Terminal City

FORTY-THREE

“I want to get out of here,” Zoya shouted.

For three minutes, PO Yolanda Figueroa and I had scoured the room for a fuse box or an alternative source of power. Even the brightly colored screens tracking train movements had gone to black in the operations center next door.

I unbolted the door and cracked it open to look in the hallway, to see whether it was simply our area that had lost juice, but the corridor was entirely dark, too.

“Don’t you carry a flashlight?” I asked Yolanda.

“Something had to give. I rarely use one working days, and they kept me overtime tonight. I had these three vests to carry up here, my walkie-talkie, water bottles, notepads. I’m sorry. Nobody thought I’d need a flashlight.”

“You have matches, Zoya?”

“A lighter.”

“Better still. Let me have it,” I said.

“No. I’m keeping it. I want to go.”

I tried the landline again, but that was dead, too. “Give it five minutes. There’s nowhere for you to go, and no sense going by yourself. The commissioner will have someone come up and get us as soon as possible. Generators usually kick in pretty quickly, don’t they, Yolanda?”

Yolanda Figueroa was jumpy, too. “Are you crazy? They’ve never been able to maintain a generator in Grand Central. Do you understand how much power would be necessary, between the train grid and the size of the terminal?”

I was trying to convince myself as much as the two women to remain calm. “There’s no generator? Maybe the rainstorm caused the blackout. Maybe that’s what did it. Lightning has knocked out the train system many times. They’ll get something up and running,” I said. “They’ll have to.”

“The only backup they have powers up the trains first,” Yolanda said. “You’ll know that when the lights go back on the screens in the operations center.”

I looked through the window, but it was as dark in there as it was on our side.

“Not so fast, Ms. Cooper. That could take half an hour,” Yolanda said. “There’ll be no lights in the terminal till they figure how and why they went off. And no generator to serve as an intermediate power source.”

“You don’t know about the button, do you?” Zoya Blunt asked me. She had stepped on her cigarette to put it out, and now there was no glow at all.

“What button?”

“My father used to call it the red button. It turns off all the power in the terminal with a single switch, and it stops every train that’s on a track, as far off as they may be.”

I tried to control my anger that she hadn’t thought about it during my questioning. I tried to control my fear at the idea that this blackout could have been caused intentionally. “Where is it, Zoya? Where is that button?”

“You think I was holding out on you, Ms. Cooper? I just don’t know where it is. I was never allowed to see it. It’s in a subbasement that nobody’s allowed in. It wasn’t a place for kids, my dad always said.”

“Is it in M42? The subbasement with the rotary converters?” That’s where Nik had been sleeping, but Scully had stationed men there so he couldn’t go back.

“No, no. It’s not M42. But it’s downstairs somewhere near there.”

I had to tell Mike and Mercer. “Yolanda, let me have your walkie-talkie.”

“It’s not getting any reception,” she said. She was slow in passing it to me. “I think I ought to bring you two back to the stationmaster.”

“I want to go with you,” Zoya said. “I don’t like the dark.”

“Let me have your lighter, please?”

She lit another cigarette and passed me the small plastic tube. I flicked it on and tried to make a call on the walkie-talkie. I pushed the right buttons but couldn’t get through.

I pulled the laptop to me and linked to my Internet service. I typed an urgent e-mail to both of the guys-and to Nan Toth, who was undoubtedly safe at home. I clicked SEND, but the notice that my message could not be delivered until a later time came back immediately.

“You won’t get anything on the Internet now,” Yolanda said. “And you can’t call or text. We’re in a dead zone, and once we lose power, it’s hopeless.”

“It wasn’t a lightning strike that did this, Ms. Cooper. It has to be Nik. He’s going to find me here,” Zoya said, growing more and more hysterical. “I want Yolanda to take me back to the detectives.”

“There’s no reason for Nik to even know you’re in the terminal,” I said. “No one wants him to know.”

“Well, what about you? He’d be after you, wouldn’t he?”

“I’m nobody in all this, Zoya. He doesn’t have a clue who I am, and that’s how I want to keep it. Nik’s bought himself a confrontation with the NYPD. That’s what he seems to want.”

The young woman drew a deep breath. “From the looks of things downstairs,” she said, “I’d have to say that’s suicide.”

Zoya Blunt was exactly right. Suicide by cop.

Suicide, though, that took with him as many innocent lives as he could muster on his way out.

Nik’s madness, his murderous rampage, was most likely a desperate effort to call attention to himself. Not a cause, not a political mission. The psychopathology of a schizophrenic who was driven by the torment of an inner voice. The psychopathology of someone who had lost everything to live for.

The young woman walked to the door of the room and opened it.

“No!” I shouted. “You can’t try and figure out your way down alone. You have no idea where Nik is.”

“I’m taking her, Ms. Cooper. I’ve got a gun.”

“He’s got a bigger gun, Yolanda. Probably more than one.”

“I have orders not to leave you here alone. And two of us don’t want to stay one minute longer,” the officer said. “I have orders to keep Ms. Blunt safe from her brother, too.”

“Are you telling me I have to leave this room?”

“I can’t make you do anything, Ms. Cooper. But I’m ready to go. There are NYPD officers with automatic weapons stationed at every landing between here and the concourse,” Yolanda said. “You must have seen that on your way upstairs. I can send one of them back up to hold your hand.”

“I-uh, I saw one where we got off the elevator.”

“You can be a sitting duck up here,” she said, patting the decorations on her breastplate, “or you can come with us. I didn’t get these citations for cowering in the dark.”

I thought about letting the two women go and bolting myself into the room. Nik Blunt didn’t know who I was. There was no point for him to target the situation room.

“Nik has no reason to come here,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

“You know the most damage he could do, Ms. Cooper?” Yolanda said. “He could get inside the operations center, to those guys on the other side of this wall who’ve still got thousands of lives in their hands.”

People speeding north through the night to Hudson and Hartford, I thought, unaware of the monster in the terminal they’d left behind.

“Nik Blunt could get in that room and throw switches. He could derail trains all over the Northeast Corridor, if he’s rigged that power button in a way that he can control it from wherever he is within Grand Central.”

And NorthStar probably taught him how to rig some controls exactly like that.

“So you can sit here on your ass, Ms. Cooper, and watch for the neon glow of those distant train signals to light up the operations board again.”

“But-”

“You cross your fingers and hope those passengers won’t know what hit them when the trains jump the rails while they’re cruising along at sixty-five, seventy miles an hour tonight. Me? I’m going out to make sure the bosses send more men upstairs to guard the workers in that room. They’re a little more important in the big scheme of things tonight than you are.”