But it had to be gotten through, so she got through that day, and then another. At the end of that day she took a cruiser back down to the Met and collapsed. Vlade awarded her a shower. The day after that she was ordered back to Central Park. After that she was put on boat patrol in lower Manhattan, cruising the canals and helping the drowned city.
This turned out to be ugly work. There were bodies floating in the canals; that was their first priority, and a gruesome unhappy one it was. Bloat and stink were setting in. People of all apparent ages had been killed, either drowned or hit by flying debris, it looked like. Then also animal bodies, less gruesome because of their fur, less unhappy because they were animals.
Navigation had to be reestablished, first in the avenues and big cross-canals, then the east-west regular canals. For quite a few of them clearing a passage wasn’t possible in the short term, as buildings had fallen across them. But the police had to sort out what was possible and what wasn’t, and establish detours, and talk it all over with the MTAs.
She was in charge of one big cruiser for the whole of the fifth day after the storm, patrolling Chelsea and the West Village, picking up refugees and clearing debris, and now, depressingly, keeping out looters, when she came on a low fast motorboat with an odd look, at Seventh and Thirtieth. She ordered them to stop by yelling at them with the bullhorn on the cruiser bridge, and brought her crew to high alert when she saw how the people on the boat were armed, and seemed to be considering whether to obey her or not.
Then they did stop, and she boarded them with her people covering her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
The captain of the boat, or the man in charge, patted his pad and showed her their papers. A private security firm, RNA, which stood for Rapid Noncompliance Abatement. “We’ve been hired to patrol the neighborhood here.”
“By who?”
“The neighborhood association.”
“Which one?”
“Chelsea Town House Association.”
Gen shook her head. “There is no such association.”
“There is now.”
“No. There isn’t. Who are you working for?”
“The Chelsea Town House Association.”
“Give me your ID and your working papers.”
The man hesitated and Gen gestured to her team, and four more officers leaped over the sides of the boat, holstered guns prominently displayed. Tasers, but still. They were armed. The men on the RNA boat were also armed.
Everyone stood there looking serious. Gen, the only woman on the boat, also the person in charge, kept a straight face, kept it professional and polite. Polite but firm. Maybe more firm than polite.
She sat down with the man and slowly put him through his ID paces. His security firm, Rapid Noncompliance Abatement, had apparently been hired by a neighborhood group that called itself the Chelsea Town House Association. They occupied the buildings on the Twenty-eighth block and were worried because so many buildings around them had been wrecked by the storm. They might have become an association very recently. They needed to protect their investment.
“Investment,” Gen repeated. She tapped around on her pad, looking for links and tapping a note to Olmstead and asking him to do the same. She was finding nothing when Olmstead got back to her: RNA is owned by Escher Security. Both do work for Morningside.
“We’re private investment security,” the man explained when Gen looked up at him.
“You sure are.”
“We’re on your side. We help you out.”
“Maybe so,” Gen said. “But we’re in an unusual situation here, and we don’t want any militia-type actions. We’ve got enough trouble. We’re going to want to talk to the people who hired you, so just give me their contact info and we’ll go from there. And this area is off-limits right now.”
“What is this, martial law?”
“This is New York, and we’re the New York Police Department. Ordinary law still holds.”
She took photos of all their documentation and got back on the police cruiser, thinking hard.
She gave Sergeant Olmstead a call. “Hey Sean, thanks for that. How did you find that connection between RNA and Escher so fast?”
“I’ve been looking into Escher pretty closely. They’re definitely Morningside’s security, and they clone subsidiaries to work on various Morningside projects. So RNA is one of those. The guy you talked to on that boat is actually on the Escher personnel list.”
“I see.”
“So, you know who else used to work for Escher? Three of the people now working at the Met tower for Vlade Marovich. Su Chen, Manuel Perez, and Emily Evans. They all worked for Escher, and they all left that off their résumés when they applied for the jobs at the Met. They all said they worked for one of the more distant clones. Out the arms of the octopus, you know.”
“Okay!” Gen said. “Maybe you’ve found the infiltration that made it possible for them to disable the cameras when they snatched Mutt and Jeff.”
“I think so.”
“And Morningside has worked with our lovely mayor?”
“Right. And also with Angel Falls, that’s the Cloisters guy, Hector Ramirez. Morningside is a really big octopus, and so is Ramirez. And I can’t get into either of their files. I’ve been trying, but the cloning makes it hard. In fact it looks to me like Morningside taught the octopus method to Escher. Heck, Escher may be just one of the arms of the Morningside octopus, probably. Just closer to the body.”
“Okay. Keep detaching the suckers on those arms. Look in particular for who made the offer on the Met.”
What a ruin it will make!
exclaimed H. G. Wells on first seeing the Manhattan skyline
c) Franklin
So I’m thinking, I’ve got the smallest boat in Manhattan and I’m the one going out after the biggest storm of all time to hunt down two crazy kids with a death wish? Really?
But it wasn’t just Vlade asking me in his heavy Slavic-mafia way, gravid or even morbid with the responsibility for all the creatures in his ark, including yea the littlest and most stupid among them. It was also Charlotte. And the way she put it was galling but ultimately effective:
“It will give you something to do,” she said. “The stock market is closed.”
“The stock market,” I scoffed. “As if that matters.”
“Yeah, well what are you going to do on a day like this? Trade bonds? It’s a holiday, Frank my boy. Go out and have some fun. Should be very exciting for your little speedboat. Things get too tough out there you can turn it into a submarine or a miniblimp, right? And besides those kids may need help. Very exciting for you.”
“Yeah right.”
But then she just gave me a look, with her little smile, and flicked me away like a mosquito. “I have to get to work,” she said. “Let me know how you do out there.”