It was 4:30 now and out on the street, most people were oblivious to anything but getting started with their holiday weekend. As he and Herrington walked away from Times Square, Harvath tried to make sense of what they were doing. A healthy bit of paranoia was a prerequisite in their business, but at what point did it become too much? The rational side of Harvath’s brain said leaving a perfectly well-stocked bar and an above-average looking bartender was that point, but his gut said Bob might be right on the money.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Pointing south down Broadway, Bob said, “ Times Square has gotta be pretty high on the terrorist hit parade. I know a good restaurant not far from the VA. Let’s go there.”
“TheVA?You’ve spent enough time there as it is. Don’t you get sick of being anywhere near there?”
“You’d be surprised. It’s not your grandfather’s VA anymore, Scot. They’ve come a long way.”
“Sterilize the instruments and everything now, do they?”
“Even better, if they amputate a limb, you get two bullets instead of one to bite on.”
At least Bob hadn’t lost his sense of humor. “What about my truck?” asked Harvath.
Seeing a cab that had just dropped off its fare, Herrington made a beeline for it and said, “Leave it. We’ll come back and pick it up later.”
As they drove, Harvath looked out the window at the hordes of people crowding the sidewalks, and his mind wandered back to the news reports they’d been watching in the Pig amp; Whistle. Taken as isolated incidents, the events unfolding just outside Manhattan were indeed serious, though nothing to panic about. But when you lumped them together as a whole, they were just too coincidental-and coincidences were something neither Scot Harvath nor Bob Herrington believed in. In fact, no one in their line of work did. They had been taught to always try to connect the dots and look for a bigger picture.
Even though he was supposed to be on vacation relaxing, Harvath couldn’t stop thinking about what Bob had said and so repeated his earlier question. “Let’s say you’re right about what’s going on across the river. Why do you think someone would want to tie up all of those tactical teams?”
“I can think of about a million answers,” replied Bob as he eyeballed a graffiti-covered truck idling outside a nearby bank, “and none of them have a happy ending.”
“But if you break this down into its simplest parts, the reason you’d want to tie up tactical teams is to prevent them from interfering with your objective or your egress, right?”
As their cab sped up, Bob’s eyes moved to a group of taxi drivers who had double-parked near a falafel stand and were chatting animatedly to one another. “So?”
“So if you were a suicide bomber or were going to fly a plane into a building, you wouldn’t care about tactical teams. By the time they knew what you were doing, theoretically it would be too late.”
“It depends on what you were doing. What if you weren’t a suicide bomber or planning on flying a plane into a building? What if you had other plans?”
Harvath looked back out his window and asked, “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” replied Herrington. “I just saw all that stuff happening on TV and it gave one of those uh-oh feelings.”
“Old habits are hard to break.”
Bob smiled.
“That’s better,” said Harvath as he decided to change the subject. They were both a little too on edge. “Now, am I going to be able to get that shot of Louis XIII you owe me at this place we’re going?”
“Probably not. For that we’ll need to find you some high-end gay bar. But maybe there’ll be some cute Navy guys there you can hook up with.”
Harvath gave his friend the finger and Bob laughed.
Below 34th Street the traffic began to back up and Herrington started giving the driver directions.
Fifteen minutes later, as they crawled down 28th, the cab’s radio erupted with terrified voices shouting in a language neither Harvath nor Herrington understood.
When Scot asked what was happening, the driver stammered, “The Queensboro Bridge!”
“What about it?”
“It just exploded!”