Michael Ledwidge: Alert

My boss, Miriam Schwartz, had sent a text about an hour before. In it she let me know that during the week I’d been in Ireland, the department had appointed a guy I’d vaguely heard of named Neil Fabretti to be its newest chief of detectives.

Chief Fabretti was trying to get up to speed before officially starting on Monday, Miriam explained, and was requesting a quick informal meet and greet with his transition team at his house up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. In the next half hour, I thought, groaning, as I checked my watch.

Get up to speed during a New York — Boston rubber game? I thought as I stared at my phone, dumbfounded. I’d been busting my hump all day with laundry and homework and getting dinner on the table. I’d even been to Mass — or at least Mass had been to us. I’d been looking forward to a little Sawx-crushing, male-bonding downtime all day.

Are you sure this guy is the new chief of detectives for the New York police department? I almost texted back.

Instead, I reluctantly put down my Smithwick’s and stood and found my keys.

“Excellent idea, Michael,” Seamus said as I headed out. “We could use some goodies for the game. And don’t forget another six of Smithy’s.”

“Sorry, Father. No goodies tonight. It’s all baddies, in fact. A.k.a. work.”

“Work, Dad? But it’s Yanks-Sox! That’s sacrilegious.”

“My sentiments exactly, Brian,” I said as I hit the door. “Keep me posted on the score. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Chief Neil Fabretti’s house turned out to be on Delafield Avenue in a ritzy section of Riverdale called Fieldston. It wasn’t a huge house, maybe two thousand square feet, but it had a slate roof and antique stained-glass windows between its Tudor beams. Not too shabby. Especially for a cop. It had to be worth well over a million bucks.

“Mike, I’m so glad you could make it,” said Chief Fabretti as he gave me a firm handshake.

Fabretti was a neat and trim fiftyish man in a brown golf shirt and khakis. He looked more like a corporate executive than a cop. I wondered if that was a good thing. A large black curly-haired dog ran around us in the foyer, woofing and sniffing.

“Down, Faulkner. Down!” Fabretti said. “I know — Faulkner? My wife’s idea, as is the house and pretty much everything in it. She’s the cultured one, an editor at Knopf. I’m just a lovable fool from Brooklyn who married up. Anyway, the other guys just left. I know this is a pain in the ass during the game. I actually have it on in my den. This won’t take long, I promise.”

He led me into a cozy, dark, wood-paneled room. Beyond a writing table were built-in bookshelves with actual books on them. I spotted a shelf of Hemingway. The Day of the Jackal next to Keith Richards’s Life . A section of military history.

The one thing I had heard about Fabretti was that he was political. But who knew? A real library was pretty telling in terms of character. Maybe this guy was okay, I thought.

“Can I get you a beer?” Fabretti said, opening a little fridge beside his desk. “Well, if you can call it that. My wife has me weaned down now to Beck’s light. It’s more like beer-flavored water.”

“No — that’s okay, Chief. What’s up? How can I help you?”

“You can help me by just continuing to do what you do, Mike,” Fabretti said as he cracked open a brew and sat behind his desk. “People complain that you’re overrated — a hot dog and a headline hound — but I’ve done my homework, and you’re obviously not. You’re just flat-out one of the department’s best detectives, if not the best. I’ve been following your phenomenal career, Mike. I’m a big fan.”

A fan? Hmm, I thought. Maybe the rumors were true. Politicians plus flattery equals what? Nothing good was a pretty sure bet.

“Where am I being reassigned?” I said.

Fabretti laughed.

“C’mon, Mike. It’s okay, I swear. I definitely want to keep you at Major Crimes. But I also need you to do what you’ve been doing. I want you to be flexible in terms of floating to local precincts occasionally to help on extra-pain-in-the-ass cases.”

“How can I be in Major Crimes plus be a precinct detective?” I said. “Who will I answer to? The precinct captains or my boss, Miriam, at Major Crimes?”

“You’ll answer to me, Mike,” Fabretti said after a moment. “You know I’ll always have your back. You’ll work out of Major Crimes for now. What do you say? This will be a little experiment. One we’ll correct as we go.”

Or, more precisely, make up as we go.

I definitely didn’t like it. A man without a home in the department was a good guy to scapegoat when the pressure got turned up. I didn’t want to be that goat, but it wasn’t looking like my opinion mattered.

The books had to be the wife’s, I finally realized.

“Whatever you need me to do, Chief,” I finally said as I turned to the flat screen above the fireplace, where Ellsbury was hitting into a double play.

At 3:23 a.m., the two Supervac trucks turned off their headlights and pulled off the northbound FDR Drive into a junk-strewn abandoned lot beside the Harlem River across from the Bronx.

After he put the first truck into park, Tony took a bottle of orange Gatorade from the cooler they’d brought, cracked its lid, and commenced gulping. His stubbled face was filthy, and he was sweating profusely; he had in fact sweated through the back of his heavy coveralls.

“Hey, you want some of this, Mr. Joyce?” said Tony, coming up for air.

“No. All you, Tony. Truly, you broke your butt down in the hole. I’m proud of you,” Mr. Joyce said.

It was true. Tony had some heft on him and could use a few suggestions about his hygiene, but no one could say he wasn’t a worker. He’d been going at it hard for the previous three hours, shuttling between the two manholes, really hustling. He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot for every task without a word of complaint.

They were finally done now. At least with the prep work. It had gone off without a hitch. The truck tanks were empty, and the manholes were closed. Everything was set up and ready to go.

“How’s the link?” Mr. Joyce called into the radio he took from his pocket.

“Crystal clear,” Mr. Beckett, in the other truck, replied.

They had hacked into the MTA’s internal subway video feed, and Mr. Beckett was now monitoring the security cameras at every line station from Harlem to Inwood.

“Okay, I see it,” Mr. Beckett said over the radio a second later. “It’s pulling out of One Fifty-Seventh in the northbound tunnel. There. It’s all the way in. You have the green light, Mr. Joyce.”

Mr. Joyce took a cheap disposable cell phone from the left breast pocket of his blue coveralls. It was a Barbie-purple slide phone made by a company called Pantech, a simple phone one would buy a suburban girl for her middle-school graduation. He turned it on and scrolled to the phone’s only preprogrammed number.

Theory becomes reality, he thought. He thumbed the Call button, and the two pressure cookers preplanted in the train tunnel ten stories beneath Broadway twenty blocks away detonated simultaneously.

The initial explosion of the pressure-cooker bombs, though great, was not that impressive in itself. It wasn’t meant to be. It was just the primer, the match to the fuel that the two trucks had been pumping into the air of the tunnel for the previous three hours.

The tunnel was dome-shaped, seventy-three feet wide at its base, twenty feet high, and a little less than four miles long. Within milliseconds of the blast, a powerful shock wave raced in both directions along its entire length. There were no people on the subway platforms that late at night, but in both stations, the wave ripped apart vendor shacks on the platforms, MTA tool carts, and wooden benches.