Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (9 page)

I was relishing my French cuisine with a bottle of Guinness, the only adult beverage left in the house. Like the laundry, the whole grocery thing was something I had to work out, since Mary Catherine was still away.

Speaking of Mary Catherine, I’d been jazzed to find a letter—an actual paper snail-mail letter—from her on the hall table when I’d come in. The good news was that there was a new lead on a buyer for the hotel. No definite offer as of yet, but things were looking good.

The bad news was that though she had asked about the kids, there was really nothing about us or our fabulous romantic week together on the windswept Cliffs of Moher. Or about her heart-wrenching note, which I had read on the plane.

What could that mean? I wondered. Cold feet? Buyer’s remorse? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted her back here with me so hard it was starting to hurt.

But like I said, at least I was home. Finally clean and warm and home, though I wasn’t in a real talkative mood after my truly insane day. I was more than content to just listen to the dull roar of the kids all around the table, talking and giggling. Even their teasing was comforting. Their normalcy, their obliviousness to the horror of today’s events, was just what the doctor ordered.

I was still sitting in my family’s warm chaos, mopping up the stout and syrup, when Seamus came in at speed through the apartment’s front door.

“Long day, eh, Mick?” said Seamus, looking a little flustered when he spotted me.

“About a week long, Father,” I said. “Make that a month, but I can’t talk about it. I refuse to, in fact. Pull up a chair and a plate. How’s the nanny hunt going?”

After Seamus’s health scare, and down one Mary Catherine, I thought it best to look for some temporary help.

“Been on it since this morning,” Seamus said. “That’s why I’m here. I think I might have found someone. He was recommended quite highly by a friend down at the archdiocese office.”

“He?”
I said.

“Yeah. He’s a bit…well, unconventional, you might say.”

“Unconventional? How so?” I asked as the doorbell rang.

“See for yourself,” Seamus said, blinking at me. “That’s him now.”

OH, I SEE,
I thought when I went out into the hall and opened the door.

The young man was tall and Colin Farrell handsome, with spiky black hair and black Clark Kent glasses. Nineteen, maybe twenty. He was wearing a white-and-green tracksuit.

“Hello, there,” he said with an infectious smile and an Irish accent. “I’m Martin Gilroy. Father Romans sent me here about a job?”

“This way,” Seamus said, ushering him in before I could open my mouth.

The ruckus in the dining room ceased immediately as Seamus and I brought him into the living room. The kids stared at him in dead silence as we walked past.

“Hello, guys,” Martin said, smiling.

If he was fazed by the ten sets of wide eyes on him, he hid it well. He actually stopped and craned his neck to look in the doorway.

“Hey, what are ya having in there? French toast, is it? Breakfast for dinner?”

He crouched down next to Shawna and made a funny face. “Then what’s for breakfast, I wonder? Let me guess. Steak and green beans and mashed potatoes?”

I smiled along with the kids. This guy was pretty good. I was starting to like him already.

“So tell us a little something about yourself, Martin,” I said as we sat on the couch.

“Not much to tell, really,” he said, crossing a big neon-green Nike on his thigh. “Me home is a little town in County Cavan, Ireland, called Kilnaleck. Eight of us in the family, not including Mom and Da. Got out of farm chores by playing football, or soccer, as you lot call it, for what reason I’ll never know.

“Anyway, I got good enough at it to get a scholarship to Manhattan College. I’m also on the track team. Trying to get a mechanical engineering degree on the side, as I thought it might be good to have a backup plan if my dreams of becoming Beckham don’t turn out. I don’t drink, so that hampers the ol’ social life a bit at school. I like kids and staying busy, and, um, I could use the money.”

“Any experience?” I said.

“Plenty, since I was one of the oldest in my family. No one died on me. I also worked at the town camp since I was sixteen, so I got all my first aid stuff and all that.”

“Do you cook?” Seamus asked.

“Oh, sure. Breakfast, lunch, dinner,” he smiled. “All at the right times, too, if you want. Only kidding. Nothing fancy, but I can keep kids fed.”

“You know how to do laundry?” I said.

He took off his glasses and polished them on the edge of his track jacket.

“I can iron a crease in a pair of trousers you could shave with,” he said as he slipped the glasses back on. “Actually, that’s not true. I read that somewhere. But I’ve done laundry before. Separate the whites and the colors or something, right? Hell, I’ll do the windows, if ya want. Improvise and overcome, that’s me motto. Bring it on.”

“Martin, there’s ten kids out there. Ten,” I said. “What would you do with them? What would be your strategy?”

“There’s a park around here, right? Riverside, is it? Well, weather permitting, after their homework and whatnot, I’d keep ’em out there, run ’em around, like we do at camp. Get ’em tired, wear ’em down, and then dinner and off to bed while I hit the chores.”

I smiled. I didn’t like this kid. I loved him.

“When can you start?”

Martin shrugged and smiled again.

“I don’t know. When can I start?”

“Tomorrow? Say, six a.m.?” I said.

“See ya then,” he said as he stood up.

“Just a second,” I said as I saw him off at the door. “The trains are out. How’d you get here from the Bronx?”

He zipped up his track jacket.

“I ran,” he said.

“You ran here from the Bronx?”

He nodded.

“And now I’m going to run back. Got to keep in tip-top for track. Why?”

It was my turn to smile.

“No reason, Martin,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

IT WAS DARK
and nasty and raining cats and dogs the next morning. The dim, dreary, churning East River beneath the Brooklyn Bridge looked about as scenic and lovely as a field of freshly poured cement as I crossed over it in my department Impala, heading to work.

Even so, my day had started at top speed. Martin Gilroy hadn’t been on time. He’d been early. All the kids seemed excited to see him, especially the older girls, who seemed particularly ready and mysteriously dolled up to go to school.

Seamus had stayed over and was on hand as well to show Martin the ropes. The lovely old codger was looking pretty good, too, I thought, after all he’d been through. Pink and healthy and cheerful. Back in form.

I was pleased. All men are mortal, and Seamus, at eighty-plus, was more mortal than most, I knew, but I doggedly refused to think he was ever going anywhere except to say Mass.

On the other side of the bridge, I found the first exit for DUMBO and took it. My trip to the hipster-paradise neighborhood of Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass wasn’t because of a burning desire for an ironic beer T-shirt but a work location shift. With all the media hoopla over the mayor’s assassination, case headquarters had been changed from the Thirty-Third Precinct to the NYPD’s discreet new Intelligence Division building in Brooklyn.

On a dark, narrow cobblestoned street just off the river, I parked in front of the large nondescript old brick building that I’d been to only twice before. I shielded my way past three armed-to-the-teeth SWAT cops manning the plain, dingy lobby and then two more stationed at a stainless steel console in the hall on the second floor.

On the other side of the security checkpoint, through a metal door, the transformation from the nineteenth-century brickwork outside to the twenty-first-century high-tech office inside became complete. There were sleek glass fishbowl offices and flat screens everywhere. Clocks on the wall gave the times of cities around the world. A lot of federal Homeland Security money was on full display.

The office was also packed with cops—dozens of detectives in polo shirts and suits. The way everyone was running around with serious expressions on their faces reminded me of an army on the muster. A tired one that just got its ass handed to it and was trying to figure out what to do next.

“Hey,” I said to Doyle as he came out of the men’s room.

“Mike, hey,” he said, leading me toward a crowded conference room at the end of the hall. “C’mon, we’re all down here about to have a briefing.”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“No one told you?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Brooklyn and Robertson scored some footage of what looks like the bombers from both of the bombing locations. They’re about to show it right now.”

A TIRED-LOOKING
Arturo put a coffee in my hand as they dimmed the lights and put the first video up on the smart-board.

On the screen appeared a large industrial-style truck—almost like a garbage truck—with Con Edison markings on the cab door. It stopped in the middle of Saint Nicholas Avenue near 181st, and two men got out of it and popped the manhole cover.

It was hard to see them, unfortunately. It was dark, and they wore dark coveralls and Con Ed hard hats with the peaks pulled down low over their eyes, which were covered with sunglasses. Both were medium to tall in height, five ten to six feet; both were pale Caucasians. One had a dark goatee; the other a white one. The guy with the dark goatee was running the show. He had a clipboard and seemed to be barking orders as the other guy drew a huge air hose–like thing from the back of the truck and climbed down into the manhole with it.

“The truck is a vacuum truck,” said Brooklyn, who was running the smartboard for the stunned-silent room of cops. “It’s used for cleaning manholes and sewers. Engineers at Con Ed say it can easily be modified to become a large pump.”

Brooklyn showed the next video, which was of a much better, less grainy quality. Another pump truck with Con Edison markings was visible out in the street by the 168th Street subway entrance with two men behind it. The same white-goateed guy was there, but the other guy was different; on the short side, tan, no facial hair, a little pudgy. The pudgy guy got into the hole with the pump this time while the older man waited by the manhole up top.

None of the guys had any distinguishing marks that we could really see. No tattoos or birthmarks or buck teeth. Was that on purpose? I wondered. It seemed like it. It seemed like these guys were going out of their way to be nondescript.

“Is that the same truck?” a cop behind me called out.

“No,” Brooklyn said. “There were two of them. We found both on a deserted stretch of the Harlem River Drive near the Macombs Dam Bridge early this morning. No tags; their cabs were burned to a crisp. We’re still trying to trace down where they might be from through their manufacturer. The good news is that the FBI lab people found traces of the material they pumped into the tunnel in the backs of the trucks. It was powdered aluminum.”

“Powdered what?” said someone else near the front of the room.

“Powdered aluminum,” Brooklyn said. “It’s the main ingredient in flash powder, the stuff they make fireworks out of. We’re still trying to track down where you could get your hands on such a massive amount. It’s not easy, because it has many industrial uses. Apparently they make lithium ion batteries out of it.”

“Unbelievable,” I said, gaping at the screen. “So you’re saying these three guys got all this expensive industrial equipment together and then just up and went ahead and stuffed that train tunnel with gunpowder like it was a huge firecracker?”

Brooklyn nodded slowly, a solemn expression on her face as she stared with me at the white-goateed man, whose image was paused on the screen.

“And then they set it off,” she said.

Everyone turned from the screen as Lieutenant Bryce Miller came in, clutching some photocopies.

“Attention, everybody. This just came from the State Department. We sent the mayor’s shooter’s prints to the feds, and they just ID’d him.

“His name is Alex Mirzoyan. He was born in Armenia, came here when he was eleven, lives in Sunny Isles Beach in south Florida. We don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly, but Sunny Isles Beach is where a lot of the Miami Russian Mafia live. He has the priors of a low-level criminal: credit card fraud, some burglaries, drug possession. But what’s concerning is that last year he traveled to Armenia and stayed there for six months.”

“Armenia? Is that near Russia?” said Arturo.

“Sort of,” I said. “It’s more toward the Middle East. I think it actually borders Iran.”

The room absorbed that in stunned silence.

“The Middle East? Iran?” said Brooklyn. “So we’re thinking terrorism? All this is Islamic terrorism?”

“Now, wait. Slow down,” I said. “We don’t know that. Terrorists take credit, usually, and there’s been nothing but silence, right? Plus we don’t even know if the two things are related yet. The assassination could have been a crime of sick opportunity. Like that nut who sent ricin-laced letters to politicians after nine eleven. We have to treat them as two separate crimes until further notice.”

There were some tentative nods, but even I was unsure about what I’d just said.

Like everybody else, I was freaking out and had no idea whatsoever what the hell was going on.

ON THE EASTERN
edge of the well-heeled Upper East Side in Manhattan, the crowded and busy neighborhood of Yorkville runs from 59th Street to 96th Street between Lexington Avenue and the East River.

Before 9/11, the neighborhood was the site of the largest disaster in New York City’s history: in 1904, just offshore of Ninetieth Street in the East River, the steamship
General Slocum
accidentally caught fire and sank, killing more than one thousand passengers.