Read Online Manhattan Lockdown by Paul Batista - Free Book Online Page B

suffered.”
    John was crying now, a long wail that Roland couldn’t associate with the man he knew. Still staring at the array of twinkling and flashing lights on the expanse of the bridge, Roland just waited. He had to accept this man’s pain.
    At least a minute passed before John’s ravaged voice came back. “Where is her body?”
    Roland rubbed his gritty eyes, which were still scratched, dry and irritated from the explosive dust. Sarah Hewitt-Gordan, a woman who looked forward to the gift of life every day, a woman who made him laugh and gave him ideas in the brilliant flow of her conversation, and who made love to him with a wild passion that always astonished him, was now a torn body temporarily lost somewhere in this wounded city.
    â€œNo one’s been able to tell me that, John. There are over one thousand people who are dead. It’s impossible at this point to know whoall of them are. The morgues are overwhelmed. For years we’ve designated places to use as temporary morgues if this ever happened.”
    More calmly, more like the stiff upper lip British Army officer, John said, “I understand.”
    â€œThe recovery people probably have no way of knowing who she is.”
    â€œI want to retrieve her. And bring her back here.”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œDo you have any idea when we will be able to fly there? When the airports will open?”
    â€œThere’s no way to know, John. Not tomorrow, maybe not for days.”
    There was a pause. “Roland, my daughter loved you.” “She loved you as well, John.”
    Roland Fortune heard another profound sob. Then silence. His cell phone pulsed and the screen abruptly read
Call Ended
. He sat in the cool dark, crying.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    G INA CARBONE HAD never been to Pier 37, even though she’d authorized building a secret, dark, unknown prison there. Until today it had never had inmates. The skeletal staff assigned to it posed as janitors and maintenance men, and their only role was to make sure that vagrants and kids never entered the pier. The prison inside, as she had ordered when it was installed, had to remain secret.
    Gina left PS 6 soon after an armored Hummer had taken Roland Fortune away to Gracie Mansion. His departure had drawn a wave of attention from the dozens of reporters who thronged Madison Avenue, and in that confusion Gina and three of her staff members slipped out a side door of the school to an unmarked Ford. The black car raced down Park Avenue. Forty blocks downtown, it sped into the strange and unique circular roadway that ran through the base of the old Helmsley Building and the towering Met Life Building over Grand Central Station. The curving, dark passageway was like a medieval tunnel, and the driver went at a speed that was so much like a race car that Gina, forced backward in the seat by the tug of the car’s velocity, said, “Who’s driving this? Mario Andretti?”
    There were men with rifles who were almost invisible in the dusk settling over the pier, the East River, and the low skylines of the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts across the river. Further to the south were the spans of the dreary industrial-looking Manhattanand Williamsburg bridges and then the glamorous Brooklyn Bridge, whose hundreds of suspension wires shined like the strings of an enormous harp in the final light of this bright day.
    The main entrance to the pier was a massive roll-up door installed in the 1950s, when the longshoreman’s union still dominated the waterfront, the long-gone era of
On the Waterfront
. Its surface was covered with rust and marked with bold swirls of spray-painted graffiti. The car stopped near the rolled-up gate. The gate opened only with manually operated pulleys. Leaving the car, Gina bent forward and passed under the gate as soon as it was high enough. The chain pulleys screeched.
    Unlike Pier 37’s decaying exterior, the inside glowed with the