Vespers

Thirty-Seven

Gentry woke at three-thirtyA.M. He wasn’t accustomed to the quiet, and it finally got to him. He left his room, warmed with the expectation of seeing Joyce’s door shut. When he saw that it was open, he tracked her down to the conference room.There were blueprints spread on the table; Joyce, Marius, and a team of OEM tacticians were collected around them and talking animatedly.

Marius spotted Gentry and motioned him in. Joyce looked up and smiled.

“I think we’ve got something, Robert,” she said enthusiastically and went back to work.

There was a coffee maker in the corner of the room, and as Gentry poured himself a cup he glanced at Nancy. She looked great in the jumpsuit, but he was more concerned that she looked exhausted.

He went and stood next to her.

“Marius, do you want to-”

“No,” Pace said. “You explain it. I’m going to check in with Gordy.” He went to the phone.

Joyce leaned on the table with one arm. With another, she pointed to diagrams of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and Upper New York Bay.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. About two blocks from the entrance to the subway station is the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. We’re going to use the video game to bring the bat into the tunnel-about here.”She pointed to a spot where it intersected Governors Island just over a half mile from the tip of Manhattan, a mile east of Liberty Island and Ellis Island. “The Brooklyn side of the tunnel is being sealed off with sandbags. Once the bat goes inside, plastic sheets will be rolled down from the portal on the Manhattan side and secured with sandbags on the bottom. If the bat tries to get out, the plastic will slow her down long enough for marksmen to take her out.”

“Assuming the little vespers don’t attack them,” Gentry said.

“The officers will be inside armored cars,” she said.

“A pair of Emergency Rescue Vehicles,” Pace added as he hung up the phone. “M75 armored personnel carriers.”

Gentry nodded. The police kept the tanklike ERVs in case it became necessary to extricate casualties under fire.

“And since the big bat will be stuck in one place behind the plastic,” Joyce said, “the marksmen should be able to sight her and get their shots off without the other vespers interfering. Once the big bat dies, the little bats will quiet down. Now, if the bat doesn’t try to escape, we’ll be waiting for her with ethyl chloride. It’ll be pumped through the fans in the tunnel. The drums containing the compound are already inside the vent house on Governors Island.”

Gentry knew the building. It was a five-story-tall hexagonal fortress on the 160-acre island.

“If we can hit her quick,” Joyce said, “her metabolism will drop and she’ll be dead in minutes.”

Gentry asked, “Where will you be while all this is going on?”

She jabbed a finger at the map of Governors Island. “Here. Monitoring that end on security cameras.”

He nodded again. This time he wasn’t going to blow his chance. “Mind if I come along?”

“No,” she smiled again. “I was kind of hoping you would.”

Pace triumphantly closed his cellular phone. “Gordy has given this his final thumbs-up. He’s calling the mayor’s office now, and we should have our go-ahead within fifteen minutes.” He looked at Joyce. “Then it’s all up to your little video game heroine.”

Pace and his aides left the room. Joyce sagged in her chair. Gentry asked if she wanted coffee. She shook her head.

“You didn’t even try to sleep, did you?” Gentry asked. She shook her head. “I’ve never been much of a rester.”

“Waste of time?”

“Pretty much.”

“Afraid you might miss something?”

“Yeah, there’s a job to do here, but that isn’t the only thing. When I lie down I always think about stuff I don’t want to think about. People I miss. People I don’t miss. Right now I don’t want to think about Professor Lowery.”

“I understand.”

“No, it isn’t what you think. I’m not real happy about the thoughts I’m having. How I’m going to miss his knowledge, his guidance, but not him.”

They looked at each other in comfortable silence. But it was silent for only a moment as Pace suddenly swung around the jamb.

“It’s showtime, folks,” he said.

Joyce and Gentry followed him out.

An OEM car drove them the short distance to Pier A where an NYPD harbor boat from Harbor Charlie in Brooklyn would take them to Governors Island. Pace went with them to the riverside. En route, he gave Joyce a radio and said that both he and Weeks would be listening for her reports. When they arrived, Pace wished Joyce and Gentry good luck. He stayed until they were on board and the tuglike vessel was headed into the bay.

The two officers who were on board went inside the cabin. Joyce and Gentry remained on deck. The detective had been on the Staten Island Ferry at night, and it was always a thrill to see the New York skyline. Millions of windows lit in the patchwork way of a big city, planes and helicopters moving overhead, headlights on the surrounding highways. It was deeply unsettling to see the city dark and seemingly dead.

The small, compact vessel plowed loudly through the salty early morning air. The engine droned and water slapped the hull. The boat felt every swell and dip of the powerful river current, and Gentry held the wood railing tightly. He hadn’t spent much time on the sea-he once went motorboating on the Long Island Sound with Priscilla-and he couldn’t get used to the ground heaving sharply up and then down while his feet remained unassailably flat.

He looked out at Governors Island. Since 1966, when it was abandoned by the Army, the island had been a Coast Guard base of operations for search and rescue missions and the interception of seagoing contraband. But the cost of housing four thousand sailors and support personnel and their families was more than thirty million dollars annually, so-save for a skeleton crew-the Coast Guard had all but shut down operations in 1997.

The ventilation tower was built on a small section of landfill just off the island proper. It was surrounded by a walkway some twenty feet wide, and there was a narrow boardwalk that led to the main island. The lights were on there as Coast Guard personnel and officers from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority worked with city engineers, harbor police, and fire department marine units to set up “the icebox,” as they were calling it.

The barge that brought the ethyl chloride had docked on the north side of the islet, so the harbor boat swung around to the south side to deposit the passengers. It was good to walk on stable land again, though Gentry continued to sway for a short while. Despite the fact that helicopters had been grounded, boats from various networks and news services were docked at the island, covering the preparations. Kathy Leung was there, of course. They were kept behind a police barricade, though Gentry shouted to Kathy that he’d talk to her when he was finished inside. That didn’t seem to satisfy her, but it was the best he could do.

Neither the mayor nor Weeks had forbidden anyone to speak with the press. No one was afraid the bats would overhear. But despite pleas from the reporters, there wasn’t time to stop and talk now. Gentry and Joyce entered the gray stone building.

Gentry’s first impression was that the tower was a huge jet engine. The floor was honeycombed with a dozen trap-doors that covered ladders and access to the fans and ducts. The doors were open and surrounded by twenty-four of the ethyl chloride canisters. Technicians were in the process of feeding coils of hard rubber tubing into the ducts. One end of each tube was attached to a canister. Gentry had no idea how far into the shafts the other ends went.

Above the fan ducts were four levels of grated metal floors that were accessible by stairs on the north side of the tower and by an elevator on the south side. The floors were eerily reminiscent of the ones in the catacombs under the subway at Grand Central Station. Gentry wondered if the rooms where he found the homeless people had originally been designed to ventilate the subways. It made sense, he thought.

This part of the operation was under the direction of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority head Charlie Schrank. Schrank was a slender, easygoing, shirtsleeves man with thinning brown hair and a chronically bemused expression. He seemed genuinely pleased as he shook Joyce’s hand.

“Gordy Weeks told me you’re a pro,” Schrank said, “and he doesn’t say that about a lot of people.”

“Thank you,” Joyce said.

She introduced Gentry, after which Schrank walked them up to the command center, a curved bank of panels, computers, and monitors along the east wall of the second floor of the cavernous tower.

“The audio portion of the operation is being controlled from the Emergency Broadcast Center at the OEM,” Schrank said. “As soon as we’re set here we’ll call the EBC. Their involvement will last until the bat enters the tunnel and the Manhattan entrance is closed off. Then we take over.”

“How will you know when the bat’s in position?” Joyce asked.

“We have security cameras in the tunnel.” Schrank pointed to the black-and-white images on the monitors.

Gentry stepped closer. There was also a feed from the video camera the police had left at the South Ferry subway station. Despite the intimate views of the surveillance cameras, Gentry felt curiously detached from the proceedings. He was accustomed to being in the middle of the action, not watching it from the outside. He looked down at the crew. Many of them had never worked with one another, but they were all pulling together. When Gentry thought of all the people and materiel that had been brought together in just a few hours, he was impressed. The machine had worked fast and it had worked well.

“I only wish we had time to test the delivery system,” Schrank said.

Joyce pointed out, “A lot of things are going to have to work right the first time.”

She was fidgeting with the zipper on the front of her jumpsuit. Gentry couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind and heart. So much had happened since this began and, more than ever, so much was sitting squarely on her shoulders.

“What exactly is going to happen?” Gentry asked. He was interested, but he also wanted to give Joyce something else to think about.

“The fans are twenty-seven feet down each shaft,” Schrank said. “They change six million cubic feet of air every minute and a half. You see the ladders?”

Gentry nodded.

“Ordinarily, they facilitate repair and cleaning. Now we’re using them as braces. One technician inside each shaft is fastening the tube to the ladder.”

“You had enough qualified technicians for that?” Gentry asked.

“Just enough,” Schrank laughed, “with a supervisor left over. What we didn’t have were enough plastic straps to attach the pipes to the ladders. We needed something with a little ‘give’ for when the fans start rattling.”

“What did you use?” Joyce asked.

Schrank pointed to his waist. “Trouser belts. Punched new holes in the sides, just the right size. It’s a littleApollo 13 -and, like I said, I wish we had time to test it. Once the pipes are secured and we see that the bat is in the tunnel, the ethyl chloride will be released and the fans will be turned on. The liquid will vaporize and, within seconds, the gaseous agent will be circulating through the tunnel, which is sixty feet below us.”

Schrank’s radio beeped. “That’s my supervisor,” he said as he slipped the unit from his back pocket. “Yes?”

Gentry watched as people climbed quickly from the shafts. He saw the supervisor standing directly below, beside the elevator door.

“We’re ready down here,” the supervisor said.

“Thanks,” Schrank said. “Tell everyone ‘good job.’” He put the radio back in his pocket and picked up a black phone under the bank of monitors. He punched in a number.

“Gordy?” he said. “We’re all set here.”

Gentry could see Joyce draw a sharp breath. He reached over and took her fingers in his.

She squeezed his hand.

A few seconds later the drumbeat came softly through a