Terminal Rage (22 page)

Vlasic
’
s face was like an ice block, and her expression opaque. She stared at him sharply for a few seconds and then nodded.

NINETEEN

Sunday, November 6, 2011—9:00 a.m.
Manhattan, New York

B
lackwell and the rest of the team were huddled around what used to be his negotiating desk. They had pushed the conference table against the wall to make room. Their eyes were glued to a monitor broadcasting live footage. Three men wearing black ski masks and dark sunglasses were exiting 200 Park Avenue. They moved with caution to the parked silver Lexus SUV, unlocked it with the remote, and climbed in. A few seconds later, the SUV slithered away on Park Avenue heading south.

Another feed came in immediately. Tagging the Lexus a safe distance behind was an unmarked red Camry with two FBI agents. Their instructions were to follow the SUV to JFK. A wide-angle camera installed on the Camry captured what the agents in the car were seeing and transmitted it back to command post.

Four hours earlier, based on Monica Vlasic’s unequivocal recommendation to Deputy Director Benny Marino, the final stages of the operation had begun to unfold. The president had approved an unprecedented nationwide evacuation of all known daycares and their immediate vicinities. Police bomb squads would follow to comb for and defuse any explosives.

The FBI
’
s orders had come from the director, and trickled down to the agency
’
s fifty-six regional field offices. In turn, these offices worked with local and state law enforcement and emergency services. In the towns and cities where first responders were thin or overstretched, the army or the National Guard stepped in.

Across the fifty states, Puerto Rico, and other US overseas territories, children and their minders were removed from any facility that could be defined as a daycare operating during nontraditional hours. Buses were chartered to take them to temporary locations—churches, public school gyms, and libraries.

The main risk facing the evacuation was the possibility that hundreds, maybe even thousands of illegal facilities were operating outside the regulatory oversight of the local child protective services. But Monica had rationalized that if a daycare was operating in the dark, it would have been unlikely for Seth to select it for inclusion as one of his targets. It was a huge gamble not based on any sound evidence. Just pure gut instinct. But Blackwell was no longer in a position to object or offer counterplans.

Within four hours after the White House had approved it, the evacuation protocol was completed. Its smooth implementation exemplified the best and worst of the country
’
s law enforcement practices. Blackwell saw it as a rare show of how federal, state and local systems can, if they want to, cooperate to implement massive public safety operations. Yet the fact this tactical move was not implemented any sooner, when Seth had first disclosed his intentions, spoke volumes about the contempt the FBI had for the news media—a hatred Blackwell shared.

If the operation had been unleashed any sooner, there was a real risk a news outlet could have gotten wind of it through one
of the dreaded “anonymous” sources within police departments.
A nationwide evacuation involving children was a story worth telling. Blackwell had a special place in the hate compartment of his heart for the news media for corrupting local police to feed an insatiable hunger for sensational stories. A hunger that often obstructed justice, and in this case, would also have endangered lives.

The second part of Monica
’
s counteroffensive against Seth was even flimsier. With Julia Price safe, Benny Marino had developed a greater appetite for approving bolder risks. Monica had sold him on the idea that rescuing the Exertify hostages by extracting them from the building was their only viable option. And it had to be done during the short window of opportunity when Seth and his accomplices were driving from Manhattan to JFK. Once the rescue was completed, and with the weekend care centers evacuated, Seth and his men would be apprehended before they even came close to the airplane.

In theory it was a great plan, but Blackwell was dreading its implementation. It was simple, even simplistic, and wrought with danger. But in the end, Blackwell had conceded it was marginally more appealing than Seth
’
s original proposal to hand him a plane and the open skies with the hope he
’
d make good on his promise.

The extraction team comprised an NYPD bomb squad and a fresh Hostage Rescue Team unit to replace Albert Voss’s now-murdered squad. Fifty-three men in total, traveling on a borrowed city bus to the Thirty-Third Street subway station, where they would disembark and ride a train to Grand Central Terminal on Forty-second street. Their ability to move and use public transport freely on the weekend facilitated by the still-evacuated chunk of midtown Manhattan.

The extraction team would proceed underground to the main terminal of the station complex. They would cross over to 200 Park Avenue through a maintenance tunnel connecting the two buildings. From the basement of the tower, they would ride two of the five service elevators up to the Exertify offices in successive waves. Exertify had prohibited the freight elevators from stopping on the thirty-ninth floor, so the extraction team had to stop on the thirty-eighth and then cross over to the only passenger elevator with access to the thirty-ninth.

Once they were inside the Exertify floor, no one had any idea what they would be up against. Seth had cut off the company
’
s headquarters from the outside world. The security lifeline connecting the Manhattan office to their other operations was one of the first things he had severed. And he had nullified all other lines of communication, including the hostages
’
cell phones.

This was the most dangerous type of rescue operation. They had no meaningful plan of action prior to entry. The bomb squad and the hostage rescue unit were going in blind and would be forced to respond to whatever dangers they encountered on the fly.

The only sliver of unverified intelligence they had to go on was actually fed to them by Seth. He had told Blackwell the entrance of the conference room had a motion detector installed to detonate the explosives if breached. Assuming they were able to get to the conference room without setting off any other hazards along the way, the only semblance of a plan was for the bomb squad to guide one of the hostages to override the motion detector by following their verbal instructions.

By the time the extraction team reached the basement of the building, the Lexus SUV had already crossed the Midtown Tunnel and was headed east on the 495 into Queens. It maintained a cruising speed of forty miles per hour to avoid unnecessary encounters with the police and to reach the airport without incident. Traffic conditions were perfect, and at that speed the Lexus would reach the airport within twenty minutes of crossing the tunnel.

When Monica had hatched the extraction plan, Blackwell refreshed his knowledge of the besieged building at 200 Park Avenue. The iconic tower had started life in the sixties as the
Pan Am building. Along the years, it had witnessed a CEO jumping to his death from the forty-fourth floor, as well as the rotors of a helicopter slicing through passengers in a horrific accident, back when its rooftop was still used as a heliport. As one of the most visible structures in the Manhattan skyline, it was also the most loathed architecturally, often described as an ugly behemoth. For many years it held the unenviable honor as the structure New Yorkers would most like to see demolished.

But its scale and visibility also made it an attractive target for terrorist plots. Blackwell was certain the men of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and the NYPD bomb squad knew the insides of the building like the back of their hands. The structure was a staple in the tactical response training curriculum.

When the men of the extraction and rescue team reached their launch point, a live camera feed of what they were seeing also began transmitting to Blackwell and the other agents and analysts on another monitor. A group of twelve FBI hostage rescue operators and two bomb-squad officers took a freight elevator up to clear access for the rest of the men. They crossed over with little difficulty from the thirty-eighth floor to a passenger elevator, then rode it up one floor as planned. The doors slid open with the familiar bell sound. Blackwell swallowed hard as the fourteen men took their first steps into the lobby of Exertify.

Meanwhile, the Lexus had cleared the end of the JFK Expressway and followed the red signs for Terminal Eight departures. The Camry slowed down to maintain a safe distance. Both cars pulled over to the curb of the departures terminal and parked, with the Camry just a few vehicles behind the Lexus. The FBI agents jumped out and made their way to the target SUV.

Any time now, the three men would emerge from the Lexus no longer wearing their disguises. Through a camera attached to one of the agent
’
s shades, Blackwell would finally see Seth. The agents had been instructed to trail them inside the airport until further orders came in from Monica and her team.

Back in Manhattan, the fourteen men had survived the entry into the foyer of the Exertify floor without setting off any explosions. They stood in front of a spacious cavity with marble floors, steel walls and a low ceiling covered in a futuristic honeycomb material. The “vault” was a high-tech buffer zone built by Exertify to screen anyone entering their offices, staff included.

The entry and exit of the vault were both wide open, with the lights of motion detectors blinking. Seth hadn
’
t just booby-trapped the entrance to the conference room, but he had extended the same protection to the vault as well.

Blackwell turned his attention to what was happening at JFK. The Lexus remained motionless. No one came out of the car, which had now been parked for close to five minutes. The hovering FBI agents had to convince a few airport police officers who were suspicious of the Lexus to ignore it for now.

Blackwell
’
s neck was hurting from alternating between the two monitors broadcasting the events inside the building and outside JFK simultaneously. But out of the corner of his eye he noticed some movements on the third monitor streaming footage from the rooftop of the building. Monica and the rest of the team were too absorbed with the other feeds to notice it.

“Is this one of ours?” Blackwell blurted.

Monica looked at him. “One of ours what?”

He pointed to the screen. “The red helicopter landing on the rooftop—right there.”

The helicopter had just contravened the no-fly zone imposed on midtown Manhattan.

Nishimura, who clearly knew his choppers said, “That
’
s a Bell 206 L IV Long Ranger. It has
Manhattan City Dreams
written on it. Most likely a commercial tour operator.”

Three shadowy figures dressed in black and carrying backpacks ran across the rooftop and boarded the aircraft, which bounced back up in the sky in record time.

This can
’
t be happening.

Blackwell screamed over the radio to the two agents at JFK, “Check the Lexus! Intercept the car now and check the passengers!”

Everything descended into madness swiftly.

Monica dialed feverishly in to the FBI Hostage Rescue Team unit inside the building.

Nishimura stepped back from the group to use his phone.

At JFK, the two agents approached the car from both sides and knocked on the front doors with their pointed guns. The driver
’
s window rolled down and the masked man behind the wheel whispered to the agents, “Is it over?”

“Kendrick, this is Vlasic,” Monica cautioned the Hostage Rescue Team in the building. “Watch your step. Suspects may have been in the building all along, and only just escaped from the rooftop using a helicopter. What
’
s your status?”

Roger Kendrick, the lead Hostage Rescue Team operator, responded, “Confirmed. We found some motion detectors installed in the vault separating the entrance and the office. But something
’
s not right here, Vlasic. The NYPD bomb guys disabled the sensors and they said it
’
s a decoy. The sensors are not wired to anything. We
’
re also not detecting
any
trace of explosives. Anywhere. None whatsoever.”

Slant touched Blackwell and Monica
’
s shoulders from the back. “It could be a trap to lead them into the conference room to maximize casualties. Tell them to tread carefully.”

It was a common terrorist tactic used with impunity—a layer of easy decoys to lower the rescue team
’
s guard, followed by the real death trap.

The FBI agent at JFK kept his aim at the temple of the masked man in the Lexus and questioned him cautiously. “Who are you?”

“We are hostages from the Exertify building. Who are
you
?”

“FBI. Move slowly and get out of the car with your hands on your heads. Now.”

Monica yelled at Nishimura, “I need a fucking helicopter in the sky—now, Liam!”

Nishimura hung up his phone, rushed back to his computer and activated yet another video feed on an unused monitor. “I am on it. There
’
s an NYPD chopper over Hoboken. I instructed them to turn around and get on their tail. We
’
re picking up their video feed any time now.”