Having trotted out his latest eye candy, Wells got down to the serious business of reminding all the do-gooders in the room how much good they were doing for the city’s less fortunate.
“And no one,” he decreed, “has been more supportive of Silver Bullet than Her Honor, the mayor of New York, Muriel Sykes.”
The city’s first female mayor, her approval rating still sky-high after only four months in office, was greeted by enthusiastic applause as she stepped up to the podium.
The busboy did not applaud. He slid his smartphone from his jacket pocket and tapped six digits onto the keypad.
One, two, two, nine, nine, seven.
He stared at it, not seeing a sequence of numbers but a moment in time that had changed his life forever: December 29, 1997. His finger hovered over the Send button as the mayor began to speak.
“I’m not a big fan of giving speeches at rubber chicken dinners,” she said, “even when the chicken turns out to be grade A5 Miyazaki Wagyu beef.”
Everyone but the busboy found that funny.
“On the second day of my administration, I had a meeting with the four founders of Silver Bullet. They showed me a picture of an abandoned old warehouse in the Bronx, and I said, ‘Who owns that eyesore?’ And they said, ‘You do, Madam Mayor. But if you sell it to us for a dollar, we will raise enough money to convert it into permanent housing for a hundred and twenty-five chronically homeless adults.’
“I accepted their offer, framed the dollar, and am thrilled to announce that next month we will start construction. I’m here tonight to thank you all for your generous contributions and to introduce one of the four men who spearheaded this project. He is the brilliant architect whose vision will turn that dilapidated monstrosity into a beautiful apartment complex for some of our neediest citizens. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Del Fairfax.”
Fairfax, architect to the one percent, stepped onto the stage to show off what wonders he could create for the indigent. Spot-on handsome and aw-shucks personable, he rested a laptop on the podium, flipped it open, and said, “I know how fond you all are of PowerPoint presentations, so I put one together for you. Only ninety-seven slides.”
The half-sloshed crowd warmly gave him his due.
“Just kidding,” he said. “Princeton told me if I showed more than five, you’d start asking for your money back. The new facility will be called Tremont Gardens. First, let me show you what it looks like now.”
He picked up a wireless remote and pushed a button.
The explosion rocked the Cotillion Room.
Del Fairfax’s upper torso hurtled toward the screen behind him, while the bomb’s jet spray of ball bearings, nails, and glass shards chewed into his lower half, scattering bits and pieces across the stage like a wood chipper gone rogue.
Thick smoke, flying shrapnel, and abject fear filled the air.
The busboy, standing far from the backblast, slipped through the emergency exit, leaving in his wake sheer pandemonium, as four hundred New Yorkers found themselves caught up in the nightmare they had been dreading since September 11, 2001.
PART ONE
SEX, DRUGS, AND HIGH-STAKES POKER
CHAPTER 1
Kylie and I had never been attached to Mayor Sykes’s security detail before, but once she agreed to speak at the Silver Bullet Foundation fund-raiser, she recruited us for the night.
The word came down from our boss. “The mayor wants to do a little fund-raising of her own,” Captain Cates said. “She comes up for reelection in three and a half years, and as long as she’s going to spend the evening rubbing elbows with her biggest donors, she wants to assure them that she’s not just a champion of the unfortunate poor. She cares deeply about the disgustingly rich. And what better way to demonstrate her concern for their welfare than by trotting out a couple of poster cops from NYPD Red?”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Kylie said. “Doesn’t she realize we already spend sixty hours a week overprotecting the overprivileged? Now she’s inviting us to suck up to them at some—”
Cates cut her off. “Did I use the word invite? Because the last time I read the department manual I didn’t see anything about invitations being passed down the chain of command. The mayor specifically instructed me to assign Detectives Kylie MacDonald and Zach Jordan to her security detail. Consider yourselves assigned. No RSVP required.”
I figured it would be the most boring night of the week. And I was right—until the podium exploded.
It was one of those shock and awe explosions. The blinding flash, the deafening boom, the thick smoke, the chemical stench, and the flying chunks of wood, glass, metal, and Del Fairfax.
Mayor Sykes had just come off the stage and returned to her seat when the bomb went off. Kylie and I were only an arm’s length away from her. We yanked her from her chair and, shielding her body with ours, bulled our way through the chaos toward our prearranged exit door.
At least fifty other frenzied people had the same idea.
I keyed my radio and yelled over the din, “Explorer, this is Red One. Vanguard is safe. Egress Alpha is blocked. We’re making our way toward Bravo.”
We did a one-eighty and shoved the mayor toward the kitchen. The path was clear, and the vast stainless steel hub of the hotel’s multimillion-dollar banquet business was almost deserted. Except for a few stragglers, the staff had beaten a quick retreat through a rear fire door and down a stairwell to the employee locker rooms.
At that point, many of them decided that they were out of harm’s way, and at least twenty of them were standing in the corridor, almost every one with a cell phone to his or her ear.
“NYPD. Get out of the way! Get out of the fucking way!” Kylie bellowed as we elbowed our way through the logjam.
A hotel security guard saw us coming and pushed open a metal door that led to the outside world. As soon as she felt the cool night air and heard the sounds of her city, the mayor stopped.
“Please,” she said. “I’m too old for this shit. Let me catch my breath.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Kylie said. “Not here. We only have another hundred feet. Keep going, or Zach and I will carry you to the car.”
The mayor gave Kylie an enigmatic stare that could have been anywhere on the spectrum from contempt to gratitude.
“Nobody…” she said, breathing heavily, “carries…Muriel Sykes…anywhere. Lead the way.”
We single-filed down a narrow alleyway, past a row of Dumpsters, and I radioed ahead to her team.
The alley came out on East 61st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. Just as we got to the far end, the mayor’s black SUV drove up onto the sidewalk. Her driver, Charlie, jumped out and swung open the rear door. I offered to help the mayor into the back seat, but she waved me off.
“This is as far as I’m going,” she said.
“Ma’am, this is not the place for you to be,” Kylie said.
“A maniac just set off a bomb in my city, Detective. This is my responsibility.”
“Yes, ma’am, but maniacs have a bad habit of setting off secondary bombs targeting people who have just run from the first,” Kylie said. “And it’s our responsibility to get you to safe ground.”
“Madam Mayor,” Charlie said, “they’re setting up a command center at the Park Avenue Armory. I can have you there in two minutes.”
Crisis averted. The mayor got in the car, shut the door, and rolled down her window. “Thank you, Detectives,” she said. That was it. Three words, and the window went back up.
Within seconds, the oversize, bulletproof Ford Explorer peeled out and, with lights flashing and sirens wailing, whisked Muriel Sykes away to the longest night of her fledgling administration.
“I hate these boring babysitting jobs,” Kylie said. “Let’s go do some real police work.”
The two of us ran back down the alley and up the stairs toward the smoke-filled ballroom.
CHAPTER 2