Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Right now, what he had to do was get to the AMC Theater and figure out what the hell was going on.

All thoughts of the hot dog vendor guy were lost. Given what was unfolding in front of his eyes on 42nd Street, Times Square was a million miles away. The uniformed officers in place would have to deal with it, and the reinforcements that were undoubtedly already on their way. Although it was clear that this was an attack on the order of 9/11, Byrne found himself hoping that the feds would let the NYPD handle it-this was their turf, and nobody knew it better. It was already a blow to the department’s pride that something like this was happening, but in fact this is what they had trained for, prepared for-it was not their fault that geopolitical developments had intervened. The job of a New York City police officer was to protect and serve, and that was exactly what he intended to do.

The AMC, or what was left of it, was only a couple of hundred yards ahead.

“Dinner at the Four Seasons it’s ragheads,” said Sid Sheinberg.

Lannie Saleh piloted the unmarked police car at top speed through traffic. From time to time, he skirted the shoals of the sidewalk, expertly navigating around rogue parking meters, illegal sidewalk cafés and the usual urban flotsam and jetsam that wouldn’t have known the city was under attack if the Last Trump was being sounded by the New York Philharmonic. “You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do,” said Sheinberg. “It ain’t nuns or Norwegians. Probably al-Qaeda.”

“Now I know you’re an ignoramus,” said Lannie, negotiating around a couple of BMWs with New Jersey tags. “And probably a bigot, too.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because if,” began Lannie, “and this is a big if, this is some kind of Muslim assault, it’s far more likely to be Twelfthers than Sunnis.”

“Who cares? What’s the diff?”

Lannie downshifted, even with the automatic transmission, and nearly threw Sid into the windshield. “If this is as big as I think it is-as big as we both think it is-then this isn’t al-Qaeda. All they want to do is kill us.”

“As opposed to-”

“As opposed to starting the apocalypse.” Lannie glanced over at Sid and saw that he had no idea what he was talking about. “Look,” he said, “Christians and Shi’as believe in the Last Days. The rest of us, not so much. If and when they come, they come, but we have no intention of hastening them. When al-Qaeda attacks, it’s because they’re pissed off, refighting some fucking battle against El Cid or whatever. Let’s face it, since Mohammed swept out of Arabia and Islam conquered everything to the east, including Persia, India, and Indonesia, we’ve been on a hell of a losing streak.”

The street buckled. “Holy shit!” shouted Lannie.

The force of the blast knocked the car sideways, then up in the air. It sailed for just a moment, hit the pavement, spun. Lannie tried desperately to control the vehicle, its siren still wailing, but the Crown Vic was being tossed around like a skiff at sea. The car hit a mailbox, rebounded, and caromed off a fire hydrant. The hydrant ripped a huge gash in the passenger’s side and exploded, water geysering straight up. They clipped several parked vehicles, flipped, and came to rest, upside down, in the middle of street.

A couple of miles to the south, Lisa Richmond was headed home to Jersey after a lunch in SoHo. She didn’t come often to New York anymore, even though she had been born in the Bronx. What had once seemed close now seemed so very far away, what with a family and all, and despite everything she had believed as a young career woman working on Wall Street twenty years ago, Jersey had turned out to be not such a bad place to live and raise a family after all. Sure, the taxes were a killer, although the new governor was making noises about reducing them-yeah, right-but the air was a bit cleaner, parking was less of a problem, and the schools were a heck of a lot better.

The approach to Holland Tunnel was always a pain. It was as if the city planners hadn’t reckoned on the population of northern New Jersey mushrooming, so they decided to cram it in down here where Canal Street met Varick and Hudson streets. No matter how you approached it, or what time of day, you were practically guaranteed at least a twenty-minute wait to enter the tube. Lisa shuddered at the memory of the old days, when the squeegee men had lurked around the tunnel entrances, wielding their spray bottles and their dirty rags and their threatening countenances as they shook you down for a quarter. A lot of her friends paid them, just to make them go away, but she never did. For one thing, she was too frightened to open the window, and for another she felt instinctively that the service they offered was an indirect form of assault. Her husband, Adam, always gave them money, explaining that it was safer and easier to pay them off rather than to risk their probably drug-addled wrath. It was one of their many areas of disagreement.

At least there were no squeegee men anymore, not in New York and certainly not in Montclair, New Jersey.

Lisa’s mind was still on the squeegee men, inching her 2010 Jeep forward toward the mouth of the tunnel, when she felt the earth tremble. At first she thought it was just the rumble of the subway, the vibrations, but then, as she began to take notice, she realized that the car was moving-not forward, but from side to side, as if it were in an earthquake. The next thing she knew she was looking down at lower Manhattan from a very great height, and screaming to earth at the speed of gravity.

Raymond Crankheit was a tourist from Wahoo, Nebraska, or so he had told everybody he met, especially the girls. New York City girls were not like the girls back home, which in fact was not Wahoo, Nebraska, but that didn’t matter at the moment. Contrary to popular myth, or at least what he saw in the movies, New York City women were harder to get than the tramps back home, snooty and stuck-up; they could smell a rube like him a mile away, and their noses visibly crinkled as he approached, so Raymond Crankheit had decided to get even. Which was why he was here, standing by the Central Park Reservoir, waiting for a call on his cell phone.

For a long time he had wondered precisely how he was going to go about it. New York City had tough gun laws, and he didn’t own a gun himself, you couldn’t take one on a plane, he was too scared to drive across the country with a heater in his glove compartment. Originally, the family named had been spelled Krankheit, but that meant “disease” in German and his father had quickly had enough of such jokes back home in Pullman, Washington, and so in partial homage to the host of the CBS News program, he’d changed the spelling, although he still got it wrong, and moved the family across the Cascades to Seattle, where they left unspoken the implication that they were related to the famous newscaster.

Luckily, the flat accents of Wahoo were very similar to the flat accents of Pullman, so Raymond had to work only moderately hard to be able to pass for a Nebraskan. For some reason, he had decided that for this mission to succeed-“Operation Revenge,” he had dubbed it in his own mind-his cover story was going to have to be perfect, and he practiced like Travis Bickle in front of a mirror, holding a broken broom handle instead of the gun he didn’t have, and coldly shooting down every woman who had ever refused him a date.

Raymond Crankheit wouldn’t have said that he hated women, exactly. He was not a mishshogomast or whatever the term was that one of the crazy shrinks his parents had sent him to after the second incident, the one with the neighbor’s dog, had used, but on the other hand, it really pissed him off when some cunt blew him off and called him a dork or a geek or an asshole or any of the other unladylike terms girls were using these days. Yeah, those same girls that tattooed themselves up like the cheap whores working the old Skid Road back in Seattle. It was payback time for a life of rejection.