As they hurried back to Gentry’s apartment, the detective told Joyce that if the Office of Emergency Management apparently had been put in charge of the crisis, Gordy Weeks would have to okay her plan to fly up into the bats.
“There may not be time to visit him and do a whole conference thing. Will he listen to me over the phone?”
“I think so,” Gentry said.
“And will he listen tome?”
“He asked for you by name,” Gentry said. “Look, I know Gordy Weeks only by reputation. He doesn’t let bureaucracy, red tape, ego, or gender get in the way of fixing problems. He also doesn’t have a lot of time to screw around here. They’ll probably have to close the harbor, the Hudson air lane into LaGuardia-can’t afford to have bats sucked into jet engines. He’ll listen and you’ll get a quick yea or nay.”
“How much clout does he have?”
“In a crisis, Weeks reports directly to Taylor. And I don’t think the mayor has ever gotten in the way of anything he wanted.”
As they entered the apartment and Gentry punched in the phone number, Joyce quickly assembled her facts. Robert was right. A manager in the middle of an unprecedented crisis wouldn’t have much time to listen-or to argue. She would have to make her point fast.
It was clear to her that the Russian female had had at least twin offspring, possibly more. The same bat could not have attacked the ESU team in New York and killed those sheep in New Paltz. And a male bat would not have come ahead, alone, to prepare a new home for another male bat. But a male bat would have come ahead for a female. He would have found a nest, settled in, and then relayed his signature cry from bat to bat-a distinctive series of bleats that would have told her exactly where he was.
He also would have gathered food for her arrival.
If a she-bat were on her way to New York, if she’d left New Paltz a few hours before, then she would be arriving very soon. Especially with an honor guard or a protective wall of drones already gathering. They, too, must have been summoned by the male.
If all that were true, it was important that Joyce be able to spot the female coming in. It was imperative that she watch where the female went so they could find the male. And she could do that most efficiently from the air.
When Weeks got on the phone, Joyce told him all of that. When she was finished, Weeks informed her that Al Doyle was in the command center with him helping to monitor and assess the situation. Doyle’s contention was that the bats were here as part of a massive migration. Doyle said they would probably move on, since-like the subway bats-they were vespertilionids that didn’t eat fruit and preferred flying insects to crawling insects.
“But,” Weeks said, “Al can’t explain what a night watchman just reported from the World Trade Center. The guard entered a bloody elevator carriage, shined his flashlight through the open hatchway, and saw a woman being hauled up the cable. He said that whatever was holding her was dark, about the size of a bull, and had wings.”
The veteran watchman had never been drunk or stoned on the job. And the sighting corroborated what Lieutenant Kilar of the ESU had dutifully noted in his report on the subway killings: that bat expert Dr. Nancy Joyce of the Bronx Zoo believed there might be “an abnormally large specimen” of bat inhabiting the NewYork subway system.
“I’m having trouble signing onto this,” Weeks said. “But people are dying and I’ve got to explore every possible lead. You can have your chopper.”
Weeks told Joyce that he needed his helicopters for reconnaissance and transportation. His office would arrange with the police commissioner to have an ESU helicopter pick her up at the pier in fifteen minutes. The OEM director had only two requests: that she stay in constant radio communication with his assistant, Marius Pace, and that she not fuck up.
Joyce promised.
She kept the binoculars and grabbed her camera. Gentry went with her to the pier to wait. He had only one request: that she come back safely.
Joyce promised.
Ten minutes later, she and two ESU fliers were airborne in an Aviation Unit Bell-412.