“What did you just say?” said Brooklyn Kale from the backseat. “The media? What are you talking about, Lopez?”
“Exactly, Arturo,” said Doyle, sitting beside her. “When you open your mouth, it would be nice if you maybe made some sense from time to time.” Jimmy Doyle, another young cop from the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, had become my right-hand man.
“Use your brains, fools,” Arturo insisted. “The media are right now in the process of doing millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of free PR work for whoever is doing this. Such over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage just sets the bar higher and higher each time for the nut jobs and terrorists to get everybody’s attention.
“Which means bigger explosions, more bodies, and more atrocities. They should take their cue from the baseball media, which nipped fan stupidity in the bud when they wisely decided to stop showing people who run onto the field.”
“So don’t tell people there’s terrorism? That’s your solution?” said Brooklyn.
“How about at least not sensationalizing it so much?” Arturo said. “This is a bloodbath. Stop selling the frickin’ popcorn.”
“Congrats, Arturo,” Doyle said as we skidded to a stop in the driveway of the Haven Avenue building’s underground parking garage. “I think you actually might have made your first-ever good point.”
“Shut up, people, please,” I said, turning up my radio as a just-arriving NYPD helicopter swooped in from the south and hovered over the building.
“There’s something on the east side of the building,” the pilot said after a minute. “It looks like some sort of a rifle.”
The ESU cops spilled out into the driveway and busted out their ballistic riot shields and submachine guns. We stayed behind them as we went across the pavement toward the side door of the building. Having neither the time nor the inclination to find and ask the super for the key, the ESU breach team unhesitatingly cracked the door open with a battering ram.
After dismissing the elevators as dangerous because of potential tampering, the ESU guys left a small contingent in the new building’s sleek marble lobby as the rest split up into the building’s two stairwells.
My team and I followed the ESU team in the north stairwell. Despite being pumped up with adrenaline, we had to stop twice for short breathers to get up the thirty-two floors.
We were the first team there. An alarm went off as the lead ESU guy hit the roof door, and we were out in the suddenly cool air with the roaring, hovering NYPD Bell helicopter right there almost on top of us. The pilot pointed to the top of a little structure that housed the elevator equipment.
I ran across the tar paper to its ladder and climbed up and just stood there staring at it.
CHAPTER 21
I’D NEVER SEEN anything like it before. I wasn’t an expert, but the long black rifle looked huge, like a sniper rifle, perhaps a .50 caliber. It was bolted into two strange, bulky stands that could have been motorized.
But the strangest thing was what was attached to the top of the rifle. Perched where the scope should have been was a bulky device about the size of a hardcover book that looked like a robotic owl. It had a single viewfinder in the sighting end and what looked like greenish-tinged binoculars in the front.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said ESU sergeant Terry Kelly as he arrived behind me.
“What the hell is it?”
The short, muscular cop spat some chewing tobacco as he knelt and carefully tilted the gun over on its side.
“One of those damn things!” he said. “On a .50-caliber Barrett! Of course. Why not? It’s like the training video said. Only a matter of time.”
“What are you talking about, Sergeant?” I said.
“We saw a Homeland Security video about this three weeks ago,” Kelly said. “See this scope thing on top? It’s a computerized targeting system. It has a laser range finder in front, like rich golf guys have to get exact distances.”
I nodded.
“Well, you get behind it and sight your target through the system’s long-range zooming video camera and just tag it with the laser. Then the computer calculates all the factors of the shot—the air density, Magnus effect, even target movement—and puts them through the computer. Then the computer—not you—robotically positions the gun and fires it.
“Anyone, a three-year-old child, can become a world-class sniper with it. All you have to do is tag the target. What am I saying? You don’t even have to be behind the gun! It has Wi-Fi.”
“So this was probably done remotely,” I said.
“Without a doubt,” he said. “Why expose yourself on a rooftop when all you have to do is set the gun up beforehand and just do it from cover? All you would need is to be within Wi-Fi range.”