I'm God

‘We’re in deep shit.’

Captain Alan Bellew threw down the New York Times, adding it to the other dailies that already lay strewn over the desk. After the previous night’s explosion, all the newspapers had produced special editions. They were full of theories, conjectures, suggestions. All of them were asking what the police were doing to ensure the safety of the citizens. The television channels could talk about nothing else, pushing all other world events into the background. All eyes were on New York. Correspondents were arriving from all over the world, as if America was in a state of war.

The latest explosion had occurred after nightfall on the banks of the Hudson, in Hell’s Kitchen in a warehouse on Twelfth Avenue, near the corner with 46th Street, right next to the Sea-Air-Space Museum, where the aircraft carrier Intrepid was on display. The building had disintegrated. Fragments had hit the moored ship and damaged the planes and helicopters displayed on the bridge, like a tragic echo of the wars they had fought. The window panes in the neighbouring buildings had been shattered by the blast. An elderly man had died of a heart attack. The street had partly slid into the Hudson. For a long time, burning fragments had floated on the water. It had been a desolate scene. Only the late hour had prevented another major massacre. The death toll amounted to no more than twenty, plus an unspecified number of wounded, none of them seriously. A group of night birds, whose only fault was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, had been blown apart and their remains strewn over the asphalt. No trace had been found of the warehouse’s night watchman. Some passing cars had been struck by the explosion and flung away as tangles of crumpled metal. Others had not braked in time and had ended up in the river together with the detritus of the street. The passengers had all died. The firefighters had fought for a long time to bring the blaze under control and the crime scene team had started their investigations as soon as the place had become accessible.

They were expecting the results at any moment.

After a sleepless night, Russell and Vivien were in the captain’s office, sharing his feelings of frustration, his inability to defeat the man who was defying them in this way.

One invisible man.

Bellew finally stopped pacing about the room and sat down, although that didn’t make him any less restless.

‘There’s been a lot of phoning going on. The president, the governor, the mayor. Anyone with any authority in this country has grabbed the phone and called someone else. Who then called the commissioner. Who of course called me straight afterwards.’

Russell and Vivien waited in silence for him to finish.

‘Willard feels as if he’s sinking, and he’s dragging me down with him. He feels guilty for being too cautious.’

‘What did you say to him?’

Bellew made a gesture that seemed to say that the answer was obvious and at the same time far from obvious. ‘I told him two things. One, that we don’t know for certain that we’re pursuing the right lead. Two, that the more people who know about this the more likely it is that the news will get out. If it reached the ears of Al-Qaeda, we’d have a real disaster on our hands. We’d have a ruthless competitor searching for that list. Think what a field day they’d have if they found it. The city already mined, just waiting to be blown up. If it was common knowledge, New York would be a desert in the space of three hours. You can just imagine it. Clogged highways, fighting, people dispersed all over the fucking map.’

Vivien could well imagine the picture the captain had conjured up. ‘What are the FBI and NSA saying?’ she asked.

The captain rested his elbows on the table. ‘Not much. You know how close to their chests those people like to keep things. Apparently they’re still pursuing the terrorism angle. Which means there’s not too much pressure coming from over there. Not for the moment, anyway. That’s one good thing, I guess.’

Russell had been lost in thought throughout the conversation between Vivien and Bellew. Now he intervened.

‘The only thing linking us to the person who set the bombs is Mitch Sparrow. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no doubt he was the guy in the wall. Nor is there any doubt that the document holder with the photographs isn’t his, which makes it likely that it was accidentally left behind by whoever stuck the poor guy in the concrete. So the two photographs, the one with the cat and the one taken in Vietnam, have to show his killer. What I think happened is that Sparrow discovered what he was doing, and the man killed him to stop him talking.’

The captain thought this over. ‘So they were co-workers.’

‘Whether continuously or occasionally, I don’t know. One thing’s for sure. That they were working in the same place when Sparrow disappeared.’

Russell took another moment to think, as if putting his ideas in order. Vivien was fascinated by his degree of concentration.

‘The person we’re looking for is clearly the son of the man who planted the bombs. The father was a Vietnam veteran, who came back with huge psychological wounds. Many soldiers were transformed by the war. Some never lost the taste for killing, even when they got back to civilian life. My brother saw this many times.’

Vivien heard the ghost of Robert Wade in Russell’s voice, but without any sense of anxiety. She looked at him and saw a face she knew looking out at the world with different eyes. She felt her heart swell for a moment before thoughts of the immediate problems facing them gained the upper hand.

Russell had not noticed a thing. Clearly and rationally, he continued, ‘Unfortunately, if whoever wrote the letter and planted the bombs had mental problems, his son seems to have inherited them tenfold. I get the impression from that letter that he never knew his father, and only found out about him after his death. I wonder why.’

Russell paused, leaving that crucial question hanging.

As if granting them a pause for thought, the telephone on the desk started ringing. The captain reached out his hand and lifted the receiver to his ear.

‘Bellew.’

He listened in silence to whatever the person at the other end was telling him. Vivien and Russell saw his jaw gradually clench. When he hung up, it was clear from the expression on his face that he would have liked to smash the telephone.

‘It was the head of the explosives team that’s been examining the debris on the Hudson.’

He paused, then said what they were all expecting to hear.

‘It’s him again. Same explosive, same kind of primer.’

Russell stood up, as if he needed to move after that confirmation.

‘Something just occurred to me. I’m no expert, but for this man to have decided to carry out what his father had planned, he has to be a sociopath or something like that, with all that that implies.’

He turned to look at Vivien and Bellew.

‘I’ve read that people like that usually develop compulsive patterns of behaviour. The first blast took place on Saturday evening. The second between Monday and Tuesday. Nearly two days later. If that madman has fixed that in his mind as the interval between one explosion and the other, we should have two more days to catch him before he decides to act again. I don’t even want to think…’

He left the sentence hanging. Then he concluded it, expressing in his tone all the gravity of the situation.

‘I don’t even want to think about what would happen if another explosion took place. Maybe in a building where thousands of men and women work.’

He had saved the worst hypothesis until last.

‘Not to mention that he might even decide to blow up all the buildings on the same day.’

Vivien saw the captain looking at Russell as if, in spite of everything, he was still wondering who this guy was and what he was doing in his office. A civilian discussing with them facts that according to the rules should have been confined to the police. The situation that had been created was absurd but