NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The ten-million-dollar NYPD 23 was a sleek silver chopper with parallel red and blue stripes running along its tail section and turning down halfway across the cabin. Inside was a crew of three: a pilot, a copilot, and an intelligence officer, who watched one of the three flat-screen monitors mounted on a slender tabletop. With sophisticated cameras mounted around the helicopter, the chopper could read faces and license plates on the ground below; it could also watch every exterior section of John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. If the TSA flagged an exiting passenger, or ground crews reported suspicious activity around any of the fuel lines or tanker trunks, the helicopter could watch them without leaving Manhattan airspace. And still had two cameras turned elsewhere.
The helicopter carried only one weapon: an XM29 Objective Individual Combat Weapon with a laser range finder. The operator of the thick, relatively compact weapon had the ability to place a 20mm shell at a target up to. 6 miles away. It was an extremely powerful weapon that could take down an aircraft, directed only by the police commissioner or the assistant police chief in charge of the aviation division.
There was not enough room in the equipment-packed helicopter for four passengers; as the helicopter set down, the copilot exited and Kealey took his place. The intelligence officer had rudimentary flying skills and would be able to land the bird if necessary.
“Mike Perlman,” the crew chief said, offering his hand as Kealey came aboard.
“Ron Sagal,” the pilot said.
Kealey introduced himself as the exiting copilot shut the door. The chopper rose instantly. In any helicopter, there was a sensation of the bottom dropping out when you rose; the amount of hardware in this one, the weight of the reinforced airframe, made the sense of the bottom about to drop out even stronger. And it was more cramped than any aircraft Kealey had ever flown in. Surrounded by hardware and tubes filled with cables, it was literally impossible to turn to either side in some sections of the helicopter.
Kealey slipped on the headphones offered by Sagal. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to hear.
“Where are we going?” Sagal asked.
Kealey adjusted the microphone. “We’re checking the Hudson for a launch that will be headed somewhere in a hurry,” he said.
“Is that all you got for us?” Perlman asked.
“No,” Kealey added. “We think it’s carrying a nuke that can be fired from a rocket launcher. I’ve got that.”
The men were instantly focused as the chopper rose.
“Any way we can patch my cell into these?” Kealey tapped the headphones.
The crew chief nodded. He plugged a jack into the phone, pasted a Velcro strip to the back, pressed it on a patch on the console beside him. “When it rings, I’ll hit TALK. You want me to cut Ron and me out?”
“No,” Kealey told him. “I’m hoping it’s the FBI. One of their guys is chasing a second nuke.”
“Mother of God,” the pilot said.
“The good news is, both weapons have GPS locators,” Kealey went on. “The bad news is, they’ll only be active thirty seconds before the weapon can be fired. How do you scan for signals like that?”
“The signals come from the satellites to the cars, cell phones, etcetera, on the ground,” Sagal told him. “Those are just passive receivers.”
“Okay, so we’re looking for an incoming signal. The weapon won’t activate without it-”
“The weapon will have to be in the open,” Perlman said. “Signals can be intermittent in those canyons.” He pointed to the city, which was falling beneath them.
“River or top of a building, then,” Kealey said. “How do we find two goddamn signals?”
“Are the weapons identical?” Perlman asked.
“Twins.”
“So we’re looking for one signal in two places,” Perlman said. “Anything data the manufacturer can provide?”
“Negative,” Kealey said. He didn’t bother explaining that people at Trask were probably involved.
“Is this DoD ordnance?” Perlman asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s a break,” he said. “We’ll watch for the Y-code.”
“Which is?”
“It’s an encryption sequence designed to prevent spoofing-mucking with military signals,” he said. “The normal satellite-to-earth signal is a P-code, a precision code. That’s used to piggyback a modulated W-code, which creates a Y-code.”
“Can you block the Y-code? That will shut the weapon down.”
“No,” Perlman said. “The W vacillates, so you can’t pin a tail on that donkey. But the W is about fifteen times slower than the five hundred kHz of the P. Not a lot of those footdraggers bouncing about. We can watch for that. Narrows the field to a manageable number.”
“Do it,” Kealey said.
“We going to circle or pick a direction?” Sagal asked.
“Not sure,” Kealey said. There was a pair of binoculars in a case at the side of the seat. He took them out and looked at the river, some 2,000 feet below. There was still a lot of traffic going to New Jersey, upriver, out of Manhattan. He looked south, hoping to catch sight of the boat Bishop had described.
“Shit,” he said.
“What is it?” Sagal asked.
“South, by the marina. There’s a launch just sitting there.”
“The one you’re looking for?” the pilot asked.
“Possibly,” Kealey said. It was empty. He looked around the area. A man with a rocket launcher would not be inconspicuous, especially in a city on high alert.
So where the hell would he go?
The freight elevator opened next to the mechanical room, the housing for the elevator equipment. Bishop stepped out, followed by the short, elderly handyman. He was dressed in a blue janitorial uniform splattered with white paint. There was, indeed, a putty knife in his back pocket.
“Is that door locked?” Bishop asked.
Bunuel tried it, nodded.
“Where’s the apartment with the lab?”
“This way,” the handyman said, pointing around a corner.
“I need to get in. Hurry.”
Bishop drew his gun as he followed Bunuel. He had no idea what he would find there. And then he saw the bloody footsteps on the hall carpet. They went in the opposite direction a few paces before vanishing.
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” the handyman cried.
“Where do those footprints in the hallway lead?”
“To the stairwell, it looks like,” Bunuel replied.
“Up as well as down?”
“Yes.”
Someone opened their apartment door, peeked out. “Is everything all right, Michel?” the young woman asked.
“It’s fine,” Bishop answered, waving with the gun. “Back inside, please.” The door slammed.
The two men hurried, then stopped by the lab door. Bishop held up a hand before the handyman could use his master key. He listened. There was no sound inside. He looked along the jamb. He couldn’t see any wiring, smell any putty. That didn’t mean there weren’t plastic explosives on the other side. It just meant he couldn’t detect any.
“Okay, Michel. Open it. Then get behind me,” Bishop said.
Bunuel did so and stepped back. Bishop tapped the door with the base of his toe, allowed it to swing in. He immediately saw the body on the floor, the empty room. He stepped in cautiously, took a quick look around. He noticed the open crate with a Trask Industries stencil on the outside. He saw the garment bag with a distinctive outline pressing against the vinyl. He went to the latter.
A sniper rifle. Fired fairly recently, from the smell of it. He took another look around. There was a window, a gurney, a booth…
What the hell were you doing up here, Hunt?
There was no time now to try and figure that out. He looked out the window, saw the Hudson. At the edge of the window he saw the western corner of the World Trade Center site. He looked up at the ceiling. The roof was above them. He looked back at the Hudson, thought for a moment. Then he swore as he grabbed the rifle. He ran into the hallway.
“Michel, call nine-one-one,” Bishop said. “Tell them we need a bomb squad, and tell them to go to the roof.”
“Sir?”
“Just do it. Inform them we’ve got a dead body in the penthouse. Make sure you tell them to take the stairs, not to come in by chopper, and to hurry like hell.” He started down the hall, then stopped. “Also, tell them not to take out the guy with the rifle. That will be me. I’m on their side.”
Bishop turned to his left, and followed the bloody footprints to the stairwell. He had no idea what the configuration of the roof was like, where she might have positioned herself. If seconds mattered, he wanted to have the range of a rifle.
There was only a single flight of concrete stairs between the thirty-sixth floor and the roof. He opened the door quietly; he didn’t want her to hear him and fire prematurely. He peered out. From where he stood, he could see most of the roof to the north. It was covered with cement tiles 3 feet square, and it was empty. He took a few steps out, looked around, and cleared the dormer-like exit that blocked the view to the south.
That was when he saw the shadow of the water tower before him, and an irregular shape on top of it. Such an unusual contour was what snipers referred to as “tree cancer,” an abnormal growth on an otherwise ordinary object. Bishop crouched, looked up, peered through the telescopic sight at the tower itself. He recognized the assassin instantly. His heart beating thick and fast, he put her in the crosshairs.
“Yasmin! Put down the weapon!”
He watched her shoulder. There would be a slight flexing if she intended to shoot. He started to squeeze the trigger…
The woman looked back. He relaxed his grip on the trigger, but slightly.
“Yasmin, raise your right hand now, or I will shoot!”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Agent Reed Bishop. We met at the Quebec airport,” he told her. “Come down now. You can’t get away!”
She hesitated. “The airport?”
“I was there with another agent,” he said. “We went to a room, talked about your daughter.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong. I have no…”
Yasmin didn’t bother to finish. She looked away, resighted the rocket launcher, hunkered into the rocket launcher.
Damn you, Bishop thought. Her head, in profile, filled the circular scope. He dropped the site very slightly; a head shot could still cause a reflex action in her finger. He remembered that much from basic weapons training. He aimed at her shoulder and squeezed the trigger. There was a pop, a recoil, the gun site exploding in red before it kicked up toward the soft blue sky.
Bishop lowered the rifle just in time to see her jerk toward the tower. He laid the weapon down, took out his handgun, and ran to the base of the water tower. He could hear her groaning, see her feet kicking at nothing, like those of a wounded animal, as they hung over the edge. He couldn’t see her hands or the rocket launcher. He hurried up the ladder, gun at the ready. When he reached the top, he saw her lying on her side, the rocket launcher at an angle beneath her. She was trying to reach the trigger, but her right arm was hanging on by sinewy strings, the flesh ripped and the shoulder shattered, the side of her face coated with blood. The blood on her face was not from her shoulder: the bullet had glanced hard from her temple upon exiting. It was still there, nestled in a raw hole in her skull.
Bishop tasted bile, swallowed hard as he walked over and carefully moved the tube from under her. He did not want to touch anything. He laid it gently beside her and knelt, called for an ambulance. He was told there would be a wait of forty minutes or more. He didn’t think that would matter.
He kept the phone out. “I’m sorry, Yasmin,” he said.
She looked up at him with uncomprehending eyes. “Where…”
He didn’t answer. He saw her good hand pawing at her broken arm. At a bracelet with a marble. She hadn’t had that in Quebec. He slipped it from her wrist. Then he searched her for a cell phone. There wasn’t any.
Yasmin shut her eyes. “Kamilah,” she sighed. “God. Oh, my God. I want… to… go… home.”
Bishop didn’t know what to say. He took her good hand. He understood what they had been doing in the lab. He held the fingers that had caused so many deaths. After a moment her eyes rolled back slightly and the fingers relaxed. He laid her hand on her side.
Bishop looked out at the sparkling waters of the Hudson as he called Kealey.
“Reed, where are you?”
“On the roof at One West,” Bishop told him. “I got Yasmin and her nuke.”
“Nice work. Real nice.” There was a slight pause. “I see you. By the water tower.”
“Right.” Bishop looked up, saw the silver 23 hovering over the World Financial Center a few blocks north.
“I think the Xana project was about brainwashing,” Bishop said. “After I shot her, Yasmin had no idea where she was or what she was doing.”
“Wipe killers’ minds, you’ve got plausible deniability,” Kealey said. “Any idea what her target was?”
“Given where she was aiming, I’d guess the bathtub of the World Trade Center site, west wall,” he said looking north toward the site. “If she’d popped that, Manhattan would’ve been cooked. The subways, Penn Station, Grand Central… There would have been endless miles for the river to empty into.”
“Jesus.”
“Exactly. The nuke is armed, but I’ve got the bomb squad-”
“Leave it,” Kealey said.
“What?”
“For just a minute, I mean. We need to get its GPS signature so we can find the other one.”
“Roger that.”
There was muted talk on the other end of the phone. Bishop looked down at the woman he’d killed. She was paling quickly as blood and life left her. He had never shot anyone. It had been easy to pull the trigger; the rest, he imagined-whatever degree of sadness, regret, revulsion-would come later, if at all. The big pain was that despite having hunted one participant down and prevented unimaginable slaughter, he didn’t feel a damn bit better about the loss of his daughter. He glanced at the bracelet. Did that have something to do with Kamilah, or was it something else? Maybe Veil’s mind was impacted by the gunshot wound, or maybe it was something else. But Bishop got the feeling that this woman truly had no idea what had just happened to her.
Like so many of your victims over the years, he thought, if they were even permitted to have a final thought.
Kealey got back on. “We got it, Reed. Listen, can you see the marina from there?”
“Negative. World Financial tower’s in the way.”
“Okay. I’m going to send you a photo of a launch at the marina. Tell me if that’s the one you saw.”
The sun was high and hot to his left, over the harbor. Bishop shielded the phone from the glare and waited for the e-mail. The sun felt good. Life felt good. Damn these people… damn them. Tears streamed along his cheeks as he thought of Laura and the days and sunlight she would never know. The graduations, books, dates, children
… Damn them all for eternity.
The phone pinged, and Bishop opened the attachment.
“That looks like the one,” Bishop told Kealey. “So he’s on foot? With a nuclear-tipped rocket launcher?”
“I doubt it,” Kealey replied.
“Right, of course,” Bishop said. Being spotted wasn’t the issue. Hunt was expecting Veil’s bomb to go off. He would have wanted to be as far away as possible.
“I’m sure he’s skipped town, and there’s one other thing I’m sure of,” Kealey said. “That SOB will have been expecting to hear a blast by now. We need to intercept Plan B.”
The speeding runabout passed below the George Washington Bridge as it left New York City.
Hunt looked at his watch. He exhaled loudly. “Was it your work or did they screw up our plan?” he asked Dr. Gillani.
“I do not believe the fault was mine,” she insisted.
“No, of course not,” Hunt rasped.
“She’s right,” Dr. Samson said as he steered the runabout north. “The programming worked straight down the line. There’s no reason to think it broke now. We spent the most time on this part of it. She was solid.”
Hunt shook his head. The years of work and planning, from Pakistan to here, and it ended up on his shoulders, after all. His one consolation was that if they took Yasmin prisoner, she would remember nothing. If they killed her, the effect would be the same: another Muslim had participated in a wave of Muslim attacks against the United States. That also meant the lab would not be destroyed. Even if they got in there- And they wouldn’t have much time to do that, he thought-even if they checked all the records, everything would point back to another Muslim, Dr. Gillani. A call to her from Scroggins’s phone would tie them together; the men would take the blame for the nukes. Trask would see to that. The drivers would disappear into a cell at any number of secret government prisons for weeks.
By then it would be too late.
As for himself, he would say that he was undercover, trying to sniff out this Muslim brainwasher. Dr. Samson was the voice of her process, knew how it worked. He was all they’d need. In one hour, she would be the last victim of this necessary evil.
Except for the ten million people of New York. That, too, was a tragic requirement for the liberation of the world.
“You store your city views?” Kealey asked.
“For twenty-four hours,” Perlman said.
“What have you got of the marina from the last hour or two?”
Perlman opened the video library, typed in the street he needed, brought up a fuzzy video of the marina from an hour before.
“That’s the best we’ve got,” he said. “We were over Midtown, between Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Second Street.”
The FBI launch had not yet arrived. There were several boats that did not appear to be there now, yachts mostly. They would probably have headed out to sea, where there was room to maneuver, up-the-coast or down-the-coast choices available.
“Can you pick me a good frame and print it out?” Kealey asked.
Perlman stepped through the video, selected an image, enhanced it as best he could, then handed Kealey an eight-by-ten glossy. Kealey looked at it. Any one of them would be a suitable, anonymous strike ship. They would have to look for all of them, listen for the GPS signal, hope to hell they could get to it in time.
“You don’t happen to have grenades on board?” Kealey asked.
Perlman shook his head. “Just the OICW.”
“You better keep it handy,” Kealey said.
“We need authorization from Aviation HQ just to take it off the-”
Kealey took the handgun from his jacket. “I don’t have time for bureaucracy. I’ll shoot the bastard with this if I have to, but no one is going to fire a nuke on my watch.”
Sagal and Perlman exchanged looks. Sagal nodded. Perlman angled awkwardly behind him and unscrewed the wing-nut bracket from the stock and barrel of the weapon. He kept it in his lap.
“Thanks,” Kealey said.
The intelligence officer nodded.
Times Square, Herald Square, Grand Central Station, the United Nations, the Empire State Building-those were obvious targets for a sniper. Some would make meaty bull’s-eyes for a nuke. If that were the case, though, why did Hunt head south toward the harbor? Why circle the island? He could have had the nuke left somewhere in that vicinity, in a van or car trunk or a storage unit.
Kealey considered the other options. Aside from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or Statue of Liberty, which he’d already determined could be destroyed by conventional weapons, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Atlantic Ocean were the closest southern targets. He didn’t think those made sense. Farther south were Philadelphia and Washington, but Kealey didn’t believe Hunt would want that kind of exposure for the time it would take to reach them. North was… what? The George Washington Bridge. Highways clogged with cars trying to get out. A pair of baseball stadiums, which would be empty in light of what had happened that morning.
There was a map on a monitor that sat on a thin metal arm beside the seat.
“How do I work this?” Kealey asked.
Perlman held up an index finger, wagged it up and down.
Kealey nodded, used his finger to scroll the map. It responded faster than MapQuest on his laptop.
“You can expand the view using your thumb and index finger,” Perlman said.
“Got it. Thanks.”
Kealey followed the river north, out of the city and into Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess counties. Nothing jumped out. He magnified the image and went back toward the city slowly.
“Shit,” Kealey said suddenly.
“What is it?” Perlman asked.
“They may not be going after people this time.”
He expanded a view. Perlman looked at it on his screen.
Save for the whapping sound of the rotors, the cabin was very quiet.
“We need to stop this,” Perlman said.
“We do,” Kealey agreed. “But if we commit to going north, and he isn’t there, we’re screwed.”
“I can take us to the GW Bridge and wait for the ping,” Sagal said. “That’ll put us more or less equidistant, in reach of him north and south.”
“In reach or on top of him?” Kealey asked. “We won’t have a lot of leeway here, about thirty seconds.”
Sagal shook his head. “No way to answer that, Mr. Kealey. It depends where he plants himself. If he goes ashore, tucks himself under a bridge or tunnel-”
“Of course.” Kealey considered their options. They hadn’t any. “Let your aviation unit know. They have other choppers they can put on this?”
“Yeah, plus maritime,” Sagal told him.
“But we’re the only ones that can hear the GPS signal.”
“In time to act,” Perlman said. “It’ll have to go through channels to turn all our ears on this.”
“Time is something we don’t have,” Kealey said. “Let’s get other eyes up there and head for the bridge.”
Sagal gave him a thumbs-up and turned the helicopter north along the river.