Sitting in the Suburban in the driving rain, snarled in traffic trying to get on the Brooklyn Bridge leaving Manhattan, Martin Franks was listening to 1010 WINS all-news radio about the attacks.
Franks swallowed hard against the searing pain in his upper right arm. Waiting for the narcotics to kick in, he checked the belt he’d placed as a tourniquet just below his shoulder and just above the gaping wound.
The treasury secretary’s bodyguard’s second shot had blown through Franks’s upper right shoulder, shattering the humerus bone and destroying nerves. Years of training was the only thing that kept Franks from blacking out in agony.
At the first stoplight south of the church, the assassin had looked in the rearview, saw no flashing lights, and dug with his left hand in his pockets for the two things he always carried into battle: commercially made foil packages that contained bandages treated with clotting agents and antibiotics and a small envelope containing forty OxyContin pills.
Franks shook six pills into his mouth and chewed them as he tore open his shirt. Swallowing the pills, he used his teeth to rip one clotting bandage free of the foil.
He slid it in under his shirt. When he stuffed the bandage in the entry wound, he almost fainted. When he got a second bandage and used it to stuff the exit wound, he’d dry-heaved and moaned.
The light turned green. Shaken, woozy, not thinking straight, Franks drove on rather than trying to take a left onto John Street.
His original escape plan called for him to abandon the Suburban as soon as possible, then get off the streets and use the subway to get uptown to Penn Station, where he’d catch an Amtrak to Albany and points north.
But being wounded like this changed everything.
Franks had to use the car to take him someplace far away where he could call for a specialist to help. The specialist would cost Franks hundreds of thousands of dollars, no doubt, but he’d live. He’d live and he’d…
In his daze and looking through the slapping windshield wipers and the driving rain, Franks tried to stay in his lane and focus on his options. He could get to the Carey Tunnel from here. But there was a toll, wasn’t there? Brooklyn Bridge, then.
He moaned when he realized he’d just missed another chance to go east. The intensity of the rain made traffic crawl as he drove farther south toward Battery Park and finally got on Water Street, where he turned and headed north.
When traffic came to a stop, Franks checked the wound again. The bleeding was slowing, and he didn’t feel like his lung had been damaged. The drugs kicked in like a warm fountain, going up his spine and into his head. He swooned.
A car honked. Franks came around, feeling better, sweeter. Traffic rolled forward half a block and stalled again. Then, on the radio, he heard the attorney general, now acting president, Larkin describe the scope of the conspiracy.
Five of them, Franks thought in awe. Coordinated attacks on the top five. Who does that?
Traffic started to move before he could consider his own involvement. He was a traitor, wasn’t he?
“Yes, that’s what I am,” he said, and he laughed bitterly and ate two more painkillers. “Just like dear old dad.”
Two minutes later, he heard Larkin institute martial law. The drugs became a wave, then, that washed over the assassin, and he barely kept the SUV in the lane.
The rain came in sheets. The windshield wipers swept wildly back and forth. He tried to use that visualization method that had served him so well in Afghanistan, tried to see what he was about to do, and he asked the universe to signal him if he was in danger.
Franks felt hypnotized and numb when he finally took a left on Beekman Street and crawled toward the right turn on Park Row and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Traffic slowed to a halt again.
On the radio, some army general was ordering people to get off the streets.
Where do they expect people to go? Franks thought, and he laughed at the absurdity of it.
Looking ahead through the rain and the wipers, he saw cruisers with lights flashing at the bridge entrance. He thought he saw dark figures walking between the cars, coming at him. And then he didn’t need a sign from above. He was positive that the police, five of them, guns drawn, were knocking on car windows and speaking to drivers and passengers alike.
Franks started to whistle “Carry On Wayward Son” and then pushed the button that popped the rear hatch. He yanked the car into park left-handed and grabbed his pistol. He forced himself over the front seat and then over the backseat, then rolled out into the pelting rain.
A young woman was driving the Land Rover behind him. She was peering at Franks through the windshield. He ignored her and took two steps, figuring out the route he would take, when the woman started honking her horn.
Franks considered shooting her but instead lowered his head to the rain and hurried diagonally away from the police across Park Row. He made the sidewalk by City Hall Park, and kept moving away from the bridge. The woman kept honking her horn.
He never looked back and thought he’d make the corner onto Vesey Street.
Twelve steps from being out of sight, he heard a woman shout, “Stop where you are. Show me your hands!”
For some reason, Franks thought of the logger, then he stuffed the barrel of his gun under his right armpit, lifted the Treasury agent badge up with his left hand, and turned to find a young female uniformed cop about thirty feet away.
She was shakily aiming her service pistol at him, and he could see doubt and fear all about her.
“Federal agent!” Franks cried, showing her the badge and ID. “Don’t shoot!”
“Down on the ground!” she shouted.
“You’re making a mistake, rookie,” he warned her as he started to lower himself down. “I was chasing the killer. He’s getting—”
A squall of rain hit them. He dropped to his knees, went for the gun, snagged it expertly, and whipped it out, intending to shoot the young cop.
She shot first and hit Franks square in the chest. He staggered back in disbelief but still tried to aim at her. She shot him twice more.
He fell on his back, dying.
Franks’s last vision was of the cop standing over him, aiming at him.
“No rookie mistake, man,” she said, her voice taunting and quivering both. “No rookie mistake at all.”