Early Warning (11 page)

Times Square

Jake Sinclair’s face was forty feet high on the JumboTron above Times Square, smiling at some joke only he was privy to. Since he pretty much owned the media in the U.S., that was not an outrageous supposition. Underneath his picture, the Zipper was proclaiming to the world:
WITH BLAST AT TYLER
,
SINCLAIR HOLDINGS SELLS MANHATTAN HEADQUARTERS TO GERMAN MEDIA CONSORTIUM
.
CORP
.
HQ TO RE-LOCATE TO LOS ANGELES
.

Those who looked up at the JumboTron at that moment would have seen Sinclair, speaking now, praising Tyler’s rival in the upcoming election. “The Tyler Administration,” he was saying, “has forfeited all claims to credibility. The attacks last year on the homeland proved that this administration is not to be trusted with our national security. Despite his gross and flagrant violation of civil liberties, President Tyler has not kept us safe and, in my opinion, it’s time for a change. That’s why every patriotic American should send a message to Tyler and his party at the polls this November. Not just ‘throw the bums out,’ but
hell yes, throw the bums out.
” He smiled the oleaginous smile that had made him a favorite of most of the media, for Jake Sinclair had long ago learned the first and most important lesson of Hollywood, which had since translated to journalism: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.

“I hate that sonofabitch,” said Morris Acker to his wife, Shirley, indicating Jake Sinclair on the JumboTron as they traversed the new pedestrian zone and waited to cross over to 42nd Street. They were heading for the New Amsterdam theater, where
Mary Poppins
was still playing. Once upon a time, this had been the crossroads of the world, the place where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersected, collided, and then split to go their separate ways. In the old days—the
very
old days—it had been a mass of pedestrians, pushcarts, horse-drawn vehicles and motorcars, but gradually order had been imposed upon civic chaos. Now, where traffic once had rushed, pretty girls sat and gawked at the buildings while the boys sat and gawked at them. Meanwhile, cars fought for space in the few lanes still allotted to them. It was a typically lunatic idea of the former mayor, a nasty little busybody who had finally been driven from office when he attempted to raise the price of pizza to prohibitive levels on the grounds that it would improve the health of the average New Yorker. Then he raised the subway fare, on the grounds that people would be even healthier if they had to walk forty blocks instead of spending five bucks for a subway ride.

“We should have parked closer,” said Shirley. “If we had, we’d be there by now.”

Morris shrugged. He hadn’t gotten this far in life by wasting money. The parking garages around here were insanely expensive. For a few bucks a trip uptown to the cheaper lots on the Upper West Side was well worth it, even with the new subway fares. The Ackers were in from Rye for the day to catch a matinee on Broadway, have an early dinner, and then return home to Westchester. Mr. Acker was a recently retired employee of Time Warner, who over the course of his career had managed to upgrade his life by two neighborhoods, four automobiles, one boat, and zero wives from his humble beginnings on Long Island. If he never set foot there again, it would be too soon.

As he stepped off the curb, Mr. Acker looked down so as not to miss the step. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and nothing would be more ridiculous—or would kill him faster—than a stupid pratfall. When you got to be his age, what was once funny was now lethal. “Schmuck,” he said to himself.

Across the street, a pushcart vendor was just setting up at the corner. The man was slightly out of breath from his sprint uptown, but he had arrived in plenty of time, and now all he had to do was wait for his customers. His cell phone buzzed silently in his breast pocket, and he took it out and looked at the display. It was not a caller, but a text message. He read it, then began his preparations…

At that moment, Marie Duplessis, a recent immigrant from Haiti, was trudging up the subway steps at 42nd Street, and heading for one of her three jobs. She had taken the train in from LaGuardia Airport, where she worked cleaning the bathrooms at Terminal Six, and was now headed to the Condé Nast building to perform the same task for the journalistic princes and princesses still lucky enough to have paying jobs churning out copy that instantly outdated long before it achieved print. Luckily, she had had just enough time to stop off at her apartment in Jamaica to check on her pregnant daughter, Eugénie, who was all of thirteen years old.

Eugénie’s pregnancy had broken her heart. True, life in America, even in Queens, was preferable to Port-au-Prince, but there were trade-offs, differing social mores being one of them. At the Catholic girls’ school back home, Eugénie at least had a fighting chance to retain her honor, but here…The boys had found her quickly, like predators on a domestic creature that had suddenly been released back into the jungle, with predictable results. Back home there had been community, family, language, religion. If you stayed within those boundaries, there was still a chance that a girl wouldn’t have to go to the altar with child. Here in America, the only certainty for people like Eugénie was a trip to the abortion clinic, and that was something her mother was simply not going to allow. To Marie, every life was sacred, even this as-yet unborn offspring of her only daughter and some gangbanger, the kind of boy who would never have been admitted into her society back in Haiti. America might still be the land of economic opportunity but the trade-off in social dysfunction was not worth it. Which is why Marie had just made up her mind to take Eugénie home to Haiti to have her baby. She’d tell Eugénie just as soon as she got home this evening…

Stranded in the middle of the great intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Uwe, Helga, and Hubertus Friedhof watched the crossing signals carefully, awaiting the green light. They had been to the movies, where, despite all the years of English they had taken in school in Germany, they had hardly understood a single word of the dialogue, which bore not the slightest resemblance to the English they were used to hearing back home.

They were discussing this strange new language of the New World as they crossed the street, heading for one of the chain restaurants they had heard so much about back in Wiesbaden, one of those places that made Americans so amazingly obese, which they simply had to see and experience for themselves.

“Look!” exclaimed Hubertus, who was nearly 19 and about to leave for university. With any luck, under the German system, his parents would only be financially responsible for him for another seven to ten years.

Hubertus pointed up at the JumboTron and Jake Sinclair’s face. Everybody knew Jake Sinclair’s face, even foreigners, and in point of fact the movie they had just seen and hardly understood a word of had been made by Jake Sinclair’s studio. “…we betray our real values, the values that made this country,” Jake Sinclair was quoted in the electronic crawl—in real English—across the bottom of the giant screen, “the values that made this country the greatest country on earth…”

Uwe was just about to ask Helga why the Americans were always banging on about being the greatest country on earth when the light changed. The crowd moved forward, in that impatient New York way, but Uwe’s path was blocked by a young man standing stock-still. Being German, Uwe’s instinct was to plow ahead. He was sick of these Americans and their uncivilized ways, and it was high time he showed one of the natives how things were done in Germany. Back home, if somebody was standing between you and wherever you were going, you simply knocked him aside, whether you were a pedestrian with the right of way or a bicyclist zipping down a marked bike path onto which some hapless tourist had inadvertently wandered, or even a speeding motorist, exercising his God-given
vorfahrt vom rechts
.

The pedestrian signal had already turned to the blinking red hand, and the numerical countdown begun. Uwe pressed forward in that familiar way that Europeans have and that Americans, with their greater need for personal space, invariably resented. The young man, however, did not budge. Instead he barked over his shoulder. “What is your fucking problem?”

Uwe stopped, taken aback. In Germany, nobody spoke back. They simply got out of the way. But these rude
Amis
were a different tribe. Well, their days of strutting around the globe as if they owned it with their no-longer-almighty dollar were over. “
Ja, okay
,” said Uwe, “so now we can go, yes?”

Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz had come to America on an express visa from his native Saudi Arabia. It amazed him that, even after 9/11, Americas were still so friendly, so trusting. Part of that friendliness, true, was owing to the country’s desperate need for oil, which ensured that the old partners in Aramco would still have need for each other’s goods and services, and a little thing like 3,000 dead people and a gigantic hole in the ground in lower Manhattan would not be allowed to come between them. As long as America ran on oil—and as long as the Americans, unaccountably, tied both hands behind their backs by not drilling for it in their own country—Saudi-American friendship would go on and on.

It felt good to be standing here, just a few miles north of where his holy brothers had accomplished their spectacular act of martyrdom. Before he embarked on his own martyrdom, he had made sure to tour the holy site, still essentially empty after all these years. It was typical of the degenerate state of America and its inhabitants, he thought, to still be squabbling about something unimportant like a memorial when there was work to be done. They could have shown the world that even a grievous blow such as 9/11 would not stop them in their godless pursuit of commerce and harlotry, but instead they reacted just as the sheikh had predicted, in sorrow and fear.

When the Towers fell—something not even the sheikh had predicted—there was much joy across the
ummah
. But in the succeeding years, as blow after blow was plotted and then failed, the opportunity to bring forth the tribulations was slipping away. What was needed now was a killing blow. Beneath his breath, he began to pray.

And then he felt a tap on his back, more of a bump, and he began to fear that his prayers were not sincere enough, that he had been discovered by the enemy. He slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the grip of the gun as he turned to see what was the matter.

The taxi let Hope and her children off at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. To the east, a series of multiplexes beckoned. They weren’t the kind of theaters she was used to back home—for one thing, there was noplace to park—but she’d heard that once you were inside, it was like being at an especially nice shopping mall. Behind them, the ugly monstrosity that was the Port Authority bus station loomed.

“What’s that?” cried Rory, pointing across Eighth Avenue at something called the Adult Entertainment Center. “Never mind,” said Hope, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him east along 42nd Street. He would learn about porn soon enough, if he hadn’t already. Up ahead, the theater marquees beckoned…

The man blocking the Friedhof family had still not budged. Instead, he was staring at his cell phone, as if waiting for a call. He was also cocking his head to one side, as if listening for something, but the only thing he could possibly hear, besides the traffic, was the rumble of the IRT subway under the ventilation grate beneath his feet. In any case, he wasn’t moving.

His patience exhausted, Uwe pressed forward again, deliberately bumping into the man. Pedestrianism was a full-body contact sport in much of Europe, especially in Germany, so what Uwe was doing was, by his lights, a perfectly reasonable way to show one’s displeasure and to remind the fellow to get a move on. Unfortunately for Uwe, the man did not see it that way. Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz turned back to him, but instead of speaking he pulled a revolver from beneath his Windbreaker and shot Uwe Friedhof right in the face.

At that moment, Byrne was on the blower to all available patrolmen in that part of Times Square, and was calling in reinforcements from elsewhere in the city. If his hunch was right, there was no time to lose.

“I want a cordon around Times Square. Nobody in and nobody out. Shut down all the West Side subway lines, including the IND, the BMT, and the IRT. No need to be subtle about it: I want the full surge. But this is not a drill. Repeat,
this is not a drill
.”

Lannie and Sid caught up with him. “What is it?” asked Sid.

“It’s a go, isn’t it?” said Lannie. If this was for real, it would be his first taste of action.

Byrne turned to his two protégés. “Not for you—I need the two of you right here. Lannie, check all the communications monitors and see who’s been calling into Times Square on cell. Sid, go back over the SIGINT files for the past 48 hours and see if you can get the slightest lead on whatever the hell it is that’s going down.”

A voice from the back of the room—“There’s a report of shots fired, somewhere in the pedestrian zone. That’s all we’ve got right now.”

Mentally, Byrne gauged how long it would take him to get from Chelsea to Times Square. With the surge already under way, there was no point in taking a car—if he hustled he could get there on foot in ten minutes. He wasn’t as fit as he used to be but, damn it, he could still run down a perp if he had to.

“I’m going in,” he shouted, heading for the door.

Uwe Friedhof never had time to realize what had happened as he toppled and fell. Helga started to scream and then she, too, dropped with a bullet in the chest. Hubertus, who had dreamed of studying the law in Munich, had just enough time to register a dark beard and a pair of piercing brown eyes when the next shot hit him in the gut. He collapsed into the street, where he was hit by a speeding taxi anticipating the change of the light. His body flew into the air as the cab stopped, then landed on the windshield and rolled off and onto the ground.