Steve Martini - The Rule of Nine

The plastic tarp blocking his view cracked in the stiff breeze off the Hudson. He looked around to make sure there were no cops on the walkway. Then, using two fingers, he reached up and ripped the tattered tarp just a few inches so that he could claim a clear view out.

He wasn’t interested in the site of the World Trade Center. Instead his attention was drawn to an area a few blocks to the south and east of where he was now standing. It was the intersection of Fulton and Broadway, almost dead center in the middle of the Financial District. Wall Street was only a stone’s throw away.

The Cold War may have been over, but the Russians and Americans were still locked in a death spiral of ever more lethal weapons. When the United States introduced its largest thermobaric device on record, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), and nicknamed it “the Mother of All Bombs,” the Russians responded with the largest vacuum bomb ever constructed. Dubbing it “the Father of All Bombs,” it was used to level an entire block of multi-story steel-reinforced concrete buildings. In testing it, they set off the largest man-made nonnuclear blast in history.

Now that the Russian cargo plane had been forced down in Thailand, Thorn had to assume that the American government was well aware of the type and size of the device on board. While he hadn’t planned it, the downing of the Russian plane played right into his hands. Like a big, flashing neon sign.

The feds would be racking their brains looking for high-risk targets. Thorn was already well ahead of them. The solid fuel-air device was much more effective in an oxygen-controlled environment. If you could introduce the device inside, solid concrete walls would serve only to magnify and focus the blast. The stronger the walls, the higher the pressure wave, the farther it would travel. Of course, American military ordnance experts would know all of this. They would be advising the FBI and other law enforcement agencies accordingly.

Identifying prime targets wouldn’t be too difficult. The problem was there were too many of them. The authorities couldn’t possibly cover them all. Adding to their problems, Thorn was already engaged in devilish games of misdirection, forcing them to look in one place while he was in another.

He wondered if anyone had ever considered what the blast from a large thermobaric weapon might do to the hardened concrete structure surrounding the reactor of a nuclear power plant. Particularly if the device were delivered from the air in the form of a bunker-busting bomb.

That reminded Thorn. He was going to have to make a call for more cash. His estimates of the cost to buy the airplane were too low. You would think that with the dismal state of the airline industry and the number of commercial jets now littering boneyards all over the desert, there would be a fire sale. But it wasn’t the case. He had gone online and checked prices.

The banks that held the mortgages on these planes were now sitting on piles of taxpayer cash. Having been bailed out, they were demanding top dollar for their securitized loan assets, in this case airplanes for which they had vastly overpaid during the boom-boom times before the crash. The politicians and the central banks had stepped in it big time, up to their hips. And why not? They knew that if the banks went under, there wasn’t enough money in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to cover even a small fraction of the claims filed by depositors. So they ran the presses, printed more cash, and deferred the inevitable to a future date when some other new regime could be left holding the bag. To Thorn it was a rat’s nest of political and financial corruption, with a new generation of liars at every turn. At least for the moment, acquiring more money didn’t seem to be a problem for his employers. What the devil could do if he had cash.

Even if the feds were able to track each of his moves, as long as he could stay ahead of them, Thorn knew they would have their hands full trying to guess what was coming next.

He trained his eye through the hole in the tarp toward the Fulton Street project. He could see the boom of a high-rise crane moving slowly, like the neck of some gentle giraffe, over the site. It was the answer to Thorn’s dreams, nearly half a billion dollars in federal stimulus money for a single piece of construction. It was the once abandoned Fulton Street Transit Center. Total cost, 1.4 billion dollars for a transportation palace, complete with a crystal dome that would have shamed the Wizard of Oz.

Scheduled completion was four years off, but Thorn didn’t care. All that mattered was that they had broken ground. The giant excavators had already ripped a two-hundred-foot wound in the earth directly above one of the busiest subway hubs in New York. According to the project schedule, the hole would be open for at least four months while they worked on foundations. This gave Thorn plenty of time. With the city providing the open aperture above the subway, the method of delivery became simple-gravity. The only question was how? And Thorn already knew the answer to that one.

It’s like a nightmare. I want to wake up, but I can’t. I keep thinking she’s going to call me any minute and tell me she’s okay, but she doesn’t. Dad, she can’t, because she’s dead.” She starts to cry all over again.

Standing in the living room, I hug her in my arms and pat her on one shoulder as she sobs.

“Who would do this? Jenny never hurt anybody. Why, Dad? Tell me. Why?” She looks up at me, searching for an answer I don’t have. Her eyes are as red as road flares. She has been crying on and off for more than an hour, ever since hearing the news that her friend Jenny Beckfeld was found dead in her house early this afternoon.

“When she didn’t show up for work, I figured she was sick. I tried to call her but she didn’t answer.”

“What did the police tell her parents? Do you know?” I ask.

She eases out of my embrace and reaches for the Kleenex box I had tossed on the coffee table. Tears run down one cheek. My daughter does not cry easily. In fact, I can recall seeing her like this only once before. Sarah was seven when her mother died.

“They’ve told them nothing!” Sarah gives me a merciless look. She turns her back to wipe her eyes, and begins to pace across the front room once more. Her shoulders are hunched up tight, one hand at her side holding a wad of Kleenex.

“Why don’t you sit down and relax?”

“I don’t want to sit. I want to know what happened,” she says.

“Herman went over to Jenny’s to see what he could find out,” I tell her. “I called him from my cell on the way home and asked him to go by and get whatever information he could.”

She turns to face me and sniffles into the Kleenex. “And what exactly are they going to tell Herman if they won’t even talk to Jenny’s family?”

“Herman has his ways,” I tell her. “Relax. We’ll find out when he gets here.”

According to Sarah, Jenny’s older brother, a CPA with one of the big firms downtown, went to her house and they wouldn’t let him in. They held him on the front lawn and refused to answer any of his questions. When he got angry, they threatened to arrest him unless he calmed down.

“So much for your police,” she says. The gulf between sorrow and anger in Sarah at this moment is narrow, and increasingly tapered toward fury. She wants answers, and if I know my daughter, at this moment she wants revenge.

“All they would tell him is that Jenny was dead and they were treating it as a homicide. Nothing more.” She turns to face me again. “So somebody killed her, right? It couldn’t be suicide, right? What am I saying?” She throws her hands up and tosses the Kleenex in the air. “Jenny would never kill herself.”