Jeff Rovin - Vespers

“It looks like they’re coming south,” Gentry said.

“No, they’re spreading,” Joyce informed him.

“Spreading as in spreading out?”

“No. The group is growing. The bats are flying back and forth. Like a loom, knitting in and out.”

“What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. Waiting, maybe. It looks like a holding pattern. The bats that are already there wait for new bats to arrive. As more bats show up, they join the perimeter.”

“Why?”

“I wonder-” she said thoughtfully.

Gentry’s pager beeped. It was a Manhattan number he didn’t recognize.

“What do you wonder?” Gentry asked.

“Do you have to check that out?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell you when you get back. I want to think it through.”

Gentry ran back toward the shore. There was a pay phone on the other side of the highway, and Gentry called the number.

It rang once before someone answered. “Yes?”

“Hi. This is detective Robert Gentry-”

“Detective,” said the voice, a husky monotone, “this is Gordon Weeks, Office of Emergency Management.”

So the guano has hit the fan,Gentry thought. Gordy Weeks was the big gun, “the lion tamer,” the press had dubbed him. In a crisis situation, the former marine called all the plays. Even Mayor Taylor deferred to him, and Taylor-a longtime FBI man who’d run the bureau’s New York field office-was not hesitant to take charge in most situations.

“I’m told you’ve been working with Dr. Nancy Joyce of the Bronx Zoo,” Weeks said.

“That’s right.”

“We’ve been trying to find her.”

“She’s with me,” Gentry said. “I’m at a pay phone. We’re out on the Christopher Street pier watching the bats.”

“Can you get her down to SevenWorld Trade Center?”

“Sure-”

“Robert!”

Joyce was running across the highway. A car had to jam on its brakes to keep from hitting her. She didn’t seem to notice. He had never seen her this driven.

“Hold on,” Gentry said into the phone. “Nancy’s coming. I think something’s up.”

“Something is,” Weeks said, “bats. They’re stretched from the George Washington Bridge down to just below the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. I need a think tankfast and ESU said she may have answers-”

“Wait a second, sir,please! ” Gentry said. “She’s pretty agitated. She may have something.”

“Look, I’ve got the police commissioner on the other line,” Weeks said. “Call me back as soon as possible.”

Gentry said he would. The OEM director hung up.

Joyce arrived, breathless. She leaned against the phone. “Robert, I need to get above the bats.”

“Above? You mean upriver?”

“No, I mean higher than. Can you get me a helicopter?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“Because I think I know what’s happening, and I need to make certain.”

“What’s happening?”

Joyce said, “The courtiers are being assembled. The king is already here. And I believe the queen is on her way.”

As they hurried back to Gentry’s apartment, the detective told Joyce that if the Office of Emergency Management apparently had been put in charge of the crisis, Gordy Weeks would have to okay her plan to fly up into the bats.

“There may not be time to visit him and do a whole conference thing. Will he listen to me over the phone?”

“I think so,” Gentry said.

“And will he listen tome?”

“He asked for you by name,” Gentry said. “Look, I know Gordy Weeks only by reputation. He doesn’t let bureaucracy, red tape, ego, or gender get in the way of fixing problems. He also doesn’t have a lot of time to screw around here. They’ll probably have to close the harbor, the Hudson air lane into LaGuardia-can’t afford to have bats sucked into jet engines. He’ll listen and you’ll get a quick yea or nay.”

“How much clout does he have?”

“In a crisis, Weeks reports directly to Taylor. And I don’t think the mayor has ever gotten in the way of anything he wanted.”

As they entered the apartment and Gentry punched in the phone number, Joyce quickly assembled her facts. Robert was right. A manager in the middle of an unprecedented crisis wouldn’t have much time to listen-or to argue. She would have to make her point fast.

It was clear to her that the Russian female had had at least twin offspring, possibly more. The same bat could not have attacked the ESU team in New York and killed those sheep in New Paltz. And a male bat would not have come ahead, alone, to prepare a new home for another male bat. But a male bat would have come ahead for a female. He would have found a nest, settled in, and then relayed his signature cry from bat to bat-a distinctive series of bleats that would have told her exactly where he was.

He also would have gathered food for her arrival.

If a she-bat were on her way to New York, if she’d left New Paltz a few hours before, then she would be arriving very soon. Especially with an honor guard or a protective wall of drones already gathering. They, too, must have been summoned by the male.

If all that were true, it was important that Joyce be able to spot the female coming in. It was imperative that she watch where the female went so they could find the male. And she could do that most efficiently from the air.

When Weeks got on the phone, Joyce told him all of that. When she was finished, Weeks informed her that Al Doyle was in the command center with him helping to monitor and assess the situation. Doyle’s contention was that the bats were here as part of a massive migration. Doyle said they would probably move on, since-like the subway bats-they were vespertilionids that didn’t eat fruit and preferred flying insects to crawling insects.

“But,” Weeks said, “Al can’t explain what a night watchman just reported from the World Trade Center. The guard entered a bloody elevator carriage, shined his flashlight through the open hatchway, and saw a woman being hauled up the cable. He said that whatever was holding her was dark, about the size of a bull, and had wings.”

The veteran watchman had never been drunk or stoned on the job. And the sighting corroborated what Lieutenant Kilar of the ESU had dutifully noted in his report on the subway killings: that bat expert Dr. Nancy Joyce of the Bronx Zoo believed there might be “an abnormally large specimen” of bat inhabiting the NewYork subway system.

“I’m having trouble signing onto this,” Weeks said. “But people are dying and I’ve got to explore every possible lead. You can have your chopper.”

Weeks told Joyce that he needed his helicopters for reconnaissance and transportation. His office would arrange with the police commissioner to have an ESU helicopter pick her up at the pier in fifteen minutes. The OEM director had only two requests: that she stay in constant radio communication with his assistant, Marius Pace, and that she not fuck up.

Joyce promised.

She kept the binoculars and grabbed her camera. Gentry went with her to the pier to wait. He had only one request: that she come back safely.

Joyce promised.

Ten minutes later, she and two ESU fliers were airborne in an Aviation Unit Bell-412.

In all her years of bat hunting, Nancy Joyce had never had the opportunity to ride in a helicopter. Within five seconds of lifting off from the pier, she realized she’d have been happy to postpone the experience indefinitely.

The chopper ascended, which wasn’t the same as taking off. Not to her. As it arced steeply from the pier, the sense of motion up and away and then forward was pronounced. It was like being in a bumper car that had suddenly added a third dimension of mobility.