, once Irish gangland’s church of choice for first-class send-offs. Because, unless Washington did its job, or they did theirs, a grand send-off was what they were about to get.

Think, you dumb paddy bastard. Think… No, the chapel was too antiseptic. He decided to face the music outside.

Slowly, he became aware that there was somebody standing beside him, and that somebody was his brother. “Hello, Tom,” he said. “Getting any lately?”

“Nothin’ you don’t know about.”

“Yeah, well, for a reporter she’s not bad.”

“It’s just business, Frankie. You know how it is with me. Always just business.”

He couldn’t help himself. “Was it business with Mary Claire, too?” Mary Claire Byrne had been Frankie’s wife, until the pressures and misery of being a cop’s wife had finally gotten to her and driven her right into Tom’s arms. But that was a long time ago.

“Let’s forget about that, Frankie.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“What would Pop have thought about all this? You know. I mean 9/11 and the way the city’s changed and now…” Tom looked up at the sky, “… this fucking thing.”

Frankie shook his head. “I don’t think Pop would have been surprised by much.”

“Just that dirtbag who snuck up behind him and his partner and killed them. What was the name of his partner back in sixty-eight…?”

“Rodriguez. Alfonso Rodriguez. New York was already changing back then, but what did we know? We were still just kids.”

Tom took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and offered one to his brother. Frankie started to shake his head, then accepted. What did it matter now? “Does it still bother you that we never got him? The bad guy, I mean.”

“What chance did we have? He was probably some junkie, got picked up a few days later on some bullshit B and E beef and got shivved in prison and we never heard about it.”

“Mom took it hard.”

“Let’s not talk about Mom.”

“How is she?”

“Still alive. Rufus still checks in on her every day. She’s old now, Tommy. Real old.” There was nothing more to say on that subject. “The kid who did this…”

“Who planted the bomb, you mean?” said Tom.

“Yeah. He was a born tunnel rat. In another life, he could have been a sandhog, done something useful. Got himself killed but good under the Central Park Reservoir. Buried your girlfriend up to her neck behind the Met. So I keep thinking… underground. That’s where he felt comfortable. That’s where he felt safe.”

Byrne turned to look back at the building. They were looking at the oldest part, the Metzger Pavilion, which had been built back in 1904, long after the hospital had changed its name from the Jews’ Hospital in the City of New York and moved uptown from Chelsea. But Brunner’s original building had long since been augmented by other wings and had even leaped Madison Avenue to connect up with the Icahn Medical Institute. Connected by…

“A tunnel,” said Frankie, tossing the cigarette away. “That’s it — the tunnel under Madison.” He was moving now, almost running. Tom jumped up and followed him. “It’s in the fucking tunnel, Tommy. That’s where he took it. That’s where he set it up. We thought he’d put it among the other radioactive devices, but he didn’t care about that — the whole damn place shows up radioactive in overflights and nobody was going to be poking around down here with sensors. The bomb didn’t need a power source because now we know what the power source is.” He stopped and looked up to the sky. The sight of the BVM looming over the Upper East Side was so remarkable that he didn’t even have time to think about it. Later, perhaps; later.

The plans for the tunnel were already waiting for them when they hit the reception desk, running. A receptionist ripped them out of the printer and handed them both copies as they charged toward the Madison Avenue side of the complex.

“Here,” said Tom, pointing as he ran. “There’s a couple of service bays, an electrical closet… a water main…”

“That’s it. That’s how he knew about the Central Park Reservoir, how to get into it. I wondered about that. Here was some fucking bumpkin from flyover land and he knows his way around the bowels of New York like a born sandhog. Well, this is where he started his exploration.”

They were in the tunnel now, running, two crazy Irish brothers, trying to save the whole damn city.

They found the entrance to the old main. The Reservoir had been the lifeline of Manhattan for decades, its water running down below the park and Fifth Avenue, all the way to Forty-second Street, where the Public Library now stood, but which in the nineteenth century had also been a reservoir, a great watershed enclosed by something that looked like it had time-traveled from the Egypt of the pharaohs.

That was New York for you. Even the dead past kept on affecting the living, the city that never slept and the city that never died.

“Not on my watch,” said Frankie Byrne as they burst through the door.

“Son of a bitch,” said Tom.

There it was. Just sitting there, unmolested, undiscovered. The nasty bastard had brought it here, in something that looked like a large duffel bag, unnoticed by anybody. Just another anonymous kid in a deliveryman’s outfit, going about his business.

“Careful,” said Tom to his brother as Frankie picked the accursed thing up. Frankie could not remember the last time his brother had looked out for him.

“Little help here,” he said.

“Right.” Tom was on the phone to the bomb squad two seconds later.

“Where are you going to take it?” ask Frankie. He had slung it over his shoulder and together they were making their way up into the lobby of the Icahn building. The squad would be coming down Madison any second now.

He was puffing hard as they made the street. Was it his imagination or was the rate of descent speeding up? How much time did they have? Would it be enough? It would have to be.

And there, right on Madison Avenue, Captain Francis Byrne fell to his knees, blessed himself, and said a prayer to the Virgin — the real Virgin, not this apparition — to spare his city, spare his people, the good and the bad, the saints and the sinners, all the people of New York. That was his sworn duty as a police officer to protect them, but now he was asking a higher power. It didn’t even matter whether there even was such a higher power, whether the Lady was as much a fantasy as any other religion’s icons.

None of that mattered now. Because, at a moment like this, all he had was his faith, and it was his faith that was going to have to get him through.

The bomb truck was there. The bomb went inside it.

And then it was gone.

“Captain Byrne!”

Byrne unfolded his hands and looked across the street to see Principessa and a camera crew filming him. Ignoring the traffic, she dashed across Madison. “That was great,” she said. “The perfect image. ‘The Praying Detective.’ In two hours, you’ll be famous.”

Byrne took her by the arm. “Listen, Ms. Stanley, I don’t want to be famous. I don’t even want to be rich. I just want to be Captain Francis Byrne, the kid from Queens who does his job.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Kill it. You want the same shot, shoot your boyfriend over there. Nobody who knows him will ever believe it, but go ahead. He’s already famous. He’s the great Tom Byrne of the FBI and you know what publicity hounds those clowns are.”

“But—”

“But nothing. You want me to help you find this Archibald Grant, you’ll do it. If not, no dice.”

Principessa thought for a moment, but only a moment. “Deal,” she said.

“You really got a jones for this Grant guy, don’t you?” said Byrne. “Why?”

She had her answers all set and ready. “Because he’s a fraud and the public has a right to know about it. Because he’s arrogant, cold, aloof, and superior. Because he put me in my place in an off-the-record RAND lecture and made me look ridiculous.”

Byrne got it. “In other words,” he said, “you’re crazy about him.”

She hadn’t expected that. She pulled back a little. “Promise you won’t tell your brother?” she said.

“Believe me, sweetheart, he already knows. And you know what — he doesn’t care.”

“A real bastard, huh?”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I know the whole of it. But I don’t care.”

“That’s what they all say — at first.”

He started to walk away. Whatever happened now, it was out of his hands. Either the government would stop the laser or it wouldn’t. Either the bomb squad would defuse a nuclear bomb or it wouldn’t. Either the sun would come out tomorrow, or it wouldn’t.

She was following him down Madison now. “Will you call me?”

“No.”

“Why not? Don’t you like me?”

What a chance this would be. Payback time for Mary Claire and everything else. “No.”

She had caught up to him now, as they were crossing Ninety-eighth Street. “Why not? Don’t you find me attractive?”

“I’d have to be blind not to. And I’m not blind.”

“Then why not?”

“I try not to share with my brother.”

She stopped. So he had to. “Strictly business, then?”

Byrne stepped back so he could get a good eyeful of her. He’d seen her on television many times, especially now that she’d become a big star. Just about every guy he knew desired her. She was single and so was he. The department generally frowned on cops boinking the media, but he knew Matt would turn a blind eye to it. That was their deal, locked into it for life: a blind eye to everything except what absolutely, positively, could not be ignored or swept under the rug.

They’d been sweeping stuff under the rug ever since Matt put two .38 slugs in Enrique Marcon’s head and then gave him four more in the body just for good measure. Just to make sure he was dead. Just to make him feel the pain that Rosa Montez had felt when Marcon ice-picked her to death. It had been frontier justice in Park Slope, and it had been real justice.

“Strictly business,” said Frankie. They shook hands.

Then Principessa leaned over and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

In the sky, the image of the Virgin had stopped descending and was now fading rapidly. In a few moments, she would be gone forever.

And then Principessa’s news van pulled up and she was gone and Francis Byrne was left to find his own way back downtown.

Story of his life.