Michael Walsh: Early Warning

Then, over the police scanner he was picking up with his PDA, he heard the reports of shots fired at the Reservoir. And he knew, he just knew, it was Raymond.

Byrne got the message. This was crazy, but crazy was all he had time for right about now. He didn’t like the tenor of his conversation with his brother-he never liked the tenor of their conversations-and he could tell the bastard was snooping around, planning something, plotting something, more likely. If it weren’t for their sainted mother, Irene, still alive and still living in the flat in Queens, although Frankie had been trying to coax her into a nursing home in the Bronx for years, a nice one, but she was convinced he meant the Hebrew Home for Aged and the very thought of that agitated the old Russian lady, who had retained her reflexive anti-Semitism all her life. Although, God knew, she had been through enough horror in her life, and the life of her family, for the world to cut a crazy old lady a little slack. Rufus even continued to keep watch over her, invisible and silent as ever, as he had for more than a decade. Rufus was a successful businessman in Jamaica, Queens, but he still cruised by the old neighborhood, looking for a random game of pickup hoops and always with the intent of checking in on Irene, just in case…

He ordered the police chopper on standby. He’d deal with his asshole brother later. As much later as he could.

Devlin moved slowly but deliberately, cautiously but not suspiciously. With the city still in lockdown, and the other shooters rounded up there would be cops rushing to the spot in minutes, converging on the Reservoir in full force. That’s what they were trained to do, and that’s the way he would have responded, too, were it not for one thing:

He knew, dead-solid-fucking-certain knew that Raymond whatever his name was, Mr. Disease, would not be there when they got there. Not because he was a genius. There was no chance a guy like him was a genius. He was in fact an idiot. But there were idiots and then there were idiots savants, and he’d long since pegged this last of the Mohicans as a savant.

Raymond would do nothing expected. He would do everything wrong. He was, in fact, like the enemy he served: technically inept, tactically amateurish, unable to grasp the basic concepts of warfare, except for the most important one: always keep your opponent guessing.

To get Raymond, he would have to think like Raymond. This was not like taking on Milverton. Milverton was good, great even, but Milverton and he had battled according to an unspoken set of precepts, like two chess grandmasters locked in mortal combat. This putz was the Paul Morphy of gunmen, probably mentally ill, but there was a brilliance in his illness, a genius in his madness.

Where would you go? What was motivating him?

Devlin’s mind raced as he neared the Reservoir. He thought back to Atwater ’s report: Love and Revenge.

There it was. Raymond was not a patch on Skorzeny and his crazy apocalypse, of which the attack on New York now obviously was just another piece of the overall mosaic, but just as ontology recapitulated phylogeny, Raymond was an adumbrator of the greater genius of his puppetmaster.

What did he know about the man? Nothing, or close to it. He didn’t turn up in any databases, and Devlin hadn’t seen enough of his MO to be able to properly formulate a-

Hang on.

The burial. The bushes. He didn’t suddenly dig that grave for Ms. Stanley, he had dug it for some purpose. To bury his weapons, perhaps. But there was another reason. Jesus, it was so obvious:

He felt comfortable underground.

That was where he had slept. That was where he would go. Underground. And nowhere in America was there a more hospitable underground-if such an adjective could be used in this context-than New York City. The city was burrowed under by miles of tunnels: subway tunnels, steam tunnels, water tunnels, electrical tunnels; there was almost as much civilization under Manhattan as there was above it. Cops hated going down there, workers hated it, maintenance men hated it, and even the sandhogs, the brotherhood of blacks and Irish who were digging-and had dug-the gigantic water tunnels that flowed down from Westchester and gave life to the city-hated it.

That’s where Raymond would go. He had to beat him to it.

And where was the nearest underground?

Under the reservoir. In the pump house.

Like its now-vanished cousins, the reservoir had once been the oasis of the city, not to the extent the old Collect Pond had been in the early days, which had fed the Five Points, both now buried under the concrete of the august courts of lower Manhattan. Nor was it a rival of the real reservoir that once had stood, in all its faux-Egyptian splendor, where the New York Public Library was today. Now that had been a reservoir. Still, the Central Park Reservoir could boast of something the others couldn’t, which was its survival.

He had to get to the pump house. And then he had to deal with Arash Kohanloo.

He glanced at his watch. Maryam should have checked in with him long ago. Well, she was a big girl and could take care of herself. No time to worry about something he couldn’t control. To think otherwise would not only be unprofessional, it would make him crazy.

Arash Kohanloo tried to stay calm. Everything was in readiness. The boat was going to leave from a private slip down the slope from River House. He was in River House, in the apartment of a fellow Iranian, who lived in the kind of splendor that he himself, for all his success, still aspired to. All he had to do was stay calm.

Calm.

The people who lived in River House were extremely rich, but while Manhattan’s newspapers may articulate the glories of philanthropy and the coerced public good of tax dollars, the bitter truth was that many of them had inherited their money, not earned it in any meaningful sense, and so could make a great show of working for a dollar a year, or donating their salaries to charity, or demanding that wage slaves pay up, secure in the knowledge that their capital was not only untouched, but always growing. After all, it was called an “income” tax, not a “capital” tax.

From the earliest days of River House, there had been a private egress down the shore, which not even the construction of the FDR Highway had disturbed. Once upon a time, the East River had been awash with vessels plying the waters around Manhattan, including steamboats, pleasure cruisers and even, in the early 19th century, a brisk trade in river piracy. The ill-fated General Slocum had passed this way, back in 1904, aflame and doomed, rushed toward her destiny on North Brother Island, just to the north, off the Bronx shoreline, but Arash Kohanloo neither knew nor cared about that now; all he could think of was getting off the island as quickly as possible and slipping out to sea.

He made his way down the dank stone stairs, slippery with age and shaking, in the damp and the chill, with his fear of this Malak al-Maut, this specter who had emerged out of the night to read his every thought, to know his every intimate wish and desire. Him he must flee; what would happen after that, after he got down to the rendezvous point in Red Hook, only Allah knew.

The boat was there, where it was supposed to be. On board were flares and firearms, maps and guidance systems, plus a communications device. He would have to run both silent and fast, but with the craft’s markings, he felt certain that no one would stop him. If anyone stopped him, he was on a mission of mercy, running medical supplies downtown. After all, he was on a Red Cross boat.

Central Park

The Reservoir-the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, to give it its full name-had not been actively connected to the city’s water supply system since the opening of a massive new water tunnel in 1991, but that didn’t mean the infrastructure wasn’t still there. As one of the main storehouses for the water that kept lower Manhattan alive, the reservoir collected the water brought down from Westchester and in turn sent it farther south, to where the people were. The area under the Park was one vast canal, much of it still in use, but some of it now abandoned. That’s where he would be.