Twelve Hours (5 page)

Shir Soroush checked his watch one last time, then marched across the Presidential Suite’s living room to the office. Navid Ramadani was conferring with his chief of staff and his secretary, huddled over the desk and away from the windows, as they had been instructed after finding out about the shootings at Grand Central. Masud and Ebrahim, who were standing guard in the room, acknowledged Soroush as he walked in.

“Come with me, Mr. President,” said Soroush.

“What is happening?” demanded Ramadani, standing up in alarm. Perspiration showed on his brow.

“We are under attack,” Soroush said.

“What? By whom?”

Soroush exchanged a glance with Masud, then unholstered his suppressed Beretta .45 and fired. The bullet burrowed through Ebrahim’s right eye and burst out the back, showering the desk and the white curtains of the suite in blood. With his silenced pistol, Masud plugged two bullets in the back of the heads of Asadi and Taleb, who collapsed on the carpeted floor.

“Me,” said Soroush.

“What are you doing?” demanded Ramadani, standing from the table, eyes ablaze with fury.

“Taking back the Republic,” said Soroush. “Sit.”

“I will not—”

Masud made his move, kicking the President’s leg to make him sit on the heavy oak chair. “
Sit,
” Soroush repeated. Then, “Masud.”

Masud drew the thin syringe from his suit jacket. In one swift motion he thrust the needle into Ramadani’s neck and pressed the plunger.

“What—” the President yelped in surprise. His eyes rolled upward and his spine went slack. Masud grabbed him before his head hit the table in front of him.

“Phase one is complete,” Soroush said into his radio communicator. “Phase two begins now.”

Lisa Frieze tried to suppress a shiver as she leaned against the cool stone of the outside of the Waldorf Astoria. She was looking around at the various law enforcement personnel who were milling about within the cordoned zone. The crowd had thinned significantly as news of the attack spread and people hurried to their loved ones or fled the area. She tried her parents again, but it was impossible to get a call through, so she checked the news for updates. Nothing. She looked up again and was startled by Peter Conley, who stood facing her.

“Couldn’t find him,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s just as well,” she said, biting her lip and looking at a policeman waving the crowd back. “It’s just busywork. With everything that’s going on, this is not really on anyone else’s list of priorities.”

“You really wish you were somewhere else, don’t you?” He leaned against the wall next to her.

“Yes. I should be doing something,” she said, exasperated. “The city’s under attack, and I’m here twiddling my goddamn thumbs.”

“Maybe you should,” he said. “Do something, I mean.”

She pushed herself off the wall and stood up straight. “I’m not looking to get reprimanded for insubordination on my first day.” She stared down Park Avenue toward the Met Life building and wondered nervously whether being under fire would throw her into a flashback. It’d been over a year since she’d had one, but the thought of testing it gave her a sense of foreboding.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” said Conley. She looked at him. He had light brown eyes brimming with openness and sincerity. Something about him was disarming, some quality that inspired instant trust.

“No,” she said. “You can’t. Listen, I can’t stay out of this fight. I’m going—”

She was interrupted by a muffled
pop pop
coming from inside the hotel.

Her eyes widened. “Is that—”

“Gunfire.”

Morgan hung up the phone in Rosso’s office after his third busy signal and tried his radio communicator again. “Conley? Conley?” No response. The signal was probably being jammed by the Secret Service. Gunshots still echoed down the hallway. “I can’t raise my guy on the outside,” he said to Rosso. “Do you have any weapons?”

“The feds locked away everyone’s guns,” he said. “Only they and the President’s security had them.”

Goddamn it.
So the hotel security team would be helpless. “We have to do something,” said Morgan, turning to go. “I’m going to the lobby to see what’s going on.”

“Wait!” said Rosso. “You don’t have to. The surveillance room’s next door. We can see what’s happening anywhere in the hotel.”

Morgan let Rosso lead the way a few yards down the service hall. Rosso pulled out an oversized key ring from under his jacket and unlocked a plain gray door. He turned the knob and pushed it open to reveal two dead Secret Service agents and an Iranian guard, already raising his silenced SIG Sauer semiautomatic to shoot.

Morgan pushed Rosso out of the way of the threshold as the bullet ripped, hearing it pierce flesh, using the impulse to impel himself in the opposite direction. Rosso fell forward on the far side of the door, rolling on his back and exposing a flower of blood blooming on his shirt. Morgan checked himself, but apart from a little splatter from Rosso, he was clean. Adrenaline pumped, and a heightened awareness kicked in. He caught a flash of red in his peripheral vision to his left. He turned to catch sight of a fire extinguisher and axe. The plan formed in his mind faster than he could even think. He lifted the extinguisher off its hinge and, holding it by its base, swung it hard against the wall. The blow broke off the entire discharge mechanism, and white powder gushed out in a constant stream. Morgan then tossed the device into the surveillance room, where the powder spouted into the room, flooding its cramped confines.

Morgan grabbed the axe off the wall as the Iranian inside coughed and loosed a hail of bullets that embedded themselves into the wall opposite the door. Morgan counted six shots, plus, probably, two in each Secret Service agent. The SIG Sauer could hold up to twenty rounds.

Two more bullets sailed out of the room. This told Morgan that the man was desperate and blind, but had enough rounds of ammo to hold them off for minutes that Morgan couldn’t spare.

Soroush smiled as he looked out the window at the officers below, running around like cockroaches. Hearing heavy footsteps coming toward the door to the Presidential Suite, he raised his Beretta and saw Zubin appear at the threshold.

“Status,” said Soroush.

“The American agents have been taken care of,” said Zubin, in a voice breathy from climbing the stairs. “As well as those not loyal to our cause. The doors to the guest rooms have been electronically locked, and all keycards de-authorized.”

“Good,” said Soroush. “I have word from Aram. Grand Central has been shut down. Thousands of people are still inside. The devices are in place for phase three. We proceed as planned.”

“Just one thing,” said Zubin. “We lost Shahin. He took a bullet from the Secret Service.”

“Have Hossein take his role in the plan.” He laid his hand on Zubin’s shoulder. “This is our day,” he said. “We cannot fail.”

“For Allah,” said Zubin, breathless, with the wide eyes of the true believer.

“For the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Out in the hallway, standing flush against the wall next to the door to the surveillance office, Morgan clutched the axe and considered his options. The best plan would be goading the man inside to spend his remaining bullets. But that would take time. He glanced at Rosso, propped against the wall across the door from him, blood pooling on the floor. Time was something he did not have. The moment settled into an eerie quiet except for the hiss of the extinguisher still gushing white inside the room. The white powder wafted out into the hallway. Morgan rearranged the weapon in his hands, clammy palms against polished wood. This was going to be a gamble.

He stood by until he heard coughing once more. At that, he pivoted into the room and, engulfed in the white powder of the fire extinguisher, swung the axe in a wide upward diagonal arc. It hit home at Morgan’s one o’clock, and he heard the man drop onto the table and then the floor.

Morgan picked up the extinguisher, still spurting gas, and rolled it down the hall. He then crouched next to Rosso. Large beads of sweat peppered his forehead and he wheezed on inhaling. Blood oozed down from his shoulder where the Iranian’s bullet had hit.

“You all right?” asked Morgan.

“Can’t say much for my left arm,” he said, pressing a handkerchief against the wound. The fabric quickly became saturated with red. Morgan helped him to his feet. “Good thing I shoot with my right. Let’s take a look at those cameras.”

They went back inside the surveillance room and wiped the suspended powder out of the way until they could just make out what was happening in the array of monitors that covered nearly half of one wall, each broken up into a grid of video feeds. It was worse than Morgan had imagined.

He looked at the lobby camera feeds first. People—by the way they were dressed, mostly hotel staff—were being herded by men with guns into the middle and made to kneel. He counted the seven Secret Service agents, fallen where they had stood minutes before—none of those had even managed to draw their guns, which betrayed the deadly coordination of this attack. Another two lay dying behind a couch in the lobby, where they had taken cover. He counted five more dead from the hallway feeds.

“Jesus Christ,” said Rosso.

“I’ve got nine hostiles in the lobby,” said Morgan. He tried his radio again, but the signal wasn’t going through.

“Two more in the hallways,” said Rosso. “And one coming down the stairs here.”

“Do you have a visual on Ramadani?”

“Negative,” said Rosso. He motioned to a row of feeds that were completely dark. “Those are for the floor of his suite. His people disabled the cameras. You think Ramadani’s men turned?”

“Yeah, they did,” said Morgan. “The question is, turned on whom?”

Soroush emerged from the stairwell into the lobby, where about one hundred people—staff and the guests who had been downstairs when they struck—were seated on the floor, hands on their heads. Three of Soroush’s men were moving among them, unspooling the wire and securing it to each with a zip tie. Soroush reveled in the hostages’ terrified incomprehension, in the tears of the women.

Zubin rushed forward to meet him. “The doors are secured. The bombs will be armed within five minutes.”

“Good,” said Soroush. “We need precision. The blasts must be timed exactly to our departure. Masud is getting the President ready to be transported. Ten minutes.”

Alex Morgan examined her left ear in a compact mirror borrowed from a Latina girl about two years younger than her who was sitting nearby. The ear was cut up and looked like it might leave scars. Wincing, Alex dabbed at it with a wet wipe provided by the same girl, cleaning out the dirt and congealed blood. Fresh blood welled out bright red. She wiped that away too, and held the sleeve of her sweater against it like a compress until the bleeding stopped. She’d have preferred to do this in the bathroom rather than sitting on the cold marble floor, but the line to the bathrooms went halfway around the downstairs waiting area.

“How are you doing?” she asked Clark, who lay back against the marble floor, staring at the ceiling, phones in his ears. He shrugged, hoodie rustling against the stone beneath.

She reached to her pocket to check if her cell phone was there, but it wasn’t. She’d left it in her backpack, which she lost when she was knocked down by the crowd.

“Hey,” she said, prodding him. He removed his earphones. “Can I borrow your phone?”

He pulled the earphones out by the wire and propped himself up on his elbows. “Here,” he said, pulling out the headphone jack and holding it out for her. “I tried to call the ’rents already, though. Couldn’t get through. Maybe you’ll get lucky, though.”

She dialed her father, then her mother. No luck.

“I’m going to take a look around,” she told him, handing him back the phone. She stood up with aching muscles. She couldn’t sit still. She was antsy, with a bad feeling something else might happen, something worse. More than anything, she wanted to make herself useful.

The main concourse of Grand Central Terminal echoed with loud voices. People were standing and sitting around the expansive floor, and more were downstairs. She estimated that they numbered at least five hundred. MTA Police had spread out, mostly keeping to the exits and the walls, although she spotted two K9 teams doing rounds, inspecting people’s bags. She passed a prayer circle as she made her way around the concourse, people old and young, of all races, holding hands as a middle-aged black man spoke a solemn supplication. “Lord, deliver all your children from harm . . .”

Near the passage to the Lexington Avenue and Forty-seventh Street entrance, she heard the disconsolate sobs of people who had lost someone outside, or who had simply broken down from fear and shock. “My son is out there,” one young mother pleaded with a policeman holding people back from the door. She sank to her knees. “Please. My Lawrence, my baby . . .”

From there, Alex made her way to Vanderbilt Hall, which opened into the main entrance. It had been cleared and set aside to form a sort of makeshift hospital. Here, people in everyday clothes were attending to the injured. Only two of the people there had bullet wounds. The rest had been injured in the tumult, trampled, pushed, or had fallen against the pavement.

“Hi, excuse me, dear,” said a tiny lady who looked to be in her forties sporting spiky orange-red hair in comfortable pants and a casual sweater. She spoke with surprising authority. “Come over here, we’ll have someone look at your ear.”

Alex said, “No, my ear’s okay. I want to help. I have some first-aid training.”

“Oh, that’s very kind of you,” said the woman. “We actually have enough doctors and nurses here. But we could use some more water, if you’d be a dear and get it for us at the market.”

It wasn’t the help she wanted to give, but, of course, help shouldn’t be about what the helper wants. Alex made her way to the Grand Central Market. The shops all seemed to be closed, but a group of girl scouts and other children were lined up to receive bottles of water and fresh fruit at the door to the market itself, where four vendors were distributing them to the kids for free. Alex approached one of them, a young, brown-skinned Hispanic man in a black cap.

“I need water,” she said. “For the wounded.”

He set off into the market and came back with a plastic-sealed case of six twenty-ounce water bottles.

“You want me to carry that for you, miss?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, grunting under the weight as he handed the case to her. “You look like you have your hands full.”