A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (3 page)

Kahn stared out at the street. At least he’d stopped giving driving directions. “You’re damn straight that’s what I want you to say. You cut it open because you were following procedures, but the procedure starts with the Wolverine, doesn’t it? We use the robot to make the assessment, not our hands. Not our guts.”

By the book,
Diaz thought.
Which one is the robot?

He turned the truck onto Seventh Avenue near the boarded-up St. Vincent’s Hospital building. Used to be ambulances stacked up there. Now it was too quiet. Diaz waited for some people to cross, turned on the light bar for a second, and ran the stoplight.

Next to him, Kahn had the incident report form on his lap and was writing with vigor. “All those people there...no way around this, Diaz. I gotta tell it straight. I like you, kid, I really do. But I gotta tell it straight for Cap’s sake.”

Diaz wanted to say he didn’t give a rip, but that wouldn’t accomplish anything, and besides it was untrue. He said, “The other day I looked up ‘procedure’ in the dictionary. It comes from the word ‘proceed.’”

“Yeah?” Kahn turned to peer at him over his reading glasses.

Diaz nodded, kept his eyes on the road. “And the word ‘proceed’ comes from the Latin for ‘to go forward.’ That’s all I was doing, Sergeant. Going forward.”

Kahn’s jaw went slack. “You looked that up—procedure?”

“I sure did.” Diaz grinned, smug.

“And you think that’s a mark in your favor?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because to my mind the only reason a person would look up the word ‘procedure’ in the dictionary would be in preparation for questioning the department’s procedures. Do you know how many cops in the NYPD Bomb Squad have fallen in the line of duty?”

Diaz pictured the wall of honor at the precinct. “Six?”

“That’s exactly right. Six in more than a hundred years, and one of those at the Twin Towers, which was a whole different thing entirely. Why so few? Because they followed procedures and those procedures constantly improved over time. One of those improvements is the robot for remote threat assessment. That’s why we use it—not to get too close—to save lives.”

Of course Diaz knew all of that. “It wasn’t working.”

“You might’ve worn the suit then.”

“The suit? The bag contained no threat!” He pulled into the small parking lot of the station house and cut the engine. Neither man moved for a couple of breaths. Then Kahn pocketed his reading glasses and climbed out.

Diaz followed him to the side entrance. “All I’m saying is that sometimes you just gotta proceed, play it by ear if you have to. It’s an imperfect world.”

“It sure is, Manny.” Kahn stopped in his tracks. “Return this vehicle to the garage and figure out what the hell’s wrong with that Wolverine.”

ALBERT HORN WORKED AS A
computer programmer in the research department of National Bible Publishers at 1440 Broadway. It had the potential to be a peaceful job and Albert Horn coveted peace. He saw it in the eyes of his coworkers, in their placid manners, in their kind smiles, and he wished he could find it in himself.

Mercifully the seventh floor felt more like a library than a business office. The small programming department huddled in one corner around a bend, the only part of the floor where people didn’t speak in hushed tones by default. Miles of bookshelves occupied most of the other areas: volumes upon volumes on subjects so esoteric that Albert Horn couldn’t explain them if he had years to prepare. All day long, on that part of the floor, scholars came and went. Editors settled down in carrels and at giant wooden tables, poring over ancient Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic. When Albert Horn once asked a research librarian what those people were looking for after so many years, she replied with one word: “Insights.”

Insights.
Albert Horn could dig it, looking for insights in books. Why not? He’d tried every other way and it had gotten him nowhere—worse than nowhere. He’d long ago mastered the computer world, once relished the places the Internet could take you, the way it could stimulate your mind. But that was a tease. You couldn’t touch and smell those places. On the screen they were just words and pictures.

In late 2002, when he was eighteen years old, Albert Horn had left Jamaica, Queens, for the United States Army. War was afoot and Horn considered himself a patriot, but it was more than that. He wanted to imbibe the world, touch it and taste it. And if he had to risk his life to do that, to his youthful mind that seemed worth the chance. He trained at Fort Jackson in South Carolina—first time he’d set foot below the Mason-Dixon line in his life—and got posted to the Eighth Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, Texas. Before he shipped out, he and some buddies hiked the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Albert Horn used to tell whoever would listen that he never again felt as close to God as he did in the Blue Ridge—not in America or Europe or the Middle East, not in any church, and certainly, sad to say, not on the seventh floor of National Bible Publishers. Not that he didn’t try like hell to keep his chin up. In Hollis, Queens, where he lived, he rented a back-room apartment from his sister and her family, who were for the most part kind to him. They often ate together, sometimes went to church together, even hung out watching football and playing video games together. But, for all that, Albert Horn felt a creeping despair that carried him further from God’s love every day.

This was no secret. His sister knew there was something wrong with him, something deep in his mind, something beyond his physical disabilities. His boss, Youssef Naftali, also knew. Their team was halfway through a multiyear project but had fallen behind schedule. If this had been Microsoft or Oracle, some geek with a Coke in his hand would be standing over them pounding the table, urging them through all-nighters. Albert Horn couldn’t have handled that. He couldn’t even handle Naftali standing over him two hours ago, telling him gently that last week’s coding turned out to be dog poo. “Dog poo”—those were the words he used. Management allowed no cursing in the building.

Now, as a kind of forced leave, Horn had two tickets from Naftali to a Broadway matinee in his shirt pocket.

“They’re for
Spider-Man,”
Naftali had said
.
“Take them. Turn off the dark! You earned it, guy.”

Delivered in an Indiana twang, the cheerleading made Albert Horn sound like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Horn himself had a pronounced New York accent, but he hadn’t used it that morning to protest any further. He’d pretended to call his sister and invite his niece to accompany him, although in reality he’d done no such thing.

At exactly 2:30 he called for the elevator. A minute later he rode it down to the lobby. And a minute after that he walked out onto Broadway.

He called his sister, Lydia, from his cell phone as he hit the street. Naftali, he told her, in suggesting that he leave early had implied that Albert Horn’s prosthetic legs couldn’t carry him as well as another man’s, which was true up to a point, but just barely. After years of practice out in the real world, he hardly thought of the legs as a limitation—at least not in his daily routine, which took him on and off the subway, along city sidewalks, in and out of chairs, even up and down steps.

He turned east onto Forty-First Street, away from the theater. He had plenty of time to make the curtain if he decided to go, but he had to think first. All in all, it had been a pretty depressing day—a pretty depressing week or two. Something had triggered within Albert Horn and he’d gone into emotional free fall.

It pertained to his brother-in-law, Kyle Butterworth, who was trying to decide whether to join the marines at the age of thirty-six. Even though they ate dinner together nearly every night, Albert never felt close to Kyle. He didn’t hate him or anything, but they didn’t connect either. Kyle worked as a plumber and Albert Horn had an office job. Over dinner they might exchange a few words about the weather or the neighbors, but they never shared their inner thoughts with one another. They could sit in front of a baseball game for two hours and never exchange a word between them, just talk to the television if at all.

A few weeks ago, however, the dynamic had changed. All of a sudden, Kyle wanted to talk and talk about joining the marines and wanted to hear stories from his brother-in-law’s days in the army. Albert Horn wondered how much Kyle had researched this thing on his own.
Can you even join the marines so late in life?
And where did the desire come from?
Not like Kyle hates Muslims or needs the job.
Horn wondered whether all this talk of the marines was just a way to draw him out, maybe Kyle’s curiosity getting the better of him after so many years not hearing a peep from this guy who strapped on his legs every morning in the rear apartment.

Meanwhile the memories that Horn had repressed for nearly a decade began to come back, first in dreams—you couldn’t call them nightmares, he told his sister, because they weren’t all horrible—and then in waking flashbacks. He might see a young girl in the street and he’d flash to a young girl in Kabul, crouched over her dead grandfather. He might pass a shadow and his mind would flash to a bloodstain on a pockmarked wall. He might be sitting on the subway and see a blemish on someone’s face and flash to the first man he ever killed, a black-bearded militant in an open window across a dirt road.

But the worst—and what had turned Horn’s code to “dog poo,” he was sure—were the memories that came back unbidden from the Battle of Fallujah, where Horn lost his legs not to an IED, as many soldiers lost limbs, but in house-to-house combat. You might call it a freak accident, but it was no
accident
because it involved an enemy RPG and it was not
freak
because nothing in combat was freak. You attempted to do violence to one another and awaited the results. The RPG...since Kyle had started asking all his questions, Albert Horn had begun to see the smoke from its launch when the light caught a window in a certain way. He’d go into a miniature seizure, almost like a trance, he told his sister, see the grenade sail under his outstretched arm, missing him as he dove for cover, then scutter along the splintered wooden floor and embed itself in the wall for a long fraction of a second. Albert Horn knew what happened after that but he couldn’t remember it. He knew from the accounts of others that stones went flying and the floor gave way and his unconscious body hung trapped between beams, his legs dangling into the space below as a vicious firefight ensued on the ground floor, eventually reducing his lower legs to shattered bone and bloody pulp. Unsalvageable.

Company C, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment.
For two tours in Afghanistan and three in Iraq, Albert Horn gave as good as he got, but it all caught up to him in Fallujah. That cursed city took away more than Horn’s legs, more than his sense of invulnerability, more than his curiosity about the wider world. It stole his patriotism.

Because today, he informed his sister, speaking in tears into his cell phone as he rounded Sixth Avenue and Forty-Third Street, he realized that he’d repressed these horrible visions now floating back to him not to avoid reliving the fear but to avoid unmasking his own hatred. His hatred of God, of man, of country. It had consumed him.

Albert Horn crossed Broadway with the tickets in his pocket and paused in front of the Times Square US Army Recruiting Station. His sister, still on the other end of the phone, noticed that her brother stopped talking in mid-sentence and that the air between them had gone silent, not even a crackle of static.

On the sidewalk, Albert Horn would never hear the explosion that destroyed his eardrums, shredded his internal organs, and severed his left hand at the wrist. The force of the blast lifted his torso eight feet into the air and dropped him on the now-exposed rear of his sacrum and iliac bones. Without another word or voluntary movement, he fell backward from that position. Stone dead.

THE THIRD PRECINCT GARAGE HAD
been given over entirely to the Bomb Squad long ago. It consisted of two asymmetrical bays with steel shelving at the back and sides, loaded with equipment and supplies, all kept as neat as the contents of any firehouse. With the doors closed, Diaz and Detective First Grade Lakshan Higgins examined the Wolverine on the floor beside the rear workbench. Behind them, the squad’s two newest and most sophisticated response trucks gleamed blue and white under fluorescent lights.

In a unit that increasingly attracted gadget lovers and puzzle solvers, Higgins was the most techie. Of both African and Indian extraction, he was thin, slight, and barely tall enough to fulfill the old NYPD height requirement—lucky for him they dropped it when they allowed women onto the force. He had skin the color of a purple potato, pitted cheeks, straight jet-black hair combed into a part, and he wore spectacles with thick clear plastic frames and lenses that always made his eyes appear to goggle.

That was the outside. Inside, he possessed the intuitive flair of a math and physics whiz, having attended the Bronx High School of Science and graduated from RPI with an engineering degree in three years.

All of this intellectual firepower he’d brought to bear on the robot. He tightened the last bolts, tapped a few keys on the laptop he was using, threw the control panel power switch on and off, rested his hands on his hips, and declared, “I give up.”

“You really mean that?” Diaz said.

“That thing hasn’t jerked one millimeter, hasn’t emitted so much as a peep, even though the batteries test fine. Software problem is all I can think. Maybe someone up the chain can call it in to the manufacturer. I’m sure as heck not authorized.”

“More rules.” Diaz shook his head. “This place has more procedures than the army ever did.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Well, my last two tours of duty it was a situation involving more slack. Put it that way.”

“That was, like, eight years ago. You still have a hard-on for it?”

“I don’t know. I’m probably just out of sorts because Kahn’s vigilance is testing my limits. The guy hasn’t shut up for a year, and I’m tired of having him on me like white on rice, no room to breath. I really lost it today, opened a suspicious package without the robot or the suit.”