Terminal City

FORTY-TWO

“Put this on, Ms. Cooper,” Yolanda Figueroa said. “Your lieutenant sent us up here with these.”

She was helping me into a bulletproof vest, just like the ones she and Zoya Blunt were wearing.

Her partner had left the three of us together. I bolted the door behind him, then dialed the stationmaster’s office from the landline.

“Let me speak to Chapman or Wallace,” I said to whomever answered, and waited while the phone was passed. “Mike?”

“I guess I was a little quick to blow off our tour guide yesterday. We should have been the ones to know about the staircase.”

“Blunt really got out of there?” I asked.

“We caught a shot of him on the surveillance camera, although no one had any way to make him at the time, to know who he was.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s dressed in camo and assault boots, carrying an automatic rifle. He looks like half the guys on the floor here, like one of the guardsmen. It was only when we hit REPLAY to see how he got into the booth that we spotted him. He just melted into the crowd.”

“We couldn’t have given him better cover,” I said.

“When the information booth employees were let go at nine fifty, Nik Blunt came out of whatever hole he’d been hiding in, unlocked the booth while everyone around him was busy doing his or her own thing, and apparently crouched inside.”

“Then Scully sends half of the troops back out on the street-”

“And Blunt sat in the crown jewel at the center of the terminal, knowing he could escape by way of the spiral staircase and come out on the lower level, which had just been evacuated because of the pipe bombs,” Mike said. “All cred to NorthStar. He’s a wily little bastard.”

“Zoya says everybody’s kids knew about the staircase. Her guess is that Nik went down to the lower concourse to get to the tracks, into the tunnels.”

“Those gates to the platforms and tunnels are all manned, Coop. Pretty hard to slip out that way. Pin her down for any other sweet spots she remembers, okay?”

“How badly hurt are the two cops?”

“One has a shattered kneecap, and the other one just got knocked down, saved by his vest. You suited up?”

“Yeah. We’re good,” I said. “You?”

“Mercer and I are itching to get into this, but at the moment we’re chained to the commissioner.”

“Scratch the itch, Mike. Scully needs you. It’s almost eleven o’clock and no one’s dead,” I said. “Let’s make it a record-breaking day.”

We hung up and I repeated the conversation, including how Nik Blunt was dressed, to the two women. Zoya was chain-smoking the remainder of a pack of cigarettes, filling the room with smoke.

I was pacing back and forth. The operation center attached to the situation room still had four workers in it. I could see from the monitors that there were no trains moving south of 125th Street. They were watching the rail connections far to the north.

I sat Zoya down at the table and pushed her again. “So none of us knew about the staircase inside the information booth. That’s not your fault-and you couldn’t have guessed that Nik would get into there any better than we did-but we want you to rack your brain to tell us about other places like it here. Nik almost killed several cops tonight. Doesn’t the hidden staircase make you think of anything else?”

“Honestly not, Ms. Cooper. For me, it’s been more than ten years since I used to come here. I wouldn’t have thought of that staircase until you told me about it.”

We went back and forth for another fifteen minutes. I picked up the phone again to call Mike. I told him about the Campbell Apartment near the Lexington Avenue entrance. It had been built as a private residence for one of the original railroad trustees, John Campbell, and was a luxurious sanctuary in the middle of the terminal. Unoccupied for much of Zoya’s youth, it was now a glamorous bar-closed for the night-that Nik knew well, too. It was the only other place the young woman could recall as a special hangout of her brother’s.

“I’ll check it out,” Mike said.

“Anything else?” I said, fidgeting with the snaps on my vest.

“Mercer just spoke with a man who worked for NorthStar.”

“How’d you find him at this hour?”

“We didn’t. He found the NYPD hotline. Called in when he saw Blunt’s photo on the news tonight.”

“Does he solve the problem of where in the world Nik Blunt was?” I asked. Zoya’s head snapped to look in my direction. “Was he ever in Russia?”

“Never. No Muslims, no jihadist mission. The US government had a contract with NorthStar to go into Uganda, looking for a rebel leader who was abducting hundreds of kids to turn them into child soldiers. That kind of thing.”

“And Nik?”

“Caught the fever. Lived there for eighteen months,” Mike said, “and seemed to have enjoyed the danger, the license to kill.”

“Voices or no voices?”

“Yeah, voices, all right. At least for the last few months. Now don’t go telling Zoya what I’m about to say to you next. Promise me?”

“Okay.”

“Just so you know what we’re dealing with, Coop. Nik and another man went off the reservation after their compound was attacked by the rebels. They attacked civilians in one of the villages in the countryside.”

I kept a poker face. Zoya was trying to study my reaction to the information I was receiving.

“Yeah?”

“All the men were off pillaging somewhere else, so Nik and his partner took it on themselves to rape four of the wives who’d been left behind.”

“Like the other guy living inside him told him to do.”

“Then he must have also told Nik to slit their throats from ear to ear,” Mike said, “because he did that, too.”

I was speechless. How many other killings had there been between the women in Uganda, Zoya’s rape, and Corinne Thatcher’s murder? And what ever put a woman like Corinne in his line of fire?

“Say something, Coop. Something normal so you don’t freak the girl out.”

“So nothing about any political mission, right? No work in Russia?” I knew it would sound like I was babbling and repeating myself, but I didn’t want Zoya to learn about the other murders yet.

“Nope. But NorthStar is where Nik picked up all his moves. Blinding security cameras, like he did at the Waldorf. Enlisting marginal types, like Carl the mole, to do his dirty work, the way he found recruits in the Ugandan villages. Killing for pleasure. You’ve got to sink pretty low to be fired from a place like NorthStar. They got him out of Uganda before he could be charged for the crimes there. Or executed. That’s why he wound up on the city streets-or below them.”

“Okay, we’ll keep on talking up here. Don’t forget about us.”

“Much as I might like that, Coop, it would be hard to do.”

I hung up the receiver.

Zoya asked what Mike had been telling me about Nik. Before I could answer her, the entire room went black.

I walked to the wall and flipped the switch, but there was no power at all. The only light in the situation room was the glowing tip of Zoya Blunt’s cigarette.