Black Market

“Also reportedly struck during the siege of unexplained bombings were safe deposit and storage vaults at Chase and the U.S. Trust Company; the New York offices of NASDAQ; the venerable New York Stock Exchange Building; Three Hanover Square, which is where Manufacturers Hanover and the European American Bank were located.

“The full extent of this awesome damage, the complete toll, will not be known tonight. Probably not for days, from the look of this incredible chaos. First estimates of the actual number of explosions range from a dozen to as many as forty separate blasts… It is an awful, awful scene here in what remains of the once proud and lofty financial district of New York.”

Green Band had struck like an invisible army.

Two justifiably nervous New York City patrolmen, Alry Simmons and Robert Havens, were carefully threading a path through the smoldering ruins of the Federal Reserve Bank located on Maiden Lane. The two men were attached at their belts to five-hundred-yard-long safety lines snaking back toward the street.

The patrolmen were now deep inside what had once been the Fed's massive and richly ornamental public lobby. Indeed, the gray-and-blue limestone, the sandstone bricks of the Federal Reserve, had always impressed visitors with a sense of their durability and authority. The fortlike appearance, the stout iron bars on every window, had reinforced the image of self-importance and impregnability. The image had obviously been a sham.

The destruction that officers Simmons and Havens found downstairs in the coin section was difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to assess. Mountainous coin-weighing machines had been blown apart like a child's toys. Fifty-pound coin bags were strewn open everywhere.

The marble floor was easily three feet deep in quarters, dimes, and nickels. Building support columns had been knocked down everywhere on the basement floor. The entire structure seemed to be trembling.

In the deepest basement of the Federal Reserve Bank was the largest single accumulation of gold stored anywhere in the world. It all belonged to foreign governments. The Fed both guarded the gold and kept track of who owned what. In an ordinary change of ownership, the Fed merely moved gold from one country's bin to another's. The gold was transported on ordinary metal carts, like books in a library. The security system in the deep basement was so highly elaborate that even the bank's president had to be accompanied when he ventured into the gold storage area.

Now patrolmen Havens and Simmons were alone in the cavernous basement. Gold was everywhere around them. Rivers of shining gold ran through the dust and rubble. Gold bars, more than they could possibly count, surrounded them. There was well over a hundred billion dollars at the day's market price of three hundred and eighty-six dollars an ounce, all within their reach.

Patrolman Robert Havens was hyperventilating, taking enormously deep breaths. His broad, flat face was expressionless.

Suddenly both emergency policemen stopped inching forward. Robert Havens let out a sharp gasp. “Christ Jesus! What the hell is this?”

An armed Federal Reserve Bank guard was sitting on a caned wooden chair, directly blocking their path from the gold section into the Fed's main garage. The cane chair still smoldered.

The guard was staring directly into Robert Havens's eyes, but he was beyond words. He was horribly burned, charred a blistering charcoal black. The ghastly sight made them so sick, they almost missed the most important clue…

Wrapped around the bank guard's right arm was a shiny, bright green band.

As Archer Carroll carefully maneuvered his battered station wagon along the Major Deegan Expressway, the words of the Atlantic Avenue restaurant owner came back to him with the persistence of an unanswerable philosophical question: And what are you?… What are you, please tell me, mister?

He glanced at his tired face in the rearview mirror. Yeah, what are you, Arch? The Rashids and Hussein Moussa are bad people, but you're some kind of okay national hero, right?

He was drained, completely numb. He wanted everything to be quiet and still inside his throbbing head.

And what are you, mister?

“Nothing worth a shit,” he finally answered in the general direction of the station wagon's fogged windshield. He felt as if he were traveling inside a sealed capsule. The world he could see beyond the grimy car windows had retreated one step farther away from him.

He turned on the car radio, looking for a diversion from his mood.

Immediately he heard the news about Wall Street, delivered by a voice edged in the hushed hysteria so favored by newscasters when they describe events of national importance. Carroll turned up the volume.

Along with the newscaster's tensely delivered reportage were a couple of man-on-the-street interviews recorded against a brassy background of screaming sirens. The people spoke in shocked tones.

Carroll tightened his hands on the steering wheel. His mind was crowded with realistic images of urban guerrilla destruction. He understood that Wall Street was a perfect target for any determined terrorist group-but he couldn't make the jump from his thoughts to the horrible reality of what had just happened.

He didn't want to think about it. Not tonight, anyway. He was almost home, and he didn't need to drag the world inside the last sanctuary left to him.

Moments later Carroll swung his stiff, aching body inside the familiar, musty front hallway of his house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Automatically he hung his coat up on the hook under an ancient totem-the snoopy-eyed Sacred Heart of Jesus. Turn out the night-light. Home from the wars, at last, he thought.

As he slumped into the living room, Carroll sighed.

“Oh, poor Arch. It's almost eleven-thirty.”

“Sorry. Didn't see you there, Mary K.”

Mary Katherine Carroll was sitting neatly curled up on one corner of the couch. The room was only dimly illuminated by an amber light from the dining parlor.

“You look like a skuzzy Bowery bag man. Is that blood on your sleeve? Are you all right?” She stood up suddenly.

Carroll looked down at his torn, dingy shirtsleeve. He turned it toward the dining parlor light. It was blood all right. Dark, dried blood, but not his own.

“I'm fine. The blood isn't mine. At least I don't think it is.”

Mary Katherine frowned deeply as she came forward to examine her brother's arm. “The bad guys get banged up, too?”

Arch Carroll smiled at his twenty-four-year-old “baby” sister. Mary Katherine was the keeper of his house, the substitute mother for his four children, the uncomplaining cook and chief bottle washer, all for a two-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend, a “scholarship.” It was all he could afford to pay her right now.

“I had to kill one of them. He won't be bothering people with his plastique bombs anymore… The kids all asleep?”

The kids, in order of arrival, were Mary III, Clancy, Mickey Kevin, and Elizabeth. All four of them were far too Irish-American cute for their own good: outrageously tow-headed and blue-eyed, with infectious smiles and quick, almost adult wits. Mary Katherine had been their house mother for nearly three years now. Ever since Arch's wife, Nora, had died on December 14, 1982.

After Nora's funeral, after just one desolate night at their old New York apartment, the six of them had moved into the Carroll family homestead in Riverdale. The old house had been closed and boarded up since the deaths of Carroll's mother and father back in 1980 and 1981.

Mary Katherine had redecorated immediately. She'd even set up a huge light-filled painting studio for herself in the attic. The kids were out of New York City proper, at least. They suddenly had acres of fresh air and space in which to ramble around. There were definite advantages to being up in Riverdale. They had almost everything they needed up here… everything but a mother.