Kehoe considered it a point of pride that he never allowed himself to show emotion at work and even though he was tired, he didn’t break character when he said, “Good work.”
The building had suffered very little damage—at least compared to the people inside—but it would be closed for months while construction crews tried to reset the clock on the damage. The fenestration had all blown out, and a few of the interior walls had been pushed in, but it was still recognizable as one of the city’s most prominent landmarks. Which was more than you could say for the victims—they looked like castings from Pompeii.
Less than an hour after the bombing, two representatives from the museum’s insurance underwriters showed up, asking for a tour. Kehoe didn’t bother letting them begin the chest-thumping, he simply told them to leave his command vehicle. But not before showing them the remains of a young woman who looked like a melted tire.
They wouldn’t be back.
Kehoe handed the envelope back to Curtis and nodded at the door; he needed some fresh air.
Kehoe and Curtis stepped out into the fall morning, and the light wind was in direct contrast to the humid, cramped environment of the command vehicle. It was state of the art, but when you piled more than the recommended 8.6 human bodies inside (which they had exceeded by 22.4 individuals), the space quickly became a humid closet that smelled of people. Kehoe hit the asphalt and took a deep breath, surprised that the air out here tasted as fresh as it did with a building full of pressure-cooked human beings mere yards away.
They had closed all traffic in the immediate vicinity—from 87th up to 90th, and from Fifth Avenue right across to Park—which meant the sounds of the city were somehow less intimate. Any cars in the zone had been towed, and the only foot traffic allowed inside the wire were residents—which was presenting its own particular set of problems with the NYPD as they checked IDs. Kehoe was proud to be a New Yorker (if only by transplant) because the citizenry were more good than bad. He had seen it during 9/11 and the big power outage of 2003—people donated blankets, handed out free sneakers for the bus and tunnel crowd, and gave away ice cream. But this time things felt different, as if the whole island could go feral. Kehoe (and the analysts he paid to do the thinking) believed that social media was responsible in that it was continually etching lines of demarcation between every discernible demographic, cutting the social fabric into smaller and smaller swatches. And things were getting worse as people started seeing the world in terms of us versus them.
Samir Chawla, the special agent in charge of the investigation, came up, coffee in hand. Curtis pocketed the evidence envelope, delivered the prerequisite I’ll keep you posted through the still-present nervous smile, and disappeared without shaking hands.
“Anything?” Kehoe asked his SAIC.
Chawla was a thin, fit man who ran on caffeine and salad. “With seven hundred and two victims, our people are buried under enough information to choke Google. I requested additional agents from the federal pool, and a few from Vermont, Jersey, and Mass have already arrived. We’re expecting a hundred more. One of the empty floors is being outfitted with workstations; the math on this one will be considerable.”
Kehoe looked up the street. The crowds were not pushing at the fencing, but they were making a lot of noise. The nutjobs had started arriving last night, holding up bristol board placards denouncing the attack as a false flag operation that had been orchestrated by the government. Some wore red ball caps, some wore QAnon T-shirts, some wore Nazi T-shirts, and some were dressed as Muppets. With Halloween a few days off, there was no shortage of costumes in the crowd, which presented its own set of security concerns. Kehoe wondered just when, specifically, postliteracy had morphed into complete stupidity. He wanted to feel sorry for these people, which he resented because they didn’t deserve the emotional space. What really bothered him was that they worked tirelessly to connect a bunch of unrelated dots when assembling a working model of even the most basic facts seemed to be impossible for them. Why was it that whenever there was a mass casualty event, the stupid gravitated en masse toward the assumption of conspiracy? Kehoe was not a pessimist—his job precluded that particular muscle—but every now and then he got tired and was tempted to give in.
Besides the rubberneckers, the media was making his life miserable. Every news network on the planet had one—if not several—crews at ground zero. Which translated to almost two thousand individuals from the entertainment corps on site. They had tents set up in the park, but they were being kept away for now. The bureau had yet to issue a comprehensive statement, other than they were in the initial stages of an investigation into what had all the earmarks of a terrorist attack. This concise and factual statement proved to be too complicated for the journalists, and they did what they did, placing blame on either Muslim or right-wing extremists, depending on the source.
But right now Kehoe had problems other than dealing with people who made things up. He crossed the street to the site proper and two of his men eased up on his flanks, doing bodyguard duty. Kehoe stopped in front of the museum and wondered what kind of a human being—or beings—were able to justify cooking 700-plus innocent people. Thirty years of trying to outthink society’s broken spokes had done nothing to assuage the repulsion he felt at times like this.
Even though all the workers wore matching white coveralls, Kehoe had no problem telling his team apart from the medical examiner’s: the bureau people were picking through the rubble, looking for evidence; the medical examiner’s minions were carting the dead out of the dust and placing them in vans that had been in constant rotation since last night. Two white-coveralled people from the ME’s office were rolling another body out, and as Kehoe watched, he was upset that he was thinking in terms of numbers, not lives.
The ME had two floors of offices and labs downtown, but nowhere near the capacity to handle this many bodies. A temporary facility had been set up in a warehouse earmarked for just such an emergency, where technicians would spend the next month sorting out which body went with what name.
“So what do you need that you do not have?”
Chawla didn’t spend any time thinking about the question. “I need more analysts. And more programmers. People who are good with numbers.”
There was some sort of a disturbance in the space behind Kehoe, and he turned, his men stepping to his front flanks in a protective measure.
A man in a red ball cap was corralled by two carbine-carrying policemen near the park wall across Fifth. The civilian had a GoPro mounted on his cap, and he kept pointing at it. The cops were shaking their heads as he screamed that he knew his rights.
One of the officers reached out and put a hand on Red Cap’s elbow and he crossed the threshold from angry to enraged. He spit on the cop and Kehoe knew that signaled the end of the argument—which the officer demonstrated by reaching around to the zip-tie cuffs hanging off his belt.
But Red Cap wasn’t interested in complying, and he faked left, then ducked right, scooching between the two policemen like a wiry little monkey.
Up the street the crowd let loose with a roar punctuated by whistles and applause. They began chanting, “Go! Go! Go! Go!”
Red Cap ran toward a stretcher being loaded into one of the vans. “False flag! False flag!” He swung a yellow utility knife.