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He did not have to say any more. Marcus knew about the Russian, as did the other member of his unit in the NYPD Intelligence Division. The Russian was an arms supplier who had been spotted a year ago. The Division had enough to shut him down immediately but the order had come from on high: ‘Keep him in play.’ It was a familiar tactic. Leave a bad guy in business, watch who comes and goes and hope he leads you to some worse guys. Throw back the minnow, catch the shark.
‘Surveillance camera caught a man in black entering the Russian's place last night, leaving an hour later. Traced him to the Tudor Hotel, 42nd and Second.’
Marcus did not react, just kept tapping away at his keyboard, for all the world an urban guy reshuffling his iTunes collection. But he knew what the location meant. The Tudor was perhaps the nearest hotel to the United Nations building. And this was the UN's big week. Heads of government from all over the world had piled into New York to address the General Assembly. US Secret Service were crawling all over the place in preparation for the President's visit later in the week, but there were more than a hundred other prize targets already here, all jammed within a few Manhattan blocks for seventy-two fraught hours. In a week like this, anything was possible. A Kurd bent on assassinating the head of the Turkish government, a Basque separatist determined to blast the Spanish prime minister, ideally on live television: you name it.
‘Placed a tap on the Tudor Hotel switchboard last night. Recorded a guest calling down to reception this morning, asking about visiting times to the UN. “Is it true tourists can go right into the Security Council chamber itself?”’
‘Accent?’ It was the first word Marcus had spoken.
‘Part British, part “foreign”.’
‘OK’
‘You need to get down there. Watch and follow.’
‘Description?’
‘White male. Five-eight. Heavy black coat, black woollen hat.’
‘Weight?’
‘Hard to tell. Coat's bulky.’
‘Back-up?’
‘There's a team.’
Felipe Tavares was now outdoors. Behind him was the temporary white marquee that served as the UN visitors' lobby – still up after five years. Not much tourist traffic yet, too early. So far it was just regular UN staff, permits dangling like necklaces. Not much for him to do. He looked up at the sky, now darkening. Rain was coming.
* * *
Marcus stationed himself on the corner of 42nd and Second Avenue – still called Nelson and Winnie Mandela Corner – tucked into the doorway of McFadden's Bar. Diagonally opposite was the Tudor Hotel. The first drops of rain were a help; the shelter gave him an excuse to be standing there, doing nothing. And it meant the Tudor's doorman, in cape and peaked cap, was too busy fussing with umbrellas and cab doors to notice a shifty guy in dreads across the street.
That was how Marcus liked it; to be unnoticed. It had become a speciality of his back when he was doing undercover work in the NYPD's narcotics squad. Since he had moved over to the Intel Division a year ago it had become a necessity. The thousand men and women of what amounted to New York's very own spy agency, a legacy of 9/11, kept themselves secret from everyone: the public, the bad guys, even their fellow cops.
He had been waiting twenty-five minutes when he saw it. A blur of black emerging through the hotel's revolving door. Just as it turned towards him, the doorman stepped forward with his umbrella, blocking Marcus's view of the man's face. By the time the umbrella was out of the way, the blur of black had turned right. In the direction of the UN.
Marcus spoke into what those around him would have believed was a Bluetooth headset for a cellphone. ‘Subject on the move.’
Without waiting for a response he started walking, keeping a few paces behind the man on the other side of the six, traffic-filled lanes of 42nd Street. A voice crackled into his ear, sounding distant. ‘Do we have a positive ID?’
Marcus shot another look. The man was swaddled in the thick, dark coat the handler had mentioned; his head was covered in a black woollen hat pulled low, and he was no more than five feet and eight inches tall. The subject matched perfectly the description of the man seen at the Russian's last night. He pressed the button clipped to his sleeve: ‘Affirmative. We have a positive ID.’
Suddenly the man in black began to turn, as if checking for a tail. Of course he would: trained terrorists didn't just let themselves get followed. Marcus swivelled quickly, switching his gaze to the steps that led up to a small city playground. In his peripheral vision he could tell the subject was no longer looking at him, but was marching onwards.
Something about the man's gait struck Marcus as odd. Was he limping slightly? There was a restriction to his movements, something slowing him down. He walked like a man carrying a heavy weight.
Suddenly the East River came into view. They had reached the corner of First Avenue: UN Plaza was visible. The rain was getting heavier now, making it harder to see.
The man in black had reached the crossroads, the traffic heavy. Marcus hung back on his side of the street, all the while keeping his eye fixed on the subject, who had now stopped by the first entrance to the United Nations, reading the sign: ‘Staff, Delegates and Residents. Correspondents Only.’ Now the subject moved on, separated by the black iron railings from a procession of flagpoles, each one empty. Further back loomed the trademark curve of glass and steel that was the UN headquarters.
Marcus cursed his short leather jacket, feeble against this downpour. He pulled his collar up to stop the rain running down his neck. The man in black seemed untroubled by the weather. He moved past another UN gate, this one for cars, and another green-tinted sentry box.
Marcus stopped for a moment in the doorway of the Chase Bank. The second he did so an oversized tourist bus – doubtless full of oversized tourists – pulled up into the slip road that fronted the UN between 45th and 46th.
‘Lost visual, lost visual!’ Marcus urged into his mouthpiece.
‘I got it,’ said another voice over the air, instant and calm. ‘Subject has halted outside main gate.’
Marcus walked on, trying to get ahead of the tourist bus without revealing himself. His headset crackled again.
‘Subject back on the move.’ OK, thought Marcus with relief. A false alarm. The man in black was not trying to enter the UN building after all.
At last the bus pulled out, giving Marcus a clear view of the subject, now walking further down First Avenue. His pace was quickening slightly, thanks to the steep downward slope. But this was no relaxed stroll. Marcus could see him studying the garden on the other side of the railings intently. He had drawn level with a large, heroic sculpture – the slaying of a dragon, the beast apparently fashioned out of an old artillery cannon – and stopped as if looking for something.
Marcus squinted. Was he searching for another, unguarded, way into the UN compound? If he was, he clearly had not found it. Now, with renewed purpose, the man turned around, heading back towards the main entrance.
Felipe Tavares' radio was bulky, low-tech and in this rain barely audible. It was hard to separate the static crackle from the rest of the noise. But the word ‘Alert’ came through clear enough, especially when repeated twice.
‘Watch Commander to main entry points, this is the Watch Commander to main entry points.’ Felipe recognized the accent: the guy from the Ivory Coast who'd started three months ago. ‘We have information on a possible threat to the building. Suspect is male, five foot eight, wearing a heavy black coat and dark woollen hat. No more details at present, but stay vigilant. Please stop and apprehend anyone fitting that description.’
Felipe had barely digested the message when he saw a blur of black striding, head down, towards the gate he was guarding.
Marcus was now halfway across First Avenue, struggling to hear the voice in his ear above the traffic.
‘… enter the UN compound. Repeat, agents are not to enter the UN compound.’
He stopped as he reached the kerb of the slip road, now just yards away from the man he had followed for more than ten minutes, and watched him walk briskly through the gate and up the few steps to the small piazza in front of the white marquee. He had crossed into UN territory: he was now officially beyond reach. All Marcus could see was the man's back. He felt his heart fill with dread.
From this angle, at the side of the piazza, Felipe could only see a little of the man's face in profile, the hat and the collar of his coat obscuring even that. But he fitted the Watch Commander's description perfectly.
Felipe watched him stop, as if contemplating what stood before him. Then he took three more paces forwards, then stopped again. What was he doing?
The security man could feel his palms growing moist. He was suddenly aware of how many people were around, dozens of them crossing between him and this black-coated figure. So many people. He wondered if he should say something into his radio, but all he could do was stare, frozen, his gaze fixed on the coat. It was raining, but it was certainly not cold. Why was the coat so thick, so heavy? Answering his own question spread a wave of nausea through him, starting in his stomach and rising into his throat.
Felipe looked around, desperate to see half a dozen of his fellow officers descending on this scene, men who by their very presence would take the decision for him. He wanted to use his radio – ‘Believe suspect could be armed with a bomb. Repeat, believe suspect could be armed with a bomb!’ – but what if that only provoked him to act? Felipe Tavares was paralysed.
The man was on the move again, now just yards away from the marquee. Felipe thought that perhaps he should wait, let him go through the doors and be stopped by Security. He wouldn't stand a chance: he'd never get past the detectors or a frisk. But he wouldn't care. That, Felipe realized as the blood drained from his head, was the absolute horror of it. Nothing could scare this man.
Now the subject changed course again, still showing his back to Felipe, but turning to face the street. Felipe wanted to cry out, demand that the man freeze and put his hands in the air. But that, he understood, could be no less fatal. Once the man knew he'd been discovered, he would push the button immediately, right here. And there were just so many people around …
Felipe did not decide to do it. That much he would remember later: there was never a decision. He simply reached for his gun. And at that moment he saw ahead of him, through the black iron railings, two men, one of them young, black and dreadlocked, both raising their hands, showing their palms, as if in surrender. The sheer alarm on their faces, the mortal panic etched on them, settled it for him. In a single motion, he pulled out his weapon and aimed it squarely at the man in black.
The next moment was one Felipe Tavares would replay over and over until his last breath, usually in slow-motion. For the rest of his life, it would be the last image he would see at night and the first when he woke up each morning. It would sear itself behind his eyelids. At the centre of it were the faces of those two men. They were aghast, not just frightened but shocked by what they had seen. One of them shouted the single word: No!
Felipe was certain what had happened. The man in black had obviously undone his coat, revealing the explosive vest underneath. The two men, on the other side of the railings, had seen that he was about to blow himself up. The sound of that cry, the look of horror on the dreadlocked man's face, coursed through Felipe, sending a charge of electricity down his right arm and into his finger. He squeezed the trigger once, twice, and watched the man collapse at the knees, falling slowly, even gracefully, like a chimney stack detonated from below.
Felipe couldn't move. He was fixed to the spot, his arms locked into position, still aiming at the man now lying in a heap no more than five yards before him.
He heard nothing for a while. Not the echo of the gunshots. Not the cries, as the crowd scattered like pigeons. Not the alarm that had been set off inside the UN building.
The first voice he heard was that of a fellow officer, who had dashed out of the marquee at the sound of gunfire. She now stood over the corpse, repeating the same word over and over, ‘No. No. No.’
Unsteadily, dumbly, Felipe walked over to the pile of black clothes now ringed by a spreading puddle of blood. And, in an instant, he understood. There, at his feet, was not the body of a suicide bomber. There was no explosive vest filling that jacket. All it had contained was the flesh and bone of a man, now broken and unmoving. Felipe could even see why he had been wearing a heavy coat in September. He understood it all and the horror of it made his knees buckle.
Felipe Tavares, and the growing crowd of security officers now circling him, were all looking at the same thing.
The corpse of a white-haired and very old man.
CHAPTER TWO (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
There was a moment, lasting perhaps two beats, of silence and then the noise erupted. There were screams of course – a man first, yelping in a language few around him understood – and then the cries of three women who had been posing for a photograph by the Pop Art sculpture of a gun, its barrel twisted into a knot. They had fallen to the ground, their larynxes temporarily stopped in fright, but now their fear pealed as loud as church bells. Soon there was crying, shouting and the sound, just audible, of a man contemplating the shard of human bone that had landed at his feet, murmuring in his own tongue, ‘Good God’.
Some in the marquee began to panic; one sounded the fire alarm. The rest remembered the drill they had practised. They abandoned their posts at the scanning machines, rushing to stand like sentries at the doors of each entrance, their pistols brandished. The United Nations headquarters was going into lockdown.
Felipe Tavares was now flanked by two colleagues, guiding him away from the corpse which lay, still uncovered and untouched, on the ground. Tavares was talking feverishly, babbling about the men he had seen at the gate, describing the horror on their faces – but when his fellow officers looked, they could see no one.
The noise soon got much louder. Less than ninety seconds after the shooting, the first of forty NYPD squad cars converged on UN Plaza, their lights flashing, their sirens wailing: this was the ‘surge’ they had practised nearly a dozen times since 9/11, the full might of the New York Police Department rapidly converging on a single spot. Several cars disgorged SWAT teams, the men, their flesh buttressed in Kevlar, armed with assault rifles, charging forward like GIs storming a Normandy beach. Soon they ringed the entire UN perimeter, their guns trained on the terrified men and women within.
First Avenue was free of traffic now, thanks to the NYPD officers armed with 50mm machine guns who had sealed the road from both north and south, 30th Street all the way to 59th. The UN headquarters now sat in the centre of a ‘sterile zone’ thirty blocks long. Since First Avenue was a main artery for the eastern half of Manhattan, New York City was about to seize up.
In the air, four NYPD Agusta A119 helicopters equipped with high-resolution, thermal-imaging ‘super-spy’ cameras now hovered, together policing an impromptu no-fly zone over the entire area. At the same time, on the East River, police launches took off from their bases in Throgs Neck, Brooklyn and along the Queens shoreline. No one would be able to enter or escape the United Nations compound by air or by water.
Not much later, the NYPD's Chief of Detectives arrived with his own lights and sirens. To his pleasure, he had got there ahead of Charles ‘Chuck’ Riley, the Police Commissioner, whose motorcade and motorcycle outriders pulled up a few moments later. Both nodded with satisfaction as they observed a lockdown utterly complete. As their aides would brief reporters for the rest of the day, there had been a suspected terror attack on one of the city's ‘high value targets’ and New York had responded ‘with swift and deadly force’.
But as they stepped out of their cars and shook hands with each other, the two men instantly saw the nature of their problem. They could approach the now-locked steel gate of the UN but go no further. They had reached the limit of the NYPD's authority, the very boundary of United States sovereignty. They were able to look into the eyes of the two men on the door, one a policeman from Montenegro, the other from Belgium. The Commissioner was sure he could see their hands trembling.
Inside, on the thirty-fourth floor, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs heard the fire alarm before he heard anything else. Henning Munchau leapt to his feet. He checked his outer office: nobody there, too early. He called down to front desk security but the phone just rang and rang. He checked his window, wondering for a moment if he was about to see a 747 steaming through the air, larger and lower than it should be, about to pierce the glass skin of the UN headquarters, killing the eight thousand people who worked within as well as a good number of the world's heads of government.
It was only then that his deputy, a Brazilian, rushed in, the blood absent from his face. He struggled to speak, and not just because he was out of breath. ‘Henning, I think you need to come right away.’
Eighteen minutes after Felipe Tavares had fired his fatal shot, Henning Munchau was standing close to the lifeless body that had still not been touched, save for the waterproof cape placed over it. The rain was still coming down.
At his side stood the Under-Secretary-General for Safety and Security, stunned into silence. Both had just received an instant briefing, giving them the roughest outline of what had happened. Munchau saw the discotheque of lights that now ringed the UN compound and the small army of NYPD men that surrounded it and felt like the inhabitant of a medieval castle on the first day of a siege.
And now he could see, standing on the other side of the railings, a face he recognized, one rarely off the front page of the city papers, the man they called ‘The Commish’. This was one legal conference that would have to take place outside, on foot and in the rain.
‘Commissioner, I am Henning Munchau, chief lawyer of the United Nations.’
‘Good to meet ya, Henning,’ the Commissioner said, his face and tone conveying nothing of the sort. ‘We appear to have a situation.’
‘We do.’
‘We cannot enter these premises and respond to this incident unless you formally request that we do so.’ The language was officialese, the accent down-home Southern.
‘Looks like you've already responded in quite a big way, Commissioner.’ Though German, Munchau spoke his eerily fluent English with a hint of Australian, both accent and idiom, the legacy, so UN legend had it, of his service in the UN mission in East Timor.
Riley shrugged. ‘We cannot enter the compound without your consent. And I'm assuming you don't have the resources to handle a terrorist incident.’
Henning tried to hide his relief. It meant the NYPD had not yet heard about the dead man. That would give him time.
‘You're quite right,’ Munchau said, struck by the strangeness of speaking through metal railings in the rain, like an outdoor prison visit. He envied the Commissioner his umbrella. ‘But I think we need to agree some terms.’
The policeman smiled wanly. ‘Go ahead.’
‘The NYPD come in but only at the request and at the discretion of the United Nations.’
‘No discretion. Once you let us in, it's our investigation. All or nothing.’
‘Fine, but none of this.’ He gestured towards the SWAT teams, their guns cocked. ‘This is not the UN way. This is not Kabul.’ Munchau saw Riley bristle, so he went further. ‘This is not Baghdad.’
‘OK, minimal show of force.’
‘I'm talking one or two armed men only, to accompany your detectives.’
‘Done.’
‘And your investigation to be shadowed at all times by a representative of the UN.’
‘A representative?’
‘A lawyer. From my team.’
‘A lawyer? For Christ's—’
‘Those are the conditions.’
Munchau saw the Commissioner weigh it up, knowing he could hardly refuse. A suspected terror attack in New York, the NYPD had to be involved. ‘The Commish’ couldn't go on television saying that the department was sitting this one out, whatever the explanation. Munchau knew that: Riley would want to be on the air within the hour, reassuring New Yorkers that he had it all under control.
Now a black limo pulled up, with a whole new battalion of lights and sirens. Behind it were two satellite TV trucks, clearly given special permission to come through. The Mayor had arrived.
‘OK,’ the Commissioner said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I accept.’
Munchau offered his hand through the railings and the policeman took it hurriedly. Munchau nodded to the UN guard on the gate, who fumbled with the lock until it opened.
Watching the TV reporter heading his way, Munchau made a point of raising his voice to declare, ‘Mr Commissioner, welcome to the United Nations.’
CHAPTER THREE (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
It took time for the Chef de Cabinet of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to convene this meeting. Besides Munchau and his counterpart in Security, the UN's most senior officials, the rest of the elite quintet of USGs – Under-Secretaries-General – had been on their way to the building when the shooting happened. (The UN high command tended to work late, but did not start especially early.) Thanks to the shutdown of First Avenue, none reached UN Plaza much before ten a.m.
Now, at last, they were gathered in the Situation Center. The more cynical folk in the building always cracked a smile at that name. Built in the aftermath of 9/11, this heavily armoured, lavishly equipped and top secret meeting place was clearly modelled on the legendary Situation Room of the White House. But of course the UN could not be seen to be aping the Americans: the United States' many enemies in the UN would not tolerate that. Nor could the Americans be allowed to believe that the UN Secretary-General was getting ideas above his station, imagining himself a match for the President of the United States. So the UN would have no Sit Room, but a Sit Center, which made all the difference.
At its heart was a solid, polished table, each place around it equipped discreetly with the sockets and switches that made all forms of communication, including simultaneous translation, possible. Facing the table was a wall fitted with state-of-the-art video conferencing facilities: half a dozen wide plasma screens that could be hooked up rapidly by satellite, across secure links, to UN missions around the globe. The Secretary-General was never on the road for less than a third of the year, but the existence of the Sit Center meant that he did not always have to leave New York if he wanted face-to-face talks with his own people. Above all, it was there for when disaster struck.
There had been no need for video links this time: the danger was right here in New York. The Chef de Cabinet, Finnish like his boss, began by explaining that the building remained in partial lockdown, with authorized access and egress only. No one would be let in or out without the express permission of the Legal Counsel. That had been agreed with the New York Police Department who wished to interview every witness, even if that meant interviewing the entire UN workforce.
The Chef de Cabinet went on to confirm that the Secretary-General himself had not been inside UN Plaza at the time. He had been at a breakfast at the Four Seasons held in his honour and was now heading over through horrendous traffic. He had told his audience that he had made a deliberate decision to continue with his planned engagement, that to do otherwise would be ‘to hand a victory to those who seek to disrupt our way of life’. Apparently that had elicited an ovation, but it made Henning Munchau wince. Not only because it felt like a crude pander to New Yorkers, echoing their own post-9/11 rhetoric of defiance, and not only because he reckoned it would have been smarter politics for the new Secretary-General to have stood with his own people as they appeared to come under attack, but largely because the SG had now opened up a gap between public perception of the morning's incident – a terrorist outrage, bravely thwarted – and what Henning knew to be the reality.
