Silent Night

FOUR

‘Morning everyone,’ he said. ‘Listen up.’

He looked over at Rach and nodded. She hit a key and a photograph came up on the screen.

‘At just after 8 o’clock this morning, a corpse was found alongside the fence at Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Take a look.’

The team examined the photograph. Archer knew Sheep Meadow well and saw from the background that the shot had been taken facing east. Yellow tape had been drawn up around a shape on the ground, the area cordoned off with small orange cones. The victim was mostly covered with snow, but patches of brown trouser and black boot were partially visible through the white. Archer saw that the body was lying near a trash can, a trolley loaded with black bags abandoned beside it.

‘An early-morning jogger stopped for a breath of air and spotted something unusual on the snow by the fence,’ Shepherd continued. ‘She walked forward to take a closer look and saw that it was a body.’

Rach tapped a key and the shot changed. This photograph had been taken immediately above the dead body. What looked like blood was faintly spattered around him, but the guy had been there for some time. His body and the blood were mostly covered by snow which had fallen overnight.

‘Was he shot?’ Josh asked.

‘No,’ Shepherd said. ‘He wasn’t.’

He nodded at Rach who hit a key.

The shot changed to a third photograph, the snow cleared off the man’s face.

His eyes were open but dim, lifeless.

Blood had dried around his mouth and lower part of his face, like a little kid who’d been eating ice cream from a cone.

‘CSU checked his body. They couldn’t find any knife or gunshots wounds, so HAZMAT and National Health Services were called. They set up a perimeter in the Park and screened the body right there on the snow. I’m afraid what they found is concerning.’

He pointed to the photograph.

‘This man was infected with a Type-3 Pneumonic virus. It’s a strain that no one at Health Services has seen before. They think it’s some sort of a bastardised form of tuberculosis.’

The team took this in, as Rach changed the photograph back to the first one.

‘CSU found a small empty pressurised vial hidden in a shoebox placed here,’ Shepherd said, tapping the screen, pointing at a small shape by the trash can. ‘Apparently it was rigged up to a disturbance switch. The victim was a groundsman who emptied the trash in the Meadow area each weeknight. It looks as if he opened the box and it sprayed some kind of gas right in his face.’

The shot changed to a close-up photo from above the box.

A lid was lying above it. Archer saw the empty vial, lying horizontally along the upper portion of the shoebox and what must have been the disturbance switch lining the open lid.

‘But we got lucky. HAZMAT said that despite the strength of whatever was in that vial the shot of gas was insignificant and not prolonged. It was snowing at the time, so the moisture in the air disseminated what gas there was before it could spread. Fortunately, no one else was in the immediate area when it went off last night. But if it hadn’t have been snowing and there’d been a wind blowing, we’d be in a very different situation right now. We’d probably be down at the city morgue tallying the dead.’

‘What about the runner who found him, sir?’ Marquez asked. ‘Is she OK?’

‘She’s fine. Once the host is dead, it’s not contagious. It’s only transmittable via the air.’

‘Has anyone claimed responsibility?’ Archer asked.

‘I’ve been working next door trying to catch a lead,’ Rach said. ‘But so far, nothing. No threats or ransom demands.’

‘Could it be international?’

Shepherd shook his head. ‘We think it’s domestic. Nothing has come up on the radar. You know how good Rach and everyone next door is. We contacted Interpol and MI6 earlier this morning but they haven’t picked anything up either. Nothing from our people in Asia, the Middle East, or South America.’

He tapped the screen, pointing at the boxed shell of the detonated bomb.

‘Whatever this is, it’s coming from inside the country. Appropriate departments around the city have been warned. Health Services are working on the victim’s body trying to isolate the strain that killed him and see if there's an existing antidote but they’re not hopeful. They’ve never seen anything like this before.’

He looked down at his team.

‘But we need to find out where the hell this shit came from and who has it. And we need to do it before any more is released. The next time we may not be so lucky. Lieutenant General Franklin has ordered that we are the investigating team. This is our responsibility.’

He paused.

‘Pull up the victim’s profile, Rach.’

She tapped several keys and a driving licence appeared on the screen. Archer saw a middle-aged Mexican man in the photograph. With jet black hair and skin the colour of coffee, he looked like a nice guy, totally harmless. And totally unrecognisable from the bloody frozen husk of a human being who’d died out there in the Meadow.

‘His name was Luis Cesar,’ Shepherd said. ‘Fifty two years old, immigrant from Mexico, worked as a groundsman in Central Park for eleven years. Leaves behind a widow and five kids. He and his wife live in an apartment up in Spanish Harlem.’

The room was silent as they looked at the dead man’s photo.

Shepherd turned to Jorgensen and Marquez.

‘I want you two to head up there. His wife called 911 early this morning saying that her husband didn’t come home last night. She hasn’t been told what happened. I want you to deliver the news.’

‘Shit,’ Jorgensen said.

‘Are we telling her the truth?’ Marquez asked.

‘Save the specifics. He died from unknown causes. Tell her he didn’t suffer. Leave it at that.’

‘OK,’ Marquez said, scribbling down the address from the driving licence.

‘If you can, find out if anything out of the ordinary has been going on lately,’ Shepherd added. ‘Anything strange in her husband’s behaviour or unusual phone calls, that sort of thing. I’m almost positive this was just wrong place, wrong time, but we need to make one hundred per cent sure he wasn’t a deliberate target.’

Shepherd shifted his attention to Archer and Josh.

‘There’s a research laboratory located on West 66and Amsterdam. It’s called Flood Microbiology. I want you two to head over there. A Dr Peter Flood is expecting you. Find out if he or his team recognise these symptoms or have any idea where this could have come from.’

The two men nodded.

‘This room will be the base of operations. Rach and I will work out of here, staying close to the line with Health Services. All precincts across the city have been notified of the threat. ESU and Chemical Response Teams are on standby but we’re the ranking team on the case.’

He pointed at Cesar’s licence.

His already tense face hardened.

‘Make no mistake. We’re going to find out who killed this man. No one does something like that in this city and gets away with it.’

‘What about Central Park security cameras?’ Marquez asked. ‘They might tell us who planted the device?’

‘Two techs next door are already checking them,’ Rach said. ‘But there isn’t any CCTV in the immediate Meadow area, and over ten thousand people went in and out of the Park yesterday. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.’

Shepherd nodded, checking his watch.

‘We need to get going. Questions?’

There were none.

‘Remember, its seven days until Christmas. There're eight million people living in the city right now with a shitload more tourists on top.’

He tapped the screen.

‘Someone out there did this for a reason. We’re going to find out who they are and take them down.’

He looked at his team and nodded.

‘Let’s go to work.’



Across Queens, three men were sitting in a booth in the middle of a diner just off the 30 Avenue subway stop in Astoria. All three were dressed in an assortment of jeans, coats and thick sweatshirts, a half-filled cup of coffee in front of each of them. Their bodies were full of nervous energy. Between them, they'd only managed a few hours sleep last night. There were two reasons for that. One of them was anticipation of the task ahead of them this morning. And the other was that there were meant to be four of them there in the diner. One of their team was missing. He’d gone out late last night to get some pizza and had never come back.

His disappearance had seriously unsettled each member of the trio. One of them, the leader of the group, was doing his best to eat something from a plate in front of him. It was a slice of apple pie doused with cream, more dessert than breakfast. He’d ordered it out of habit but it wasn’t going down.

Watching him struggle with the pie, the man sitting across from him frowned. Dark-haired and wiry with a forgettable face, he was dressed in a thick jacket and sweater, the faint wispy lines of some tattoos visible just above the collar.

‘How the hell can you eat right now, Bleeker?’ he asked.

The man called Bleeker glanced up at him. He hesitated, then admitted defeat and tossed the fork on the plate, grabbing his coffee and forcing down a mouthful of caffeine. Around the cup, his knuckles were red and bruised.

His first name was Paul but everyone called him Bleeker. Even his mother. At twenty eight years old, he was a complete and utter failure in every aspect of his life. He’d dropped out of high school with no qualifications. He had no girlfriend. He lived alone and was overweight. He’d never held down a job for longer than a couple of months and that was only if they took him on in the first place. Being a convicted felon didn’t help his cause. The only thing he had in his life that meant something was membership of a certain organisation. After a stint upstate two years ago, he’d joined the group his first week inside and had been a member ever since. He’d signed up partly out of curiosity and a need to belong, but mostly out of wanting to survive his prison term and avoid getting gang-raped in his cell or shanked out in the yard. However, he’d been pleasantly surprised at the perks that had followed after he was released. Given that he’d done legit time, he found he wasn’t at the bottom of the food chain for once. Suddenly he had some authority and people willing to do what he said. For the first time in his life, Paul Bleeker had a say in something. That unfamiliar feeling of importance had increased over time, to the point where he now didn’t take shit from anybody. And if he saw an opportunity, he took it.

All those factors had put him in the diner this morning and set in course what would take place in the city later that day. His bruised knuckles tightening around the mug, he drank from his coffee, thinking of all those years when he’d been treated like shit and how he’d had to put up with it.

After this morning, that would never happen again.

The diner was reasonably busy, people drifting in and out, the bell above the door frequently dinging and a blast of cold air accompanying each entrance and exit. Christmas music from the sound system filled the air, mingling with the murmurs of low conversation and the noise from the kitchen around the back. A tired-looking middle-aged waitress wandered over to their table, giving them a perfunctory smile, a pot of coffee in her hand.

‘Refill?’

Bleeker nodded, pushing his cup towards her. The woman filled it, then looked at the other two men. Neither responded and she moved away.

‘You think he got cold feet?’ asked the man sitting beside Bleeker, looking at the empty space in the four-man booth. He was the youngest of the group, just turned twenty years old with a slight frame and a weak face. His eyes were darting nervously around the room, his leg jiggling under the table.

The man across the table shook his head.

‘You know Ray. He isn’t a p-ssy.’

‘So where the hell is he?’

‘Forget him,’ Bleeker said. ‘Whether he ran or not, we’ve got a job to do. You need to focus. We do this and we do it right.’

Silence followed. Bleeker drank some of his fresh coffee, then looked at his watch.

‘Time check.’

The other two looked at their watches.

‘10:25.’

‘Check.’

‘Check.’

Bleeker took a deep breath. ‘So let’s do this thing. Donnie, pay the tab.’

Bleeker and the other man slid out from the booth. The kid called Donnie pulled a twenty from his wallet and trapped it under a glass, then moved out and joined the others. Together, the three men walked to the door of the diner.

Each of them carrying a white plastic bag containing a rectangular shoebox.