Fear City (43 page)

“Then we'll find the van and wait for him to come back. Simple, huh?”

“Yeah, as long as that's the same van.”

“It is,” Tommy said. “I feel it in my bones.”

*   *   *

12:07
P.M.

Kadir set the brake, grabbed the lighter, and applied the flame to the ends of the fuses. When he was sure all four were burning, he locked the doors and dashed for the stairs up to street level. Once outside he would hurry uptown. He had plenty of time to put buildings between himself and the blast, but he wanted to be as far away as possible when the tower fell.

He came out of the stairwell and spotted the ramp to West Street on his right. He trotted for that and had just reached the snowy fresh air when he heard a voice behind him.

“Hey, asshole!”

As he turned, a fist slammed into his face—once, twice.

Blinded by pain, he staggered back and would have fallen if someone hadn't grabbed him by the back of his jacket. A big black car pulled up, the rear door opened, and he was pushed inside. The man sitting there grabbed his throat and yanked his head up.

“Hello, raghead.”

Oh, no. The thug who had lent him the money. Kadir had thought he'd never see him again.

“I … I…” What could he say?

“I don't suppose you have my money.”

The bomb!

“Please, we must be away from here!”

He smiled. “I'll take that as a ‘no.' Which means I get to beat the shit outta you.”

“No way, Tommy,” said the big driver. “Not in my car, you don't. Mess up your own ride.”

The fuse … the ten-minute fuse. How long ago had he lit it?

“We must go!” Kadir screamed.

“You ain't goin' nowhere,” the one called Tommy said as he pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. “'Cause y'see, you and me we got this … this connection, y'know. It's a very complex thing. It's cosmic, it's karmic, it's … money.”

Kadir turned, opened the door, and leaped. His foot caught on something and he fell, landing hard on the ramp. As he tried to get up, he was grabbed from behind and hurled against the sidewall. His head slammed against the concrete. Through the ringing in his ears he heard a third voice call from the car.

“Vinny says throw him in the trunk and we'll take him somewhere.”

“Uh-uh,” Tommy said. “We got important stuff to discuss.”

“Play your games somewhere else,” the driver said.

“You don't want it in your ride, we'll do it right here.”

“Fine. Have it your way. But I'm getting off the ramp. Meet us down on the street. We'll pop the trunk when we see you comin'.”

“Gotcha,” Tommy said.

The feel of the cuff ratcheting closed around his wrist wrenched Kadir from his daze. The bomb! They had to be away from here! Yousef had said the blast wave from the explosion would move at five thousand kilometers per second, and this ramp was the only escape valve for all that force. It would blow debris along here like a giant shotgun. He had to tell this man, this Tommy.

“A bomb!” he screamed. “A bomb will explode.”

Tommy sneered as he closed the other cuff over his own wrist. “You got that right. It's about to explode in your gut.”

Kadir tried to pull him down the ramp by the cuffs.

“Please!”

The hoodlum yanked him back. Pain exploded in Kadir's gut as a fist rammed into his belly. He doubled over in agony.

“Now, as I was saying before you so rudely tried to get away … you and me, we got this connection and it's a very complex thing. It's cosmic, it's karmic, it's—”

The world exploded.

*   *   *

12:17
P.M.

Jack had already made one pass by the north tower and then one by the south without seeing a suspicious van. He'd just turned onto West Street for a second look at north when the ground shook and the sky roared. Ralph bucked and reared like a stallion as flames, smoke, and concrete chunks of all shapes and sizes blew across the street fifty yards ahead of him, carrying two pinwheeling human bodies with them. Jack slammed on the brakes.

Shit! The bomb.

Too late.

He stepped out of his car to see if he could help those two flying humans, and through the smoke he saw a pair who seemed to have the same idea. He continued forward a few steps but stopped when he recognized one of the others: big fat Vinny Donuts. What was he doing here? Then he recognized the other as his pal, Aldo.

They both rushed to the bodies, checked them, then lifted them. Jack couldn't identify the dead men—too much blood. Their bodies flopped limp as rag dolls, like every bone had been broken. Vinny and Aldo carried them toward a black Crown Vic. The strangest part of the bizarre sight was how the two bodies appeared joined at the wrist. Handcuffs?

The trunk was already open and both bodies were dumped into it like sacks of potatoes.

Why were a couple of Gambinos down here? Who were the dead guys? And why were they cuffed together? Jack wasn't going to attempt to explain what he was watching.

When Vinny slammed the lid shut, Jack saw that the Vic's rear window was shattered. Blown out by the explosion?

As the two hoods climbed in and roared away, Jack could only watch them go. The street before him was strewn with broken concrete waiting to tear out the undercarriage of any car trying to drive through.

He looked up at the north tower. He didn't know what carnage the bomb had wreaked inside—had to be considerable—but the tower appeared unfazed. Probably take a helluva lot more than a truck bomb to topple that baby.

He turned at the sound of sirens. Half a dozen cars had backed up behind him. Looked like he was going to be stuck here awhile.

 

9

“Jesus Christ!” Tony said as he stared into the trunk. “I know you two wasn't exactly buddies, but what the fuck you do to him?”

Vinny had wheeled the Vic around to the back of Tony's appliance store and brought him out to see Tommy. He would've left him on West Street but figured he'd catch the blame when Tommy showed up dead. That was why he'd brought him here.

“Didn't do nothin',” Vinny said.

“Well, somebody did somethin'! Looks like he's been through a meat grinder!”

“Well, you ain't gonna believe this, but here goes.”

He gave Tony a rundown of the events leading to the explosion. He was glad Aldo had been along so he could back up his story.

When Vinny finished, Tony was scratching his jaw. “You mean that bomb in the Trade Tower that's all over the news, it killed Tommy?”

“Wrong place at the wrong time,” Vinny said, though he was thinking just the opposite.

Good thing he'd moved his car off the ramp when he did. If he'd waited for Tommy to finish his games with the Arab, he and Aldo would've been heading for the morgue along with the other two.

Tony pointed to Kadir's mangled body. “Word is the bomb was an Arab deal. You think this cocksucker…?”

Aldo was nodding. “Yeah. I hadn't thought about it before, but yeah. I like him for it.”

Vinny said, “We saw him drive a van into the garage and then come trotting out, heading for the street, like he was haulin' his ass outta there.”

“That wasn't no pipe bomb,” Aldo added. “You shoulda seen the size of the chunks it blew down the ramp.”

“Question is,” Vinny said, “what do we do with Tommy?”

“First thing you do is unhook him from this raghead son of a bitch. Then you take him to his place over in Howard Beach—keys gotta be in his pockets somewhere—and you lay him on a couch or his bed. Call me when you're done and I'll put out the word to some of his family so they can ‘find' him.”

“Why don't we just take him straight to Garibaldi's?” Aldo said.

Tony flashed him a
you-asshole
look. “'Cause a funeral home can't just bury a guy. They need a death certificate and all that.”

“Oh.”

“And the raghead?” Vinny said.

“Deep-six him so he'll never be found. You're good at that.”

Vinny nodded. Easy enough.

 

10

Just as he had earlier this month, Mohammed Salameh stood on the dock of the Central Railroad Terminal and stared at the twin Trade Towers across the water. The last time he did this he had been with Abouhalima, Yousef, Kasi, and Kadir. Today he was alone.

He'd hurried away from the UN along 44th Street as fast as he could without running, waiting for the sound of the blast. It hadn't come by the time he reached Second Avenue, so he stopped at the corner and waited. The street ran downhill toward the UN complex from there. The Secretariat was obscured to the right, but he could glimpse the General Assembly building down at the end.

He waited and waited for the boom, for the cloud of dust and smoke and debris, but it never came. He was tempted to go back and see what had gone wrong, but was afraid he'd be recognized as the man who abandoned a stolen car in the middle of First Avenue.

He was also afraid that if Yousef had been delayed, the bomb would go off as soon as he peeked around the corner, obliterating him along with everyone else.

After standing around for more than half an hour, he'd walked to West 33rd Street to catch a PATH train to Jersey City. At the station he heard that no trains were running to the World Trade Center because a section of track leading to the center had been damaged by an explosion. Exalted, he got off at the Grove Street stop and raced toward the waterfront. Long before he reached it he spotted the towers, both standing with no sign of damage. He continued all the way to the river, only to be greeted by the dismaying sight of two apparently healthy towers. Not even smoke!

What had happened? No bomb had gone off by the targeted UN, but one had gone off somewhere in the old target, the World Trade Center.
Whose
bomb—Yousef's or Kadir's?

He sighed and turned away. What was he to do now? Wait to be contacted, he guessed. Would they want to make more bombs? Only time would tell.

Meanwhile he would return to the Ryder rental place and see if he could get back his deposit on the truck he had reported stolen.

 

11

Safe!

Ramzi Yousef relaxed in his first-class seat as the Royal Jordanian jet lifted off the JFK runway. No one could bring him back now. Tomorrow morning he would land in Amman. Sadly, he would have no good news to tell.

The day had been a disappointment all around. His own bomb had either failed to ignite or had been defused. He suspected it might be the latter. He had seen too many police around the UN Plaza. Somehow they had been on higher alert than usual.

At least Kadir had come through, although that too was a disappointment. He had chosen Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's favored target but the bomb failed to topple it.

Ramzi was composing what he would tell his mother's brother. For some reason the news media were making no mention of the UN bomb. Perhaps because it embarrassed them. And perhaps, because it hadn't exploded, they felt they could sweep it under the rug? They certainly could not hide the Trade Tower bomb.

Ramzi too would keep silent about the UN bomb—that hadn't been in his instructions.

The only bright spot in this dour day, the only upbeat news he could offer his uncle, was that America was vulnerable. He and the others had bought the explosive ingredients and mixed them right under the noses of the police and the vaunted FBI. The only reason the towers remained standing now was because they were so well built. That didn't mean they couldn't be brought down. It meant only that their bomb hadn't been big enough. If only they had parked both bombs in the basement … the Manhattan skyline would look very different right now.

He knew Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would keep looking for ways to bring down those towers, and Ramzi would be close by his side, helping him.

He looked out at the sparkling lights of the city below.

We'll be back.

 

12

Good thing Julio had walked him home—if a propped-up stumbling stagger qualified as walking.

Long day.

After the tower blast it had taken Jack an hour and a half to move off West Street. He was an eyewitness, after all, and the cops wanted to know what he'd seen. He told them about flames and smoke and flying debris, but left out mention of Vinny and Aldo and the pinwheeling bodies. The cops would want to know who they were and where they were and Jack didn't want to get into that.

When the opportunity presented itself, he'd tried to call Burkes but the phones weren't working. The cops told him NYNEX had installed a major switching center in the basement of Tower One, so forget calling from anywhere downtown unless he had a mobile. He didn't, so he took their advice and forgot about it.

When they finally let him go, he knew he needed to be with a friend. That left him two choices. He chose the friend with beer. And if he'd stuck with beer, he would have been fine. But he'd started thinking of Cristin, and that prompted a shot of Cuervo Gold in her honor. Which led to another. And another. And …

The hard stuff wasn't his thing. He'd thought he was doing fine until he went to stand up from his table.

Jack might—just
might
have made it home without Julio, but he never would have made it up the stairs.

“Got there too late,” he mumbled as he reeled across his front room. “News says six people dead, hundreds hurt.”

“That's bad for them, meng, but it coulda been lots worse. Least the building's okay. The bomb didn't bring her down. That's important, right?”

“Who gives a rat's ass about the building.”

“Oh, I dunno. Maybe the couple thousand people in it.”

“Oh, yeah. Them.”

Jack hadn't seen anything about the UN bomb on the news, so he hadn't mentioned it to Julio. Maybe he'd saved some lives there, but some special lives were over.