Early Warning

CHAPTER THREE

Manhattan

Francis Xavier Byrne had a choice: the.38 or the 9-millimeter?

It was the same choice that every senior officer in the New York City Police Department had to make every year, a choice not given to the grunts, to the junior officers, to the rank and file, but to only a select few, those with seniority and experience.

He had earned that right. Earned it long ago and continued it every day he spent on the force. And every year, when this moment rolled around at the Police Academy on E. 20th Street, Captain Francis Xavier Byrne made the same choice:

He took the.38 Colt Detective Special.

As he raised the weapon into firing position, sighting on the first of the targets, he took a moment to reflect. He was 51 years old now and most definitely old school. No matter how many times he fired the various 9 mms. the department authorized, he still preferred the security and heft of a revolver. The Glock 19 was a plastic piece of shit with a six-pound pull-not the thing for some frightened rookie to be wielding in a crisis-and even retrofitted with a twelve-pound-pull “NY-2 Trigger,” it still felt like a lethal toy gun. The Smith & Wesson 5946 and the Sig P226 were improvements, although not by much. Byrne and his men also had the option of carrying the Kahr K9s as backup pieces or off-duty weapons, but in his opinion, unless the brass was willing to admit the past century of semi-automatic firearms technology was a mistake and get some old-fashioned Colt 1911s, he was going to stick to the trusty revolver as his sidearm until they pried it from his cold, dead hands.

He slid his right index finger down the frame from just below the cylinder toward the trigger. That was the way they taught it now at the Academy: no fingers on the triggers until you were ready to fire. Until you were ready to shoot. Until you were ready to kill.

Byrne brought the Colt up to eye level. He used a one-handed, full-frontal stance, right eye closed, his dominant left eye sighting down the barrel. Not for him was the sideways stance, in which you were essentially aiming over your shoulder. Not for him was any flashy, muzzle-waving, sideways-pointing ghetto grip: throughout his career, he had several times staked his life on the proposition that the safest place to stand between a gangbanger with a Glock and whatever he was shooting at was right in front of the target.

Fuck it: it didn’t feel natural. The whole “finger on the side of the gun” crap was a “safety” rule-for the perp’s safety, not the cop’s. He dropped his finger onto the trigger, let it curl around the trigger in a lover’s caress. There was next to no chance of a double-action revolver going off accidentally, or even of a bed-wetting patrolman jerking the trigger hard enough by accident to fire the weapon.

Byrne let out his breath, then held it. Despite the noise of the range all around him, only partly muffled by his protective ear wear, he always felt at peace here. It was so unlike real life: just you and the target, standing there motionless, a big bull’s-eye at its center, dangling twenty feet away, just begging you to shoot it. Of course, it wasn’t really shooting. It was just punching holes, very quickly, through a piece of paper. But it still felt good, and the fact that there was no return fire was a bonus.

Byrne pulled back the hammer: now the weapon had a hair trigger. He fired and punched a hole near the center of the target, just slightly to the left. Each year, as he requalified, his astigmatism got a little worse, and each year he had to learn to compensate for it a little more. Some of the men-Vinnie Mancuso, his old partner back in the days when they were both young and hungry, now working in Commissioner White’s office and about ready to start pulling his pension as he counted down the days-suggested that he wear his glasses to the range, but to Byrne that was like making love with them on. You didn’t really need to see what you were doing as long as you knew what it was and how to do it.

He compensated a little to the left and fired again. Closer; good enough for government work. Not good enough for him. Another slight shift, another shot: perfect.

“You’re getting old, Frankie,” shouted a voice off to his left. With his headgear on, the voice to Byrne was like a whisper. He didn’t have to turn or look to know who it was.

“Move ’em back another fifteen, Lannie,” he barked. “And this time make it hard.”

Aslan “Lannie” Saleh stifled the crack he almost made. Something about “old” and “hard.” After all, Capt. Byrne was his boss, the man who had given him his break, and even though the unit operated more or less full-time in politically incorrect mode, Lannie Saleh knew that for Frankie Byrne the shooting range was the next best thing to St. Michael’s on Easter Sunday. He knew better than to break the boss’s sacramental concentration.

Lannie said nothing as he hit the control button and dragged the shredded target forward. Everybody kidded everybody in the Counter-Terrorism Unit about their marksmanship, but over fifty or not, Capt. Byrne was still the best shot in the department. There were all sorts of stories about him; about the time when he had caught a burglar in his mother’s apartment in Queens and, without even looking, had put a bullet in the man and knocked him through a window.

Lannie pinched up a paper bad guy and sent it fleeing into the distance. Twenty-five feet, thirty, thirty-five-

“Keep going.”

He stopped at fifty. Byrne was reloading. Lannie admired the way the boss so smoothly, so effortlessly, slipped the.38 cartridges into the cylinder, then snapped it into place with a flick of his wrist. That was something you weren’t supposed to do; you were supposed to politely shut the cylinder with your free hand. But Frankie Byrne was at heart an Irish cowboy, and his men loved him for it.

“What did you say?” shouted Byrne. Saleh shook his head: nothing. Jesus, the man really was a mind reader, just like everybody said.

Byrne turned back toward the target and let out his breath. Instead of holding it this time, he kept exhaling; instead of cocking the hammer and firing single-action, he fired double-action, each pull of the trigger doing double duty, each pull cocking the hammer and then releasing it. Six shots. Lannie didn’t even have to look at the target as he reeled it back in to know the extent of the damage.

The first shot, he knew, would be right in the bad guy’s head; the other five were just for show. Or, knowing Byrne, to make a point. In the CTU, setting a good example and, from time to totally unreported time, creating an object lesson for the mother of some son of a bitch back home in Amman, was simply good manners.

Byrne grunted as he looked at his handiwork. Head, heart, stomach, spleen, balls, and, for good measure, a kneecap. Mission accomplished. “Your turn,” he said.

Lannie felt his heart drop into his shoes. He hadn’t come prepared to shoot, and certainly hadn’t expected to perform in front of the boss. Byrne slapped the protective earmuffs on his head and thrust the Glock into his hand. “You’re good to go,” he said.

The new target rocketed out. The book said that most sidearm confrontations took place from point-blank range to no more than twenty-five feet, but Byrne had just sent Osama bin Laden flapping in the breeze at least ten meters.

Lannie took the pistol and tried to steady himself. Even though he had already qualified this year, it didn’t matter: Byrne could fire him at any moment for any reason. The CTU was the most highly regarded and hard to get into unit in the NYPD, and the most top-down in its hierarchy; its members didn’t have to answer to any civilian review board, fat-bottomed top brass, or even the mayor. Once, shortly after 9/11, some deputy chief had tried to insert one of his stooges into the CTU’s secret headquarters, which in those dark days were in Brooklyn. Byrne, or so the story went, marched down to One Police Plaza and threatened to put the dope’s head through one of the double-glazed windows on the fourteenth floor; and since Frankie and Commissioner Matt White had been partners in the old days, that was the end of departmental interference in the CTU.

Lannie took a deep breath of pride-pride in his unit and pride in what he had already accomplished just getting into it-and squeezed off nine shots in lightning succession. Three hits, six misses, but at this distance that was pretty good, good enough for government work.

“You shoot like a sand nigger,” said Byrne, inspecting the target. “No wonder you guys always lose.”

Had anyone else said that to him, Lannie would have brought him up on charges; from Byrne, it was a compliment. “You know, I could have your badge for a crack like that, Captain,” he ventured.

Byrne laughed. “Which is one of the things that’s wrong with this country today. In the old days, in New York, that’s how we used to talk to each other, the Irish to the Italians to the Jews. Nowadays, you foreign pussies go running to the U.N. if somebody looks at you askance.”

“Askance? What does that mean?”

“It means you’re in America now, Buckwheat, so learn American.” Byrne slipped the.38 he had been using back into the holster that he wore on his right hip. He popped the clip-there was another term they didn’t want you to use anymore-out of the Glock and left both pieces of the weapon on the shelf.

They walked together out of the old Academy and into the glorious sunlight of an afternoon in New York City. Almost instinctively, Lannie turned east, toward Second Avenue, but Byrne took him by the arm and headed west, toward Gramercy Park, instead. “We’re in Chelsea, remember?” he said.

The corpse of Cabrini Medical Center lay directly across the street. The century-old Catholic hospital had closed down in the spring of 2008. Byrne could feel Lannie’s gaze on him as he reacted to the sight. “What is it?” said Saleh.

“It’s an old hospital.”

“I know that.”

“ Cabrini Medical Center. One of the oldest Catholic hospitals in the city. Not financially viable, the state said. And now it’s gone.”

Lannie shrugged. “So what? New York ’s got plenty of hospitals.”

Byrne put a hand on his shoulder: gently, but firmly. “It’s what we were just talking about. It’s the past, old New York. It’s what used to be. And now it’s not.”

Lannie still didn’t get it. Byrne kept his hand on his shoulder as he spoke:

“It was named after Mother Cabrini. Frances Xavier Cabrini, an Italian nun from Lombardy. She was the first American citizen ever canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1946, every wop in this town went apeshit when Pius XII punched her ticket to heaven. If you don’t believe me, ask Vinnie.”

“So I guess that makes her pretty special.” Lannie hoped his tone came off as encouraging, but knew it didn’t.

Byrne seemed to let it slide. “I’ll say. I was born there. I was named after her. And one other thing-”

Byrne still hadn’t moved. His hand was still on Lannie’s shoulder, his eyes still focused across the street, at the back of what used to be Cabrini Medical Center.

“My father died there.”

Lannie felt his cell phone buzz in his pocket, but he didn’t answer it, or even glance at it. He didn’t want to break the mood, even though to him this was all ancient history, and foreign ancient history at that. “I’m sorry, boss,” he said.

“It was a long time ago,” replied Byrne.

They started walking. “You know,” said Lannie, “not all Muslims are Arabs.”

“So the Iranians tell me,” said Byrne. “But you’re not Persian. Hell, you’re not even Irish.”

“And not all Arabs are Muslims,” Lannie said, undeterred. “Some of us are Christians.”

“And not all Christians are Catholics, but all Catholics are Christians. So what does that prove?”

Lannie had no answer. He was 24 years old, and even though he knew pretty much everything about life that was worth knowing, like computers and girls, he also knew that he knew almost nothing about anything that actually mattered. He was on the CTU thanks to Capt. Byrne, especially considering he couldn’t shoot for shit.

Byrne buttoned his overcoat against the raw spring wind. “So, is that your own personal.38?” Lannie asked. Walking with the boss was awkward, and it helped to have some neutral conversational topic.

“Yes, it’s mine. And no, not originally. It belonged to my dad. He was wearing it the day he was killed in the line of duty.”

Byrne got that faraway look in his eyes that everybody in the department knew so well. It was a look that said: this far and no farther. There are some lines not to be crossed.

Byrne had picked up the tempo now, barreling west past Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace and across Fifth Avenue. It was as if he knew something was up, was responding to some unarticulated urgency, and it was all Lannie could do to keep up with the old man…on any level.

They had crossed Seventh Avenue, into Chelsea, and were heading north when Lannie felt his cell phone buzz again. Involuntarily, he stopped and pulled the phone out of his pocket. It was one of those shitty departmental phones, standard-issue, not his BlackBerry, which he had left back at his desk in case something really important happened.

“What is it?” asked Byrne. If it were really important, whoever was on the other end of the line would have called him. On the other hand, if it had anything to do with computers, Lannie would be the go-to guy. And that was, after all, the reason Byrne had hired him. Certainly not for his marksmanship.

Lannie glanced at the display: URGENT. He picked up the pace. They didn’t have to say anything. Byrne got it. That was one of the things that made him such a good chief.

They hit the intersection of 20th and Eighth, nearly running now, and headed north.

They rounded the corner. Up ahead was an old, nondescript warehouse, one of the few buildings that hadn’t been converted into artists’ lofts or art galleries. Actually, that was not quite true: most of it had in fact been converted, but there was still a big chunk of the giant building, which occupied a full city block in two dimensions and rose five stories into the air, that had been given over to the CTU. Not that any of the other tenants knew about it.

That was one of the things that still made New York New York, thought Byrne as he spied the building: not making eye contact with neighbors was still considered a virtue.

They pulled up in front of the building. “Mother Cabrini-Frances Xavier Cabrini-is the patron saint of immigrants,” said Byrne. His cell phone was buzzing now, too.

Lannie beat him to the punch. “We’re here, right in front of the building,” he said softly.

Byrne watched his younger colleague’s face fall. “What is it?” he asked, but Lannie was already sprinting through the front door.

CHAPTER FOUR

New Orleans

“Archibald Grant” had a choice: to finish his speech or to react to the urgent message now coming across the face of his wristwatch.

This was no ordinary watch he wore, but then nothing about Mr. Grant was ordinary. As one of the RAND Corporation’s leading experts on international terrorism, he was in great demand, not only back at the home office in Santa Monica, California, but worldwide. RAND maintained divisions in Boston, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Jackson, Mississippi; Cambridge, England; Brussels; and Doha, Qatar.

His attention from the message was distracted by the blonde in the front row. She was a reporter, one of the few the RAND Corporation allowed into policy addresses such as this. Most of the time, RAND hid its global activities behind its anonymous name, Research ANd Development.

This was a special occasion: a conference organized by RAND’s Gulf States Policy Institute, which had been formed post-Katrina to aid three of the most benighted states in the union, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The topic of his lecture was: “Terrorist Opportunities in a Devastated Environment: Some Thoughts on Media Responsibility,” but the reporter seemed more interested in him than in the subject of his remarks. Even in his guise of “Mr. Grant,” he hated inquisitive people, and blonde network reporters were right up there with the worst of them.

It wasn’t that Grant was so good-looking: balding, over-weight, slightly buck-toothed, he was no woman’s idea of a prize. But he was brilliant, and a compelling speaker, which in his experience was more than enough to interest a certain class of women. Luckily for men, brains often counted more than looks when it came to the fair sex.

“…and so, ladies and gentlemen, let me conclude with this thought…” His mind raced, trying to finish his remarks and at the same time process the information he was reading surreptitiously. Silently, he cursed himself for taking this gig, for being so far away from Washington and New York at a time like this. Maybe it was just an early yellow flag, but in his experience the National Security Agency didn’t issue SCI alerts-Sensitive Compartmented Information-on a whim. And besides, these days, there were no yellow flags, only red ones. He’d have to wrap it up and leave as quickly as possible, without incurring suspicion. Especially from the blonde.

“The days of so-called ‘separation of church and state,’ whether we want to admit it, are over. A new media environment, brought on first by the emergence, and by the dominance, of the Internet, coupled with the severe economic downturn of the past 48 months, has finally brought the relationship of the press and the government into a new era of cooperation and, dare I suggest, symbiosis: no longer natural adversaries, but partners in the brave new world of the 21st century. Our shared land, our common patriotism, demands no less.

“ America is unique among the world’s nations in more ways than simply the political, the military, or the economic. Three other countries- Russia, Canada, China -may be larger, territorially speaking, but none is subject to the kinds of climatological and ecological disruption. Blizzards, earthquakes, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes; had civilization tried to arise here, rather than the Indus Valley, it surely would have perished in short order. Far from being a land of milk and honey, America has always demanded the survival of the fittest. Lest we forget, the ‘shining city on a hill’ was bought with the blood of patriots.”

There was a slight stir in the audience; nobody used the word “patriots” anymore, nor referenced Jefferson ’s famous Tree of Liberty, however obliquely. What they usually forgot, of course, was Jefferson’s exact formulation in his 1787 letter to William Smith, written from Paris, of which Mr. Grant now reminded them:

“Or, to quote Jefferson directly, ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’”

The buzz grew louder as he entered his peroration: “Against all odds, America defeated the world’s other superpower through a combination of willpower, tactical superiority, and a consummate knowledge of the battlefield-virtues we sorely lacked on September 11, 2001, and in its aftermath, and in many ways continue to lack. When the next terrorist attack comes-notice I said when, not if-our first line of defense will not be the government, or even the first responders, but will be the media. How the attack is framed, and explained, will determine in large part the will of this nation to fight back. In a sense, we were lucky on 9/11. The attack came so suddenly, and without warning, that the usual collection of nervous nellies, naysayers, National Public Radio eunuchs, and nabobs in the ‘loyal opposition’ took several months before they were able to regroup and begin the counterattack. But when the next blow comes, they will be ready, appeasement on their lips and terms of surrender already signed and sealed in their pockets. I just hope that we-the tip of the tip of the spear-will be ready, too.”

There was a smattering of weak applause, which is about what Mr. Grant had expected. He let it almost subside before finishing.

“Of the abilities of the men and women employed by our counterterrorism agencies I have no doubt. Nothing the media says or writes or broadcasts can or should or will affect them. Rather, I am thinking of the civilian population, the people who get their news from the networks and the cables and from what few newspapers and magazines anyone still takes seriously. I am thinking, in short, of ordinary, average Americans. People who once knew how to deal with extraordinary events and overcome them or endure them, secure in the knowledge that Der Wille zur Macht would see them through adversity. The very people whose will to fight has been eroded by half a century of guilt, defeatism, analysis, and Hollywood. For, when the time comes-and come it will-it is they who, more than anyone else, must once again summon the courage of their forebears and seize the day.”

He paused and looked out over the sea of faces. It was time to go. “Thank you for your kind attention.”

Through the perfunctory applause, a question: “So you’re advocating vigilantism?” It was the blonde. “And a follow-up-if so, then why do the American taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year on the military and the intelligence services? Are you saying that, in the end, all of our vaunted technology and martial prowess can’t guarantee our safety? And finally-”

“Would you kindly identify yourself, please, Miss?” Mr. Grant asked.

“Principessa Stanley. National-security correspondent, People’s News Network.”

There were a couple of titters in the audience from the Europeans. That was to be expected. The Americans were too ignorant and uneducated to get the operatic reference, while the Europeans got it at once. She had spent most of her life trying to live up to the implications of her name, to be as regal and beautiful and as cold as her namesake, the Princess Turandot. She turned briefly and flashed her famously telegenic smile: “My father was a big Puccini fan,” she explained.

“You understand, Ms. Stanley, that we are on Chatham House rules. Off the record, on deep background, however you care to phrase it. In any case, not for attribution.” He took a small sip of water to delay her answer, giving him time to glance down at his watch once more. The news had not gotten any better. Luckily, she was waiting for him just outside, and they would be at the airport in short order.

Principessa smiled her famous network smile again. A cable network smile, but still a network smile, and one that had, along with her pretty face and killer figure, taken her a long way from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. If she played her cards right, pretty soon she’d move up from the mid-morning slot to the late-afternoon slot and after that, there was no telling what might happen when one of the prized evening gabfests suddenly found itself in need of a host. She had been hearing rumors, and doing her best to spread of few of her own, and in her opinion a couple of the anchors were only in need of a little push-or a gossip item dropped in the right place at the right time-and the way would be open to her. Besides, Jake Sinclair liked her, a lot.

“Yes, I do.” She rose, letting everyone in the audience get a good look at her. Like all the interchangeable blondes on the cable newscasts, she was leggy, bosomy, brash, and the proud possessor of a law degree. One more button on her blouse was unbuttoned than absolutely necessary. “And finally…what do you have against the news media? Wasn’t it also Jefferson who also said that given a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would happily choose the latter?”

Mr. Grant smiled; she had walked right into his trap. “Yes, Ms. Stanley. To which George Washington replied, ‘I consider such vehicles of knowledge’-that’s newspapers to you-‘more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and ameliorate the morals of a free and enlightened people.’ And by ‘industry,’ of course, he meant-”

“I know what he meant by ‘industry,’ Mr. Grant,” she retorted.

His return glance indicated that he very much doubted that. “What Washington meant, Ms. Stanley, was that vigorous political opposition was a good thing, but that a news media, to give it its current favored term, that saps the will of the people, that reduces them to pleading, whining petitioners and diminishes the morals of the public is not one to be admired. The First Amendment does not protect sedition.”

“But it sounds to me like you’re arguing in favor of American exceptionalism. Isn’t that a form of elitism?”

“On the contrary. I’m arguing in favor of results. Which, in my world, are the only things that count.” He shuffled his papers, reassembling in an unmistakable sign that the talk was over. These days, all of the reporters’ questions emanated from a mountain of moral certitude, which crumbled the second it was assailed.

Principessa reddened, sat down, seethed. “This all sounds rather jingoistic to me,” she said.

Mr. Grant looked at her with all the pity in world. “Who cares what it sounds like to you?” he said, and left the stage.

That went well he thought to himself as he stepped into the wings, to the sound of applause. He moved swiftly, glancing down at his secure BlackBerry. A quick glance at the screen caused him to double his speed. He exited by an emergency door.

There was a car waiting, a nondescript black sedan with four tinted windows. He got into the back seat, closed the door and hit: AUTO-START.

Driverless, the car started up and moved forward. He could control the steering from a console on the back of the driver’s seat. He wasn’t going far.

He glanced in the rearview mirror: a door was opening, and he could see a woman’s head peeking out. It was Ms. Stanley, eyeballing the car and talking into her cell phone. It was too bad he couldn’t treat reporters the way he treated enemies of the Republic…

As the car moved, Mr. Grant underwent a remarkable transformation. His teeth fell out of his head; his midsection slid away, a hairpiece came off. And all the while he was wondering whether the raw data he was receiving was as sinister as it seemed, or worse.

The car reached the far end of the parking lot and slid into a reserved, covered space. He ran a brush through his hair, popped a pair of brown contact lenses from his eyes. He had to hurry.

He opened the door and, keeping low, slid into the adjoining Mercedes, its engine purring, as the front passenger door opened.

“Not bad,” came a voice from the driver’s seat. He didn’t turn to look at her, but he didn’t have to. He knew every line of her lovely face. “But that reporter sure was a bitch.”

“You were watching?”

“And listening. Every word, every gesture…”

Jealous. He liked that in a woman. Especially one he hardly knew, but trusted with his life. “You know there’s-”

She turned toward him and, as usual, he fell in love with her all over again. His mouth covered hers.

“Really, Frank, I think you’re slipping,” she said, breaking away. “Why put yourself in-”

He reclined and, for the first time in two hours, stretched. They both knew the answer to that question, which was: there was no answer. “My name’s not Frank.”

“You’re telling me.” She pulled the car out of the lot and into traffic. “How bad is it?”

“Hard to say. Cyber attack, maybe a security breach.”

“Against us?”

Mr. Grant shook his head. “Worse-NYPD. Fort Meade is still monitoring, but the situation is unclear. And you know how tough it is to get any information out of the cops. They’d rather see the city nuked than share anything with us. We need to get to Teterboro A-sap.”

“So I guess Arnaud’s is out of the question.”

He smiled. “Arnaud’s, Galatoire’s Brennan’s, Congo Square, Exchange Alley-the whole nine yards.”

Maryam hit the radio button twice and nodded to Devlin. He took the cigarette lighter out of its holder and pressed it against his thumb. The biometric reader vetted him, and suddenly the navigator screen leaped to life. He punched in his instructions.

“Go.”

The car leaped forward, speeding west out of town and toward Louis Armstrong Airport. There would be a private plane there, fully equipped, on the director’s orders. In no time, he and Maryam would be fully up to speed and, if possible, already fighting back. There were contingency plans for something like this, but plans went out the window as soon as the first shots were fired, and from the looks of this…

No matter. He was doing what he was born to do. He was himself again.

He was Devlin.

CHAPTER FIVE

Los Angeles

Jake Sinclair had a choice: to stay sober or to get drunk?

Not just drunk, but, like Elmer Gantry, eloquently drunk, lovingly drunk. Elmer Gantry was one of his favorite characters in literature-not that he had ever read the novel, but he had seen the movie many times over, and he loved Burt Lancaster’s performance, even if the movie left out most of the novel. He loved it so much that he owned a print of it-not a DVD, but an honest-to-God movie print-and had it shown in the screening room at his house in Loughlin Park whenever he wished. It was easy; he owned the studio.

From his custom-built, body-contoured easy chair, Sinclair looked longingly across the room at the built-in wet bar, a relict of a time when real men not only drank but also smoked.

Loughlin Park was the Beverly Hills of Los Feliz. Sinclair was very proud of himself for living in Los Feliz. Los Angeles had moved as far west as it could go without actually trying to build houses in the Pacific Ocean-although there were more than a few movie industry types of his acquaintance who were convinced they could walk on water-so now the smart money had begun to move back east, or at least as far east as Griffith Park Boulevard, where houses that might go for twenty million dollars in the bird streets above Beverly Hills could be snapped up for two or three, and yet you were still dozens of blocks away from the nearest Mexicans. Now that was what he called smart shopping.

Now, about that drink…after all, it was always five o’clock somewhere.

The house had been built by W. C. Fields when he decided to follow Hollywood ’s path westward and move in next door to Cecil B. DeMille. Although Sinclair had “modernized” the place, Mrs. Sinclair had insisted on sparing a few of the period touches, and so the wet bar still stood, its hidden refrigerators filled with designer waters like Saint-Géron, which was supposed to be a prophylactic against anemia. Mrs. Sinclair was enamored of the distinctive long-necked Alberto Bali-designed bottles. But there was no booze in the wet bar, nor anywhere else in the house, in keeping with Hollywood ’s new, healthy, raw-foods-and-Brita-filtered-water lifestyle. Thank God tennis and sportfucking were still allowed.

The reason Sinclair wished he was drunk had to do with business. Almost everything in his life had to do with business, including the current Mrs. Sinclair. She was, of course, not the first Mrs. Sinclair; Jake Sinclair eagerly subscribed to the Hollywood custom in which every man of significance is or was married to some other man of significance’s wife, and every man owned, at one time or another, a house that had formerly belonged to one of his rivals, colleagues, or mortal enemies, and then either totally remodeled it or tore down. As the saying went: Hollywood is a relationship business. And, as far as relationships went, he’d had quite a few.

Luckily, the current, although soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Sinclair was Jennifer, just like the first Mrs. Sinclair, which is why he thought of her as Jennifer II or Jenny the Second. Like some arranged marriage between European potentates in the 16th century, she had come to him as a kind of reverse dowry. Jennifer Gailliard was the daughter of one of the biggest investors in the country, an investor Sinclair had been wooing with even greater ardor than he would later woo the man’s daughter. The three-day celebration of their marriage on the island of Corfu was in all the gossip magazines-the photo rights alone went for more than $2 million to People-and it was quickly followed with the news that the bride’s father had invested upwards of $500 million in Jake Sinclair’s media company for acquisitions, with which money he partly financed his hostile takeover of Time Warner and thus now owned People. So the two million bucks was money well spent, especially since it had landed back in his pocket. Plus he had some really great family photos.

He liked Jenny the Second well enough, but he would have liked her more had she allowed him his favorite Scotch at a time like this. Which was the closing of yet another deal. For even by Jake Sinclair standards-Sinclair often thought of himself in the third person, although he rarely slipped into that particular locution, at least in public-it was a big deal. As his father often told him, it was a stupid man who could not make financial hay in an economic meltdown, and Jake Sinclair’s father had not raised a stupid child.

Which was why, at this moment, he had just decided to divorce her.

Since he had been a kid, he had anticipated this day. Not just to own a major newspaper chain, a major newsweekly, a major television network, and even a major Hollywood studio-but to own all four. The superfecta of media, made possible by other men’s blind greed, blinkered overreaching, and sheer sightless stupidity. During the 1980s, when corporations were merging faster than actors on a movie set, Sinclair-then a junior executive in a media mini-conglomerate-had watched, listened, and learned. Watched as one moron after another, so fearful of being left behind in the tsunami of M &As, had yanked the cord on his golden parachute and sold out his company for a mess of pottage and a face-saving seat on the board, which was soon revoked. One dope after another had fallen for the snake-oil salesman’s charms of “high tech” whispers and “transformative transaction” pornography. Most of them, like his principal rival, had ended up padding the beach at Santa Monica with their New Age replacement wife in tow, spouting some holistic bullshit and telling Us Weekly how glad they were to finally be out of the rat race and living on a mere million dollars a year.

Well, fuck them. They were out and he was very much in, and glad to be here. For it wasn’t an honor just to be nominated-for Jake Sinclair, the only honor that counted was to see his face on the cover of as many magazines as possible, to have his minions chart how many hits his name garnered on Google every day, to ferret out references to himself in novels, television shows, and movies, where he often appeared, thinly veiled as an Important Tycoon or a Media Mogul.

Well, fuck that, too. He was not just an important Media Mogul. He was the Media Mogul. He could afford to divorce Jenny II and get seriously involved with the Other Woman.

That was another thing. Most people laughed at him when, during a time of collapsing “old media” value, Sinclair Holdings, LLC, had snapped up failing properties like Time Inc. and the New York Times. Well, they were as dumb as the people who bailed on New York City during the Abe Beame administration, when Gerald Ford famously told the city to drop dead.

He could taste the Scotch. The cigarette, too. And, if he tried real hard, he could taste her.

Jake Sinclair rose and padded toward the bar. He pressed a switch under the sink, recessed behind the garbage disposal. The false back of one of the cabinets slid aside, revealing his private stash of Oban Scotch and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, the ones with his initials monogrammed on each coffin nail.

Houses were like wives, he thought as he sipped his Scotch and sent the smoke from the Sobranie cigarette spiraling toward the extractor fan, in that you didn’t hang on to them for the memories-you tore them down, rebuilt them, or replaced them with somebody’s else’s. Memories, good or bad, were noxious.

He was glad he didn’t have any children. This was an evil world, and it would be criminal to bring an innocent life into it. The thought hadn’t occurred to him that perhaps, in the instant before conception, his own parents had thought this way, and their parents before them. That if, going back to Adam and Eve at the Fall, every prospective pair of parents had thought this way, there would be no human race all.

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World…

“Yum.” He looked around the room for the voice and then realized it was his own. That’s what often happened after a drink or two, and for that he blamed Jenny II. If she let him have a nip every now and then, this wouldn’t have happened. Yes, he definitely was going to divorce her. He made a mental note to call his personal attorney in the morning.

Anyway, fuck Milton. Sinclair had hated it when they made him read Paradise Lost in school, mostly because he found the sentences hard to understand.

In fact, it was Paradise Lost and its lit-class ilk that had set him on his current path. For Jake Sinclair believed two things: that he was always the smartest guy in the room, and anything he couldn’t readily understand would be too hard for his fellow citizens to grasp. Therefore, in the name of humanity, he had made it his life’s work to “dumb down” all of his publications and broadcasts and movies and television shows, so that people less fortunate then he would not have to be confronted on a daily basis with the proof of their own ignorance.

He was so wrapped up in thoughts of his own magnanimity that it took him a few seconds to realize the phone was ringing. He downed the last gulp of scotch and jacked the extractor fan to High. Jennifer would be home from her tennis game at any minute. “Hello?”

The caller ID revealed the identity of every one of his callers and, on the off chance that the ID was blocked, he simply refused to answer: in fact, the phone company bumped it immediately to voice mail heaven. Which he never checked. If it was a solicitor, they could call his business manager; if it was someone trying to evade security, the hell with them; if it was a petitioner, then fuck him.

It was none of the above.

A brief beat as switching and relay systems from Los Feliz to Mars did their thing. This was another perk of the office: a massive security system that, once having identified a legitimate caller-especially this one-encrypted all voice communications into something that nobody, not even the National Security Agency, would be able to readily decode.

Finally, the voice came on the line. As agreed, the chatter was kept to under 2.3 seconds, so as best to avoid the tender mercies of Fort Meade. No matter which political party you bribed, in the end, they were both going to fuck you. But there was no mistaking the sweet sound of her voice:

“They took the offer.”

Sinclair hung up, poured himself another drink, and looked at the clock. What the hell was he worried about? Jenny II wouldn’t be home for at least another half hour. He made it a double. Now he wouldn’t have to calculate how much a divorce would cost him. He’d just made half a billion dollars by answering the phone, and that would be more than enough to take care of her.

CHAPTER SIX

Manhattan -afternoon

Byrne and Saleh rode in silence up the elevator, Byrne slumped back against the lift’s wall, watching his subordinate’s agitation. “You know the old joke, right?” he said. “About the old bull and the young bull?”

“Huh? Joke?”

“Yeah, joke. Don’t they tell jokes in Ragville?”

Lannie got that aggrieved look on his face so characteristic of young people these days. “You know, Chief, I could-”

Byrne finished the sentence for him. “Bust me down to buck private for hate speech? Maybe. But I can bust all your teeth down your throat first, so the choice is yours.” They went through this all the time, half-joking, half-serious.

“It’s always the Irish way with you, isn’t is, Boss? Punch first, ask questions later?”

The elevator shuddered to a stop. “It’s the only way that works,” said Byrne, getting off first.

As long as he had been on the force, Byrne had never quite gotten used to his new digs. He was used to shit-ass quarters in precincts around the city, at Police Plaza, which even to his office had just enough room for one desk, two chairs, and a window. Even the city’s best detectives were lucky if they had access to a computer that worked only slightly more often than a civil servant.

This was different. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYPD had spared absolutely no expense in outfitting the CTU with the finest equipment available, and if it wasn’t available, to create it. How the brass had managed to conceal the vast expenditures it took to get CTU up and running was beyond Byrne. But, over the years, his former partner and permanent friend Matt White had mastered bureaucratic infighting to an extent that Byrne never would have thought possible. Matt was the living reincarnation of the old Irish Tammany bosses-John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charlie Murphy. Not bad for a black guy from Houston.

Byrne and Saleh badged their way in. This was no ordinary cop shop; you couldn’t just waltz past a metal detector, plow through the busted hookers, and get to some sad-sack sergeant to report that your car had been stolen. Instead, a scanner read a microchip on your special NYPD badge, a second scanner zapped your eyeballs, and a third made sure you were not carrying any unauthorized weapons-even Byrne’s daddy’s.38 had to pass muster.

“What is it?” barked Byrne.

“DoS,” came a reply from somewhere in the room.

DoS was the last word any computer operator wanted to hear, much less utter. Denial of service. A call on the system’s resources so great that its servers failed, overwhelmed from the sheer volume of access requests. “Standby main, alternate packets,” barked Byrne. “Secondary servers…what does Langley say?”

“Langley OotL, sir,” said somebody. Out of the Loop.

“NSA ditto,” said somebody else. There were new faces, and voices, all the time; the burnout rate was tremendous. Staring all day at computer screens was no job for a real cop, in Byrne’s opinion, but a lot had changed since September 11, including him.

“NSA is never ditto,” said Lannie settling into his chair. Of all the aces in the room, Lannie Saleh was the ace of aces. That was why he was on the team. “Even if we think they’re ditto, even if they promise us they’re ditto, they’re never fucking ditto.”

Byrne knew exactly what he meant. Chiefs past and present had fought hard to make the NYPD’s CTU a stand-alone operation, answerable to no one but the residents of New York City. The attack on the Trade Center had happened in their city; the CIA, the NSA, and every other federal agency had let his people down, badly, and they paid for it with their lives-along with the cops and firemen who died alongside them when the towers shuddered and fell. NYPD was often accused of making 9/11 personal, to which their answer was: Damn right it’s personal. And it’s never going to happen again.

To that end, Byrne had cops stationed all over the world. One was based in Lyons, France, to liaise with Interpol; two more worked with the Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Byrne himself had done a stint in Belfast and Dublin, sharing information and techniques with both the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Irish Gardai. As needed, officers headed to Bombay, or whatever the hell they were calling it today, to the Philippines; even Australia -wherever and whenever a terrorist incident occurred.

The point was, NYPD did not trust the CIA, nor any of the other dozen-plus intelligence agencies the federal monster had spawned, including the FBI. Byrne had his own, very good reasons for never trusting the FBI, all of them named Tom Byrne, but in general when the Langley Home for Lost Boys told him they weren’t interfering with the CTU he believed them; most of them, in his estimation, were too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, and the thought of them getting a jump on his boys was laughable.

The National Security Agency, on the other hand, was something else. The former “No Such Agency” had seized an inordinate amount of power in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and even under the reformist President Jeb Tyler, it still wielded a hell of a lot of clout. Was it eavesdropping on their eavesdropping? Of course it was, if the Black Widow was doing her job.

Lannie was making clucking noises under his breath as he punched the keyboard, which Byrne knew was actually Arabic. He’d learn Arabic someday, he promised himself, right after he learned Irish Gaelic, Urdu, and Esperanto and maybe even French. “Speak English,” he commanded.

Lannie stopped clucking and wrapped his tongue around words everybody could understand. “Not good. We have a major DoS coming from”-he punched in a blur-“coming from, it looks like… Bulgaria and… Israel…”

“Typical Arab,” said a good-natured voice Byrne recognized as Sid Sheinberg’s. “Always blaming Israel first.” Sid was Sy’s nephew, a smart lawyer who had dropped his fledgling practice and joined the force when Frankie recruited him for the team. The former Medical Examiner, Sy Sheinberg, had been Byrne’s friend, mentor, and rabbi, and he still missed him after all these years. Almost enough time had passed for Byrne to be able to forget the last time he saw Sy, when he found the body after the suicide…

“In this case, Sid, I’m blaming Israel second,” Lannie snapped. “And then Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and…”

Byrne ran an emotionally loose ship. The CTU was no place for hurt feelings; you checked your resentments and entitlements at the door and you elbowed your way to the table like everybody else. Festering grievances were the worst-if anybody had a beef, let him air it out. Byrne and Matt White had worked that way for two decades, and were not about to change now.

“What have we got-are we blind?” Instead of answering, Lannie turned to Sid. “Gimme a hand here.”

Sid slid into the seat next to Lannie’s and for the next five minutes, neither of them said a thing. Instead, they worked furiously, in some kind of mental rapport, their agile minds leaping to the same hypotheses almost at once.

As they worked, the playfulness fell away, to be replaced by a grim, serious look that played around their lips. The CTU computers had been fucked with before-that much was SOP in this business-but something told Byrne that this time it was different, that this time it might be very, very bad.

“We’ve got a shitload of traffic going across the core switches-forty gigs a sec minimum,” shouted Sid Sheinberg.

“We’ve got timeouts…we’re out of CPU on the core switches…impossible,” barked Lannie.

“What’s this ‘multicast’ shit?” said Sid. “Come on, you fuckers!”

“Is it a virus?” asked Byrne.

Neither man turned to look at him. “No, external,” said Lannie. “Incoming ports are swamped by ‘bots.’ What the fuck?”

“Rebooting the cores,” said Sid, and one by one the machines went down. For all practical purposes, the CTU was now blind, if only for a few moments…

The screens blinked on again. “Fuck,” said Sid. “We’re still greened out, to the max.”

“Impossible-”

“Connections dropping like flies off a camel’s ass-”

“Origination point?”

“Dunno. Cabinet switches…ten gigs apiece. Fubared.”

“Isolate.”

“Isolating now…gotcha suckers!” Sid was nearly out of his seat.

“Kill the downlink ports.”

“Killing…”

“Rebooting now…”

Everyone in the room held his breath and the screens winked out again…and then blinked back on. One by one they came back up-and held.

Lannie never took his eyes off the screen. “T1 and T2-quarantine those motherfuckers,” he said. Sid shut the switches down. The crisis was over.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Lannie.

“You can say that again,” said Sid.

“Watch your mouth, boys,” said Byrne, “especially seeing as how neither of you believes in Our Lord and Savior in the first place.”

Applause rippled through the room. Lannie and Sid stood up to take a bow. Byrne cut their end-zone dance short.

“My office, now,” he said. “On my father’s immortal soul, everybody else, back to work.”

He didn’t have to say anything more: the older guys in the squad knew, and the newer ones would hear about it soon enough. How Byrne’s father, Robert, a detective first grade, had been shot in the back on the Lower East Side, killed on Delancey Street along with his partner, in 1968. He had lived long enough to draw his service revolver-the same.38 Byrne still used-and might have shot his assailant, but the street was too crowded with innocents. So he died, bled to death on the street in front of the pushcarts, taking the identity of his killer to the grave with him, but sparing the lives of others.

Like everything else on the floor except for computer operational security, it was informal. Byrne’s office was not one of the glass-walled fortresses the brass had over at One Police Plaza, with the views of Brooklyn Bridge and, if you looked hard enough and used your imagination, into the borough where half the cops in the city had originated. Flat-bush. Bensonhurst. Brownsville.

“Fingerprints?”

Lannie looked at Sid, then spoke. “Hard to tell until we take a closer look, but first guess is the Chinese.”

“First guess is always the Chinese,” Byrne said. “Continue.”

“But upon further review,” began Sid, who was a big football Giants fan, “it looks like somebody’s just trying a little deflection, a juke and okey-doke.”

Byrne hadn’t heard those terms since O. J. Simpson was playing for Buffalo. “A flea flicker?” he asked.

Lannie was thoroughly confused. “I thought you said to speak English,” he said.

“Football,” said Byrne. “It’s as American as baseball.”

“But there are no feet in your football,” said Lannie.

“Sure there are,” said Byrne. “You use ’em to kick the other guys in the nards when the refs aren’t looking. Which is what I want to do to these people. So who are they?”

Sid shuffled through some notes. “They might be Indians. There are some indications of a redirect via Mumbai- Bombay to you-but now that I look at it, I think this is a flea flicker too. So I-we-are going with Azerbaijani. Baku, probably.”

That was a new one to Byrne. The Chinese were always probing the American cyber-defenses-hell, they attacked the Pentagon every chance they got-but because they bought our increasingly worthless bonds, whichever administration was in power in Washington generally let them skate. And that pussy Tyler was not about to let a little thing like cyber-war interfere with his we-are-the-world foreign policy. Byrne despised everybody in Washington.

“What happened in the window?” he asked, referring to the moments that their defenses were down. There were times, he swore, when he felt like Captain Kirk on the deck of the Enterprise, shouting to Scotty about the shields being down. Another reference they probably wouldn’t get.

“Running a recap now,” said Lannie. “And it’s not Baku. It’s Budapest.”

“Let’s worry about that later. Right now, we need to know how blind we were.”

Hopefully, the window was as short as possible and their redundant systems and fail-safe backups would have worked. Hopefully, this was not a one-two punch. But as Byrne well knew, hope was never an option, much less a plan. Hope was for losers.

Lannie stood there for a moment, transfixed as he consulted his secure PDA. It was a knockoff of the ultra-secure BlackBerrys the NSA had developed for the President; supposedly, it was unhackable, but Byrne knew enough about computers and personal digital assistants to know that nothing was unhackable.

The window was crucial. From this location in Chelsea, the NYPD monitored all its cameras and sensors installed in the wake of 9/11-not just the ones in the subways, but surreptitious monitoring devices at either end of every bridge and tunnel connecting Manhattan either to the Bronx, to Long Island or to Jersey. Not only that-there were also cameras and radioactivity sensors underwater, below river level, on every pier, dock, and jetty. New York had been born a water city and a water city it still was, even if commerce now came by train, plane, and truck. But an island cannot afford to be without its seawall defenses. Pirates had roamed the East River well into the 19th century, and it was up to the NYPD to make sure they never returned.

Lannie’s brown eyes remained impassive as he completed his readout. “Not good,” he said at last. “Down three, maybe four minutes.”

“Where?” asked Byrne.

“Everywhere. City-wide. Somebody just crawled in our ass and shoved a sharp stick up it.”

“What about overlap?” There was a certain amount of fail-safe built into the system, so that if any one part of it went down, a nearby camera would cover for it. But fail-safe didn’t even kick in until they’d been down for five minutes. A system-wide failure would mean no coverage.

Command decisions came easily to Byrne; he’d been making them ever since his father was killed and he realized that he, not his older brother Tom, was going to have to be the man of the house. “What do you think, Sid?” he said, requesting the only other opinion that mattered.

“Think it might be time to liaise with NSA,” he said.

That did it. If Sid was recommending outside assistance, the shit really must be hitting the fan.

“We’ve been breached,” barked Byrne. “Go red.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Manhattan -late afternoon

“Mom! Look at this!” Emma Gardner squealed like the child she once was, not the freshly minted teenager she had so recently become. Standing there on Broadway in SoHo, in front of shops she had only ever dreamed about back in Edwardsville, Illinois, she was again her mother’s little girl, the ghosts of her horrible ordeal for the moment cast off, gone.

“Yuck!” exclaimed Rory. He was about to turn eleven, and still had no use for girls, much less girlish things. But such was his love for his sister that even he managed to feign interest in the latest fashions that almost entirely occupied the minds of girls.

“Say cheese!” shouted Hope. Rory and Emma struck a mock-pose as she snapped the picture with her cell phone camera. She didn’t care if she looked like a dumb tourist. She was a dumb tourist, in New York City for the first time in her life, and loving it. “Now, who’s for some lunch?”

“I am!” “I am!!”

They walked up Broadway to Houston Street. The plastic map she was consulting indicated that the mysterious and wonderful place called Greenwich Village lay to the west, and a brisk walk should bring them into that legendary land of hippies, gays, poets, and painters in just a few minutes.

“I like New York,” said Emma. “And I’m getting real hungry.”

“Me, too,” seconded Rory.

They crossed Seventh Avenue and soon found themselves in the maze of the West Village. The angles of the streets confused Hope. She was determined to show her kids that she was in charge, but when they crossed the intersection of West 4th Street and West 10th Street, she was sure her world had turned upside down.

“Mom, are you sure you know where we’re going?” asked Rory skeptically, scratching his head. He didn’t know much about Manhattan streets, but he knew what a grid looked like, and this wasn’t it.

Hope looked at the map in her hands and realized it wasn’t there. Rory had snatched it away and was studying it like an expert cartographer charting the coast of Malabar. “This way,” he decided, and off he went, heading north by northeast, with Hope and Emma trailing.

Hope took Emma’s hand as they walked past the rows of brownstones and red brick houses, so unlike her notion of what New York City was. This was one of the oldest surviving parts of Manhattan, and as she walked she began to understand what it was that had attracted so many people to Greenwich Village over the centuries. It really was like a little village, if you didn’t count the whizzing yellow cabs and the trucks rumbling down Seventh Avenue and the…unusual…people on the street.

They passed restaurant after restaurant, but didn’t stop. Although none of them would admit it, there was something forbidding about Manhattan eateries. It was almost as if they were a series of private clubs, with admittance only to familiars; Hope was sure that the minute she entered one the people inside would immediately spot them for the tourists they so obviously were, and would make fun of them behind their backs, or take advantage of them. Besides, the prices…

Emma clutched her mother’s hand tightly. It wasn’t that she was afraid-the nightmares had finally stopped a few months ago, and she knew she was as safe here, in the middle of the largest city in the country and the greatest city in the world, as she possibly could be. But there was something reassuring about the physical contract, a warmth that helped dispel the lingering fear.

Suddenly, she shivered and stopped. “What is it?” asked Hope, and then she heard it: Thwack thwack thwack…The sound of angels’ wings. The sound of a helicopter.

Hope turned and craned her neck. Emma looked down at the dirty pavement. Rory felt, rather than saw, that they had stopped, and was rushing back to his sister. Thwack thwack thwack…

Then Hope saw it: high over the Hudson, a police chopper was describing a lazy arc in the sky as it surveyed the area along what the locals still referred to as the West Side Highway, even though the highway was long gone. It was not threatening, not alarming, but the sight and sound brought back unwelcomed memories for both Hope and Emma.

“Food!” shouted Rory, rushing ahead.

In their ignorance, they had wandered north of 14th Street, where Rory had spotted a Sabrett’s hot dog vendor wheeling his pushcart north. A hot dog was far from haute cuisine, but it was certainly better than nothing.

The vendor, however, didn’t seem to want to stop. From time to time he glanced down at his watch, and then cast a look at the sky, but he kept pushing the cart north on Seventh Avenue, Rory on his heels. “Hey, mister, wait up! We wanna buy some hot dogs.”

The pushcart vendor, however, didn’t stop, but kept up his steady pace. He wasn’t exactly running-you couldn’t really run with a pushcart, Rory noticed-but his pace was quick, almost double-time, and he either didn’t hear Rory or wasn’t inclined to stop.

“Hey, mister!”

The man looked over his shoulder: “Off duty!” he shouted and kept right on moving.

Hope watched her son chase the man up the avenue. She had already learned the hard way that, in New York, when people said they were off-duty, they were off-duty. A couple of fruitless interactions with yellow cabs and the mysterious dome-light signals had taught her that.

Still, Rory was not about to give up. When the vendor had to halt at a light, the boy caught up with him. “Three hot dogs, please,” he said, brightly.

The man turned to look at him. Rory wasn’t much good at guessing grown-ups’ ages-they all looked old to him-but he figured the guy had to be somewhere between 20 and 50, African American, with close-cropped hair and a small mustache. He noticed the man had a couple of tats on his big arms. He looked like he worked out pretty regularly, and you wouldn’t want to mess with him.

“Off duty,” said the man and started up the pushcart again. Then, suddenly, he changed his mind, flipped open the top, and pulled out three dogs as Hope and Emma approached. “What d’you want on ’em?” the man asked.

“One with ketchup, one with mustard, and one with sauerkraut,” replied Rory.

“You got it,” said the man, much friendlier, coming up with the three hot dogs.

“My name’s Rory. Rory Gardner. What’s yours?” For a moment, Rory thought the man was going to snap at him, but instead he smiled a nice smile and replied, “Ben. My name’s Ben.”

Ben stuffed the hot dogs into buns, added the condiments, and handed them over.

“Thank you so much,” said Hope, handing him a $20 bill as Emma and Rory tucked in. “Please forgive my son. He’s just curious, is all.”

Ben smiled again. “First time in New York, huh?” he said. “Have a nice day.” And then he was gone.

“People sure are weird here,” said Emma. Rory made a face at Emma as they walked and ate, just like real New Yorkers. Hope was glad to see them laughing and kidding…and then she remembered the hurt and the void at the center of her heart. She took a bite out of her hot dog and looked up at the sky. The noise had distracted her: not just one helicopter now, but two, three, more, circling in the clear blue sky.

A taxi slowed to turn the corner. It was available. “Come on, kids,” shouted Hope, signaling to the cab. Astoundingly, it rolled to a stop. “Who’s up for a movie?” Gleefully, they all piled into the backseat.”

“Times Square, please,” said Hope. The driver hit the pedal, sending them tumbling back into the seat cushion. This was going to be fun.

CHAPTER EIGHT

New Orleans

Maryam noticed the car behind them before Devlin did. “Seven o’clock,” she said. They were driving up Canal Street, past the ghost of Ignatius J. Reilly and the clock.

“Bogies?”

“What is bogies?”

Sometimes he felt older than he actually was. Why would she know what “bogies” were?

“Bad guys. Like Bogey, before he became a good guy.”

“Right-who is Bogey?”

Devlin took a deep breath. “He was a bad guy before he became a good guy.”

She moved the car ahead faster, but not too much faster. Maryam was an expert. She knew that too sudden a movement would indicate they had something to hide, or, worse, something to flee from.

She swerved around a low-riding Chevy and a Prius, then cut in front of both of them as she took a hard right on St. Charles Avenue. The Howard Avenue roundabout was coming up fast.

“Where are you-”

“Shut up,” she said. “And hang on.” She floored it.

The car behind them picked up speed. Whoever was tailing them was inexpert and obvious. But he was a good driver.

They shot under the Pontchartrain Expressway. The Garden District was dead ahead, served by the famous St. Charles Avenue streetcar, which trundled down the middle of the boulevard from Canal Street to the terminus, thirteen miles away. “Slow down,” said Devlin. Maryam obeyed instantly, knowing he would have a reason.

Devlin used the darkness of the underpass to flip over into the backseat, where his briefcase was. There were weapons in it, but he didn’t need a weapon at the moment. A special hand-held would do just fine.

Most drivers didn’t realize it, but today’s cars were basically computers attached to a drive train, and topped with a home entertainment center. The days of “driving” a car were long gone; the computer drove it and you just steered it. There was no need anymore to shoot out tires of a pursuing vehicle, or run it off the road; all you had to do was knock out its computer and a $50,000 Mercedes became just another expensive piece of immobile junk. And the jalopy behind them was no Mercedes.

Devlin punched the make and model of the car into his PDA. It was a little something of his own devising, which he had developed in his spare time in his office at Fort Meade. At close enough range, it could access a car’s onboard computer and get a complete readout of the vehicle, including its VIN; via a satellite uplink, Devlin could then take control of the car, jam it, disable it, or even wreck it if he so chose. All he had to do, once the readout was complete, was push a button.

Sam Raclette was enjoying the ride. It wasn’t every day that he got a call from a big-shot network correspondent to “follow that car,” but today was his lucky day, in more ways than one. For one thing, he had just happened to be hanging around RAND when the call came in, hoping to squeeze off a shot or two of somebody famous, but idling in the parking lot having coffee, all he saw was some dumpy guy get into a car. Then Ms. Stanley stuck her head out as if she was looking for him, so naturally his curiosity was aroused and he decided to grab a couple of pictures of the Principessa when she saw him and started to chew his ass out until she had a better idea.

“Follow that car,” she said, just like in the movies, and slipped him a couple of hundred fresh simoleons. Well, as it turned out the damn car didn’t go anywhere except into the parking garage, but he never saw the dumpy guy get out and when the car next to it pulled out, he decided what the hell, especially after he got a load of the babe behind the wheel.

And now here he was, chasing a woman into the Garden District and enjoying it. He’d catch up to her soon enough, somewhere at a light on St. Charles, and try to calm her fears. All he wanted to do was talk to her, ask her a couple of questions, maybe get her number. He heard cops did that sort of shit all the time, pulled over a hot chick just for the heck of it, pretend she was doing 50 in a 35-mph zone, check out her license and registration, let her off with a friendly warning and then give her a call a couple of days later.

There she was, just ahead. The damn tinted windows made it hard to see through the back windshield, which was really pissing him off. He was going to have to get closer, but she kept pulling away from him.

Suddenly, the car in front of him slowed. Maybe she was getting tired of the game. Maybe she’d caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror and liked what she saw. He was known to have that effect on women, if he did say so himself. NOLA was a pretty easy town to get laid in, especially if you didn’t mind big girls, but Sam liked a challenge, and who didn’t?

Something caught his eye, something he hadn’t noticed before. There was somebody else in the car with her: a man. A man who had just climbed into the backseat. Damn! Suddenly his whole fantasy of scoring with the hot chick didn’t seem so plausible anymore. Now it was back to business, try to flag them down and-

What if the guy in the car was the dumpy guy? Then he’d really be on to something. There was an underpass below the Pontchartrain Expressway just ahead. If he sped up now he might be able to catch them in the darkness.

He gunned it.

Something was wrong. The readout on the car came through okay, but that was part of the problem. It was an ordinary, off-the-lot Taurus from a few years back, nothing at all special. If the guy following them was really on to them, he would have been driving something up to the challenge. If he really suspected something or if he were sent by somebody who did, he would be driving a lot differently. If it really was an enemy and not a random dope, they wouldn’t even have spotted him until it was almost too late. Something was definitely wrong.

It can’t be, thought Devlin, his finger on the button. What were the odds of a civilian picking them up and giving chase? None at all. Plus the handoff in the garage had been clean, of that he was sure. His mind raced, trying to spot the flaw in his argument, but he couldn’t find any. Not on short notice.

And the guy was following them.

Still…what if the guy was an amateur…

Too late. He pushed the button.

Sam Raclette was closing fast on her when all of a sudden his car stopped.

Except it just didn’t stop. It went from 40 to zero almost instantly. The engine shut off, the brakes locked, and the steering went out. There was a sharp jerk and then the back of the car came up off the ground and flipped over. The car’s windows exploded outward from the impact, the airbags popped and the theft-alarm system went off. In the gloom of the underpass, it spun on its roof once or twice, then settled. Tires screeched, horns honked, as the other cars tried to avoid the wreck.

Inside, Sam followed it head over heels in its tumble, and found himself hanging upside down by his seat belt. This fucking piece of shit he thought to himself. Outside, he heard the screech of tires as the cars behind him braked and squealed around him. All he needed was some idiot to smash into him now, before he could get out.

The noise inside the car was deafening; it was hard for him to hear any of what was going on outside. Still, the first thing was to get the hell out of there. With some difficulty, he released the seat-belt catch and slid down the seat. He was covered with broken glass, and there was blood running down his face, but nothing seemed to be broken except the damn car. Although he was stunned from the impact, Sam could still think clearly enough to understand that he had to get out fast, and that he was going to sue the ass off Ford Motor Company once he did.

And then he heard the klaxon of a semi, right behind him.

Devlin had a ringside seat as the truck clipped the Taurus. “Shit!” he exclaimed.

“What’s wrong?” Maryam glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the aftermath.

The Taurus spun crazily, a lopsided top sent careening toward one of the stanchions that held up the highway. The truck driver delay-reacted, swerving only after it was far too late, which caused several other cars to leap out of the way as best they could. Unable to stop, the truck righted itself and continued to plow on until the driver could bring the vehicle under control.

“We’ve gotta stop. Go back,” said Devlin. Unbidden to his mind came the memory of that FBI agent he’d killed in his home in Falls Church. The woman he’d shot in his bathroom-

Evalina Anderson. That was her name. He had found it out later, and had made sure that her family would never want for anything again. They were told you won the lottery and then they were whisked away from a modest home in Prince Georges County and resettled in northern California. They thought good fortune had at last smiled on them. But it was not good fortune. It was the Angel of Death.

Did he have to kill everything he touched? That was the way he’d been trained, practically from birth, and certainly from childhood. Raised by the man he most loathed in the whole world and condemned to this horrid existence as an operative of Branch 4 of the Central Security Service, the most secret intelligence unit of the United States government. Although the work of the CSS was fundamental to the overall mission of the National Security Agency, it was the CSS that had remained anonymous from the day it was ordered into existence by President Nixon on Dec. 23, 1971, his little Christmas present to the nation, courtesy of National Security Decision Memorandum 5100.20.

On paper, the CSS looked like a million other government agencies-how they had grown, until it was now they, rather than the elected officials, who ran the country-hiding behind a bland exterior and a mission statement that concealed rather than revealed. He could recite it by heart:

“The Central Security Service (CSS) provides timely and accurate cryptologic support, knowledge, and assistance to the military cryptologic community.

“It promotes full partnership between the NSA and the cryptologic elements of the Armed Forces, and teams with senior military and civilian leaders to address and act on critical military-related issues in support of national and tactical intelligence objectives. CSS coordinates and develops policy and guidance on the Signals Intelligence and Information Assurance missions of NSA/CSS to ensure military integration.”

The CSS was so secret that it didn’t even get its own emblem until 1996; the insignia showed five service emblems balanced around a five-pointed star; each emblem was that of one of the armed services’ cryptologic elements, including the United States Naval Network Warfare Command, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, the United States Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency, and the US Coast Guard. That ought to tell you nothing.

In fact, what the CSS was, was the muscle arm of the NSA. Nixon had originally intended CSS to be equal in stature with the other armed services-the “fourth branch,” which is where his unit got its in-house name-but the services are good at nothing if not turf warfare and so CSS took refuge at NSA, where it could take its creation as an “armed service” literally. As the focal point of interservice liaisons, and with the weight of the NSA behind it, there was nothing it could not do, nowhere it could not go.

As thus Devlin had been born. “Devlin” was not his real name. His real name had died long ago, along with his real parents, at Rome ’s Leonardo da Vinci airport, Christmas 1985, when Arab terrorists shot the place up, as well as Vienna ’s Schwechat Airport. The eight-year-old Devlin had survived when his mother threw herself on him, but both she and his father-intelligence service professionals-had died in the attack.

The man who was not there that day had raised him from that moment on. He had taken him away, taken him off the grid, taught him, trained him to follow in both his parents’ footsteps, but stronger and tougher than even his father had been. His new father had had an apt pupil, one equally adept at combat and weapons training, at languages, and in ELINT and cryptology. He was Mime to Devlin’s Siegfried, trying to create and hone a fine, burnished weapon but unable to put on the finishing touches. Only Devlin could do that, and he had: completely anonymous, like his service, he was the CSS’s most valuable asset, his existence above SCI-Sensitive Compartmented Information, which was above top secret-and known to only a handful of the highest officials in the U.S. government: the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the National Security Agency.

And the man who had raised him, who had whisked him away after the death of his parents, the man who had been having an affair with Devlin’s mother, the man who had betrayed them to their worst enemy…that man was General Armond Seelye. His boss.

His worst enemy was the man who had financed the Abu Nidal operation, as he had financed the operations of the terror network across Europe in those days. The man who posed as a great benefactor of the people, the man who used his suffering at the hands of the Nazis as both a sword and a shield, the man whose philanthropy-although a pittance compared with the huge sums he’d made as a rapacious financial genius-was celebrated on the covers of magazines around the world…that man was Emanuel Skorzeny. Who, Devlin fully understood, not only wanted him dead but needed him dead.

Skorzeny had escaped the last time they met, in France. He wouldn’t be so lucky the next time.

“What are you going to do?” Maryam’s worried voice brought him back to reality.

He had to make this right. He had to. If the man in the trailing vehicle was still alive, he had to rescue him. “I’m going to save him.”

Maryam turned right on Erato Street and doubled back on Carondelet and turned right again on Clio, which brought them back to the scene of the accident. The cops had not arrived yet and, knowing the New Orleans cops, it would be hours before they got out of the donut shops or the bars. Before they got to St. Charles, he jumped out, fully outfitted for the task, and ran. He gave a tug on his Tigers cap, making sure it obscured as much of his face as possible. In a situation like this, no one would remember anything but the truck hitting the car, but no point in taking chances; he’d had enough bad luck for one afternoon.

The Taurus was shoved up against the side of the underpass, and traffic had slowed. Good. This would make things a lot easier.

The first thing he had to do was stop traffic. A couple of smoke grenades rolled down the street accomplished that in a hurry; traffic, already crawling, simply came to a stop as it neared the underpass.

He tossed a couple of flares to mark the car’s location. Good Samaritans did that all the time. Psychologically, they would further serve to keep nosy civilians away.

He shone a light into the car, a powerful beam that he activated from his key ring: nothing fancy, the kind you could buy commercially to use both as a flashlight or as a distress signal, but amazingly useful.

The driver was alive but unconscious. His face was covered in blood, but Devlin could see at a glance the blood was coming from a cut forehead. He pulled up an eyelid and directed the light into the man’s eyes. The pupil reacted: good.

Maryam had the car right where he needed it, backed into the underpass, trunk opened. Devlin got the man into the trunk, closed it, and hopped back in. Then they were around the corner and up onto Highway 90, the famous Gulf Coast Highway that soon enough would turn into I-10 and get them to the airport.

Devlin lowered the rear seats and slid the unconscious man into the back of the car. He could give him some first aid, but they’d be at Charity Hospital in five minutes, and he’d never remember a thing.

CHAPTER NINE

Washington, D.C. -late afternoon

President John Edward Bilodeau Tyler slumped back in his chair in the private quarters, alone. As the first unmarried president since James A. Buchanan, he had the ultimate bachelor pad. If you couldn’t get chicks to come home to the White House, you were a sorry-assed loser for sure. But that was just the problem-even had he wanted to, he couldn’t get chicks to come back to the private quarters of the White House because, in a time of heightened security, the Secret Service would blow them out of their high heels. So he was a sorry-assed loser after all.

There was a soft knock at the door, which he at once recognized as Manuel’s. Manuel Concepcion was his private steward, bartender, shrink, priest, and rabbi all rolled into one short Filipino whose English was still inflected with the cadences of his native Samar. The Concepcions had been fighting on the side of the Americans since the Philippines insurrection of 1902; even in an age of ethnic grievances, there was no question where his loyalty lay. Since the death of Bill Hartley, Manuel was, in fact, the only person the president of the United States really trusted. “Come in.”

The door opened a crack. “May I get you anything, sir?”

Tyler ’s first instinct was to say no and then he decided to hell with his first instinct. “Bourbon and branch,” he ordered. The door opened and Manuel walked in carrying a silver tray upon which was a bourbon and water, fixed just the way he liked it. “You’re a mind reader, Manuel,” said Tyler.

“No, sir,” replied Manuel, setting the drink down in front of the president, “but I am observant.”

As Tyler reached for the liquor, Manuel straightened and reached into the interior breast pocket of his steward’s coat. “I brought you a cigar, too,” he said. Already, he had the cutter out, deftly sliced off the closed end, and handed it to Tyler at the same time producing a lighted kitchen match. Tyler accepted the cigar gratefully and leaned forward into the flame, which jumped as he breathed it in until the tip of the cigar glowed ruby red.

“I’m going to lose, aren’t I?” Tyler finally said.

“Probably, yes, sir, if you believe the polls,” Manuel replied. “She looks unstoppable.”

Tyler took a long sip of bourbon. This was not how he had envisioned the end of his presidency, tossed out after one term, not because the people despised him, as they eventually did all presidents, but because they liked the other guy better. It wasn’t as if his polls were in free fall. Instead they read like the chart of a slowly dying patient whose condition was terminal and it was just a matter of time before he was carted off from the hospital to the hospice, to make room for some son of a bitch who actually had a chance.

Four years ago, Angela Hassett had been the first-term governor of Rhode Island, of all places, a state barely bigger than one of Louisiana ’s larger parishes and even more corrupt. But when you stopped to think about it, it all made perfect sense. Providence was a wholly owned subsidiary of Beacon Hill, a kind of farm team for the gangsters and criminals who had turned Massachusetts from the cradle of liberty into what was, in effect, a criminal organization populated by suckers, easy marks, and robots, who regularly return the Party in Power to power no matter how many Speakers of the House got indicted.

Hassett and her handlers, however, had taken the unholy conjoining of politics and crime to a whole new level. In her, they had the perfect front woman: a Harvard-educated lawyer (were there any other kind?) with a thousand-watt smile, impeccable but understated taste in clothes, a way of mellifluously stringing an endless series of platitudes together, and absolutely ruthless political instincts. The media loved her as well, finding everything about her fascinating; the lockstep editorial pages of both the Boston Globe and the New York Times hailed her as the perfect, sophisticated antidote to the hillbilly regime of Jeb Tyler. The funny part was, Tyler had been hailed in exactly the same way when he first ran for the Senate, but the Zeitgeist had evidently tired of his rustic good looks, folksy ways, and cracker-barrel delivery. Just as black was the new white, Angela Hassett was the new Jeb Tyler.

Then there was that son of a bitch, Jake Sinclair…

That Skorzeny business hadn’t helped, either. Tyler ’s administration had foiled an EMP attack on the east coast that would have plunged America into a hundred years of dysfunction and darkness, but he couldn’t take any credit for it; in fact, he couldn’t even let anybody know how close they had come to the abyss. Instead, he was blamed for the death toll in Los Angeles and Edwardsville, Ill.

True, he had struck an onerous deal with the fugitive financier. In exchange for his relative freedom, Emanuel Skorzeny had become, in effect, a combination of debtor and confidential informant, forced to pay an enormous sum to the United States in compensation for the Grove bombing and the attack on the midwestern middle school, as well as to Her Majesty’s government in London, where the bombed-out London Eye had been transformed into affordable housing and a mosque for the capital’s burgeoning immigrant population.

That was not all. Skorzeny also had been forced to surrender all his domiciles save Liechtenstein and use his continuing influence in the world’s stock market to restore some of the lost capital his machinations had stolen. In exchange for his cooperation, and to prevent him from going completely stir-crazy, Skorzeny was free to fly on his private jet. But it could not land anywhere in the world that the United States of America had any political, economic, or military influence. All Skorzeny could do was go for a ride in his custom 707, refueling in the air if he could manage it, and occasionally stopping off in Chad, Vanuatu, and Lapland. Even Switzerland didn’t want to see him anymore, although the Swiss were still happy to take and harbor his money.

Even so, Tyler had nearly blown one of the nation’s most valuable resources-the Central Security Service’s Branch 4 clandestine operation, and in particular the agent known as Devlin. And then there was Bill Hartley’s suicide, which had left him without a single Senator he could either trust or reliably bribe. The presidency thing was a lot harder than it looked. No wonder Caesar had nudged the Roman Republic toward the Empire.

“Sir?” Manuel’s question brought him out of his fog.

“Yes, Manuel?”

“Will there be anything else this evening?”

Tyler looked at his manservant; funny how here, in the heart of the world’s greatest democracy, the president still had man-servants. He was about to say something when the phone buzzed softly. That was Manuel’s signal to leave. He bowed and backed out of the room, closing the door and leaving the president alone with whatever problem was now announcing itself.

It was Millie Dhouri, his private secretary, calling from the Oval Office. “Yes, Millie, what is it?”

“Mr. President, I have Director Seelye on the line. He says it’s urgent.”

Tyler wished that Manuel had made it a double. Calls from Seelye could never be good news. “Patch him through, please.”

“Yes, sir.” There was a short pause, with a faint crackle on the line, as the security of the connection was verified and the scrambling devices activated, and then Lt. General Armond “Army” Seelye-the Director of the National Security Agency-came on the line.

Tyler spoke first: “How bad is it?”

Seelye did not seem surprised in the least by the president’s opening gambit. “Unknown at this time. Apparently, there’s been a major security breach at NYPD CTU. They were blinded for several minutes by a coordinated DoS attack, most likely Chinese in origin.”

“The Chinks are always doing that sort of thing,” Tyler interrupted. “They’ve been in our shorts for years: at DoD, the Agency, even the power grid and water supply. I thought you guys were supposed to be doing something about that.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Seelye’s voice; even scrambled, the sting was audible. “We are, sir. But as you know, despite the reorganizations post 9/11, interservice agency cooperation is still a reformer’s fantasy and a bureaucrat’s nightmare. And, in any case, NYPD acts alone.”

That much was true. The New York Police Department had become a stand-alone, off-the-shelf operation, completely independent of the nation’s intelligence establishment. How exactly that had happened was unclear, but it didn’t really matter at this point. The clannish Irish-and every cop on the NYPD was at heart Irish, no matter what his or her ethnicity-were deeply suspicious of the Washington outsiders and, after Atta & Co. punched two huge smoking holes in the ground of lower Manhattan, were in no mood to trust Langley, Fort Meade, or the Pentagon ever again.

“Who’s in command of the CTU these days?” asked Tyler.

“Captain Byrne, Francis X. Byrne,” replied Seelye. “Old-school to the end. Father was a cop, KIA. Plenty of write-ups and citations. He’s also been best buds with the commish since they were young detectives together. He’s bulletproof.”

“So we know nothing about their operation.”

“Not really, no sir.”

Tyler sighed. What the hell was the point of having multiple intelligence agencies under the vague aegis of the Director of National Intelligence and the cumbersome Department of Homeland Security? The whole thing was a giant cluster fuck. If he survived the fall campaign, it was something he was going to have to fix. Especially when a city cop shop could tell all of them to go pound sand.

The hell of it was, the CTU was probably the best-equipped counterterrorism operation in the world, even better than the Israelis’. They had the latest equipment, state-of-the-art computers, and the top techies, including a cadre of former hackers who had been persuaded to join the force in lieu of a stretch at Auburn or Dannemora. By contrast, the FBI was making do with the un-networked equivalents of the old Trash 80s and Kaypros, and even the vaunted NSA was still behind the WYSIWYG curve on some of its older terminals. It was a wonder, Tyler reflected, that given the determination of America ’s enemies to strike and strike again that there were any buildings standing in Washington and New York at all.

“…and there’s a reason for that, which goes beyond their insularity,” Seelye was saying.

“What’s that?” Talking to Seelye exasperated Tyler, but given their shared past, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Seelye stayed until he quit, or until Devlin asked for his resignation. That was part of the deal, too.

“Byrne’s brother, Tom.”

“Go on.”

“As in Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Thomas A. Byrne.”

“Oh, shit. Don’t tell me that asshole is our guy’s brother.”

“That’s what they say the ‘A’ stands for, yes sir.”

How and why Tom Byrne was still with the Bureau, not to mention how and why he had risen as far as he had, was one of Washington ’s great mysteries. Not since Hoover himself had a SAC been as roundly and as cordially despised as Tom Byrne, and yet he had continued his unimpeded rise through the ranks. “Haven’t you got anything on him?”

There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment as Seelye chose his words. “Plenty of stories, mostly about something that went down years ago. Something that seems to have involved both Byrne brothers. But if anybody knows anything, they’re either not talking or sleeping with the fishes. Which is weird, because…”

“Because?” prompted Tyler.

“Because the two brothers hate each other’s guts. They’re like two guys, each with a loaded gun at the other one’s head, knowing that no matter who pulls the trigger first, they both get their heads blown off.”

Tyler saw the outlines of a possible play. As Seelye had told him in the middle of the Skorzeny business, he really was getting the hang of the intelligence game. “Sort of like you and me, in other words.”

“You could put it that way, yes, sir,” Seelye said.

“Not to mention Devlin.”

“Let’s not, if you don’t mind, Mr. President.”

“You don’t like him very much, do you?” asked Tyler. “Is it because he’s hard to like?” Tyler was still smarting from his confrontations with Devlin.

“It’s not that he’s hard to like,” replied Seelye. “He’s impossible to like.” He wondered if the president would get the reference to the original Manchurian Candidate and immediately decided he would not.

He did. “The first version really was much better,” said Tyler. “Did you know I was one of the Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch?” This president was always full of surprises.

“Nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state.”

“So is Ohio, for that matter-so level with me. Where’s Devlin?”

The thought crossed Seelye’s mind that somehow Tyler had found out about his true relationship with the man known as Devlin-how he had in fact raised him after his parents’ death in 1985, trained him to be the perfect operative, kept him off the grid and in his pocket until…until the Skorzeny business came out into the open. The only other person who knew was Howard Rubin, the former Secretary of Defense, but he had retired to his farm in Maryland six months ago. Seelye and Rubin had never been particularly friendly, but he felt for the man when Rubin had called him up one afternoon to tell him of his impending resignation. “When a couple of guys with a suitcase nuke can take down a whole country,” Rubin had wondered, “what’s the point of a Defense Department?” Especially one that, for reasons of political cowardice, wouldn’t fight back.

The new SecDef was Shalika Johnson, the former governor of Tyler ’s home state, Louisiana. There were plenty of folks who thought Johnson was simply an affirmative-action appointment by a floundering president looking to shore up his minority base, but Seelye had already learned the hard way that Ms. Johnson was one of the toughest human beings in Washington, which was saying something. If the country were ever really to go on a war footing, she would be the fiercest, most uncompromising warrior since Scipio Africanus. He dreaded having to have the Devlin discussion with her, when and if the time came.

“He’s in the air.”

“Where is he going?”

Seelye hesitated. “He…he didn’t say sir?”

“The fuck you mean, ‘he didn’t say’?” At the other end of the line, Seelye could feel the temperature rising inside the White House.

“He was supposed to return to Fort Meade, but-”

Tyler exploded. He hadn’t yelled at anyone all day, and it felt good. “God fucking damn it, I don’t give a rat’s fucking rear end what he was supposed to do. I’m in the goddamned fight of my life with this phony from Rhode Island, even my bought-and-paid-for pollsters and TV pundits are telling me there’s no way I can win, and after all I’ve done for this goddamned country, and if something goes tits up in New York, well, this job won’t be worth a plugged nickel. And neither will yours, General. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly, sir, yes.” Seelye was used to dealing with Tyler, had even come to almost like him, and he reached for the right words to say. The last thing he wanted to see was Angela Hassett-untested, untried, a creature of the media and mostly of Jake Sinclair, who was probably fucking her or was thinking about fucking her-in the Oval Office. Especially since her one qualification for the office was that she was not Jeb Tyler. “Devlin has an instinct for these things, Mr. President. He’s probably on his way to New York right now. That’s where I’d head if I were him. Teterboro, most likely-no commercial traffic.” Seelye paused, the telephone equivalent of a shrug. “Anyway, you know his deal. He does what he wants, when he wants.”

“I know it,” said Tyler evenly, “but I still don’t like it.”

“It’s the only deal we have.”

“It’s the only deal you have,” Tyler reminded him. “And he can pull the plug on it any time he wants. So you’d better make damn sure that, whatever he’s up to, it goes smoothly.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Seelye.

“Now make sure he gets wherever he’s going, on the double.”

“Er…sir?” Seelye got his question in just before Tyler hung up on him.

“Yes, General?”

“It’s not just him, sir. It’s her, too.”

“Who?”

“The woman he’s taken as his partner in Branch 4 operations. You remember, the Iranian. You authorized it, at the meeting at the Willard Hotel.”

“I don’t remember anything about an Iranian.” That part was probably true. Tyler only remembered things that were important and, of course, grudges. “Who is she?”

“We don’t know, exactly. Only Devlin knows who she is. That was part of the deal. We haven’t even been able to vet her, and here she is-”

Tyler didn’t feel like arguing. The U.S. Government was so endemically riddled with moles, sleeper agents, old Soviet illegals, and various other burrowed and semi-dormant creatures that one more wouldn’t make any difference; it was a miracle the Republic had lasted this long, what with all the enemies, foreign and domestic. And, these days, it was impossible to tell them apart…

“Whatever. Defend your country, General Seelye.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you sir.”

Once again, the President of the United States was alone.

Tyler leaned back in his chair. He’d only been president for three years, but it already seemed like a lifetime, and as he looked back on that much younger man who had sought, and won, the office, he hardly recognized him. From the outside, running a presidential campaign might look hard, and of course it was, but it was nothing compared to actually having the job itself. All the political bullshit went out the window the minute you walked into the Oval Office for the first time and, unless you were really stupid or arrogant or both, that’s where it stayed, fertilizing the Rose Garden until either you were ready to leave or the voters sickened of you and threw you out.

If anything happened, he could pretty much kiss his reelection chances good-bye. Even if the country rallied round the flag, there was just enough time from now to the election to make them forget. Maybe. Unless it was really horrific, in which case a century wouldn’t be enough. The patriotic shock would turn to outrage, and the second term of a Tyler presidency would be toast. He had to figure out an angle…of political survival.

Instinctively, Tyler reached for his bourbon, then remembered he’d finished it. But when he brought the glass to his lips, he saw to his astonishment that it was a fresh one, as if delivered by a ghost. Manuel must have brought it to him while he was on the blower with Seelye. Nothing like a man you could trust, even here in the White House.

CHAPTER TEN

Fort Meade, Maryland

General Armond “Army” Seelye put down the secure phone to the White House and typed out an encrypted message to Devlin: FRANCIS X. BYRNE, CHIEF OF NY CTU. He’d gotten his orders, which was the easy part. Executing them was something else.

Whatever was going on in New York was plenty troubling. Not that it was exactly a surprise. The Chinese, the Russians, and all sorts of other “frenemies” were constantly engaged in a relentless probing of America’s cyber-defenses, so much so that the President had recently appointed a “cyber-czar” to war-game possible responses to a takedown of, say, the electrical grid. Not that they were going to stop there. Over the past few years, the number and the severity of the probes had been growing exponentially, which told him plenty. For one thing, it meant that the Chinese were no longer afraid of the Americans, and why should they be? They were holding a huge amount of American paper, notes they could call in any time they wanted to wreck the currency or take down the economy. Not even Emanuel Skorzeny at his most powerful could take on the once-almighty dollar.

For another, they had millions of men under arms and, in the coming years, that number would only swell. One of the unintended side effects of the Peoples Republic ’s one-child policy and the preference of Chinese families for boys was the creation of a lopsided generation in which males outnumbered females in a ratio 1.25 to 1. That was a lot of horny, frustrated boys, more than a quarter of whom were born losers who never would get any girl at all. The English used to deal with this by having one boy inherit the estate, the second son join the army, and the third take the cloth, but the Chinese had no cloth, and so droves of young males were heading into the army every day; if they couldn’t fuck they could damn sure fight.

Worse, it told Seelye that even countries like Bulgaria and Israel and the lesser ’stans of the old Soviet Union had no fear of the American eagle, either. Al-Qaeda had taught Americans that a handful of zealots armed mostly with the element of surprise, ruthlessness of will, and the sheeplike nature of modern boobus Americanus could easily overpower a crew and turn the morning flight to Los Angeles into a guided missile; all it took was the audacity of a bunch of dopes who thought they were ticketed for paradise instead of a fiery inferno or a farmer’s field. Everyone, it seemed, felt free to poke the old lion.

But even a czar wouldn’t be able to pry anything out of the NYPD if they didn’t want to give it up. New York City was its own country, and just as unafraid of Washington as everybody else.

He pressed a buzzer on his desk, which connected him immediately to his assistant. In the old days, she would have been called his secretary, but somewhere along the line someone had decided this wasn’t politically correct.

“Ms. Overbay?” he said. “Please ask Major Atwater to come up, please.”

“Right away, Director,” replied Ms. Overbay. If someone put a gun to his head and demanded that he describe Ms. Overbay, he wasn’t sure he could do it. Everything about the modern workplace had become distant, defensive, protective, impersonal. If he could get through the day without interacting with anyone face-to-face, he would, and Seelye suspected that a lot of managers and office workers around the country felt the same way.

It would take Atwater only a few minutes to hustle to the DIRNSA’s office. Seelye let his eyes roam over his desk, which was always kept as tidy as possible. But on this day there were a few items laid out on it, simple enough individually but disturbing when taken as a whole. Someone was trying to send him a message.

Regarding the first, there was no doubt about its provenance. It was a letter, an old-fashioned letter, from Moscow, bearing the unique postal stamp of the Kremlin:

“My dear Seelye,” it began, in English, obviously painstakingly translated in its writer’s head from the original Russian thoughts. And then, just as obviously, not. It read instead as if it had been passed through one of those Web translation programs, which rendered the most elegant original into snarling gibberish. “Long time I am retired but fashion change so I write tell you danger. Illegals program of course you know but what don’t know is that continued long after Soviet Union demise, people in place already, what else to do, nothing. But still election danger. Yours, N-.”

The old Soviet “illegals program” was a long-running attempt to recruit, or insinuate, native-born sleeper agents into the U.S. government at the highest levels. Throughout his career, Seelye had monitored and tracked them, taking them out where he could-that was a real problem, since so many of them had graduated from elite prep schools like Hotchkiss and Choate, or from Harvard and Yale; there really were no traitors like old-money traitors, and the nouveau quota babies who aped them. But this note took the illegals program to a whole new level. Was an “illegal” now running for the highest office in the land?

If the information was true-a big if-then this was a problem that no one in the U.S. government had ever before confronted. For nearly three centuries, it was assumed that both political parties were acting in good faith, that the candidates they offered were Constitutionally eligible, and beholden to no foreign power. But, aside from Article II, Section One, there was no check on eligibility. The people had to take the word of the parties that the candidates they offered up for consideration were, in fact, eligible. It didn’t matter whether the Constitution was “living” or “original,” the language was plain. And from that trust in the system flowed all else, including the military’s tradition of absolute deference to duly constituted civil authority, which most certainly included his own deference to the President of the United States, whoever might be currently occupying the office. Still, he was going to have a run a thorough background check on Angela Hassett-and on Jeb Tyler, for that matter, just to be fair.

That task was certainly much easier today than it ever had been. There was a world of personal information about nearly every man, woman, and child in America available on the Internet and the amazing part was that-through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the other social-networking sites-the American public had made such information freely and publicly available.

Which was why Government 2.0 had been such a success, depending on your point of view, of course. The executive branch didn’t need the NSA or any of the other intelligence agencies to compile their rosters and lists of the voting public, didn’t need spooks and FBI agents going door to door to inquire about people’s loyalty or sexual predilections or political persuasions: the public had already volunteered such information, even if it didn’t yet realize it. The thought of all this information in the wrong hands sometimes kept Seelye awake at night. It was all right if such material stayed relatively safely in the hands of professionals like himself, but now every political hack, twenty-something ideologue, and freelance double agent had access to it. It would, he knew, all end badly. He just hoped and prayed that he wouldn’t be around to see it happen.

The note from the “Russian” was only one of several puzzling things on his desk. Spread out before him were several pieces of paper he had not yet shared with the president or anybody else. They were printouts of a series of anonymous e-mails that had come not through channels but directly to his in-box. His secure e-mail addresses-he had several, depending on the usage-were known to only a handful of staffers both in NSA/CSS and at the White House. They were classified Top Secret. And yet someone had at least one of them.

“Dirnsa Seelye,” began the first one. “What are the Thirty-Nine Steps?”

“Lt. General Armond Seelye or To Whom It May Concern,” ran the second. “Edgar Allan POE. (signed) the Magician.”

The third was a bit more complex: “UG RMK CSXHMUFMKB TOXG CMVATLUIV.” It was unsigned.

The fourth was a series of numbers: 317, 8, 92, 73, 112, 79, 67, 318, 28, 96, 107, 41, 631, 78, 146, 397, 118, 98, 114.

The fifth was a series of 87 characters, squiggles based on the letter “E,” arranged in three rows:

The sixth was the briefest of them all: “Masterman. XX.”

All were, of course, ridiculously easy to recognize, if not to understand. The real question was what, cumulatively, did they mean? Were they a game? A warning? A threat? And did they have anything to do with what was going on in New York? In the wilderness of mirrors, everything was related and nothing was connected.

Seelye spread the printouts on his desk and looked them over. How he longed for the days when written communications were actually written, or at least typed, and the paper could be subjected to various forms of analysis. In the old days, each typewriter had its own distinctive signature, like a fingerprint, and many was the criminal who went to jail, or the spy who was exposed when the papers came out of the pumpkin, or executed when his machine was found and identified. Not anymore. Today almost everything came electronically, even bills and junk mail, and thanks to the infinite permutations of ones and zeroes, anything could be encoded within anything else. Churchill’s famous comment about Russia, that it was a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” could now properly be applied to everything. Even e-mail.

Well, that was part of the NSA’s brief, too. No Such Agency was founded by President Truman in 1952 to both collect and decode foreign signals (SIGINT) and to protect America ’s codes from hostile code breakers. The Second World War had made both encryption and cryptanalysis boom industries, and a wide variety of codes had been employed, everything from the Germans’ “Enigma” machine-named after the series of musical variations by the British composer, Sir Edward Elgar, to the Navajo “code talkers” who had worked for the Marine Corps in the Pacific theater.

Still, in the end, code-breaking was all about patterns, even if those patterns were sometimes so deeply hidden that they resembled wheels within wheels, whose sprockets had to be carefully aligned for the message to be read and understood. Today, the volume and the magnitude of the threat was infinitely greater than it had been 75 years ago-one missed pattern and the next thing you knew there was a smoking, radioactive crater where midtown Manhattan or the Washington Monument had once stood.

Which is where the Black Widow came in.

The Black Widow was the in-house nickname of the NSA’s Cray supercomputer at Fort Meade. Forget privacy-no matter what the sideshow arguments in Congress were about the FISA laws or civil liberties, the Black Widow continued to go remorselessly about her job, which was to listen in on, and read, all telephonic and written electronic communication, in any language, anywhere in the world. It was the old Clinton-era “Echelon” project writ large, able to perform trillions of calculations per second as it sifted and sorted in its never-ending quest for key words, code words, patterns. The ACLU had screamed, but presidents from both parties had surreptitiously embraced it. The Black Widow was here to stay if only she could be heeded and translated in time.

Wiretapping had come a long way. In the popular imagination-and in the minds of the media, which, to judge from the op-ed pages of the New York Times, now viewed everything through the lenses of bad movies and show tunes-“eavesdropping” still conjured up images of fake telephone repairmen in jump suits, shimmying up phone poles or cracking open service boxes in the sub-sub-basement and applying alligator clips to the switching machinery.

None of that mattered anymore. It was all for show. the Black Widow not only heard all and read all, she could sense all: the technology had advanced to such an extent that the Widow and other Cray supercomputers like her-including the Cray XT4, known as the Jaguar, and the MPP (massively parallel processor) housed at the University of Tennessee-could read the keystrokes of a given computer through the electrical current serving the machine. And all linkable. If the Singularity wasn’t here yet, it would be soon.

“Major Atwater is here, sir,” said Ms. Overbay’s disembodied voice. Seelye punched a button on his desk that unlocked his office door-security was everything here-and in came the major as the door closed behind him.

Kent Atwater was from Thief River Falls, Minnesota, a place more celebrated for its evocative name than for any particular attraction, other than its mind-numbing winter weather. He had graduated from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs with high marks in math and cryptography, and had distinguished himself with the 91st Missile Wing at Minot in North Dakota, first with the Gravehaulers of the 741st squadron, then with the Security Forces Group. In that capacity, he had caught the eye of NSA brass, been transferred to Fort Meade, and bumped up the chain in Seelye’s direction. Blond, strongly built, in his early 30s, he was a practically a caricature of what the world used to think of as a typical American but was now the vanishing remnant of a bygone ethnic archetype. Seelye liked and admired Atwater, although his demeanor never showed it, but the young Air Force officer had promise, which is why Seelye was grooming him as a possible deputy.

“Sir?” said Atwater, saluting.

“At ease, Major,” said Seelye, gathering up the sheaf of papers and handing them to Atwater. “Please take a look at these and give me your first reaction. Don’t think, just react. And please sit down.”

Atwater was already through the papers by the time his rear hit the seat. He said, “Anybody who knows anything about the history of cryptography knows what these are. Someone with a literary bent.”

“Indeed,” replied Seelye.

“I mean, The Gold Bug, Dorothy L. Sayers, the Beale Treasure. The only thing missing is the Voynich Manuscript. What is this, sir, a treatment for the next National Treasure movie?”

“You tell me, Major.”

Atwater thought for a moment. “Well,” he began, “obviously it can’t be as simple as it looks.”

“Does it really look that simple? And what if it is? Sometimes the best codes are the simplest.” Seelye suddenly flashed on those ridiculous “Dancing Men” from the Sherlock Holmes story, the substitution cipher that he had overlooked, but that had unlocked Devlin’s past, and thus given his most potent agent complete power over him, the nominal boss.

Which brought today’s events full circle. President Tyler had just ordered Devlin into action, and Seelye had no choice but to obey. And yet, under his agreement with Tyler, Devlin could terminate Seelye at any time, for any reason. That was something that was going to have to change.

“…me to do, sir?” Atwater was saying. Seelye looked up-

“Sorry, Major, say again?”

“I said, what do you want me to do, sir?” inquired Atwater.

“I want you to track down the sender-that shouldn’t be too hard-and I want you to tell me what all these references to bygone codes-”

“Some of which have never been cracked,” interjected Atwater. The man was evincing just the slightest signs of borderline insubordination, which was another thing that would have to be addressed. As if he’d read Seelye’s mind, Atwater immediately apologized. “If you’ll pardon the interruption, sir.”

Seelye ignored the mea culpa. “Just give me your best assessment on this, Major. It goes without saying that, since this directly affects the operations of DIRNSA, your report is eyes-only.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“That’s all.”

Atwater shot to his feet. “Yes, sir,” he said, saluted once more, performed a crisp about-face, and pushed the door open the instant he heard Seelye unlock it.

“Fail me not,” said Seelye as the Major left. Or maybe he said it to himself. It wasn’t clear, even to him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the air

Emanuel Skorzeny was so absorbed in the numbers dancing in front of him on a computer screen that he almost forgot his manners. “Would you like a drink, my dear?” he inquired, reaching out to pat her on her knee. “A gin martini, ice-cold, just the way you like them? All you have to do is ask, and Mlle. Derrida here will be more than happy to fetch one for you. Isn’t that right, Mlle. Derrida?”

Whether she was happy or not didn’t really matter. Emanuelle Derrida swallowed both her tongue and her pride as she awaited a request-no, an order-from the woman who had boarded the plane in Macao and who was now on her way with them toward their next destination. Where that was, exactly, Skorzeny had not told her, but it didn’t really matter: wherever he went, she went, no questions asked or answered.

Amanda Harrington stiffened at his touch. That he was insane, there could be no doubt. After what he had done to her in London and in France, and now here, as if nothing untoward had occurred. And there was nothing she could do about it. She hated the evil bastard, and dreaded whatever it was he now wanted from her. Maybe a martini would help. She nodded assent, and Ms. Derrida went to fetch it, leaving them alone.

Skorzeny gazed at her with those relentless eyes, so used to command, to fulfillment. Then he spoke:

“It seems that we underestimated the opposition,” he began, without preamble, as if the past nine months were but a single day. That was Emanuel Skorzeny’s secret of success, an indefatigable focus, a refusal to accept defeat. “And of course the loss of…”-here it came-“the loss of Mr. Milverton was regrettable. But here again perhaps I overestimated his powers.”

Amanda had never fully learned the whole story of her lover’s last moments in London, and she had no way of knowing how much Skorzeny knew of her relationship with the man called Milverton. That he knew, of course, was indisputable-she was barely living proof of his jealousy and malice. “How did he die?” she managed to ask.

“But here is Mlle. Derrida with your libation,” he said. The assistant set the drink down in front of her and awaited further instruction. “That will be all, Mlle. Derrida,” he said dismissing her. The woman shot Amanda a look as she left.

“Happy days,” said Skorzeny.

Amanda took a tentative, flinching sip. The last martini she had accepted from his hand nearly killed her. But if he had wanted her dead in Clairvaux, in that horrible prison he called a country retreat, he would have killed her. Instead, he’d paralyzed her as punishment for her love for Milverton.

“I trust the libation is satisfactory?”

Amanda knew that had she replied in the negative, Mlle. Derrida’s days in Skorzeny’s employment, if not upon this earth, would be numbered. She decided to let the girl live. “Yes, sir,” replied Amanda, setting the drink down on the spotless table.

“Excellent. And now to work.” Skorzeny produced a manila folder, extracted a few papers, and spread them out on the desk. For a man addicted to computers-a facility remarkable in a man his age-he still preferred real paper for important things.

The papers were a curious lot. One was a map, with a series of international destinations. One, she could see at a glance, was Macao, so presumably the others would be places at which Skorzeny planned to call. Others appeared to be gibberish-rows of numbers, nonsense letters, childish scribblings. “What is the point of chess, Miss Harrington?” he asked.

“To win?”

Skorzeny shook his head. “No. Not to win. That is the inevitable effect of the point of chess. Please try again.”

Another of his infernal Socratic puzzles. “If not to win, then what?”

“Think.”

She knew how his mind worked. She got it. “Then, not to lose.”

He smiled a reptilian smile that, at some point, someone must have told him was as close to a simulacrum of pleasure as he was ever likely to display. “Very good. Not to lose. In fact, no one every really loses at chess. There is no killing blow, no coup de grâce, no severed head to exhibit to the throngs and multitudes, as the Mahdi’s men severed General Gordon’s head at Khartoum and lodged it in a tree branch, so that the birds could peck out its eyes, and the tree would be watered with the last of Gordon’s lifeblood, what little might remain.”

Amanda shuddered: Skorzeny had lost none of his taste for the grisly and the macabre. Whatever had happened in London, whatever had transpired at the old monastery while she lay in her drug-induced coma, he had been defeated and yet somehow he had escaped, determined to fight on. That was a quality in a man she usually admired, but in him it was only hateful.

“…not to lose,” he was still rattling on. “Instead, the lesser player resigns, turns his king over, surrenders, the way the smaller and weaker of two fighting lions eventually gives up his pride of lionesses and slinks off into the veldt, there to displace another lion weaker than himself, or to die. To fight on, or to give up: those are the only two choices life offers us. As you can see, I have made my choice.” This, she knew, was as close to admission of temporary failure as he was ever likely to come.

He pointed to the map. The places circled were far from his usual civilized haunts-remote parts of Asia, the Sub-continent, sub-Saharan Africa. “Are these the places we’re going?” she asked.

“No, those are the places I’ve been,” he replied. “Countries without extradition treaties with the United States. Gruesome places, without a modicum of refinement and, in most cases, evidence of civilization of any kind. In short, the only places that savage, President Tyler, would let me visit. But I turned it to my advantage. Preparing for this day.”

“And which day is that, Mr. Skorzeny?” It was amazing how quickly she fell back into her old role as his advisor, confidante and, when necessary, executrix.

Instead of answering, he asked: “What do you know of the End Times, Miss Harrington?”

“The End Times, sir?” she asked. “The Last Trump, you mean?”

“Indeed, I do.” He seemed very pleased with the prospect of this conversation. “Apocalypse. Armageddon.”

“Have you had a religious epiphany, then?”

Now he laughed out loud, a horrible barking laugh. “I should say not. Organized superstition is hardly my line, but adherents to the millenarian faiths often prove helpful. Useful idiots, as Lenin deemed them. And it is a fact that many cultures foretell the end of the world. Both Christianity and Shi’a Islam anticipate the day when Jesus will come again, although our Muslim brethren consign the Nazarene to a secondary role in the final drama. Still, they share a vision of turmoil, of war, until the end finally comes in a rain of quenching fire.”

“And then what?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked. She wasn’t sure he would answer, but his mood seemed temporarily expansive.

“You’ll learn out when we get there.”

“And where would that be, sir?”

Abruptly, startlingly, his hand landed with a thump on the desk, his right index finger pointing to a place not highlighted on the map. “Do you believe in God, Miss Harrington?” he said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Manhattan

The screens that kept Manhattan safe stayed on. But Byrne already knew it was too late. Something had happened, something more than a probe, and now it was simply a matter of finding out just how bad it was. Silently, he cursed under his breath. This was not how he liked to fight. Byrne’s natural impulse toward hotheadedness he had outgrown with age, but he still liked to play offense, not defense.

This was no ordinary breach, that much he already knew. He not only knew it, he felt it. Like a lot of Irish cops, Byrne trusted his Celtic instincts, the little voice that whispered you’d be okay when you crashed through that apartment door in the Bronx or the one that warned you not to dash around the corner just this instant. He had gotten this far, and stayed alive this long, by listening to those little voices. Now he had a job to do.

It was the job he never wanted and yet was now closest to his heart: protecting New York City. If over the years he had earned a reputation as a cowboy, well so be it. A cowboy was what New York needed now, not some by-the-book bureaucrat, not some IA weasel or desk jockey who had never pulled his piece or fired his weapon. When Byrne got into trouble, as he had a couple of times, Matt White had had his back, and when this job opened up there really was only one man in the entire department White trusted with.

“Now what?” said Lannie.

“Let’s brainstorm this thing and try to figure out what we’re up against before the shit hits the fan.”

“You think it will?” asked Sid.

“Your father would never have asked such a dumb question.”

“That’s because the people he worked with couldn’t talk back to him.”

Byrne smiled. “That’s where you’re wrong, Sid. Nobody could make a dead man talk like Sy Sheinberg. Anything about a cause of death that Sy didn’t know or couldn’t discover wasn’t worth knowing or discovering. That’s what made him the best medical examiner I ever worked with.

“But our job is different-it’s the opposite, in fact. We’re not like normal cops, who basically show up to cart away the stiff and interview the witnesses. We’re here to stop things before they happen. Remember what the president said years ago: we have to be lucky all the time; the terrorists only have to be lucky once. Well, on 9/11 they got lucky, if you call shooting an unsuspecting man in the back lucky. I call it cowardly. But on my watch, lucky ain’t got nothing to do with it. So let’s stop some shit, whatever it is. Lannie, what’ve we got?”

Aslan Saleh tapped on a terminal and brought up the camera feeds, displayed on a large screen on the wall across from Byrne’s desk. It was like a fly’s-eye view of midtown, fractured into dozens of individual CCTV scans, but they were all virtuosos at reading the images, able to sense hinky body language before they could see it. And not by accident. The Department of Homeland Security had spent a fortune developing something called Project Hostile Intent, a kind of vaguely practical version of “pre-crime” that moviegoers saw in Minority Report. Lannie, in fact, had been recruited from DHS by Byrne himself, when he was looking for a native Arabic-speaker/computer geek to join the CTU, and Lannie had brought some of the principles of the program over with him.

Byrne thought much of Project Hostile Intent was typical Washington bullshit, the kind of gee-whiz crap that got gobs of money thrown its way, but at its core was simply good old-fashioned police work, the kind that used to be SOP across the country before the ACLU and its fleet of lawyers sank their teeth into the cop on the beat. In a normal civilian setting, “pre-crime” would be laughed out of court, dismissed on all sorts of procedural grounds, with the racism flag fluttering ominously in the background. The program relied heavily on facial expressions and body language, but also employed a battery of sensors that could read body temperature and brain waves; it had even developed a laser radar to monitor pulse and breathing rates from a distance. Now dubbed FAST, for Future Attribute Screening Technologies, the program was still in development, but was being discreetly deployed at various airports and other ports of entry around the country.

Byrne had simply stolen it. Lannie and his handpicked crew had installed advanced prototypes at key points around Manhattan-at Wall Street, City Hall and the Tweed Courthouse, Brooklyn Bridge, Gracie Mansion (the mayor, who took everything personally, had insisted on that), and, of course, in Times Square. It was mind-numbingly boring to spend half your life watching people go about their daily business, or lack of it; but it had to be done, if only as a complement to the computers that never tired of monitoring human beings, finding them as endlessly fascinating as cows watching traffic on a country road.

The CTU’s computers were outfitted with advanced facial-recognition software, in part developed right here in Chelsea and-not being hampered by the strictures of political correctness or probable cause-the CTU was empowered to act on whatever information, leads, and hunches the combination of men and machines developed. Byrne had drilled into his men that they were to stay out of the courts if at all possible, which was why dead-solid takedowns never got reported, either into the main NYPD database or, God forbid, to the media. Terrorists had rights in every court and police precinct in America, except here. Sure, there were mistakes from time to time, but they either were hushed up, paid off, or buried in unmarked graves.

“Okay, let’s play catch-up,” said Byrne.

On the screens, everything was as it had been ten minutes earlier. Out in the command room, teams were busy retro-tracing the DoS tracks, piecing together a model that would help prevent future blindsides. But that was barn-door stuff; right now, Byrne was more interested in what was going to happen next.

“What’s your hunch, Captain?” asked Saleh.

“ Times Square.” It was less a hunch than a wager he would take to Vegas. Nothing would shout maximum impact more than an attack on Times Square. Nobody in America cared about the mayor, or even knew where Gracie Mansion was.

Brooklyn Bridge was iconic, but would be plenty tough to bring down, especially with the unadvertised but very real police boat presence on both sides of the East River. If a dog so much as took a dump on the bridge, the likelihood was that the cops knew about it before the pooch’s owner did.

All at once, sixteen different angles of Times Square jumped onto the screen. Nobody said a word as they scanned the crowds. The usual: tourists gawking, theater crowds milling, a few hookers trolling, pickpockets sniffing the wind. Gazing at the human comedy day in and day out, Byrne often thought that it was a miracle that cities existed at all, that citizens were not constantly at each other’s throats, the hunters and the prey, but in this jungle the ratio of prey to predator was thousands to one, and so ignorance, and the law of averages, was bliss.

“What’s that?” said Byrne, pointing. “Gimme a zoom.”

It was a pushcart vendor. Normally, no big deal. There were pushcart vendors all over the city and had been for two centuries. But this guy was different.

For one thing, he was running. Vendors paid the city for their allotted spaces, but these were general licenses. There was no need to rush to your spot, like a homeless guy who had dibs on a certain step of one of the West Side Protestant churches, which now functioned as impromptu shelters for those too proud or too strung out to enter a real shelter. But this guy was out of breath. He was also doing something even fishier-he was looking at his cell phone like his life depended on it.

“Nobody’s in that big a rush to sell hot dogs,” said Byrne. “Let’s snuggle up a little closer to this baby.” Lannie zoomed in. Although the cameras shot in black and white, they could clearly relay facial features, skin tone, even hair color.

Now the man was doing something hot dog vendors didn’t usually do. He put down his cell phone and opened up his cart, but didn’t appear terribly interested, for all his haste, in the presence of customers. Instead, he was fiddling with something under the cart.

“Who’s in the area?” asked Byrne. “What units, foot, horse-what’ve we got?”

Sid was already punching up the data. NYPD cops in Manhattan never went anywhere without GPS locators on them, which really cut down the time they could spend with their girlfriends and mistresses, but which meant that One Police Plaza brass and others could find them instantly. At first the cops had bitched about it, but after a couple of lives were saved in officer-shot situations, they quickly came around.

“Couple of Tacs over on Eighth, Johnson, Guttierez, Adderly and Kemp between 42nd and 45th, and Bradley and Petrovich on the ponies.”

“Converge,” said Byrne, rising. “On the double.”

Byrne was already through the door of his office and into the command center by the time Lannie and Sid saw what he had seen.

Protruding from the hot dog vendor’s waistband as he got up from underneath his cart was the unmistakable grip of a.45 automatic.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Times Square

Jake Sinclair’s face was forty feet high on the JumboTron above Times Square, smiling at some joke only he was privy to. Since he pretty much owned the media in the U.S., that was not an outrageous supposition. Underneath his picture, the Zipper was proclaiming to the world: WITH BLAST AT TYLER, SINCLAIR HOLDINGS SELLS MANHATTAN HEADQUARTERS TO GERMAN MEDIA CONSORTIUM. CORP. HQ TO RE-LOCATE TO LOS ANGELES.

Those who looked up at the JumboTron at that moment would have seen Sinclair, speaking now, praising Tyler ’s rival in the upcoming election. “The Tyler Administration,” he was saying, “has forfeited all claims to credibility. The attacks last year on the homeland proved that this administration is not to be trusted with our national security. Despite his gross and flagrant violation of civil liberties, President Tyler has not kept us safe and, in my opinion, it’s time for a change. That’s why every patriotic American should send a message to Tyler and his party at the polls this November. Not just ‘throw the bums out,’ but hell yes, throw the bums out.” He smiled the oleaginous smile that had made him a favorite of most of the media, for Jake Sinclair had long ago learned the first and most important lesson of Hollywood, which had since translated to journalism: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.

“I hate that sonofabitch,” said Morris Acker to his wife, Shirley, indicating Jake Sinclair on the JumboTron as they traversed the new pedestrian zone and waited to cross over to 42nd Street. They were heading for the New Amsterdam theater, where Mary Poppins was still playing. Once upon a time, this had been the crossroads of the world, the place where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersected, collided, and then split to go their separate ways. In the old days-the very old days-it had been a mass of pedestrians, pushcarts, horse-drawn vehicles and motorcars, but gradually order had been imposed upon civic chaos. Now, where traffic once had rushed, pretty girls sat and gawked at the buildings while the boys sat and gawked at them. Meanwhile, cars fought for space in the few lanes still allotted to them. It was a typically lunatic idea of the former mayor, a nasty little busybody who had finally been driven from office when he attempted to raise the price of pizza to prohibitive levels on the grounds that it would improve the health of the average New Yorker. Then he raised the subway fare, on the grounds that people would be even healthier if they had to walk forty blocks instead of spending five bucks for a subway ride.

“We should have parked closer,” said Shirley. “If we had, we’d be there by now.”

Morris shrugged. He hadn’t gotten this far in life by wasting money. The parking garages around here were insanely expensive. For a few bucks a trip uptown to the cheaper lots on the Upper West Side was well worth it, even with the new subway fares. The Ackers were in from Rye for the day to catch a matinee on Broadway, have an early dinner, and then return home to Westchester. Mr. Acker was a recently retired employee of Time Warner, who over the course of his career had managed to upgrade his life by two neighborhoods, four automobiles, one boat, and zero wives from his humble beginnings on Long Island. If he never set foot there again, it would be too soon.

As he stepped off the curb, Mr. Acker looked down so as not to miss the step. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and nothing would be more ridiculous-or would kill him faster-than a stupid pratfall. When you got to be his age, what was once funny was now lethal. “Schmuck,” he said to himself.

Across the street, a pushcart vendor was just setting up at the corner. The man was slightly out of breath from his sprint uptown, but he had arrived in plenty of time, and now all he had to do was wait for his customers. His cell phone buzzed silently in his breast pocket, and he took it out and looked at the display. It was not a caller, but a text message. He read it, then began his preparations…

At that moment, Marie Duplessis, a recent immigrant from Haiti, was trudging up the subway steps at 42nd Street, and heading for one of her three jobs. She had taken the train in from LaGuardia Airport, where she worked cleaning the bathrooms at Terminal Six, and was now headed to the Condé Nast building to perform the same task for the journalistic princes and princesses still lucky enough to have paying jobs churning out copy that instantly outdated long before it achieved print. Luckily, she had had just enough time to stop off at her apartment in Jamaica to check on her pregnant daughter, Eugénie, who was all of thirteen years old.

Eugénie’s pregnancy had broken her heart. True, life in America, even in Queens, was preferable to Port-au-Prince, but there were trade-offs, differing social mores being one of them. At the Catholic girls’ school back home, Eugénie at least had a fighting chance to retain her honor, but here…The boys had found her quickly, like predators on a domestic creature that had suddenly been released back into the jungle, with predictable results. Back home there had been community, family, language, religion. If you stayed within those boundaries, there was still a chance that a girl wouldn’t have to go to the altar with child. Here in America, the only certainty for people like Eugénie was a trip to the abortion clinic, and that was something her mother was simply not going to allow. To Marie, every life was sacred, even this as-yet unborn offspring of her only daughter and some gangbanger, the kind of boy who would never have been admitted into her society back in Haiti. America might still be the land of economic opportunity but the trade-off in social dysfunction was not worth it. Which is why Marie had just made up her mind to take Eugénie home to Haiti to have her baby. She’d tell Eugénie just as soon as she got home this evening…

Stranded in the middle of the great intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Uwe, Helga, and Hubertus Friedhof watched the crossing signals carefully, awaiting the green light. They had been to the movies, where, despite all the years of English they had taken in school in Germany, they had hardly understood a single word of the dialogue, which bore not the slightest resemblance to the English they were used to hearing back home.

They were discussing this strange new language of the New World as they crossed the street, heading for one of the chain restaurants they had heard so much about back in Wiesbaden, one of those places that made Americans so amazingly obese, which they simply had to see and experience for themselves.

“Look!” exclaimed Hubertus, who was nearly 19 and about to leave for university. With any luck, under the German system, his parents would only be financially responsible for him for another seven to ten years.

Hubertus pointed up at the JumboTron and Jake Sinclair’s face. Everybody knew Jake Sinclair’s face, even foreigners, and in point of fact the movie they had just seen and hardly understood a word of had been made by Jake Sinclair’s studio. “…we betray our real values, the values that made this country,” Jake Sinclair was quoted in the electronic crawl-in real English-across the bottom of the giant screen, “the values that made this country the greatest country on earth…”

Uwe was just about to ask Helga why the Americans were always banging on about being the greatest country on earth when the light changed. The crowd moved forward, in that impatient New York way, but Uwe’s path was blocked by a young man standing stock-still. Being German, Uwe’s instinct was to plow ahead. He was sick of these Americans and their uncivilized ways, and it was high time he showed one of the natives how things were done in Germany. Back home, if somebody was standing between you and wherever you were going, you simply knocked him aside, whether you were a pedestrian with the right of way or a bicyclist zipping down a marked bike path onto which some hapless tourist had inadvertently wandered, or even a speeding motorist, exercising his God-given vorfahrt vom rechts.

The pedestrian signal had already turned to the blinking red hand, and the numerical countdown begun. Uwe pressed forward in that familiar way that Europeans have and that Americans, with their greater need for personal space, invariably resented. The young man, however, did not budge. Instead he barked over his shoulder. “What is your fucking problem?”

Uwe stopped, taken aback. In Germany, nobody spoke back. They simply got out of the way. But these rude Amis were a different tribe. Well, their days of strutting around the globe as if they owned it with their no-longer-almighty dollar were over. “Ja, okay,” said Uwe, “so now we can go, yes?”

Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz had come to America on an express visa from his native Saudi Arabia. It amazed him that, even after 9/11, Americas were still so friendly, so trusting. Part of that friendliness, true, was owing to the country’s desperate need for oil, which ensured that the old partners in Aramco would still have need for each other’s goods and services, and a little thing like 3,000 dead people and a gigantic hole in the ground in lower Manhattan would not be allowed to come between them. As long as America ran on oil-and as long as the Americans, unaccountably, tied both hands behind their backs by not drilling for it in their own country-Saudi-American friendship would go on and on.

It felt good to be standing here, just a few miles north of where his holy brothers had accomplished their spectacular act of martyrdom. Before he embarked on his own martyrdom, he had made sure to tour the holy site, still essentially empty after all these years. It was typical of the degenerate state of America and its inhabitants, he thought, to still be squabbling about something unimportant like a memorial when there was work to be done. They could have shown the world that even a grievous blow such as 9/11 would not stop them in their godless pursuit of commerce and harlotry, but instead they reacted just as the sheikh had predicted, in sorrow and fear.

When the Towers fell-something not even the sheikh had predicted-there was much joy across the ummah. But in the succeeding years, as blow after blow was plotted and then failed, the opportunity to bring forth the tribulations was slipping away. What was needed now was a killing blow. Beneath his breath, he began to pray.

And then he felt a tap on his back, more of a bump, and he began to fear that his prayers were not sincere enough, that he had been discovered by the enemy. He slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the grip of the gun as he turned to see what was the matter.

The taxi let Hope and her children off at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. To the east, a series of multiplexes beckoned. They weren’t the kind of theaters she was used to back home-for one thing, there was noplace to park-but she’d heard that once you were inside, it was like being at an especially nice shopping mall. Behind them, the ugly monstrosity that was the Port Authority bus station loomed.

“What’s that?” cried Rory, pointing across Eighth Avenue at something called the Adult Entertainment Center. “Never mind,” said Hope, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him east along 42nd Street. He would learn about porn soon enough, if he hadn’t already. Up ahead, the theater marquees beckoned…

The man blocking the Friedhof family had still not budged. Instead, he was staring at his cell phone, as if waiting for a call. He was also cocking his head to one side, as if listening for something, but the only thing he could possibly hear, besides the traffic, was the rumble of the IRT subway under the ventilation grate beneath his feet. In any case, he wasn’t moving.

His patience exhausted, Uwe pressed forward again, deliberately bumping into the man. Pedestrianism was a full-body contact sport in much of Europe, especially in Germany, so what Uwe was doing was, by his lights, a perfectly reasonable way to show one’s displeasure and to remind the fellow to get a move on. Unfortunately for Uwe, the man did not see it that way. Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz turned back to him, but instead of speaking he pulled a revolver from beneath his Windbreaker and shot Uwe Friedhof right in the face.

At that moment, Byrne was on the blower to all available patrolmen in that part of Times Square, and was calling in reinforcements from elsewhere in the city. If his hunch was right, there was no time to lose.

“I want a cordon around Times Square. Nobody in and nobody out. Shut down all the West Side subway lines, including the IND, the BMT, and the IRT. No need to be subtle about it: I want the full surge. But this is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

Lannie and Sid caught up with him. “What is it?” asked Sid.

“It’s a go, isn’t it?” said Lannie. If this was for real, it would be his first taste of action.

Byrne turned to his two protégés. “Not for you-I need the two of you right here. Lannie, check all the communications monitors and see who’s been calling into Times Square on cell. Sid, go back over the SIGINT files for the past 48 hours and see if you can get the slightest lead on whatever the hell it is that’s going down.”

A voice from the back of the room-“There’s a report of shots fired, somewhere in the pedestrian zone. That’s all we’ve got right now.”

Mentally, Byrne gauged how long it would take him to get from Chelsea to Times Square. With the surge already under way, there was no point in taking a car-if he hustled he could get there on foot in ten minutes. He wasn’t as fit as he used to be but, damn it, he could still run down a perp if he had to.

“I’m going in,” he shouted, heading for the door.

Uwe Friedhof never had time to realize what had happened as he toppled and fell. Helga started to scream and then she, too, dropped with a bullet in the chest. Hubertus, who had dreamed of studying the law in Munich, had just enough time to register a dark beard and a pair of piercing brown eyes when the next shot hit him in the gut. He collapsed into the street, where he was hit by a speeding taxi anticipating the change of the light. His body flew into the air as the cab stopped, then landed on the windshield and rolled off and onto the ground.

The cabbie, a recent immigrant from Bangladesh, jumped from his taxi, recoiling in horror as he realized what had happened. Three young women dropped their ice cream cones as the enormity of what they were witnessing overtook them. Others screamed, cried, fled. The gunman, however, never moved, but instead seemed to be talking to himself, muttering really, as the roar of the Seventh Avenue express train approached. As the brakeman slowed the train, the roar changed to a screech, and Ali held his cell phone aloft in the air for all to see, and bear witness.

At that moment, Marie Duplessis decided that her Metro-Card needed a refill, and that as long as she was here, she might as well go back down the stairs and put some more money on it. She hated running for a train only to realize she was short of funds, so while she had money in her pocket and plenty of time to get to her next job she could take care of it now and not have to worry about it later. She turned and headed back down the stairs. She stuck her card into one of the addfare machines, punched in how much she wanted, and inserted a $20 bill.

Hope and her children were moving east on 42nd Street, savoring the marquees of the theaters on both sides of the broad crosstown street, trying to decide what to see. This was not like even the big cineplexes back home. This was a veritable feast of cinematic choices. There were a couple of vulgar sex comedies, which she was under no circumstances going to allow them to see, along with the usual assortment of full-length cartoons, vampire movies, gruesome slasher flicks, and movies about giant robots that could turn into cars and other heavy machinery. She had not been to the movies on a regular basis for years, and from the choices available, she could see she wasn’t missing much. Why couldn’t they make movies like Tender Mercies anymore? Well, she supposed those days were long gone; not enough sex, and nothing to blow up. It was going to have to be the talking cars.

They went inside the AMC Theaters complex on the south side of the street and bought their tickets. Even though she was expecting the worst, Hope was still amazed at how expensive they were, twice as much as back home. How in the world could people afford to live here was beyond her.

They took a series of endless up escalators, higher and higher, until she was sure they were heading for the top of the Empire State Building, which she knew was around here somewhere. At last, they got to the top floor, where a giant candy counter practically begged them to spend some more of their money, but Hope steered Rory clear of temptation and pointed him and Emma toward the theater. She was about to wonder what had happened to grownup culture when suddenly the whole building shook and everything went dark.

A car bomb is no ordinary bomb, nor even an enhanced Improvised Explosive Device (IED). In fact, it is three bombs in one. The first bomb is the one packed tightly in the trunk or under the vehicle-Semtex, or C-4 plastic explosive. Detonating with the force of 150 pounds of TNT, it will destroy everything within a 100-foot radius, shattering glass, penetrating and exploding brickwork and masonry, tearing and rending flesh. Its fireball will incinerate everything it touches, and as the blast radius extends outward, it will singe all living creatures within a tenth of a mile. But that is just the beginning.

The second, and worse, effect is the air-blast shock wave, which causes devastating failure in exterior walls and interior columns and girders, resulting in floor failure. The third effect is shrapnel. For, packed tightly into the plastic explosive, is an array of common objects-nails, screws, ball bearings, washers-that turn suddenly lethal when propelled at several hundred miles an hour. They rip through flesh and bones effortlessly, hurtling outward like some ontological recapitulation of the phylogenic Big Bang. And, in a confined space such as a movie theater or a New York city street, the amount of damage they can do to human beings is almost incalculable.

The United States military calls them “VBIEDs,” or “Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices.” When there is someone at the wheel, willing to die for his cause, they are referred to as SVBIEDs, the “S” standing for “suicide.”

They are often referred to as “the poor man’s air force,” for they accomplish on the ground what cannot be managed from the air. But the effect is the same.

Byrne’s mind raced as he ran. He’d seen the gun on the man’s hip, but worse, he had seen the assault weapons beneath the pushcart. A man might carry a gun in Manhattan, even legally, but there was no way that a brace of AK-47s was ever going to be allowed. And what did he have two of them for? A lone nut with a semi-automatic weapon was high on the list of things that every cop worried about, but a lone nut with two of them was capable of anything.

His radio crackled. The cops on the scene were converging. In the distance, he could hear the sirens as the surge charged toward Times Square. The surge was something the NYPD had practiced since 2004-the sudden, unannounced arrival of dozens of squad cars on a single area, up to 200 heavily armed and flak-jacketed cops bursting from the vehicles. It was meant not only for tactical practice but as a very visible show of force designed to put the fear of God-or Allah-into anyone witnessing it. Police work had changed dramatically since Byrne was a rookie-instead of the kind cops on the beat, the NYPD had become a paramilitary force, with some of the best tools and tactics in the world.

He listened up ahead, trying to detect the sounds of gunfire. A single shot might be lost in the noise of the city, but multiple shots would be unmistakable. Even with the exertion, he started to breathe a little easier. Maybe his men had already taken the perp down, pre-crime.

Then he heard the explosion, and he knew this was going to be a very long and shitty day. There was more to come, and it was his job to be in the middle of it. If he could not save those people, it was at the very least his duty to die trying.

Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz also heard the explosion. In fact, he could see it, across Times Square to the west. That would be the signal to the others, the sign that the glorious strike was beginning. They had planned this martyrdom operation for years, since right after 9/11, but the Americans had been too quick for them, had reacted too fast. They had instituted all sorts of safeguards, been aggressive in their counterattack, disrupted the domestic cells, shut off much of the funding. What the movement had hoped would be a killing second blow had been on hold, first for months, then for years.

But then they had learned how to penetrate the defenses, how to hack the security codes. Not on their own, of course, but with the help of their friends in Russia and central Europe. Left to its own devices, the ummah would never be able to create even a single computer, much less a network. The only proper study in a university was the study of the Holy Koran, the divinely revealed word of Allah to Mohammed, his Messenger. But al-Aziz and the others were no longer students, they were holy warriors, jihadis; no longer dwelling peacefully in the dar-al-Islam but fighting the infidels in the dar-al-Harb, the territory of war and chaos, where the final battle against the West would be fought and won: on its turf.

It was true: so decadent had the West become that there were many who actively supported the jihadis and their networks, not men of Islam but men of no faith at all. Men who would be among the first killed when the final triumph was proclaimed, men who cared so little for themselves, their wives, their families, and their decayed culture that they would rather submit to the holy blade. They deserved nothing less than scorn and death.

The subway train beneath his feet had stopped. He could hear the conductor’s voice over the loudspeaker. He said a quick silent prayer and then pushed the talk button on his cell phone just as he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”

Marie Duplessis waited for the machine to spit back her card at her. She was old enough to remember the days of tokens, and she guessed that, on balance, the present system was better than the old one. But still, it was a racket, since a lot of times you never quite managed to use every dollar of your fare before you bought a new card. Marie, who had a head for figures, reckoned that the MTA made millions a year in unused credits on the fare cards, but somehow it was still always broke, always asking for fare increases, and usually getting them.

The card snapped back out at her and she took it. There were plenty of rides on it now, and when she got home she would give it to her daughter to let her take a ride out to Coney Island to get some sea air and some exercise before the baby started weighing her down. Then, before she really started to show, before the other kids in her school started making fun of her, before the boy who had knocked her up started bragging all over Jamaica about how he’d treated this “ho,” they would catch a flight home, maybe leave the child with her mother to be raised properly, maybe put it up for adoption with the church. It would all work itself out, and they could get on with their lives.

Alas, Eugénie would never learn of this plan, because these, as it turned out, were the last thoughts Marie Duplessis ever had.

At the sound of the explosion Ben, the hot dog vendor, pulled out his AK-47 and opened fire. God, but it felt good to finally be able to strike back. All the years in Green Haven and other prisons had hardened him, made him even more vicious and relentless than he had been growing up in Brownsville/East New York, Brooklyn. Guys from Brownsville prided themselves on how tough they were, how relentless, how remorseless. They had to live up to the standards of the old neighborhood, the place that had given America Murder Incorporated, guys who would put your eyes out with ice picks, who would hang you from meathooks and leave you there to dangle until you finally died.

The only rules Ben Addison ever knew were the rules of the street, the law of the jungle. School held no interest for him, and when his mama managed to scrape together enough scratch to send him to that Catholic school one year, he never got along with the other kids, mostly Latinos; never liked having to wear a uniform; and seriously disagreed with the turn-the-other-cheek tenets that they preached there.

One hot summer night Ben and some of his crew had gone into the city-gone into New York, as some Brooklynites still said-to see what was up. Even after one of the former mayors had cleaned up the place, there were still parts of Manhattan that outsiders were well advised to stay out of, and when they found a group of smashed college kids bar-hopping along the old gangland main drag of Allen Street, near Rivington Street, they decided to mug them. The boys gave it up quick, but one of the girls had mouthed off to him, called him out, dared him to do something, and so he did. He shot her in the head and then, because the guys had seen them, he shot the rest of them too. One, though, had lived, and it was his testimony that had sent Ben to the slammer. The mouthpiece had managed to negotiate the beef down to manslaughter, on the grounds that the kids had provoked him, and that they reasonably should have known that a man with his underprivileged background might react violently to any perceived assault on his manhood. At sentencing, Addison ’s court-appointed shrinks made the pitch that “black rage” had contributed to the events of that night, that Ben was not solely responsible for his actions, and the judge saw it their way. Ben got eight-to-twelve years, was out in seven.

And that had been the only break he had ever caught in this life until he got to Green Haven, which was where he met the Imam. It was not until then that he learned what the words mercy and compassion truly meant-not weak weasel words, the way the Christians used them, but strong, muscular language that befits a warrior race. Courtesy of the people of New York State, and cheered on in the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Imam came regularly to minister to his burgeoning flock. He was so much more compelling than the pallid padre and the timorous rabbi, both of whom spent their time trying to understand the men and their crimes, to “work with them,” to tell them that God forgave them. The hell with that.

Most of the converts were, like Ben, African Americans, but there was a smattering of white boys as well, guys looking for something better than passivity and forgiveness toward others, cons who regretted their time but not necessarily their crime. In Islam, they found a new way of looking at the world, at their society, and at themselves, and they liked what they saw. The Imam Abdul never forgave anybody; forgiveness jive was not what he was selling. Instead, the Imam was selling punishment, misery, pain. The Imam didn’t want to understand the old you: he wanted him to die, and be reborn, not as a Christian but as a fighter. You died in Christ, but arose again in Allah, whose plan for mankind required killers, not healers. “We love Death as you love Life,” the Imam taught them to chant in Arabic, after he had trained them in the recitation of selected verses from the Holy Koran. Ben’s childhood Christianity, what little there was of it, had sloughed away like an old skin, to reveal the proud Islamic warrior beneath.

And so Ben Addison, Jr., had become a new man, with a new name. He was now Ismail bin-Abdul al-Amriki, Ishmael the American, son of Abdul, and his vengeance on the society that had spawned him would be terrible.

Once he had nothing to live for; now he had everything to die for.

“You know how I hate that word, schmuck.” said Shirley Acker, just as they heard the shots behind them. Not that they recognized them as shots. Like most New Yorkers, the Ackers lived in a gun-free world, at least as far as their social circle was concerned. They were against firearms in all forms, didn’t see why a little thing like the Second Amendment couldn’t easily be ignored, failed to understand why anyone would hunt for food when you simply buy it at Fair-way, and were quite sure that, were they ever to possess a gun, one of them would quickly kill the other, or perhaps him-or herself, entirely by accident. And should there ever be trouble in a post-Giuliani New York (they hated the sonofabitch, but had to admit that fascist had cleaned up the town), they would simply call 911 and the cops would come running.

“Look, Morris, there’s a Sabrett’s guy,” said Shirley. “I could use a nosh. How about you?”

With a muzzle velocity of 2,346 feet per second, and a 40-cartridge magazine, you could fire 600 rounds per minute and pretty much hit everything within 300 meters. Unless you were a sniper, in combat you were basically firing at a man standing right in front of you, and the Kalashnikov was designed to be operational in all kinds of weather and under all kinds of conditions. There might be better assault rifles-and there were-but none could touch it, even today, for ease and reliability.

Death from a weapon like the AK-47, even the cheap Chinese-made imitation of the Soviet original, was not like it was in the movies. The impact of the bullets did not lift you off your feet and knock you back 25 feet. Instead, they put you down, hard. One shot might shear off the top of your skull. Another might drill a hole in your forehead and blow out the back of your head like a pumpkin, but in either case you dropped, dead.

At the training camps in Pakistan, Ismail had learned to shoot. Not for him was the gangbangers’ spray paint job, stylin’ as they shot and pretty much missing everything except babies in their carriages and nuns on their way to Mass. With the AK-47, you fire either semi-automatic-one trigger pull, one shot-or full auto, but Ismail had learned to husband his ammo and make every shot count. Besides, he wasn’t alone. From all over midtown Manhattan, Chelsea, the Flatiron District, and Hell’s Kitchen, more holy warriors had converged and were in place, freshly armed. In fact, he could hear them firing now.

The first people the former Ben Addison, Jr., killed were an elderly couple who were heading for him, right in the line of fire. The old man never saw him, so intent was he on not falling on his face as he stepped into the street, and the woman only had time to allow a fleeting look of understanding flit across her face and then she, too, went down.

Then he opened fire in earnest. At first he fired single-shot, semi-automatic. It was fun to see how well he had been trained, to watch the enemy-he didn’t think of them as “victims,” since everybody was a victim these days, most especially himself-fall, ripped apart, just as first the paper targets had shredded and then the metal targets had clanged and finally the live-fire captives, scrambling desperately for their worthless lives, had been cut down in a burst of well-placed fire.

Now people screamed and ran. But withering fire came from everywhere, from all directions, high and low-the Brothers, activated by the sound of the explosions. Gunfire came from everywhere, from several stories high in some of the surrounding buildings, from the streets, even from the storm sewers. Screams rent the air as bodies dropped. Panic broke out. Nobody knew where to run, where it might be safe. There was noplace to hide. Vehicles collided, pancaked. And still the gunfire continued, a rain of fire from hell.

Phase one was now well and truly under way. And then the ground beneath his feet rippled, buckled, and exploded.

The No. 3 train was just starting up to leave the station for its run uptown to 72nd Street when Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz pressed the talk button on his cell phone and activated the bomb that had been stowed away on the train in the few minutes the sensors had been down. The resulting explosion sent several cars of the train hurtling skyward, ripping apart the street where the ancient cut-and-cover was at its shallowest. Immediately, the signal shorted out all along this stretch of the line, which meant that the trailing No. 2 had no way of knowing that the station wasn’t clear. The resulting collision forced the cars from the demolished No. 3 train up and out into the street, carrying a load of incinerated corpses into what had become a running gun battle.

The force of the car bomb that had struck the AMC Theatres on 42nd Street was nothing compared to this. Triggered by the cell phone call, more than 1,000 kilos of plastic explosive had obliterated much of Times Square. A giant sinkhole yawned across the famous intersection, swallowing up cars, buses, and small buildings alike. The military recruiting center above the station was one of the first to go, collapsing in upon itself and tumbling into the abyss. Beneath the ruined train, tunnels fell in upon themselves, then plunged down, into the network of other tunnels-electrical, steam-that had run beneath the streets of Manhattan for more than a century.

The ripple effect was devastating, as electrical systems failed, manhole covers were blown 50 feet into the air dozens of blocks away and scalding steam flayed alive anyone unlucky enough to be near a vent when it sundered. Chunks of pavement became lethal weapons, buried electrical wires became snaking, spitting instruments of death. Worst of all were the ruptured gas lines, which quickly ignited and set ablaze the buildings directly above. The air quickly filled with acrid, lethal smoke.

And still, gunfire from all directions continued to rake the killing field that had once been Times Square.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Teterboro Airport -later

Technically, Teterboro was a township in New Jersey, but it was basically an airport and not much else. As Van Nuys was to Los Angeles, Teterboro was to New York -an unglamorous location for the very glamorous private airplanes of the moneyed set.

“What?” said Devlin. “Say again?”

Maryam looked at him as he spoke softly on the secure phone. Throughout the flight aboard the custom-built Gulfstream C-37B, he had kept his own counsel, remaining mostly silent as he absorbed real-time information streaming over his direct connection to Fort Meade. Since she was not, officially, an employee of either the NSA or the Central Security Service, it was none of her business to inquire. He would tell her soon enough, if he chose to.

Secrets. They were the basis of their relationship. Even though she knew it was not his real name, she still called him “Frank,” because that was how he had first introduced himself. She had since learned that “Frank Ross” was one of a series of operational pseudonyms he had used, never to be repeated, but Frank he first was to her and Frank he had remained. Perhaps, someday, she would learn who he really was. But then, she supposed, he would have to kill her.

As for herself, there were plenty of things she hadn’t told him. Most things. In fact, everything about their relationship-even their love affair-was based on indirection, misdirection, or outright lies. And neither of them would have it any other way.

They both had jobs to do. Thrice already in their lives their jobs had intersected, the first time in Paris, the second last year in Los Angeles and, later, in France. They had been there for each other, when they needed each other, and in their business that was just about the highest compliment one could pay to a colleague-or a lover.

And she did love him. Whatever had been the original impetus for her assignment, it didn’t matter. Iranian politics, especially since the revolution, were impenetrable to outsiders, even to him. But she had been raised in them. For more than thirty years her country had cried out for justice and vengeance. She only hoped she could give it a little bit of both.

Most Americans over the age of 50, she understood, had zero sympathy for Iran. As young people, they had had their senses assaulted by the hordes of Iranian demonstrators on the streets of America ’s cities, shouting about the Shah and his secret police force, the SAVAK. Then Khomeini came back to Tehran from Paris and the Shah fled and the ayatollahs took over, and suddenly the most Western country in the Middle East, a Persian culture that had existed for millennia, with great art, literature, poetry, and music, had succumbed once more to an alien, fundamentalist oppressor and was taking American hostages and shoving its women into burqas. In less than a decade, the glorious Peacock Throne had degenerated into another totalitarian dictatorship.

Then the demonstrators took the streets again, this time against the Ayatollah. With hundreds of Americans being held hostage in the embassy, in violation of every international diplomatic protocol, they found no shoulders to cry on. If, in 1980, President Carter had nuked Tehran, he would have won reelection in a landslide, thought Maryam. But he was too weak, and the rot that had taken over America had first revealed itself; despite Reagan’s tough talk, his primary focus was breaking the Soviet Union, which he did. And after him, the deluge of mediocrity that resulted from warring political families, neither with the best interests of the nation at heart. Which is why Tyler had been elected as a breath of fresh air, a plague and a pox on both their houses.

“…ready?” he was asking her.

“Sorry, what?” she said, coming out of her fog of remembrance.

Devlin looked at her. Every instinct, every bit of his training told him that he shouldn’t trust her, that he didn’t really know anything about her, and yet he did. It was Milverton’s last question to him as they battled to the death in London: “Do you trust the bitch? You don’t even know her real name.” But he had ignored that, instead taking a page from Milverton’s old outfit, the SAS-22’s: “Who Dares, Wins.” All his life he had trusted nobody, but he trusted her.

“ New York is under attack. We have to move. Now.”

Maryam tried not to let her alarm show. She was, after all, a professional. But an attack on New York was the nightmare that had been waiting to happen for a decade. “Then we go in together,” she said.

The plane was rolling to a stop as he replied: “No. I go in. You go on.”

“Where? When?”

“As soon as I tell that idiot Tyler what we’re going to do. Right now you’re going to tell me how bad it is.”

“But-” She caught herself. She knew it was no use to remonstrate with him. Neither love nor guilt played any role in his psyche, and on some level she felt that he would willingly sacrifice her if the mission ever required it. Just as she knew, deep inside, that if the day ever came when she had to choose between her mission and their happiness…She let the thought trail off, not wishing to finish it.

“There’s some kind of incident going on in Times Square. Whether the police are up to handling it, we’ll soon find out. Probably not, but they’ll never admit it. That’s why I need you to crack the CTU unit and find out what they know.”

“With what?” Even though they were aboard an NSA plane, which was as well equipped with computers and surveillance equipment as anything in the air, including Air Force One, they still might not be up to the challenge. The New York Counter-Terrorism Unit was famously secure.

“With your head,” he replied. “Now get cracking.”

Devlin pulled out his secure BlackBerry and opened up a direct channel to Seelye. This was not his preferred method of communication, because he felt a wireless device, no matter how well designed by the NSA engineers at The Building, could never be as safe as the hard-wire he’d had back at his home in Falls Church, but at this point he didn’t have any choice. This would get him straight to Seelye, which meant straight to Tyler.

IN PLACE SIT UPDATE ASAP

The scrambled and decoded text came flying right back at him. There were a lot of things he hated about Tyler -almost everything, in fact-but one thing he had to admit, the man was always on the job. Tyler had taught him a lot of things Devlin wished every night he could forget, but a work ethic and a sense of duty was not one of them.

HANDS OFF THIS END. YOU ARE SOLO. NORMAL ROE. CONFIRM

CONFIRMED. ACCESS?

NONE. LOCKDOWN. NYPD SHOW.

TOOLS?

IN PLACE, SAFE HOUSES. STAND BY. REVOLUTION

Devlin had to wait only a beat or two before a series of numbers flooded the secure computer screen. In a few minutes, they would be sorted out into street addresses superimposed upon enhanced-imaging maps provided by the National Reconnaissance Office, another of the many U.S. intelligence organizations few Americans had ever heard of. The NRO was attached to the SecDef, and it was responsible for collecting and coordinating aerial imagery from airplanes and satellites. In other words, the NRO was Google Earth on steroids, and it could send you a picture via nearly instantaneous transmission that could show you the Iranian nuclear installations at Qom or the tramp stamp on the girl on the beach at Ipanema.

“Revolution” simply meant that the vetted safe houses revolved on a daily basis and the secure information he was receiving would sort out the active flops from the dummies and the poisoned pills. Assuming he could get to one of them, it would be outfitted with just about any kind of weapon he might need, short of a low-yield nuclear device and he wouldn’t put that past NSA, either. Devlin glanced at the computer, which had identified three safe houses in Manhattan; one in midtown near the United Nations, one downtown near Wall Street, and one at the northern tip of the island, in Inwood.

ROGER THAT. COOP?

ASSUME NONE.

EMERGENCY LIAISON BYRNE, FRANCIS X, CORRECT?

UNDER ROE ONLY, YOUR CALL

Devlin clicked off. He memorized the locations of the safe houses and committed the floor plans to memory as well, noting all entrances and exits. There would be codes at each of them, security death traps for the unwary, the too-curious, and the sacrificial pawns, but he could handle that sort of thing in his sleep. He only hoped that the situation would not get too far out of control before he could in and get fully equipped.

Maryam’s voice nearly startled him: “It’s him, isn’t it?” He didn’t need to ask who “him” was. They both knew and they both knew it was him. Hope was not a plan.

Devlin turned to Maryam. There was no point in lying to her. Instincts had kept them both alive for years, and to try to deny them was suicidal. Nevertheless, Devlin preferred to base his conclusions on evidence, which right now was in short supply.

Maryam saw it in his eyes, saw the lack of the comforting lie. “I know it. It’s him.” Her eyes flashed and, for an instant, changed color from deep brown to something more akin to gold. “He’ll never leave you alone. He’ll never leave us alone. Until we kill him.”

“Or he kills us. But right now this isn’t about us.”

“Of course it is. You’re going in. That makes it about us, whether it began that way or no.” He loved that, “or no.” There was a slight British quality to her speech that he would have to expunge if she ever really had to pass for an American overseas, but they could work on that later.

She placed her hand on his wounded shoulder, into which Milverton had plunged his killing knife. How close the thrust had come to severing an artery she would never know, and he would never speak of it. She only knew how close to death he had been when she got to him in that horrible cell in France. To watch the sight of his life’s blood draining away was a vision she never wanted to see again. “How do you feel? Are you fit enough?” It was not a question she should have asked, but one that she had to ask.

“Fine. In the pink. Never better.” He smiled. “Any other clichés I can lay on you to make you think twice about asking a stupid question?”

She gave him that look, that mysterious Oriental glance that women of the region had been giving their men since the days of Darius. The one that is at once challenge, taunt, reproach, and exhortation. He returned the glance as best a Westerner could, then glanced down at the computer. The safe house information had already been atomized and now only the screensaver-an animated gif of a bobblehead Alexander Graham Bell doll doing handsprings and backflips while rushing for a ringing telephone-now visible.

“This might tell us something while Washington figures out what’s going on.” He punched a few keys, and Maryam saw that he was tapping into the live Echelon II feeds across Manhattan. ATM cameras, CCTV cameras, bodega cameras, building security cameras-their cyclopean images floated across the tiny screen, stupefying in their uneventful reality.

“Nothing much-Jesus!”

Times Square. Something was happening there. It was hard to make out, but one of the rotating CCTV cameras was on to something…

A streetscape and then smoke. Flames. Even in grainy low-res, it was clear that something was happening. Devlin called up the cable news nets and divided the screen in four quadrants.

“We have to do something.” Maryam’s eyes were still glued to the unfolding disaster. Devlin turned to look at her, and then, once more, the voice of his old enemy sounded in his ear:

“What is she to you? She’s a dream, the dream of the prisoner in the condemned hold. You think that this time it’s going to be different, but when they string you up and drop the trap, you’ll realize as your neck snaps that it was all a fantasy.”

Milverton’s voice, in his head. Not the voice of his conscience, but of caution. The caution that, as the saying went, had been thrown to the winds in his desire for her, and in his desire to be free-from Seelye. Free of the past that had entrapped him and refused to let him go. But freedom was not a gift. It had to be won, and hard-won. Milverton had been there at the beginning, in Paris, and he had been there at the end, in London. He haunted them still.

Devlin’s hand shot out, grasped hers. The horror remained on the screen. “Are you real, or only a dream? Who are you?”

“What?” She pulled back a little, frightened by the intensity in his eyes. She knew that look. She was one of the few-perhaps the only one-to have seen it and lived.

Best not to show fear. “Who are you, Frank?”

“You know who I am,” he replied calmly. His touch was like ice. “I am the Angel of Death.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The White House

Tyler had all the TV screens up and running as Seelye entered the private quarters. He was surprised to find Tyler alone. At the beginning of his presidency, Tyler would have been in the Oval Office, jacket off, sleeves rolled in his faux-populist style, hands on hips, barking orders to a room full of acolytes and subalterns, trying as hard he could to look presidential. Now, after nearly four years, he looked simply old and tired and in disbelief at what was occurring in New York.

“Where’s Secretary Johnson?” he asked, coming through the door. “Where’s Celina Sanchez? Melinda Dylan? Pam Dobson?” Sanchez was the National Security Advisor, Dylan, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Dobson, the press secretary. All of Tyler ’s top security officers were women.

That wasn’t quite true, of course, even in this time of female ascendancy. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was Marine Corps General Lance Higgins, the Director of National Intelligence was Lamont Sutton, and the head of the Department of Homeland Security was Bob Colangelo. But, in Seelye’s opinion, their input was pretty much negligible. Tyler came into office with a pronounced aversion to military men-he hardly ever laid eyes on his military attaché, Col. Al Grizzard, the man who controlled the nuclear football-which ruled out Higgins’s input. Sutton, in a politically incorrect opinion he kept exclusively to himself, was an affirmative-action appointment, and Colangelo was simply an idiot whose lack of organizational talent or intellectual acumen was perfectly suited to running the country’s most useless bureaucracy. So maybe Tyler was right to trust the women; after all, just about the only job in the U.S. government women hadn’t taken over was that of chief executive and that was just a matter of time-maybe a matter of months, if the polls were right. A President Angela Hassett meant the end of his career, the end of a lifetime of work. The end of Devlin as well, after which Devlin would be looking to cash in his chips. And that simply could not be allowed. He had to save Jeb Tyler’s ass to save his own.

“Sit down, Army, and give me what you’ve got.”

Seelye was ready with the numbers. “It began with a denial-of-service attack this afternoon on the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department. A complete wipeout that lasted nearly five minutes, so bad it rang the alarm bells from Manhattan to Fort Meade.”

The president gestured at the television screens. “Best guess?”

Seelye hated to have to say what he was about to say. It represented a complete failure of all the safeguards that had been put in place since 9/11. It was the last thing a reeling Tyler Administration needed, and when the word got out, there was going to be unholy hell to pay. He took a deep breath.

“Best guess is that they’ve been planning this for months, maybe years. First they probed our defenses-and, as you know, despite all our best efforts, despite our crack Department of Homeland Security, our state of the art ain’t so great, especially as you travel down the bureaucratic food chain-set off a series of feints, hinted that they might strike the electrical grid, the water supplies. And then…”

“And then?” Tyler was in no mood for coy. He was watching midtown Manhattan burn live on national television.

“And then they rammed it right up our ass. How they smuggled the stuff into the city…” His voice trailed off. This was exactly the kind of thing all those sensors and hidden cameras were supposed to help prevent. All those city, state, and federal dollars. The networks of HUMINT. “We can only hope that the sensors were not down long enough not to detect anything fissionable.”

“You mean nukes. A suitcase nuke?”

“Or two. Or four. Or, God willing, none.”

“How could they get them into the city so fast?”

Tyler wasn’t going to like this answer. “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were there all along, waiting. You know how patient these people are. They’re still fighting battles from a thousand years ago, nursing grudges, plotting. For them, revenge is a dish that cannot possibly be cold enough.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe the devices-if they’ve got them and that’s a big if at this point-were already in Manhattan, secreted there and then activated before all our shields were back up. There’s a lot of places they could hide them: in hospitals, swimming pools-”

“Not a lot of swimming pools in Manhattan,” said Tyler, reddening. Seelye braced for what he knew would be the eventual eruption of Mount Tyler. Maybe this time, he thought, the president would keep his cool. Maybe this time he would control himself and his fiery temper. Maybe this time, he’d act like an adult. If not, they were all doomed.

“You’d be surprised, sir. There are lots of indoor swimming pools in the city. Any Y will do just fine. But that’s worst-case scenario, and the rest of it is barn-door stuff. The real question is, what are we going to do about this?” He gestured at the televisions.

From every angle, on every network, the extent of the destruction was awesome. Half the great intersection was afire, and 42nd Street was burning as well. Down the block, the wreck of the AMC theaters was plainly visible. Across the expanse of the square itself, heavily armed cops were engaging in a running firefight with an unknown number of assailants, and they were taking casualties.

“Has the governor sent in the National Guard yet?” asked Tyler. Hurricane Katrina had taught every succeeding president that one could stand too long on ceremony and chain of command.

“NYPD hasn’t yet called for military assistance, so the answer is presumably no. We’re monitoring the governor’s office and the official police communication channels, of course.”

“Of course.” Another bourbon and branch had materialized on a side table, but as much as he wanted another drink, this was no time to lose his faculties. “What’s the SIGINT chatter?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. If this was an al-Qaeda operation, they’d be shouting from the tops of their mud huts already. But everything’s quiet. Which means…”

Tyler arched an eyebrow.

“Which means,” continued Seelye, “that we’re not up against a group of terrorists. We’re up against something that can keep a secret, that holds absolute operational security. In other words, one man.”

“In other words, Emanuel Skorzeny,” said Tyler, one eye glued to the TV screens.

Seelye chose his words carefully; there was a play for him here, a chance to settle the oldest and most personal score in his book, but he had to be careful how he laid it out. “No, sir, I think not. He’s old, he’s taken a terrific financial beating, and he’s content to fly around all day in that airborne fuck palace of his, trying to put the pieces of his empire back together. I don’t think we have anything to worry about from Skorzeny at this point. Besides, he knows he exists at your sufferance, so why go out of his way to attract unwelcome attention?”

“Simple,” said Tyler. “Best reason there is: because he can. Look, he’s old, he’s mean, he’s ornery, and he’s guilty as sin. He’s already got his ticket punched straight to Hell, whether he believes in it or not…” Tyler thought for a moment. After all, it was he who had let Skorzeny off-in order to protect the CSS, Branch 4, and Devlin, to be sure. “Who then?”

Seelye tossed a couple of dossiers in front of the president. “This man,” he said. “Arash Kohanloo.”

Tyler ’s heart sank as he picked up the first manila folder, stamped SCI, eyes only. “Please don’t tell me he’s Iranian.”

“With a name like that, of course he is,” replied Seelye as the President leafed through the folder. “But he’s no ordinary Persian. He’s not one of the mullah’s thugs. He’s older, for one thing. He remembers a time before the Islamic Revolution. He attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and went on to Yale. How the CIA missed recruiting him with that pedigree, I’ll never understand. Got a doctorate at the London School of Economics, then another degree at the Sorbonne. Speaks six languages fluently. For some reason the ayatollahs seem to trust him, and pretty much let him have the run of the planet, which means that whatever scam he’s running is enriching all of them and clearly serves their geo-political ambitions. He spends as much time looking after his private business interests in Macao, Goa, Dubai, Los Angeles as he does in Tehran. In short, he’s a sophisticated man of the world. Just like…”

Tyler put the folder down, took his eye off the TV, and gave Seelye his full attention. “Just like…?”

“Just like Emanuel Skorzeny, with whom he met in Macao within the past twenty-four hours.”

Tyler took a deep breath through his nose, held the air a moment, then expelled it slowly. Good; breathing exercises might keep him calm, at least for a while. “You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir. Skorzeny uses some pretty sophisticated hamming equipment, and of course he’s bought off half the air-traffic control systems in the world, but we can still track the old goat. Just waiting for the word from you for him to have an unfortunate aeronautics accident.”

“Well, just don’t let him have it over Iran, for Chris-sakes,” said Tyler. The United States was still having trouble living down its wipeout of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq war-a purpose pitch and small payback for the hostage crisis that still inflamed anti-American sentiment, as if Iran needed any more reasons to hate the Great Satan. “Two questions: what’s this Kohanloo’s weakness?”

Seelye had been expecting those very queries. “I wish I could tell you he had some exotic vices, Mr. President,” he said. “That he raises tropical fish and uses them as an aphrodisiac for the little girls he kidnaps on school playgrounds, but no such luck. He’s a good Muslim. He doesn’t smoke or drink, conducts his financial affairs in accordance with Islamic principles, and in general lives according to Shari’a law.”

“So what’s his vice?” Tyler certainly knew from vices; in his view a man without a vice wasn’t a man at all.

“His vice is that, outside the caliphate, in the West, he does as the Romans do. He gambles at all the best London clubs, and there isn’t a reasonably attractive woman in the Western world he hasn’t tried to seduce.”

“And the Iranian security services let him get away with that?”

“I think the question answers itself, sir. He’s still kicking.”

“So how do we get to him?”

“At the moment, we don’t.” Seelye pointed back at the screen. “We have to see how this plays out. It might be a coordinated attack-and I think the evidence is clear on that point-but it might also be sheer coincidence, the timing of the DoS attack and the bombing. Probably it’s not, but stranger things have happened. But we’re not without certain, er, weapons.”

Tyler was already mentally calculating the amount of money the feds were going to have to send to New York, even assuming this incident got resolved quickly. He was also weighing the hit his reputation was going to take, and how much political hay that bitch Hassett would be able to make out of this once the fires were out and the victims were buried. “What weap-?”

Tyler was cut off by the sound of the intercom. It was Millie Dhouri, his private secretary. “Deputy Director Byrne is here, Mr. President,” said the disembodied voice.

“Read the other dossier first,” advised Seelye.

“Ask Director Byrne to wait just a couple more minutes,” said Tyler, opening the dossier.

One thing you had to admit about Tyler, Seelye thought, the man was a quick study. A lot of lawyers were, especially trial lawyers, but Tyler was exceptional. He could speed-read the densest page and absorb it in one gulp. Not only could he sell igloos to Eskimos, carry coals to Newcastle, and hawk oil burners in the Sahara, he could sell himself to the American people as something other than what he was: a millionaire trial lawyer who had made his reputation and his fortune putting doctors out of business with crippling lawsuits, all the while posing as a champion of women’s reproductive rights. It was either a commentary on Tyler ’s political skills, or the stupidity of the American public, or both. And yet…

And yet there was no question that he had a knack for the presidency, in a way many of his predecessors didn’t. Maybe you really could grow in office.

Tyler tossed the dossier back onto the table. “Show him in,” he said.

A knock at the door, and in came Byrne. At sixty-two, Tom Byrne had lost neither a hair on his black Irish head nor his good looks, and he moved with the confident grace of a man who held an awful lot of secrets. Like his brother, Frankie, Tom had grown up in Woodside, Queens, when it was still a Paddy stronghold, and even though New York had long since ceased being the city of the Irish, Italians, and Jews, nobody had had the guts to tell him that. Tom Byrne believed passionately in George Washington Plunkitt’s dictum that “the Irish were born to rule.”

“Mr. President,” he said by way of acknowledgment. “General Seelye.”

Seelye rose and shook hands. Despite all his years in Washington, this was the first time he had ever met the fabulous creature in the flesh. Stories about Byrne were legendary, particularly his Kennedyesque appetite for women, but NSA and the FBI had very little to do with each other, and both sides endeavored to keep it that way.

“Sit down, Mr. Byrne, and tell me what you make of the situation in New York. You know why I’ve asked you to come here, I’m sure.”

Byrne smiled. “Because my little brother, Frankie, is head of CTU.”

“Precisely,” said Tyler. “What do you hear from him?”

“Hear from him?” replied Byrne. “Nothing. We haven’t talked in years, except through official channels.”

“You two don’t like each other very much, is that it?”

“No, sir. But that’s no secret. We’ve hated each other since we were kids.”

“May I ask why?”

Byrne smiled. “It’s complicated, Mr. President. And, with all due respect, I think we have a lot bigger fish to fry at the moment.”

“Where do you suppose your brother is right now?”

Now Byrne laughed. “Not at his desk, that’s for sure. Frankie’s got this big mick, first-through-the-door attitude, so if I know my bro, he’s out there right now, in the middle of the sh-in the middle of it.”

“Are you in contact with him?”

“No, sir,” replied Tom. “Frankie speaks only to God and his squad. Mere mortals like us need not apply.”

Tyler looked Byrne over closely, trying not to let his distaste for the man show. He’d read the files, heard all the stories. But Washington was a tough, unforgiving town, and sometimes you had to climb into bed with people you’d otherwise cheerfully strangle, just to get the job done. This was one of those times.

“Director Byrne, let me be blunt. I need to know what your brother knows, in real time, and I don’t much care how you do it, so long as that information pipeline is up and running A-sap. No matter how much you know, or think you know, about me, Director Seelye, members of my cabinet, or the dog I had when I was twelve, it doesn’t matter to me a bit. Your job depends on opening up a channel of communication for me to Captain Byrne. Do I make myself clear?”

Seelye expected to watch with satisfaction as the wind went out of Byrne’s sails, leaving him becalmed on the shoals of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, he looked as if Tyler had just handed him a present. “Rat out my own brother? The pleasure’s all mine. I’ll need your authorization though-in writing.”

Seelye saw the play right away, even if Tyler didn’t. What Tyler had just done was crack the wall of separation that the NYPD had so assiduously erected between it and the feds; by ordering the FBI, in the person of Tom Byrne, to breach NYPD security, he had effectively just delivered the New York City cops to their ancient enemies, the Bureau: the street Irish versus the Notre Dame Irish, pigs in the parlor vs. the lace curtains. The same fucking tribal animosities, imported from the Ould Sod to the New World, most likely with the same sad results. Both sides would lose.

“Director Byrne,” replied Tyler, coldly, “I am the President of the United States. My word ought to be good enough for you. And Director Seelye is your witness. Now get out of here and get me an inside channel to the CTU. I don’t give a rat’s fucking rear end how you do it, whose toes you have to step on, or whose balls you have to break. Are we clear about this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now give me your assessment before I have the AG fire you right now and give the job to somebody else.”

“Yes, sir.” Byrne collected his thoughts. He was pretty sure Tyler was bluffing about firing him. After all, it was he who had successfully transformed the FBI from a bunch of lawyers with guns chasing bank robbers in Omaha into a pretty fair imitation of Britain ’s MI5, the domestic security service, and the front-line counterterrorism soldiers in the ongoing war against the jihad. Not to mention the fact that the Director was a moron, and the AG couldn’t indict a ham sandwich even if he caught it standing over the dead body with a smoking gun between two slices of rye bread. On the other hand, Tyler was known to do some pretty strange things, and with a tough election fight coming up, Tom’s scalp might just turn out to be a campaign collectible.

“From what we can tell,” he began, “there are at least a dozen terrorists on the ground in New York at the moment. There may be more. There may be sleeper cells, waiting to go into action after we tip our hand. In fact, I would say that is entirely likely. But right now, that’s our best guesstimate, and they’re armed with some pretty formidable firepower.”

“Can the NYPD take them?” asked Seelye.

The intercom buzzed. “What is it, Millie?” barked Tyler, annoyed.

“Pam Dobson on the line, sir. She says the media is clamoring for a statement.”

“Tell her to keep her panties on,” said Tyler. “And I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ms. Dhouri’s voice. “I’ll phrase it more artfully.”

“See that you do, thanks,” said the president. He turned back to Byrne. “Well, can they?”

“Of course they can. And if they can’t, the Guard is on the way, and with those reinforcements-”

At that moment, a terrific explosion could be heard from the TVs. All three men turned to look.

A huge plume of smoke was rising over the Hudson and lower Manhattan around Canal Street on the west side. It looked like half the city was on fire.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Tom Byrne. “They bombed the Holland Tunnel.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Los Angeles

Even in his semi-buzzed state, Jake Sinclair was on the phone in a flash when it vibrated in his palm. He had seen the first news reports-sketchy, incomplete things born of panic and fallibility and gossip and rumor, full of the mistaken details that would later give rise to a thousand conspiracy theories-and was clutching the instrument even before it rang. He pushed the talk button and spoke: “Flood the zone. Everybody in the field. I don’t care how dangerous it is.”

The voice on the other end of the line crackled with something very like fear. It was Bill Connolly, the head of his cable news division. “We’re on it, Mr. Sinclair.”

Sinclair tossed a glance at one of the video feeds. Huge billows of smoke were ascending into the sky from what had once been Times Square, and farther to the south, another conflagration had started. The only question now was how much worse it was going to get. A lot worse, was his guess. “Status report,” he commanded.

“ Times Square is cut off. Looks like some kind of bomb just sealed the entrance to the Holland Tunnel on the Manhattan side. Jesus Christ, what are they doing, taking out all the-?”

“That’s your job to find out,” snapped Sinclair, “so get to it. Put Principessa on the air-let her anchor. People like to see a pretty girl when the shit hits the fan.”

“Um, sir? Principessa’s just getting back to the city now. She did a hell of a job just getting to within a hundred miles of Manhattan.”

Sinclair’s mind raced. He would have preferred to have that magnificent rack front and center on America ’s TV screens; she wasn’t terribly smart but she was pretty, had a great body and was absolutely unafraid of her own stupidity. In fact, she was stone-cold brave, a quality you didn’t find in many women.

“Okay, then track her. Get another crew with her. If she starts to mix it up in the shit, we need to be there to cover her.” He’d hate to lose Stanley if anything happened to her, if she caught a stray bullet or got clipped in an explosion, but hey, this was war. Ernie Pyle made a great career move when he bought the farm in the Pacific, and as far as Sinclair was concerned, today’s reporters were a bunch of pussies anyway, covering stories from the studio or, in a pinch, from their satellite vans. Good to see the girl on the streets.

“I’ve got another call.” He punched the talk button again. This time it was Ben Bernstein, the editor in chief of the Times. “Give it to me straight, Benny,” he said.

“We’re under attack,” shouted Bernstein-

“Calm down,” he soothed. The man sounded like he was having a heart attack. “It’s happening right in your own backyard. Chance of a lifetime. Who’ve you got on it?”

“Everybody-”

“Good. See that they stay there. Tear the paper up and get ready for a Pulitzer.”

Bernstein was practically sobbing. “But, Jake, it’s…it’s terrible.”

“Of course it’s terrible. It’s news. Forget 9/11-we own this story.” He rang off. Alert now, he punched up Firefox. Almost immediately, the tabs to his principal websites popped up so he could watch what was happening in real time. Under the guise of providing “traffic cams” and “beauty shots” of various cities, Sinclair had been one of the first to install and link a series of private spy cams around the country. Gradually, sub rosa and through discreet bribery, he also managed to install “news feeds” in Europe, the principal Asian cities, and a couple of places in South America, precisely against moments like these. People didn’t trust the news much anymore-not that he could blame them; after all, he didn’t trust it much anymore, and the reporters were mainly employed by him-and they were more likely to believe the evidence of their own senses than some silly blow-dried mouthpiece doing a standup from a safely secured “war zone.” This way, the anchors could perform their voice-overs while the remotely controlled cameras gave the viewers a grunt’s-eye view of what was really going on. Needless to say, the viewers loved it, even if the reporters didn’t, and his network’s ratings soared. Besides, who cared what the reporters thought? He had fired half of them already and looked forward to the day when he could fire them all and use 3-D animated avatars, just like in the movies.

One glance was enough to tell him this was very, very bad-which meant for the news business, it was very, very good. It mattered not if he lost a day, or a week-hell, even a month’s worth of revenue. He would make it up in the numbers of eyeballs delivered to advertisers down the line, and in prestige by his Nielsens. And he would make it up on the back end when he eventually drove his competitors completely out of business, leaving the field entirely to himself. Too big to fail was just fine by Jake Sinclair, and, if anything, he planned to get even bigger.

Which was why he had left New York, and wasn’t that looking like a smart idea? Not like the poor guy who had leased the old World Trade Center a few weeks before the nineteen holy warriors leveled it. Part of his considerable fortune had been based on smart real-estate deals, and the close of the sale of the New York corporate headquarters to some European interests was his smartest deal yet. The building he had purchased quietly in Century City -the retrofitting was almost complete-would be a beacon for all other corporate moguls, and with better weather.

“Oh, my God-have you heard?” That would be Jenny II, coming in the door from the porte cochere. He could hear her rustling around in the kitchen, dropping her Maxfield’s bags and her keys; in a few seconds, she’d be in the room, and then he was going to have to feign shock and horror at what was transpiring three thousand miles away instead of gloating about how he’d just made a fortune, and that his network’s rating were sure to soar. “Yes,” he shouted, hoping his voice had just the right amount of concern. “It’s terrible. I’ve got it on right now.” Sinclair linked his computer’s screens to the huge flat-screen television that dominated one wall of the room.

“I thought the president was supposed to keep us safe,” said Jenny. The look on her face was so real and so sincere that for just a moment Sinclair felt a little embarrassed at his own conflict of interest.

He put his arms around her and held her close. It was at times like these, when she was the vulnerable girl he had first met playing tennis at her father’s house, that day he had come to consummate his business relationship with the father and eventually wound up marrying the daughter, that he actually enjoyed her company again.

“What can I do? What can one man do?” he whispered softly. Like most Hollywood wives, she gladly accepted the often brutal violence of the torture-porn movies his and other studios made, yet in the face of the real thing became completely unglued.

“You can fight him,” said Jenny, softly. “You fight him with everything you’ve got. With everything we’ve got.” She pulled away and gestured around. “I mean, why have you worked so hard to acquire this business, your newspapers, your whole media empire, if not to use it to save our country?”

Sinclair pulled Jenny II close to him. It was at moments like this that he was grateful he didn’t have to remember a new name. Over her tender, soft shoulder, he could see New York burning.

It was surreal, a sight he had seen hundreds of times before in his studio’s movies. Disaster movies were ten cents a dance these days, when filmmakers looked for any excuse to blow up the White House and the Vatican (but never anything Muslim), but that was only because nobody ever expected their cinematic visions to actually happen. Fiction was only fun when it stayed fiction.

There wasn’t much left in Jake Sinclair other than greed and a vague, free-floating animus against various wrongs, both real and imagined, but whatever it was welled up inside him, and he found himself once again making promises that he could not keep. Still, as always, it felt good to make them. “I’ll get them,” he said.

Jenny II pulled back, her face still turned away from the disaster unfolding in New York. He would try to shield her from it as long as possible; holding fast to progressive belief meant denying reality as long as one could. “Will you, Jake?” she asked, her face streaming. “Promise me you will.”

Still holding her in his arms, Sinclair maneuvered her as far away from the flatscreen as he could. “You know I will,” he whispered. “When have I ever lied to you?” From this angle, he could just manage to reach out and hit the computer, shutting off the video feed to the other twelve televisions in the house.

They had moved toward the French doors, which led out to the patio. Sinclair spent most of his life indoors, in a car, or on an airplane; the fresh air felt good.

“You can do it, Jake,” Jenny said. “You can get them, those bastards.” Somewhere, on somebody’s TV, Manhattan was still under attack, but that was not what Jenny meant. “You can get them, hold their feet to the fire, make them live up to our American ideals.”

The relaxation of monopoly rules under a succession of presidents and congresses had given men like him an opportunity. Most Americans never thought at all about where their information was coming from, how it was filtered, interpreted, refashioned, and corrupted until it landed on their computer screens, BlackBerrys, iPhones or, diminishingly, in newspapers. Sinclair’s genius was that he owned them all. In fact, some of them he had purchased from a man named Emanuel Skorzeny, a well-known financier who had mysteriously gone missing the year before after selling off many of his media assets at fire-sale prices.

“Get in the game, Jake,” Jenny was saying. “Use your empire. Take that bastard Tyler down.”

Jenny II or no Jenny II, he had just about had it with the party in power. The man had been elected on an “anti-” platform. Anti-everything that had come before, most especially his predecessor, whose invincible ignorance and smug moral certainty had enraged every almost segment of society except Flyover Country. And yet, something had caused Tyler to turn away from Blame America First. Once in office, he had disappointed many of his supporters and enraged others by refusing to move his social reforms along as quickly as he had promised, and they had hoped. Some devil had snuck into the White House in the dead of night and climbed under the covers with the Bachelor President. Sinclair wondered who it had been.

There were plenty of stories about Tyler on hold. Stories in the newspapers, the magazines, stories ready for broadcast, awaiting just the pushing of the “publish” buttons on the net. But progressives weren’t supposed to attack their own, certainly not the matter of sexuality, or even of speculative sexuality, and certainly not when they were supposed to take the side of the “anti-” party, whatever its current positions were. It was unseemly to attack any member of the party, any potential ally, any useful idiot, which Tyler had always been. But now, with New York aflame, it was time to take the gloves off.

Gently, he released Jenny II. Thoughts of divorcing her had fled his mind; his field of vision had room only for the devastated heart of midtown Manhattan and her father’s bank account, most of it still unplundered, ripe for the taking. “I’ll get the bastard,” he told Jenny II. “You can count on me.”

As they moved toward the pool, he unfastened the halter top of her simple shift, which dropped to the ground. As he stroked her bare back, he guided her toward the spa.

She slipped into the water like a sleek mermaid. It was amazing how much better, how much sexier, naked women were in the water, so smooth, so unencumbered, their skins glistening as they cut through the water like seals. It was their natural element.

He sloughed off his shirt and slid out of his trousers. One thing left to do.

He punched a single key on his Surge, the one that connected him directly to the newsroom of his flagship paper in Manhattan. He was getting ready for another round of down-sizing, but they didn’t have to know that now. All they had to think about at the moment was the Pulitzers they were going to win. Might as well live it up.

“Endorse Hassett. Yes, tomorrow morning. No, I don’t care how this ends, it’s not going to change my mind. You have my standing editorial. Set the agenda. Do some damage. It’s the American way.”

He turned to Jenny II, so seductive. His hand brushed the button for the spa. The bubbles leapt to life. So did he.

By God, he still had it. He still had it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Manhattan

In his heart, nearly bursting from the exertion of his sprint, Frankie Byrne had always known he would be too late, but he didn’t know what else to do. “First through the door” was the motto of New York ’s Finest, Irishmen to the core no matter what their ethnicity. He had lived by this motto for his entire career on the force, and he was not about to give it up now. Not even when the danger was greatest, which made the urgency all the more fierce. First through the door meant first through the door, whether the door was real or figurative, whether a shithole in the Bronx or a Park Avenue apartment, whether the door opened onto a swanky restaurant, an East Village head shop, a Queens crack house, or the Archbishop’s fuckpad across from MoMA. It was all the same to him. You went in to sort the situation out, or you died in the attempt. There was no sense rationalizing it. You just did it, and if the devil got you, well, you hoped you’d be in heaven long before the cocksucker knew you were dead. That was the Paddy way, and it was the only way he knew.

Why this was true was a mystery, but it was departmental lore and so every cop on the force abided by it. For Byrne, however, it went deeper. His father had died in the line of duty. In a firefight, you shot first or you died, and Robert Byrne had had been shot in the back, and even though he managed to turn on his unknown assailant he had not fired his weapon, out of fear of hitting a civilian. And so he died. Byrne honored his father’s memory, but he had no intention of ever letting that happen to him.

The explosion at the AMC movie theater practically hit him in the face. Luckily, he had not yet rounded the corner, or else he would have been instantly as dead as all the other pedestrians in the vicinity, from the Port Authority to the Great White Way. Instinctively, he fell to the pavement, rolling as close to a nearby building as he could manage, waiting for the shitstorm to stop.

He had never been this close to a general disaster-personal disasters had been enough for him-but he found himself strangely calm in the midst of it. In all his other encounters with the forces of evil, he had been a lone man, facing another lone man, both of them holding a sidearm. The romance of the movies was that men fired at each other from great distances with pistols, but Byrne knew from bitter personal experience that in urban confrontations your opponent was usually standing right in front of you, so it was not a matter of marksmanship but alacrity. Despite the caterwauling from the sissies and the nancy boys on the city council and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an officer’s first job was to go home safe every night.

Even as an NYPD officer, Byrne had never experienced anything like this: a rain of fire, of molten brick and steel and plastic. When he was finally able to peek around the corner, a stunning sight met his eyes: shredded bodies, some of them headless, many of them limbless, all of them dead.

Despite the increasingly militarized nature of urban police forces, cops weren’t supposed to be soldiers. They kept the peace up close and personal, not from a marksman’s dispassionate remove. They fought one-on-one, like the street fighters they had once been, battling the thugs, grifters, and second-story men their forebears knew so well. In the old days, back when Byrne’s grandparents had come over from Ireland and settled first on the Lower East Side and later in Queens, you grew up with the criminals you would eventually put in jail. Today, they came from thousands of miles away, disembarking at Kennedy Airport, their support staff already in place along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, just waiting for a signal, whether from their controllers or Allah.

Right now, what he had to do was get to the AMC Theater and figure out what the hell was going on.

All thoughts of the hot dog vendor guy were lost. Given what was unfolding in front of his eyes on 42nd Street, Times Square was a million miles away. The uniformed officers in place would have to deal with it, and the reinforcements that were undoubtedly already on their way. Although it was clear that this was an attack on the order of 9/11, Byrne found himself hoping that the feds would let the NYPD handle it-this was their turf, and nobody knew it better. It was already a blow to the department’s pride that something like this was happening, but in fact this is what they had trained for, prepared for-it was not their fault that geopolitical developments had intervened. The job of a New York City police officer was to protect and serve, and that was exactly what he intended to do.

The AMC, or what was left of it, was only a couple of hundred yards ahead.

“Dinner at the Four Seasons it’s ragheads,” said Sid Sheinberg.

Lannie Saleh piloted the unmarked police car at top speed through traffic. From time to time, he skirted the shoals of the sidewalk, expertly navigating around rogue parking meters, illegal sidewalk cafés and the usual urban flotsam and jetsam that wouldn’t have known the city was under attack if the Last Trump was being sounded by the New York Philharmonic. “You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do,” said Sheinberg. “It ain’t nuns or Norwegians. Probably al-Qaeda.”

“Now I know you’re an ignoramus,” said Lannie, negotiating around a couple of BMWs with New Jersey tags. “And probably a bigot, too.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because if,” began Lannie, “and this is a big if, this is some kind of Muslim assault, it’s far more likely to be Twelfthers than Sunnis.”

“Who cares? What’s the diff?”

Lannie downshifted, even with the automatic transmission, and nearly threw Sid into the windshield. “If this is as big as I think it is-as big as we both think it is-then this isn’t al-Qaeda. All they want to do is kill us.”

“As opposed to-”

“As opposed to starting the apocalypse.” Lannie glanced over at Sid and saw that he had no idea what he was talking about. “Look,” he said, “Christians and Shi’as believe in the Last Days. The rest of us, not so much. If and when they come, they come, but we have no intention of hastening them. When al-Qaeda attacks, it’s because they’re pissed off, refighting some fucking battle against El Cid or whatever. Let’s face it, since Mohammed swept out of Arabia and Islam conquered everything to the east, including Persia, India, and Indonesia, we’ve been on a hell of a losing streak.”

The street buckled. “Holy shit!” shouted Lannie.

The force of the blast knocked the car sideways, then up in the air. It sailed for just a moment, hit the pavement, spun. Lannie tried desperately to control the vehicle, its siren still wailing, but the Crown Vic was being tossed around like a skiff at sea. The car hit a mailbox, rebounded, and caromed off a fire hydrant. The hydrant ripped a huge gash in the passenger’s side and exploded, water geysering straight up. They clipped several parked vehicles, flipped, and came to rest, upside down, in the middle of street.

A couple of miles to the south, Lisa Richmond was headed home to Jersey after a lunch in SoHo. She didn’t come often to New York anymore, even though she had been born in the Bronx. What had once seemed close now seemed so very far away, what with a family and all, and despite everything she had believed as a young career woman working on Wall Street twenty years ago, Jersey had turned out to be not such a bad place to live and raise a family after all. Sure, the taxes were a killer, although the new governor was making noises about reducing them-yeah, right-but the air was a bit cleaner, parking was less of a problem, and the schools were a heck of a lot better.

The approach to Holland Tunnel was always a pain. It was as if the city planners hadn’t reckoned on the population of northern New Jersey mushrooming, so they decided to cram it in down here where Canal Street met Varick and Hudson streets. No matter how you approached it, or what time of day, you were practically guaranteed at least a twenty-minute wait to enter the tube. Lisa shuddered at the memory of the old days, when the squeegee men had lurked around the tunnel entrances, wielding their spray bottles and their dirty rags and their threatening countenances as they shook you down for a quarter. A lot of her friends paid them, just to make them go away, but she never did. For one thing, she was too frightened to open the window, and for another she felt instinctively that the service they offered was an indirect form of assault. Her husband, Adam, always gave them money, explaining that it was safer and easier to pay them off rather than to risk their probably drug-addled wrath. It was one of their many areas of disagreement.

At least there were no squeegee men anymore, not in New York and certainly not in Montclair, New Jersey.

Lisa’s mind was still on the squeegee men, inching her 2010 Jeep forward toward the mouth of the tunnel, when she felt the earth tremble. At first she thought it was just the rumble of the subway, the vibrations, but then, as she began to take notice, she realized that the car was moving-not forward, but from side to side, as if it were in an earthquake. The next thing she knew she was looking down at lower Manhattan from a very great height, and screaming to earth at the speed of gravity.

Raymond Crankheit was a tourist from Wahoo, Nebraska, or so he had told everybody he met, especially the girls. New York City girls were not like the girls back home, which in fact was not Wahoo, Nebraska, but that didn’t matter at the moment. Contrary to popular myth, or at least what he saw in the movies, New York City women were harder to get than the tramps back home, snooty and stuck-up; they could smell a rube like him a mile away, and their noses visibly crinkled as he approached, so Raymond Crankheit had decided to get even. Which was why he was here, standing by the Central Park Reservoir, waiting for a call on his cell phone.

For a long time he had wondered precisely how he was going to go about it. New York City had tough gun laws, and he didn’t own a gun himself, you couldn’t take one on a plane, he was too scared to drive across the country with a heater in his glove compartment. Originally, the family named had been spelled Krankheit, but that meant “disease” in German and his father had quickly had enough of such jokes back home in Pullman, Washington, and so in partial homage to the host of the CBS News program, he’d changed the spelling, although he still got it wrong, and moved the family across the Cascades to Seattle, where they left unspoken the implication that they were related to the famous newscaster.

Luckily, the flat accents of Wahoo were very similar to the flat accents of Pullman, so Raymond had to work only moderately hard to be able to pass for a Nebraskan. For some reason, he had decided that for this mission to succeed-“Operation Revenge,” he had dubbed it in his own mind-his cover story was going to have to be perfect, and he practiced like Travis Bickle in front of a mirror, holding a broken broom handle instead of the gun he didn’t have, and coldly shooting down every woman who had ever refused him a date.

Raymond Crankheit wouldn’t have said that he hated women, exactly. He was not a mishshogomast or whatever the term was that one of the crazy shrinks his parents had sent him to after the second incident, the one with the neighbor’s dog, had used, but on the other hand, it really pissed him off when some cunt blew him off and called him a dork or a geek or an asshole or any of the other unladylike terms girls were using these days. Yeah, those same girls that tattooed themselves up like the cheap whores working the old Skid Road back in Seattle. It was payback time for a life of rejection.

Pullman, Washington, was just across the state line from Moscow, Idaho, and for a time as a kid Raymond had fantasized about running away from home by “defecting,” as he thought of it, to Idaho. Eastern Washington State was a pretty dreary place, apple farms where there was water and alkaline deserts was there was not, and in his youthful imagination Idaho was a land of green mountains and secret communists. Then he got uprooted and transplanted, and that was the end of that notion, although he kept his lifelong fascination with the Soviets, the heroic protectors of the Third World and of people of color everywhere. There weren’t many people of color, except for the odd Mexican migrant worker, in Pullman, Washington, and so in the absence of people at whom to direct his compassion, Raymond’s sense of injustice burned even fiercer.

And so Raymond left home without telling anybody, not the ’rents or the parole officer or anybody. He hitched his way down to Frisco, and that had pretty much been the extent of the plan except that he never actually made it to Frisco. Instead, he wound up across the bay, in Oakland, where his money ran out, and he decided to find a place to crash in the Oakland flats. Everybody told him the Oakland flats were no place for a white boy like him, but by chance he had wandered into a little bakeshop not far from the Berkeley border, a Black Muslim bakeshop, the kind of place that attracted big black tough guys and those hot little white girls and Asian tramps from the UC campus, the ones that liked to walk on the wild side and pretend they were fucking for social justice when in fact they were just fucking.

The place was called the Malik Shabazz, Jr., Bakery and Book Store, and it was a place where you could bum a halfway decent, if halfway eaten croissant if you promised to help with the washing-up, and there was always plenty to read. That’s where Raymond encountered the Holy Koran, which at first he found hard to understand until one of the Brothers explained some of the more interesting suras to him. It was one of those moments he had wished for all his life, when a flash of knowledge, of revelation, comes and all at once he could see exactly what he had to do and how to do it.

The Brothers saw the flash of light in his eyes and knew they had found a soul mate. Instruction had begun immediately. Raymond was an apt pupil.

And now here he was. He glanced around at the cityscape, a 360 maneuver that rotated him from the top of the park to the residential towers of Central Park West, south to the wall of 59th Street and then back around again, east, across Fifth Avenue.

His cell phone rang. It was one of the Brothers, telling him that all his dreams were about to come true.

Even though he knew everything was A-OK, Raymond checked the backpack that had been stashed for him, as promised, in a trash can behind the National Academy. All the tools were there, everything he had trained with. He’d never be readier. He slung the backpack over his shoulder and stepped across Fifth Avenue. If he had any regrets for what he was about to do, it was that, despite what the Brothers had preached, he personally had nothing against the Jews.

Janice Gottlieb left her office at the 92nd Street Y to nip around the corner for a quick coffee with a cultural critic for the New York Times. Ms. Gottlieb had been at the Y for almost five years, having landed a plum job as assistant director of public relations for the Y’s ongoing series of concerts and speakers. Out-of-towners were always amazed when she told them that she worked at the Y, helping to put on concerts. For most of them, gentiles, “the Y” conjured up visions of indoor swimming pools and basketball courts, but she always patiently explained that this was a Jewish Y, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, one of New York’s foremost cultural institutions since its founding in 1874.

One of the best things about her job, thought Janice as she stepped onto Lexington Avenue and headed for a little Greek coffee shop, was that it made her parents so proud. Unlike most of the Jewish women who worked at the Y, Janice hailed from Omaha; New York was more than a thousand miles away, a fabled land that stood as a living monument to Jewish achievement in America.

Her head was still full of these thoughts as she left the building. The fresh air felt good. It was hot today, but not as hot as it was going to get. Janice had already been through a few New York Augusts, when the steam rose off the pavements and the garbage reeked and the city’s denizens stripped down to the bare minimum of clothing that decency, or what was left of it, and New York City’s public lewdness laws allowed. Which was almost nothing.

She didn’t mind. It was something you didn’t see back home in Omaha.

There was a young man trying to cross the street, from the look of him obviously not a New Yorker. Instinctively, Janice recognized a kindred spirit, a fellow midwesterner, baffled by the city and intimidated by the traffic. Against the light, he’d gotten halfway across, then chickened out and dashed back to the safety of the curb on the west side of the street. That was how she could tell: a real New Yorker, once committed to jaywalking, would proudly continue carrying out the crime.

“Come on, you can make it!” she shouted at him. The lights on Lex were synched, and even though the crossing showed red, he had plenty of time before the taxis came flying down from Spanish Harlem.

The man looked at her and smiled. Definitely a non-New Yorker. New Yorkers, even transplants, just didn’t look like him, or dress like him, or give off that vibe. In fact, as he approached, Janice thought he seemed a little weird, and was briefly sorry she had encouraged him. Out-of-towners had strange ideas about New York and New Yorkers. Instead of waiting to greet him, she turned away.

“Hey, miss!” he shouted and now she really was sorry. And ashamed of the-what was it? Could it be called bigotry?-what she felt. It wasn’t danger, probably, it was just difference. Diversity. Yes, that was it. Diversity.

The man was pointing at the Y, smiling. “Is that the 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association?” he asked and then she knew. But it was too late. She had already nodded and words had already tumbled out of her mouth-

“Yes. I work there.”

Raymond was still smiling when he produced a machine pistol and shot her in the chest and in the head, just the way the Brothers had taught him. One Jew down, so many more to go.

He sprinted into the Y, firing as he went. The guards, the metal detectors-nothing was stopping him. It was so easy to squeeze the trigger, and they all went down so fast.

“You okay, Sid?” From a distance, Sheinberg could hear Lannie’s voice calling to him. “ Sidney, talk to me!” There was a terrible pressure on his chest, which was one of the things that was hindering his reply. Sid took a deep breath and winced at the pain.

“What happened?” He tried to focus his eyes, then realized he was upside down, still strapped into his seat and dangling in midair.

“Some kind of bomb. While they blinded us.”

“Eyeless in Gaza,” muttered Sid, although why that particular expression came to him at this moment he could not know. But he knew he was right.

“Come on.”

Sid could feel Lannie’s fumbling with the seat belt clasp. In the distance he could hear explosions, maybe gunfire. Aside from training, he had never used his weapon; in the parlance of the squad room, he was a virgin. “A virgin Hebe,” some of the guys called him, in honor of the character in Q &A, which was every detective’s favorite movie, but he didn’t care: the virgin Hebe had been the guy who, at the end, took down Nick Nolte’s rogue Irish cop.

Sid hit the top of the car with the thud, but didn’t feel a thing. “I think my legs are fucked, Lannie,” he said, but Lannie wasn’t listening. Instead, he was pulling Sid through one of the shattered windows, out of the car and into the street. The pavement was burning hot. Lannie hauled him to his feet.

“I can’t walk, Lannie. I can’t.” The pain was excruciating.

“I don’t give a shit,” shouted Lannie. “You walk, I carry you, it doesn’t matter. We gotta get out of here.”

The two men were face-to-face. Amazing how all that had divided them didn’t matter anymore. Not ethnicity, not religion. It was a cliché, but it was true: right now, they were both Americans, fighting for their lives and their country.

“Whoever these fuckers are,” Lannie was shouting, “I am personally going to fuck up their shit two times.”

Through his pain, Sid Sheinberg smiled. Lannie was such a Brooklyn boy.

Byrne managed to grab his radio, but he knew before he tried that he wouldn’t get through. Everything around him was on fire, and he knew enough from all the war-gaming they’d done that Times Square probably wasn’t the only place in the city that was burning right now.

What was it Sid Sheinberg had said about the cyberattack-a redirect through Mumbai. Byrne’s mind raced, trying to intuit what was going on. In 2008, a group of ten Pakistani-trained terrorists had attacked Mumbai and held the entire city hostage for nearly three days, killing nearly three hundred people before the Indian police managed to take them down, killing nine and capturing one.

As Byrne tried to shake some sense back into his head, he repeated that to himself: ten gunman had held one of the world’s largest cities hostage.

Oh, Jesus.

A Mumbai-style attack was one of the CTU’s worst nightmares. A handful of killers who didn’t care whether they lived or died could do tremendous damage, not simply in human terms, in the number of lives taken, but in psychological damage. The Indians had been used to it, since their country, with its huge Muslim minority, had been subjected to ongoing horrific attacks of terrorism for years. Mumbai had been hit repeatedly, including a nasty series of train bombings in 1993 that killed more than two hundred and fifty people and wounded seven hundred others. True, periodically the Hindu majority wreaked its terrible revenge, but even bloody retaliation hadn’t stopped the ongoing conflict between two irreconcilable beliefs and political systems.

And we thought it couldn’t happen here, thought Byrne. Secular America was beyond such petty religious squabbles; nobody, not even the twelve nuns left in the United States, took their faith that seriously anymore; we mourned Michael Jackson, not Jesus, and suffered along with the contestants and judges on American Idol. And yet we worried. Which was one of the reasons why, in the wake of 9/11, Manhattan ’s defenses had been hardened and strengthened. And what good had it done?

He realized he had his.38 in his hand, his father’s gun, and was running toward to the destruction now, east, toward the wreckage that could only have come from a car bomb, and toward the gun battle he could hear in the distance at Times Square.

And then he heard the explosion behind him, to the south, and he knew they were in for it now.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Washington, D.C.

Tyler ’s reeling presidency couldn’t take much more of this, thought Army Seelye as they gathered in the Oval Office: the president, Seelye, and Byrne; plus the SecDef, Shalika Johnson; Celina Sanchez, the National Security Advisor; the DNI, Lamont Sutton; Colangelo from Homeland Security; and General Higgins from the Joint Chiefs. Even Col. Grizzard, the man with the football, was present.

Seelye felt a sense of despair wash over him. These were the best minds of the Republic, or should have been. They owed that, at least, to the American people who were paying their salaries and trusting in them to do the right thing, which was, first and foremost, protect them. Instead what the great American people got was this collection of hacks, time-servers, and affirmative-action appointees, most of whom couldn’t get a job in the private sector unless it had something to do with their brother-in-law or a government contract. It really was pathetic when you thought about it: that more than two centuries of American History had come to this.

The old Tyler ’s first instinct would have been caution, wait and see; the new Tyler, emboldened by his success last year in stopping the EMP attack on the east coast, would want to hit back, strike out. But this Tyler was already a different man-one who saw his political death staring him in the face. There was no way out of this. No matter how much worse things got in New York, the damage was already done. Hassett might as well start measuring the Oval Office for new drapes, especially with the endorsement that sonofabitch Jake Sinclair already ringing over the airwaves.

“What’s the situation?” asked the president, as if he didn’t already know. He looked at Seelye to begin the briefing.

“A short while ago, the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department came under a coordinated denial-of-service attack from various points overseas,” Seelye began. “As you know, NYPD has been given extraordinary latitude in defending the city, especially after we all let them down so badly on 9/11. And, as you also know, they’ve been extraordinarily successful in preventing further attacks-at least fourteen that we know about.” On the silent TV screens, images of a burning New York danced to the unheard words of the network anchors’ professional, dispassionate concern.

“But today was different. We’ve seen coordinated cyber-assaults before-hell, the DoD gets them on a daily basis, mostly from China. Our infrastructure is also routinely probed, including the electrical grid, computer networks, and the water supply. While we’re sleeping, our enemies are awake, trying to take us down, and no amount of kumbaya is going to change that. You’d think we’d all learned that by now, from 9/11.”

That part was bureaucratic ass-covering. Seelye knew that Tyler would now turn on Sutton and Colangelo, and he was right.

“God-fucking-damn it!” exclaimed the volcano, exploding from his chair behind the Resolute desk. “Ladies and gentlemen, the American taxpayer spends a hellacious amount of money on us annually, and the only thing that John and Jane Q. Fucking Public expect in return is that we keep their asses safe. And now,” he gestured at the TV sets, “we’ve let them down again…I’ve let them down again.”

“Sir,” began Colangelo. This was not going to look good for Homeland Security, and the Secretary was leaping to the defense of his turf. Would that he would leap to the defense of his country with such alacrity. “With all due respect, my department has done everything in its power to-”

“Shut the fuck up, Bob,” shouted Tyler and Seelye flashed back to the late Senator Bob Hartley, Tyler ’s friend from across the aisle, whom he had left to hang out to dry in the interests of state, and so caused his death. Seelye wondered how heavily that weighed on the man behind the desk.

“If I may, sir,” interjected Sutton. The Director of National Intelligence was another accretion from the aftermath of 9/11, part of the defensive political reaction to the disaster: the creation of yet more bureaucratic bullshit, sold to the American public as a great leap forward in the defense of democracy.

“You may not,” snapped Tyler. “I know what you’re going to say, what you’re all going to say. We don’t have the right equipment. We don’t have enough manpower. We don’t have enough money. Nobody in this town ever has enough men and matériel; nobody ever has enough money. The American people throw it at you like women throwing their panties at a rock star, and still it’s not enough. It’s never fucking enough. I sign the budget authorizations and yet we still have secretaries that don’t talk to each other, crap-assed equipment that sucked back in 1984, and a metastasizing bureaucracy of vampires that hoovers the life out of our countrymen while it fucks them in the ass and doesn’t even give ’em the courtesy of a reach-around.”

“So,” Tyler concluded, “what are we going to do? And don’t give me any bullshit. Give me your best recommendations and make sure they’re good, because if they aren’t I am going down. But before I do, I am taking you all with me.”

The usual boilerplate. Homeland Security wanted to send in the Army. General Higgins pointed out that sending in the Army was basically unconstitutional. The Director of National Intelligence had no particular intelligence. Defense Secretary Johnson kept her mouth shut, waiting for Seelye’s turn. But Tyler turned to Byrne first.

“Deputy Director Byrne, what do you say?”

Tom Byrne looked around the room. He’d had long experience with the Soviets and their surrogates and cutouts, and while everybody else’s attention was directed to the Arab world by the spectacular example of the crashing Twin Towers, Tom had kept his eye on the ball. He knew that the old enemy was not really dead, just sleeping, reconstituting, lying in wait. The Soviets had had extensive dealings in the Islamic world. People forgot that the Tudeh Party, Iran ’s communists, had allied themselves with the Ayatollah against the Shah as the Soviets sought hegemony both in the Iranian oil fields and in the Caspian Sea -only to see the whole thing fall apart in the wake of mass executions as Khomeini turned on his erstwhile allies and liquidated them.

All this Tom Byrne laid out in a calm and rational voice. He had always been the calculating one; emotion he left to his brother, Frankie, the hotheaded cop, who at least once too often had shot first and asked questions later. Frankie still had plenty on him, but in this world, where every e-mail was read and every phone conversation was recorded, who didn’t? Lack of privacy was just something the world had to live with. Brass balls would have to see him through.

“So what’s your recommendation, Director Byrne?” asked Tyler, who seemed impressed. If Byrne’s reputation as a major-league asshole had preceded him, today’s appearance severely diminished it.

Tom welcomed the attention. It wasn’t often he got to tell off the brass, and he was going to make the most of his moment. And get back at his brother, although that was incidental at this point. “My recommendation is nothing,” he began. “First, you can’t send in the Army, not just for legal reasons but for political ones. You send in the Army and it tells the country that you’ve lost all control of our borders. You think that fight over illegal immigration was bad? It was nothing.

“Second, you have to let NYPD handle this. We don’t know how many gunmen there are, or-”

“What the hell difference does it make?” shouted Colangelo, manning up. “We’ve already lost Times Square and the Holland Tunnel, and for all we know they might have smuggled a nuke or two into the city while our pants were down, so-”

“That’s precisely correct, Mr. Secretary. We don’t know. We should but we don’t. You send troops in there and you’re going to have an even bigger catastrophe on your hands.” Byrne wished he could light a cigarette, but in the new fascist-friendly America, everything that was not expressly allowed was forbidden. “I grew up in New York. The city’s never been part of America, not really. We rooted for the Brits during the Revolution, faked patriotism during World War II, when half my Irish people were working for the Germans, and have supported every commie notion since before they fried the Rosenbergs. A lot of New Yorkers hate America, more or less, which is why God gave us the New York Yankees to beat the crap out of the rest of the American League. Whatever happens, happens. But let them handle it.”

“Director Byrne’s bother, Francis, is the head of the CTU of NYPD,” interjected Seelye, hoping to sound like the voice of reason. For his own purposes, he had no desire to see Tyler send in the caissons; as bad as this thing was, they had to let it unfold, to find out who was behind it. Not that he had much doubt and neither, he suspected, did Tyler. “I think we should listen to him.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Shalika Johnson. Over the past few months, Seelye had gradually been sizing her up, and he liked what he saw. He could work with her. “You’re telling me that the National Security Agency is seconding the motion to let New York fry?”

“‘Fry’ is not the way I’d put it, but-”

“Well, how do you put it?” retorted Johnson. “I mean, it’s your agency that’s supposed to ensure cyber-security. It’s your agency that reads every e-mail, listens in to every phone conversation. It’s your agency that’s supposed to-”

“You’re talking about classified information, Madame Secretary,” responded Seelye, coolly.

“I’m talking about the damn Black Widow,” said Johnson. “That’s what I’m talking about. And I want to know why it didn’t work, why it failed us at this crucial moment and why New York City ’s on fire right now.” She gestured empathically toward the televisions and then turned back to Tyler. “With all due respect, Mr. President, please don’t give us some song and dance about the Kaypros in the Commerce Department and the Trash-80s at IRS. We all know that NSA gets whatever it wants, and a lot of times it gets it under the table, off-budget and off the books. That’s why NSA has stuff like the Black Widow while we make do with whatever.” She paused, and then, almost as an afterthought, added: “And God only knows what CSS gets.”

Well, there it was: the Central Security Service. Tyler wondered if she knew; certainly he had never told her. He glanced over at Seelye, but the longtime NSA chief was his usual impassive self. Well, if the Sec Def was ignorant, she wouldn’t be for long. He would see to that, right after this meeting was adjourned. Which would be very soon, since he had made up his mind.

He liked this Tom Byrne character, found him a man after his own heart. Sure, he’d made his career faking both sympathy and empathy, whereas Byrne had clawed his way to the top despite everybody’s loathing of him at nearly every step. To get that far, Byrne either had to be ruthless, or have something on everybody in town or, more likely, both. In any case, they could do business together.

Why Byrne seemed to want to abandon Manhattan to its fate was still a little puzzling, but he assumed the man had his reasons. Being from Louisiana, Tyler only knew New York the way the rest of the nation knew it, as a tourist. Byrne was the genuine article.

Which meant his brother was likely to be as well. In fact, if what he’d read and been told was true, his brother was even tougher than he was. Frankie Byrne was nobody’s idea of the kindly cop on the beat, but he’d caught the nastiest assignments on the force and distinguished himself in every one. Oh, there’d been trouble along the way, but F. X. Byrne-the altar boy’s name hardly seemed suitable-had been both tough and smart, tough enough to get out of tight spots, with firepower when necessary, and smart enough to hitch his wagon to the only star brighter than his in the department when they came up together: to J. Arness White, the Commissioner of Police. The man who sat where O’Ryan and TR once sat, the man who was the odds-on favorite to be the next Mayor of the City of New York and was goddamn sure to be even now figuring out a way to salvage this situation from the shit. What Tom Byrne knew, what he felt, Frankie Byrne knew and felt, too. They’d been through too much together, and Tyler instinctively grasped that neither of them was likely to let the other go down, and sure as hell not without a fight. If he’d had a brother, he’d want their relationship to be exactly the same.

“Cut off the island of Manhattan,” said Tyler. “Seal all the tunnels and blockade the bridges-all of them, not just the toll roads. Railroad bridges, too. Nothing and nobody goes in or out of the island until we get our arms around this thing.” He had to pretend to get the others involved and so he looked at Colangelo and Sutton. “Keep your ears to the ground. Use every asset you have, HUMINT or ELINT. I want to know what the world is thinking and saying about this. Every little detail, no matter how innocuous, could potentially be helpful. And, for God’s sake, keep NORTHCOM out of this until I say so.” That would keep them busy for a while.

“Otherwise, we let NYPD play this one out. I want to let the American people know that politics has nothing to do with this. The easy thing, the telegenic thing, would be to send in the Army or the National Guard. But that’s probably exactly what they’re expecting us to do-and then who knows what will happen, or what they’ve got? For too long we’ve worried about the death of a single soldier or civilian, and let hundreds, thousands of our people die for our prissy precaution. Well, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. May God have mercy on the souls of the people who will die, that others might live. God bless America. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” said Tyler, rising and signaling that the meeting was over.

Puzzled looks were exchanged. “Secretary Johnson, Director Seelye, will you kindly remain after the others leave?”

Nobody said a word as the room emptied. Byrne lingered a little, as if half-expecting to be spoken to. In this, he was not disappointed. “Thank you, Director,” said Tyler, shaking his hand. “I’m sorry that your brother is in the shit, but-”

“Frankie can handle it, Mr. President,” said Byrne. “In the shit is where he lives.”

“I don’t know your brother, Byrne,” replied Tyler, “but from everything I’ve read he’s a hell of a guy. I look forward to welcoming him to the White House when this is all over.”

“I’ll be sure to tell him that, sir,” said Tom.

“I’m counting on it,” said Tyler, ushering him out. Once the door was shut and Ms. Dhouri signaled that the coast was clear, Tyler spoke again to his remaining confidantes.

“Army, I think there’s something you need to tell Secretary Johnson?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Los Angeles

“Dad?”

Danny Impellatieri heard the voice of his nine-year-old daughter, Jade, as if in a dream. It was not that he didn’t hear it-no parent can ignore the sound of his own child’s voice-or that he didn’t care, but he was riveted to what was going on in Manhattan.

Jade stuck her head around the corner of his study and made a face at him. He was sitting at his desk, several computers going at once; instinctively, he minimized the video feeds on one of the screens, and turned toward her as she spoke: “Did you know that operating two computers at once is one of the telltale signs of nerd-dom?” she asked playfully. “It is. You can Google it. What are you watching?”

Danny tried not to let the concern he felt, both professional and personal, show in his face. Jade had already been through a lot in her young life, and there was no point in putting her through this, however remotely, unless he absolutely had to. She’d find out soon enough.

“Just some stuff for work.”

She didn’t fall for it. He didn’t expect her to. “I thought you were off work. You just got home.”

“I am,” he lied. “Or, rather, I was. But, you know…”

“Duty calls, right?” She was a sharp kid, with sharp eyes and ears. It hadn’t been as hard raising her by himself the past nine months as he thought it was going to be, as everybody had said it would be. Although they had both taken Diane’s death hard, they had also realized that the only way to get through the grief and the loss was to do it together, and so they had made an unspoken pact: Diane would live, forever, in their hearts, and life would go on.

Jade stepped into the room, a little hesitant as she crossed the threshold and stopped. This had always been his inner sanctum, a place she had been trained to stay out of, not from fear of punishment, but because it was her father’s private space. The big house on Hobart Street had plenty of places for a kid to play in, to get lost in, and when all else failed there was always the swimming pool and the big, overgrown yard beyond it. “What is it?” she said, with that tone in her voice. The tone that said: I know something is wrong.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t nothing me, Dad.” She was right: he should never nothing her again. He owed her that much. He owed Diane that much.

“There’s some trouble, back in New York.” There, he said it. He knew it wouldn’t take long for her young mind to make the leap, the leap straight toward his heart.

“ New York? That’s where Mrs. Gardner is, right?”

He nodded. “Yes. And Rory and Emma.”

“Are they okay?”

“I’m sure they are. New York ’s a big city, bigger than L.A. ”

“You should check.” She was right. He already had.

And nothing. Cell service was spotty and was likely to be for a long time. That was one of the lessons of 9/11, the instant disruption of communications not simply by a terrorist act, but by the sheer volume-a kind of self-inflicted denial-of-service attack. The Emergency Services units had learned from that disaster and had developed relatively secure methods of communication, but theirs would be just about the only signals working reliably on the island of Manhattan. He was going to have to hack into them to find out what the hell was going on.

He looked at his iPhone, as if expecting it to say something. Why hadn’t he called? If the hostage situation in Edwardsville had been enough to activate Danny and a hand-picked unit from Xe, the old Blackwater group, then surely an assault on Manhattan would-

“Have you reached her?” He shook his head. “But you’ve tried?”

He nodded. He hadn’t expected things to move this quickly, felt there was something unseemly about it and had resisted. But the heart did what the heart did, and although neither of them had so much had hinted at it, he suspected that not only did they know, but that their children did, too.

He looked at Jade. You could hardly see a trace of her injuries, except for a few scars on her face. In a city filled with great plastic surgeons, Dr. Kamin had made all the scars disappear; you practically had to look at her face under a microscope to see the tiny pitting caused by the flying glass in the Grove bombing. The bombing that had taken Diane’s life and changed his world forever. Nine months on, the Grove’s rubble had long since been carted away and a new and better high-end shopping center was going up on the site. But the hole in his heart had only just begun to mend. Hope had lost her husband as well, not at the Grove but during the Edwardsville school-hostage crisis that had immediately preceded it; that was the act of war that had brought them together, and that was the bond that was pulling them ever closer.

And now he couldn’t reach her. Where the hell was “Linus Larrabee” when he needed him?

Not that “Linus Larrabee” was the man’s real name. Danny had worked with his mysterious colleague for years, most recently on the Budapest snatch, where they had both used Humphrey Bogart character aliases. But that didn’t mean he knew who he was. They had always engaged each other only through cutouts, with “Larrabee,” or whichever randomly generated alias he was using for that particular mission, always initiating contact.

He stared at his iPhone. That was how they communicated with one another. The most compromised popular technology on the planet, and at the same time the most useful.

Most people didn’t realize that every time they used their iPhone, the SKIPJACK chip gave the NSA access to everything the phone users generated: phonebooks, websites visited, photos, the works. As the so-called “warrantless wiretapping” program had proven, the telephone companies, such as AT &T, were in bed with the government, and despite all the lawsuits that the American Civil Liberties Union could bring against what was left of Ma Bell, in the end it didn’t really matter. In the sacred name of national security, the National Security Agency was going to get its way. Devlin would have nearly instant access to any message on the iPhone that rang the bell back at The Building, even while the Black Widow was still chomping down on the data.

The Black Widow. Not the fastest supercomputer in the world anymore-that honor probably went to the Cray XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of the principal birthplaces of the American nuclear program during the Manhattan Project, which boasted a processing rate of 1.759 petaflops. Home computer users had gradually accustomed themselves to bits and bytes and megabytes and even gigabytes, but supercomputing took speed to an astronomical new level. FLOPS-floating point operations per second-were the new benchmark, measured in teraflops (10¹² flops) and petaflops (10¹⁵), or one quadrillion flops. But the dreaded Widow was still plenty fast enough, and she never slept, on guard against America ’s enemies throughout each dark, dangerous night.

Most of the bed-wetters at the New York Times and elsewhere in what was left of the American establishment took it as a given that the Black Widow and other components of the “illegal eavesdropping” program were listening to them. In the solipsistic world of the Good Gray Lady and other pillars of the Democrat-Media Establishment, everything was about them. They woke up in the morning and went to bed at night believing in vast right-wing conspiracies; in forces bent with hostile intent on depriving them of their civil liberties; of the presence in America of a huge, inimical mass of people who were only a beer and a shot away from joining the KKK and the Michigan Militia. From dawn til dusk they shook with terror at the hidden-but so transparent!-motives and emotions of their fellow citizens, and fled to the embrace of their shrinks and grief counselors and the hosts on MSNBC at the first available opportunities. It was so much easier than facing the reality that people they didn’t even know-enemies they hadn’t met yet-were out to kill them. Much more comforting to suspect the couple down the street, the ones with the New Hampshire flag on their car bumpers: “Don’t Tread on Me.”

For his part, Danny and the rest of his old crew from the 160th SOAR had learned from bitter experience to fight the battle in front of them. And then hit the bars instead of the psychiatrists’ couches. Easier that way, cheaper, and if the medical reports were to be believed, healthier all the way around. He wished he could have a drink, but it was still too early and besides, his daughter was standing right there in front of him. Not the enemy, but the person he loved most in the entire world.

He punched in the magic words. “Now I have,” he said.

She was wiser than he, and probably smarter. She had had to do a lot of growing up fast in the past nine months, part of her rude and premature confrontation with the everyday horrors of the world. No matter how you tried to protect your child from reality-and wasn’t that what parenting was, in the end, all about?-reality had a way of intruding whenever it wished, as if God or the universe of whatever was hell-bent on reminding mere puny human beings that they controlled the ongoing nihilist narrative, not the snarky screenwriters, not the smarmy politicians, not the small-minded editorialists who left downtown Los Angeles and went home not to Angelino Heights, which would have been a five-minute drive, but to Brentwood, or West L.A. or Flintridge or Pasadena or even Montecito or Santa Barbara.

Jade declined to follow his thoughts. Instead, she stood there in the doorway, waiting. Finally he understood. He opened his arms to his daughter, and she ran to him.

For a long time, they held each other, no words necessary.

He made up his mind quickly. “Honey,” he said, “we have to go now.”

Jade was young, but she was smart. She didn’t have to ask where they were going. All she knew was that, this time, he was taking her with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Teterboro, New Jersey

Devlin felt the pingback before he heard it. “Showtime,” he said to Maryam.

He took out a PDA, a special, modified BlackBerry just like the one the president used. Tyler famously did not want to give up his mobile device, and so rather than go without he’d asked some of the best minds at the agency to come with an uncrackable device. Whether it was in fact uncrackable was open to conjecture, and in any case Devlin assumed that the NSA could crack it anytime they wanted to; if Tyler thought no one would be monitoring his conversations he was probably very much mistaken. The point was, Devlin had one just like it, but insofar as he could make it, it was better and even more secure.

The message was from Seelye, officially authorizing him into action. Not that that really mattered, since he’d already decided on his course of action, knew they had no other choice. Under the terms of his deal, he could do what he wanted when he wanted and if the government didn’t like it it had two choices: terminate him or live with it. It was not a privilege he abused, but rather insisted upon, and there was no one to gainsay him. As long as Seelye held his job, Devlin was both his boy and his master.

“Punch up every point of subterranean access to Manhattan,” he told Maryam, who was already working the computers, calling up every map the NSA and other governmental databases had on file.

Few civilians realized it, but the island of Manhattan was riddled with tunnels: automobile tunnels, steam tunnels, train tunnels, subway tunnels, water tunnels, electrical tunnels; it was a wonder that the island hadn’t collapsed into New York Harbor of its own weight. But Manhattan bedrock was stern stuff.

“That’s how we get in, huh?” she said. Her eyes were aglow with an eagerness to get into the fight, an eagerness that nearly matched his own, although he would never let it show. The Angel of Death had no emotion when it was time to wield his sword.

“That’s how I get in,” he corrected. “The zone is red hot, and you’re more useful to me elsewhere.” Her face fell, but she said nothing. There was nothing to say: he was the boss.

At another computer, Devlin took stock of the situation: Times Square was a battleground, with the cops engaged in a running firefight with an unknown number of assailants. Inwardly, he shuddered. This had been one of the planners’ worst nightmares for years, but the attack on Mumbai a few years back had upped the stakes significantly. Conventional wisdom had been that a suicide bomber or two might self-detonate near the TKTS booth, killing scores of tourists and causing panic. But the Pakistani-directed attacks on Mumbai by members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization, changed everybody’s thinking: Mumbai, like New York, was surrounded by water, and it was by water that the attackers had come, putting ashore in small boats and bringing death with them. And now they were here.

He punched in Seelye’s secure number on the computer and waited for the randomly generated redirects to conclude. “Are you ready?” came the voice from the computer speakers.

“Assessment.”

“The attacks are still coming; they’re not just limited to Times Square as we first thought. There’s been reports of gunfire on the Upper East Side, at the 92nd Street Y. We’ve got all the bridges and tunnels sealed, except for the Holland, which has been bombed.”

“How bad?”

“The Manhattan side; otherwise, the structure is intact. Remember they plotted to do this at least once before, back in 2006, when they thought they could flood lower Manhattan by taking out the tunnel. The FBI broke up that plot, and the sensors, plus the no tractor-trailer rule, have kept the bad stuff out.”

“ Mission objective?”

There was a pause as the man who had raised him after the deaths of his parents at the 1985 airport massacre in Rome considered his next words. “I don’t know. Tyler thinks you’re a miracle worker.”

“Why hasn’t the National Guard been called in?”

“The president thinks the cops should handle it. And for what it’s worth, so does the DD of the FBI, Tom Byrne Seems his brother, Francis, is the chief of the CTU. One of the city’s top cops, and a real Irish warrior.”

“Great,” said Devlin. “We’ve got family pride being brought to bear on a major emergency.”

“Or family rivalry, I can’t tell. The point is that you’re to get in there, assess the situation for us without being made, take out as many of them as you can, and get the hell out. You know the drill.”

He knew the drill. As the lead operative of the Central Security Service’s Branch 4, Devlin lived a life on the edge, not simply of danger but of existence itself. Branch 4 ops were unknown to each other, and their existence was known only to three officers of the U.S. government: the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the director of the National Security Agency, or DIRNSA. A loss of anonymity was a death sentence, whether carried out by an enemy agent or, cruelly but necessarily, by a fellow member of Branch 4. That was the blow you would never see coming.

For a moment his mind flashed back to Milverton, the most potent adversary of his career, lying dead in his small house in London, put in his grave by Devlin himself, with both relief and regret.

“You want me to clean them all?”

“For starters.”

“But what you really need to know is who’s behind it. How much time have I got?”

“Not much. You can imagine the firestorm we’re in the middle of. The President’s-”

“-ass is in a sling, mostly of his own making. Hassett is going to hammer him no matter which way this thing shakes out, and he’ll have the faces of the dead staring at him right through the election. He doesn’t want to invoke the Posse Comitatus act and get the military involved if he doesn’t have to. This is law enforcement, not war. Otherwise it’s just what the terrorists want. If we call in the Marines, the terrorists win; if we don’t call in the Marines, the terrorists win. Who thought up that play? The Marx Brothers?” Devlin paused. He was urgently aware of the need to bring the situation under control as quickly as possible, but he couldn’t let himself be distracted by emotion. Somehow, he was going to have to get into Manhattan, identify this Byrne guy, and work with him without ever giving himself away. “What about NORTHCOM and the Rock of the Marne and the Sea Smurfs? The rules don’t apply to them.”

NORTHCOM-the United States Northern Command-was the Army command created after 9/11, and explicitly tasked with the defense of the homeland. Few Americans knew anything about NORTHCOM, and fewer still knew that since 2008 it had controlled the Third Infantry Division’s First Brigade Combat Team, which was charged with controlling the civilian population in the wake of civil unrest or a terrorist attack. Based in Fort Steward, Georgia, the Third Division, known as the “Rock of the Marne ” thanks to its valorous service in World War I, had seen its 1st Brigade essentially seconded to the feds to deal with domestic disturbances. The brigade, which now also included sailors, airmen, and Marines, had been renamed the “Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF), which was immediately dubbed the “Sea Smurfs.”

“So far they’re staying out of it. But if things go south…”

Now Devlin understood. He had to give it to the man: Tyler got smarter and more devious every day. “So you’re sending me in to keep Tyler looking good on his left while I’m supposed to keep him looking good on his right.”

“That’s about the size of it-secondarily speaking, of course.”

“I don’t know which of you I hate more.”

“It’s a tough choice, I’ll give you that. We can sort it out later. In the meantime-”

“They’re communicating by cell phone.”

“Were,” corrected Seelye. “We bubbled it down.”

“Then bubble it back up-we need to know where each of these clowns is, so locate them and start tracking them. In the meantime, they’re probably using something like BBM, so tap that net, too. I’ll want a real-time map once I’m in. Weapons?”

“Everything you can need, including a judge. Sending you the code now.” An instant, and then the unlocking codes for the armory appeared on his screen. “What about your partner?”

Not for the first time, Devlin felt like reaching through the ether and throttling Seelye. As secure as their communications were-and they were as secure as the best minds in NSA/CSS, including his, could make them-they were still not secure enough, could never be secure enough, for him to safeguard Maryam the way he wanted to. He had brought her into this, and she had willingly joined him, but her safety was now his prime concern-more so than his own and, God help him, maybe even more so than his country’s.

“Who?” he said. Point made.

Devlin glanced up and caught her look. Silently, he shook his head at her: it’s not what you think. Her eyes stayed liquid, reproachful as the voice went off inside Devlin’s head:

“Do you trust the bitch? I don’t see why you should. She was on to you in Paris before I was. You don’t even know her real name, do you?”

Devlin shook his head, trying to clear the webs, to get a dead man’s voice out of his consciousness, trying to ignore the question, the first question, the only question, about her that really mattered, and the one question he didn’t want an answer to: not because he didn’t want to know, but because he didn’t want to have to face the consequences of his knowledge.

“Right,” said Seelye. “So off you go. Good luck, son.” He rang off, if you could call disconnecting from a nearly infinite network “ringing off.”

Maryam looked away as he tried to meet her eyes. “Why don’t you trust me? I mean, what else do I have-”

“I do trust you. That’s just the problem. If I didn’t trust you I’d take you inside with me, and maybe get you killed. If I didn’t trust you, I’d miss you, I’d mourn you, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But I do trust you. I don’t know why, but I do.”

“Which is why-”

“Which is why I’m sending you elsewhere. Somewhere important. Somewhere where you can help me…”

“…find the source of the DoS attack.” She’d got it in one. That was another of the reasons why he loved her, and trusted her.

“We find that, we know who we’re up against.” She was already punching keys as he continued: “And that’s another reason why I have to go in and you have to get out. You’re never going to be able to hack into the CTU’s computers from here. Oh, you might be able to take them down for a stretch if you had enough typing robot monkeys, but they’re off our grid. So I’m going to have to find this Byrne character and check it from the inside.”

“Where should I go? I can’t stay here.”

For the first time, Devlin smiled. Outside, the world might be going to hell, but in this last quiet moment, it was just the two of them.

“We’ve got one clue.” Devlin punched some keys and then, to her astonishment, Maryam realized she was listening to conversations recorded inside the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department that very day:

“Hard to tell until we take a closer look, but first guess is the Chinese.”

“First guess is always the Chinese. Another reason to hate Nixon…never mind. Continue.”

“But upon closer review, they might be Indians. There are some indications of a redirect via Mumbai-that’s Bombay to you, buddy-but now that I look at it, I think this is a flea flicker too. So I-we-are going with Azerbaijani. Baku, probably.”

“What happened in the window?”

“Running a recap now…And it’s not Baku. It’s Budapest.”

Maryam looked up with a half-smile of disbelief on her lips. “You bugged the NYPD?”

Devlin shrugged. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

“ Budapest,” she said.

“It’s as good a place to start as any. Besides, you know your way around that town, as I recall.”

Devlin stood and punched in some codes on one of the overhead storage compartments. He could have opened it with the latch, but that would have gotten him nowhere. It might even have gotten them both killed. Any plane authorized for use by the Central Security Service came fully equipped with extreme-prejudice countermeasures should any trolls or doubles be aboard. The easiest and most effective preventative measure was the sudden injection of poison gas into the passenger compartment, on the theory that once the mission was compromised there was no point in trying to preserve any of the operationals; all had been lost and all must be liquidated in the name of Op Sec.

Codes were a good thing.

The latch opened and the compartment door popped open, but instead of revealing pieces of luggage and presents for the kids, the rear of the space opened up and moved forward, offering Devlin a wide choice of personal weapons.

He outfitted himself the way he liked to fight. Throwing knives inside each of his back pockets, a KA-BAR in its scabbard down the back of his jeans, and a couple of grenades in his jacket. Twin Glock 37s with ten-shot magazines under each armpit, with a pair of Colt.38s revolvers for the special pockets that were always sewn into the front of his pants. Anything else he needed, he could pick up in combat. The bad guys always came armed, and one of his first orders of business was to disarm them with extreme prejudice and appropriate their weapons as necessary. Most often of Chinese or old Soviet manufacture, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

And then, just as promised, there was the Judge.

The Taurus Judge was, at its cold little heart, simplicity itself. Most of the time you used a handgun, the target was standing nearly directly in front of you. Sure, the movies showed cops trading shots with.38s from distances of several hundred feet, but in real life that hardly ever happened-and besides there were better weapons for that sort of killing. A handgun was more like a sword, a weapon best wielded as close-in distances; marksmanship was less important than a steady hand and willingness to pull the trigger. It so happened that Devlin was a marksman with a handgun, as he was with every other weapon he had ever trained on or been instructed in. But the Judge was something different.

Originally invented for outdoorsmen who spent a lot of time in snake country, or at least quickly adopted by them, the Judge was a five-shot Tracker.45 revolver with a lengthened frame and cylinder, which meant that not only could it take a standard.45 Colt round, it could also fire a.410 shotgun shell, buckshot, or rifle slugs, and in any combination. Even the best shot sometimes found it difficult to nail a sidewinder on the first shot, which is why the dispersing firepower of a shotgun shell came in mighty handy at close quarters. So whether you were shooting at something fifty feet away or just about to bite you on the ass, the Judge made a perfect defensive weapon. Even the most appeasement-oriented State Department official couldn’t miss with one of these, although whether he’d want to take the shot, even in the interests of self-preservation, was another matter. Devlin briefly wondered at the suicide cult the American diplomatic establishment had become. Sometimes he felt like he was fighting a civil war against his own government, and half his own people.

“What about you?” Maryam’s voice intruded upon his lethal reverie. Devlin turned to look at her. Standard-issue saucer eyes, deep dark brown. Light olive skin that allowed her to pass for almost anything: Indian, Italian, Spanish, American Indian, Afghani. A generic Third World woman, if you viewed her that way. He did not. She was the woman he loved.

Perhaps, by any rational analysis, not a woman worth dying for. She was short and compact, like most Iranian women, and eventually she’d run to fat and turn into a little Persian butterball, able to spout Hafiz as well as Horace as she whipped up some champa, naan, beryani, and chai, and woe betide any son of a bitch that interrupted their repast. Hafiz, after all, had stared down Tamerlane, and she could do no less. In Devlin’s world the future was as ever-receding as the horizon, but not half so trustworthy.

“Bulbul zi shakh-i sarw be gulbang-i pahlavi / Mikhwand dosh dars-i maqamat-i ma’navi.”

“What did you say?” He never ceased to surprise her. It was one of the many things she loved about him.

“Last night, from the cypress branch, the nightingale sang-”

Without hesitation, she finished the couplet for him. “In Old Persian tones, the lesson of spiritual stations.” Although we could translate ‘spiritual’ as ‘meaningful,’ which sort of ruins it. Poetically, I mean.”

“Hafiz is never ruined, only misunderstood.”

“Like Horace?” She never ceased to surprise him. It was why they were perfect together even if they could never really trust one another…

He moved to kiss her, then refrained. It might, after all, be their last kiss, and he wanted it to mean something. Wanted it to mean more than any other kiss they had ever exchanged, whether in Paris or Los Angeles or Budapest. Whether in passion or friendship or love or opportunity or greeting or good-bye. No kiss could mean more than the next kiss he would give her. Unless it was the one, inshallah, that he would give her when they next met. Whenever and wherever that might be.

“Time to go,” he said, punching a last few keys on the computers. He grabbed a few things and made ready to leave.

“What about me?” she asked.

“You know what to do. I’ll contact you there.” She didn’t bother to ask how. She just knew he would. If he was still alive.

Devlin rose and handed Maryam the computer. She was going to need it more than he was, and besides, he’d have others waiting for him on-site. “Use this. It’s got a secure link to anyplace you’ll need to go. Guard it with your life. If anything happens, make sure to get this before they get you.”

He was about to go when he got another pingback, this one on his iPhone. He glanced at the screen. It was a message relayed from The Building. Devlin smiled as he looked at the screen.

“Who is it?” asked Maryam.

“Martin Ferguson.”

“Who’s that?”

“Someone who lived and died in 1951,” he replied. “He used to be somebody. In fact, he used to be an assistant district attorney in New York. Now…he needs a friend. And that would be me.”

He kissed her like it was the last time. And then he was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

New York

Hope lay amid the rubble, listening for the sounds of her children breathing. She had no idea what had happened, only the knowledge that something terrible had occurred, another manifestation of the evil that had visited her and her family back home in Edwardsville. Lightning never struck twice in the same place, except when it did. Some people went for years without an automobile accident, then had two of them in the space of a week. The law of averages held except when it didn’t, and that was when it was evening things out for someone else, somewhere else in the great wide world. We were all prisoners of numbers, and of ruthless dispassionate Nature. And of such singularity were religions born.

This Hope knew as she lay there in the choking blackness. How many stories had she read in which someone-a survivor-had said that God had singled him out for protection, even as others died? Such items were staples of the media because, after all, the dead could not speak, whereas the lucky among the living were there to bear false witness that Somebody Up There cared for them, had saved them, preserved them, from the fate of their comrades. Until, of course, they met the same fate, as eventually everybody must. Hope’s faith, never very strong, had now entirely evaporated.

“Mama?” A voice out of the bleak, endless darkness, soft but not weak. It was Emma. She was alive.

“Where’s your brother?” Hope asked. “Rory? RORY?”

For a moment, silence. Then-

“I’m over here, Mama. I’m okay.”

“Can you walk? Can you move?” Even in asking, Hope realized that she herself could not move. Gingerly, she tested her legs. They seemed to function, but they could not get herself up off the ground. Something was pinning her to the floor.

Hope tried to stay calm. Losing it now would help neither her nor the children. She tried to collect herself. Tried to think.

How could this be happening to her, again? What she had gone through in Edwardsville was nothing put up against what her children had gone through. What Jack had gone through…

She felt herself starting to break down. No: stop. Crying wouldn’t bring Jack back, wouldn’t erase what had happened. Jack was gone, and yet she was still here, and so were Emma and Rory. That was the way he would have wanted it, she was sure. No, she knew. That was the kind of man he was.

So why was she thinking of Danny?

Hope had often read of characters in the chick lit novels she sometimes glanced at, when Janey Eagleton slipped them to her, because she would never buy that kind of trash when Jack was alive, the kind of women that would forget their man the minute they met Fabio, or whatever name he was going by in this particular incarnation, how they would be literally swept off their feet, caught up in his strong arms, smothered by his kisses, their bodies thrilling to his harsh touch and his soft caresses, driving them crazy with the combination of tenderness and violence, sending their minds into paroxysms of confusion, torn between modern shibboleths and ancient passions and with everyone, author and reader, and character alike, knowing which side of the equations they were all about to come down upon in politically incorrect unison.

“Mom?” It was Rory. He had been brave before, not just once but many times, and now her young hero had come to her rescue once more.

The air was filling with smoke from what Hope knew was a raging fire below. They had to get out of here, and fast, or they would suffocate. But she couldn’t let on. She had to stay calm. If only she could get free…

“It’s okay, Mom,” Rory was saying. “I can handle it, I think.” She felt something move, something scraping across her legs, an awful weight being shifted, rearranged but not lifted.

“Try again, Rory.”

“Emma! Help me.”

In dread, Hope waited for Emma’s assent. Please, God, let her be able to move. Otherwise, they were all lost…

“I’m here, Rory,” said Emma. “I’m right beside you. Come on-push.”

Hope bit down hard as the heavy weight slid across her legs. Something warm and sticky ran down her calves. She could feel the fabric of her skirt rend, her flesh tear-but it was worth it to finally get that awful weight off her limbs.

No matter the pain, she managed to stand. “What was it?” she asked.

“The popcorn machine, Mom,” replied Rory. “Now let’s get outta here. I think the whole place is about to blow.”

At the moment, the building shifted on its foundations. The tilt was noticeable. They were at least ten stories in the air and while that was nowhere near the height of the World Trade Center as it collapsed, she had no wish to experience even one-tenth of the terror those poor souls felt as the Port Authority’s underpinnings failed them, and they were sped on their journey to heaven by a sudden, irrevocable plunge toward hell.

“Fire escape,” she managed to breathe. The air was getting heavier now. In a couple of minutes, they would have to crawl along the floor, searching for the outside exits.

“But where is it, Mama?” cried Emma.

She had no idea.

“Try your phone,” shouted Rory. “Get a map.”

Hope had no idea how to do what her son was suggesting. She could barely make him out in outline as she handed the instrument over. “You find it.”

Rory slid his fingers over the display. You no longer need to punch keys: now everything was touch-screen, the lighter touch the better. No need to hit anything anymore, no keyboards to pound. No longer even any need for the clicks that IBM once electronically tethered to its keyboards, just so the typists could have some sort of audible feedback. The digital world had replaced the analog, cause and effect were now irretrievably disconnected. It was a metaphor for the brave new world of nothing they were entering: a world in which everything mattered, and nothing caused it.

“Nothing, Ma. We’re shut down.”

“Then let’s get out of here. Any way we can.”

There was a great groan as the building shifted again, this time distinctly listing to one side. Hope didn’t know much about architecture, but she knew enough about the groans she was hearing to understand that the structure was in great distress, and was soon about to give up the unequal struggle. The building was going down, and the only question was whether they were going to go down with it.

“Come on!” shouted Rory, grabbing his sister’s hand. Hope would just have to fend for herself, but that was her generational role; she had done her duty to the species, to the culture, to the country. Now it was up to her children to survive, live on, fight on.

And then the floor fell out from beneath them.

It could have been worse. They could have plummeted four, five, six stories down as the huge structure collapsed upon itself. Instead, they dropped only a few feet, although the creaking of the structural steel continued to resonate throughout the theater complex.

“Mom-what’s happening?” screamed Emma. Hope knew her girl was the weak link. They had spent so many hours with the shrinks back home, making sure that she would be okay, no matter what, not that they or anyone could have foreseen this, but even so, Hope always knew that Emma would be the first to break should anything ever happen again, and now here it was, happening again, and so soon thereafter, and there was nothing she could do about it except reach for her baby and hold her and, if necessary, die trying to protect her.

“Come on, Emma-come to Mama!” she shouted She reached…reached…reached.

The AMC Theaters groaned, shifted, settled. Whatever had caused the explosion had happened on the ground floor, and it was only a matter of time before the entire building entropically headed to the source of the derangement. The scream of the wounded metal was terrifying, but to the Gardner family, it was as from a distance, a call to death that they would not heed.

Hope reached in the dark-and realized that reaching in the dark was all she had ever done. At the moment she had determined to do something about the Edwardsville hostage situation, she had begun to grope her way toward her ultimate goal. When she had crawled across the frozen blacktop on her hands and knees, she began to see it more clearly. When she had come up and fallen into the arms of that horrible man, when she was so close to her children, could practically hear them calling out to her, when she realized that she could only save one, that somebody would have to help her, when that somebody turned out to be her husband, Jack, and when he died…

Somebody else had to save them, then-Danny…

And in death there was life. In death for both of them there was life. And in death they had found each other, amid blood and misery and grief and loss. Oprah would have wept, but her audience would have understood-you took love where you found it, and damn the circumstances, the only principle of life was, after all, life itself, and no amount of death, or death cults, or people who loved death more than they loved life could defeat life itself.

And fuck everybody who didn’t understand that simple, fundamental principle of America and Americanism.

Again, Hope felt violence welling up inside her-a violence that she thought had long since been bred out of her, beaten out of her, beaten out of the America she had been born into, an America she had grown up with, an America she had been raised to think of as good and noble and true and honorable. And yet for years, they had been telling her-they, the impersonal they that ran the media, that ruled in Washington, that she saw every night on her TV set, the chirping anchors and the serious graybeards, the snarky commentators who celebrated what she had grown up to think of as deviancy, shoved it right in her face. She had often wondered, sitting at home with Jack watching the TV, why they let them get away with this, when she finally realized that the “they” she had long assumed were in charge of the America she had once known were no longer the “they” in charge, that the moral rules had changed, without even an election, that the rules were new, that the snarky commentators were on the other side, that without even so much as a press release, the power structure had changed, and she and everybody else she knew had suddenly come up on the short side of the equation. How did it happen, and how did it happen so fast?

Had her country gone from American dream to nightmare in her lifetime?

That was a question for another time. Right now, she had to figure out how to get out of here and how to get her kids out of here. It didn’t matter if she died, it only mattered whether she could save them

And, by God, she would-no matter how much “they” tried to drive God out of her life, and the life of a country whose money proclaimed “In God We Trust.” At that moment, Hope swore to herself that, if she lived, she would contest every local seat, every county board, every state house and senate sinecure, every national office, even the presidency itself. From now on, she would be their worst enemy. And they had no one but themselves to blame, because, finally, they had driven her to it. What a mighty force the American people could be, once aroused.

Emma’s hand was in hers. The pain was suddenly gone. Nothing could stop her now.

“Atta girl, Ma!” shouted Rory.

They ran. Not caring what was in front of them in the darkness, not caring whether it was popcorn boxes or movie posters or even dead bodies. The only thing that mattered now was to get to the exit, still vaguely but bravely illuminated against the carnage they knew lurked below.

If only they could make it before the building totally collapsed. If only they could cross the few short yards, no matter what her physical condition. Hope knew she could do it, and prayed passionately that her children could follow. She had never prayed much in her life, beyond the pro-forma Protestantism she had grown up with, a religion that didn’t much matter, like any religion, in times of peace. But now they were up against a religion that very much did matter in times of war, a religion that welcomed war, no matter if it was only a tiny minority, as the newspapers kept telling her, no matter if it was only a fraction, a fraction of a billion was a very large fraction and it was that fraction, she knew, that was causing them all this trouble.

The exit sign-

“Come, on Emma!” shouted Rory. “Come on, Mom!”

They ran. The building groaned once more. They ran faster. A small amount of ground, which on the outside you could leap over in a flash, not less than a heartbeat away. A heartbeat, one tick missed and you were gone, one tick missed and you were meeting your maker if Maker there was to meet.

Hope didn’t want to find out. She was not yet ready to put her faith to the test. Not ready to be able to answer Abraham’s challenge, not disposed to be confronted by an altar upon which she was supposed to sacrifice her children, not even one of them. They would all get out, or they would all die trying.

And then, against all odds, her phone rang.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Under the Hudson River

Few civilians knew that the Hudson River was crisscrossed by tunnels, those both successful and in use, and those failed and long since fallen into desuetude. The old North River-that had been its name until the mid-20th century, reflecting its origins as part freshwater river and part brackish estuary, like the East River-had been the object of man’s desire to simplify the crossing from Manhattan to Jersey for more than two hundred years. The Hudson and Manhattan Tunnels dated back to 1874, when the first attempts were made to dig beneath the silt of the river bottom and snake a tube across to the west side of the island. Because the technology was not up to the task, those early efforts collapsed, but they remained beneath the water today, unfinished and unused. Until now.

Devlin approached the edge of the water. He had committed to memory the old maps Maryam had showed him aboard the plane and, triangulating with his GPS device, knew precisely where they were.

He would have less than two minutes to find the old opening, long since buried in the river and under about ten feet of water. When the tubes eventually were successfully built-the railroad they had once served had become the PATH trains from New Jersey, operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which also controlled the other bridges from Jersey, as well as the late World Trade Center-most of the aborted tunnels had been simply left to rot. But bits of them had been incorporated into the design and, if the maps were correct, there was still access. All Devlin had to do was dive down, locate the ingress, and try to hold his breath long enough to get in.

There was no entry from the Jersey side. When Tyler had issued his order to close off the city, all trains had immediately stopped running. Both the passenger vehicle tunnels had been choked off at the Jersey end as well. And, since he did not officially exist, there was no use trying to pull rank on the PA cops. He was going in, and he was going in invisibly.

Diving was something else few people knew anything about, except divers, of course. What seemed like just a short distance-say, a hundred feet-might as well be a mile to a diver. The pressure grew exponentially with every few feet down, and while man may well have originated in the primal soup, he had long since accepted his fate as a breathing biped. Water might be fun at the Jersey shore sixty miles south of where he was standing, but at this point, it was an enemy.

Across the river, Devlin could see the smoke rising from where Times Square would be, to the north of where he was now standing. The prevailing winds were from the west, as usual, so he couldn’t smell anything, but he knew from his survey of the situation aboard the Gulfstream that the world’s most famous intersection was now very likely uninhabitable. The acridity of the smoke, the ongoing gunfire, the rapidly spreading fires were sure to destroy the place, and not even the best men in the NYPD and the Fire Department were likely to be able to stop it. How many times did this have to happen, he wondered, before the United States was ready to go on offense? To hit back, hard, to lay waste to its enemies without the albatross of the lawyers and the JAGs perched on its shoulder, warning, hedging, caviling?

He took a deep breath, then exhaled. Then another, deeper breath, expanding his lungs, prepping them for what was to come.

But whom to attack? In the world of asymmetrical warfare, it was impossible for the leaders of nation-states to make their decisions. There were no diplomatic establishments to deal with, no ultimatums to be issued and then either accepted or ignored. The country was fighting a shadow army, led by invisible commanders, troglodytes who could issue their commands from cell phones and sat phones in far-off caves in countries that only existed as diplomatic fictions. Sometimes it seemed that most of the world was a giant Potemkin village, a simulacrum of a country; only kick down the false front to reveal the savage beating heart behind it, so filled with jealousy and hatred.

And behind those cave dwellers? Who financed them, manipulated them, stroked them, plied them with fake understanding? Devlin had already met one of them, a man so implacable and hate-filled that their one, brief, unfinished encounter had chilled him to his soul. He-a man famously without a soul-had looked into the ferocious eyes of nihilism and had recoiled from the void. Pray to God that he would never end up like that, that he could hold on to just enough of his humanity to keep him on the other side of the line from well-educated beasts bent on an apocalypse far beyond anything that Wagner had dreamed of at Bayreuth.

Skorzeny. It had to be him.

They had come so close to him in Budapest. But even the tender ministrations of an Egyptian rendition stint had not been enough to get Farid Belghazi to talk, and so he had died, his body dismembered and fed to the crocodiles that still could be found along the Nile. President Tyler had given them permission to take Skorzeny out, but they had failed. And now, here he was.

The mission was simple: get into the beleaguered city and terminate each and every one of the terrorists the NYPD had not yet captured or killed. As usual, he was to remain invisible to the locals at all times, tracking and killing without ever revealing his presence either to friend or foe. To any NYPD officer he encountered, he was just another endangered civilian, and should they make him, he would have to kill them. That was the part about the job he hated. It was easy to kill the other side. They had richly deserved their fate and, in fact, many of them actively sought and embraced it. Devlin’s dispatching them made no difference to either of them, and it had the salubrious effect of creating one less dirtbag in the world. But the good guys didn’t deserve it.

Get Skorzeny and get out. That’s what the voice inside his head had been telling him for months now. Get out and take Maryam with him. Retire, and take your money with you-let the government take care of you for a change, the way it took care of so many these days, instead of you taking care of it. Take this woman, even though you know next to nothing about her. Have never allowed yourself to run so much as a cursory investigation on her. Never bothered to check her cover story with the NCRI, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or even the scattered remnants of SAVAK, half of whom now lived in Los Angeles. Didn’t care. If she was right she was right.

And if in the end she was the one who had his name tattooed on a bullet in her gun, well, that was a fate he was gladly going to accept. It would put an end to all this, to this life he saw vanish anyway, before his eyes, at the airport in Rome, to the lie he had been living for so long. It would be the end of him, but it would be the end of Seelye, too, and half the NSA. If this was martyrdom, then so be it. Perhaps he had something in common with the scores of men he had killed. In the end, when your turn came, there was nothing left to do but take it, and like it.

Get in, get out.

Get into the tunnel. Once inside he would find a change of clothes in a utility station, adjacent to one of the early monitoring posts that constantly measured the conditions in the tunnel for air quality, radiation, minute increases in humidity-anything that might signal the approach of catastrophe. In the locker he would find any other weapons he needed, in case any of his became unusable after the submersion, along with some heavier firepower beyond what the Gulfstream had provided.

He cleared his mind. He had done this many times before, although never under such hostile conditions. But at root the job was as simple as it always was.

Get in, get out.

Rely on his superior training, his instincts, and the vast emptiness at the bottom of his soul to get him through. Above all, don’t think of her. She was on her way back to Europe. She was already dead to him and should by chance she be resurrected after this was over and they were together again, well, it was just another of the miracles that life held in store for a man in his profession.

He stepped into the water. Nobody saw him, nobody noticed him. What eyes there were nearby were focused on what was going on across the river.

Ten feet, twenty at the most. He stayed in the bathtub longer as a kid, head at the bottom, pretending he was a hero, a treasure-hunter, a deep-sea diver about to come up with rare pearls for the naked Japanese girls admiring him from the shore. For men like him, there were rewards in both heaven and hell.

He filled his lungs with air and slipped beneath the surface of the Hudson.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Times Square

Francis Xavier Byrne had waited his whole life for a moment like this. It sounded horrible to say, but it was true. Every cop, every politician, every reporter, dreamed of such a moment. Not death and destruction, but opportunity. That was the way they saw it-opportunity to prove what they were made of. Unfortunately, it most often included violent death.

The country had so devolved, and heroism had been so devalued, that it was politically incorrect for little boys-and some girls-to imagine themselves the heroes of their own dramas. Peace might seem like a good idea to the ninnies of Code Pink and MoveOn, but it took a real crisis for the men to separate themselves from the boys and the cable news anchors and to step up. It was something they lived their lives for, hoping it would happen. Not for blood, but for glory. And if the two were intertwined, well, so what? The entire course of human history up until the 1950s had proclaimed that one simple truth, and only in a country infected with the postwar guilt-ridden moral relativism of America-the insane notion that up was down, black was white, and good was evil-could it be questioned or challenged.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some of the old virtues had briefly returned. Suddenly the cops and firemen were heroes again, instead of public enemies and figures of fun on account of their lack of an Ivy League education, their Queens accents. The motto of the NYPD had long been “first through the door,” a stone-brave Irish attitude that said you’d rather die than let your pals think you a coward. Cops and firefighters didn’t call their lawyers when they got punched in the nose, didn’t sue their neighbors or fight with them on the condo boards-in fact, they didn’t even live in condos, preferring rentals in Middle Village or small houses in Orange County, which were pretty much all they could afford. Instead, they sucked it up, put their kids through school as best they could, survived their divorces without eating their.38s, most of them anyway, and got on with their lives. Although Byrne had managed to move across the East River to the city, and his place on 50th Street and Tenth Avenue in what had once been the dregs of Hell’s Kitchen had turned into a very fashionable part of town, he’d never forgotten his roots, nor lost his fear of ever doing anything less than his duty.

A dying breed, he thought, that’s what I am. And if today is the day that the breed finally vanishes, well, so be it. He had the.38 in his hand, drawn and ready to fire, as he hit the wreckage of the AMC.

He’d never seen anything like the destruction.

Being a cop in New York City, especially when you’d been on the force as long as he had-which meant going back to the bad old days of the Dinkins administration-meant you had seen a lot of terrible things. But those bad things were usually small family tragedies, a single point of blackness located among the thousand points of light that were the lives of the normal New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers-in other words, those who had not gotten themselves killed on this particular day.

Most cops went through their whole careers, from the Academy to roundsman to squad cars to donuts and coffee to the desk sergeant to retirement, without every being involved in violence, except after the fact, when the crime, no matter how gruesome, had stopped bleeding and was even now bloating, swelling, and heading for the corruption of the grave. And even that was rare. Most cops only ever experienced corruption when it came to them not in the form of a popper fished out of the river or a dismembered body half-buried up near the Cloisters, but in the form of a bribe or a payoff, from a city councilman or a drug dealer or even just a two-bit hooker who offered you a blow job in lieu of a bust, and every once in a while you took it because it beat the alternative, which was nothing.

But he, Francis Xavier, would have no such luck. Sure, Mary Claire had left him long ago, and Doreen as well, and with her his entrée to the downtown Manhattan society he had always despised. But then came Ingrid and that mess with his brother Tom, and once again he had had to corrupt himself, to take a perfectly good bust and turn it, not in the direction of justice but to his own advantage, to give him power over people, over Ingrid, whom he’d condemned, and over his brother, whom he’d always loathed. He’d gotten out of that one alive and well and even prospering, just as his boss, Matt White, had, so many years ago. In that incident they both remembered all too well but which they never discussed, never could discuss, because to do so would mean the end of both of them. Behind every great fortune is a great crime, Balzac said, but far worse was the policeman’s axiom that behind every great career was an even greater crime, as he understood all too well.

He could still see Rikki Marcon, holding his dead girl, Rosa, who had begged the cops to save her from her violent boyfriend, and whom he’d loved so much that he’d gone to work on her with an ice pick, and there wasn’t much left of her when Matt and Frankie came upon them and without hesitation Matt had capped Enrique twice in the head with his.38 and that was the end of that. That was the reality of the city streets in those days, of bloody love and violent death, the only way these things could end when you got right down to it, which was maybe for the best. It spared everyone the happily-ever-after bullshit, the broadening of the hips, the weakening of the libido, the screaming children, the fights, the broken crockery, the sound of gunshots breaking the semi-stillness of the night in the south Bronx or Bed-Stuy or Brownsville or East New York or…

“RIP, motherfucker,” was all Matt had said when he blew Rikki away, and as far as Byrne was concerned, that was about all the valedictory and eulogy any one of us deserved.

From that moment on, neither of them had even mentioned the incident. It was the unspoken scales of Blind Justice between them, both of them eternally complicit in what had been a righteous kill, but what had also been a crime, and the fact that one of them was now Commissioner and the other the head of the CTU was the only possible virtuous outcome in a world long ago condemned.

And now here he was, twenty years later, not as fit as he was back then but twice as smart, not as clever but twice as wise, not as amoral but twice as opportunistic, faced with an opportunity even he had never dreamed of. Not even when he and Tom were boys, sleeping in their bunk beds back in Queens, Tom the older, Tom the tougher, Tom the dominant, Tom the one he’d hated all his life. Tom who lorded it over him after the death of their father, Tom the successful one, Tom the FBI agent, the lawyer with the gun, whereas he was just Frankie the cop, the Fordham grad with the old.38, because he was too old or too dumb or too scared or simply too lazy to change.

The.38, his dad’s service revolver, was in his hand as he looked up at what had been the AMC on 42nd Street.

The entire front of the building had been blown away, leaving two flanking sides with a great gap in the middle, with only the back wall of the lower floors still standing, although for how much longer was hard to tell. It was sagging, groaning with the agony of collapsing steel, a great expiring beast on its last legs, gravity about to claim it. If there was anybody still alive in there it was a miracle.

In the distance he could hear the sirens of the fire trucks. His job lay to the east, toward the gunfire that he could still discern among all the other sounds-screaming, moaning, shattering glass, the wordless voices of destruction. The voices that had always surrounded him, even back in Woodside, back when New York had been safe, when little Irish boys could sleep soundly in their beds, back before Kitty Genovese and the first World Trade Center bombing and 9/11. Back before the greatest city in the world had nearly been brought to its knees in fear and shame and guilt by 19 men from Saudi Arabia and other parts unknown. Back before invincible New York was bloodied. Back before the spiritual rot and nihilism that had long since infected the engine of capitalism and freedom had taken hold, hollowed it out, and rendered it supine before a handful of savages armed with box cutters and faith.

Twenty years ago, he remembered sitting in an Irish bar with Sy Sheinberg, Sid’s late uncle, and musing that the exhausted Irish couldn’t even muster one of their own as a bartender; today, the entire city couldn’t even muster a single priest to give it the Last Rites, if not absolution, on its way to Hell.

A man was running toward him. The hot dog vendor. Byrne didn’t have to think about the make: he knew.

Hope knew who it was before she looked at the display. Knew by the ring, the very same ring that announced the arrival of every incoming call. Hope didn’t have the patience of her children, who somehow had managed to assign a special ring tone to each of the callers in the phone books, the better to sort them out aurally as well as visually. How long that would take, she had no idea, but it was just one of those things she was never going to get around to. When Hope was a kid, all the phones came pretty much in black and rang pretty much the same, although there were those weird pink Princess phones, but you still couldn’t buy them, you just rented them from the phone company at a premium, and thought you were getting a bargain on some level. Such was the power of marketing.

“Danny?” she cried. “Help us! Oh my God, please help us!”

She knew he couldn’t. Even if he were overhead in one of his choppers right this minute he still wouldn’t be able to help her. But help was not really what she was after at this moment, not with the building swaying the way it was, not with hope fading so fast, not with her children clinging to her as if she were some sort of goddess, able to save them with a wave of her divine wand.

Well, why not-she had, once before. She had plucked her son out of the rubble of the middle school in Edwardsville, found her daughter in that awful prison in France when all hope had been lost.

“Hope-HOPE! Where are you? What’s happening?” She could hear the fear in his voice, but more than the fear-there was something else. Something else that she herself had been feeling, but not letting herself feel. It was too soon, that’s what she’d kept telling herself. Too soon for feeling, too soon after the death of her husband, too soon after the adventure in France, too soon. But Fate had a way of trumping Time, and too soon may not after all be quite soon enough.

“We’re okay, Danny, but we’re trapped. We were in the AMC on 42nd Street, when-”

Even in the vortex of sound, she could hear him punching a computer. “I’ve got you on video feed from the police helicopters,” he said, and she didn’t even bother to wonder how that was possible. “I’ve got the building on Google Earth. Now listen to me, Hope-”

Hope screamed as the building shifted and tilted. She had a flash of being on the Titanic, just like in the movie, when the boat began to slide beneath the waves, the elevation of the stern growing ever steeper.

“Hope. HOPE. Listen to me, baby, listen to me. I’ve tapped into the city building archives, so I’ve got the plans right here in front of me. Can you see all right? Can you breathe?

“We’re on the roof, Danny. Can’t you get someone here to pick us up?”

“Not right now, baby. So stay as calm as you can and listen very carefully…”

Ben Addison, Jr., saw the cop in front of him, made him as sure as he’d ever made any cop in his life. Cops were something he knew almost from childhood, cops were the things you’d best avoided unless you were ready to take them on, cops were the white men-even if they were black, like you-the white men who made your life miserable, the white men who were the font of all your misery, and your mama’s misery and your long-gone daddy’s misery, because after all he was probably in the jug somewhere, some guy you never knew whose rash action had brought you into this shitass world, and now here you were face-to-face with the Man, and it was long since past payback time.

To your left was the crackling hulk of the AMC, another evil infidel pleasure palace, where men and women could watch shameful films together, not segregated but side by side. There was a time when Ben Addison, Jr., enjoyed the company of women and, like every man, had measured his progress as a man by the number of women he’d seduced, or coerced or, once in a while, had even raped. But none of that was his fault-those were just terms, arbitrary definitions, judgments made by another culture on his culture. That was what they had taught him in the joint, the reason why the words of the imam had soothed rather than inflamed, had made him feel better about his own base appetites, although still ashamed, rather than angry. After all, he had a lot to thank the white man for, the removal of that awful guilt he had once felt, felt for so much of his life, to be replaced not by atonement but by righteous anger-by a burning desire for revenge, which had become his own personal version of atonement.

The cop was running toward him. So what if one of his AK’s was gone? The other one would be plenty to take this sucka down…

Byrne knew he had no chance if the shooter got off more than a few shots. Even a spray-painting gangbanger like this guy could get lucky once in a while. Byrne firmly believed in the cop’s adage that a single law enforcement officer with the right training and experience could take down an asshat with a single round left in the cylinder, before said asshat could blow away two little girls, an old woman, the milkman, a couple of cleaning ladies and half the side of the building, but miss his target, with an Uzi or an AK. As politically incorrect as it was to say, there wasn’t a cop in that situation, facing those odds, who didn’t like his chances.

Ben Addison, Jr., liked his chances. He’s seen the way the people fell when he pointed and shot them. What a feeling of power-to merely wish and will and down they went, all his tormentors from childhood, defenseless and helpless, unable to fight back because they were unwilling to fight back, having long ago disarmed themselves morally and emotionally. Whereas he had found the truth in the white man’s jail, where his brothers had come to him with love and mercy and the promise of justice, and then had put a gun in his hand to prove it.

The cop was his. He brought his weapon up into a firing position…

Byrne saw the AK: ghetto sideways, body out of alignment, weight on the wrong foot. His odds had just markedly improved. Closing fast, it wasn’t about firepower now, it was about marksmanship. And aside from blind luck, marksmanship was always the deciding factor in a firefight.

Like a.335 hitter watching a pitcher’s release point and picking up the rotation of the baseball, Byrne could see the shooter’s finger on the trigger, could follow as if in slow motion, every twitch of the muscle ordering the cartridge into position, the firing pin to engage, the powder to ignite, the bullet to shoot down the rifling, spinning, heading straight for him-

His hand on his piece, Byrne dropped to the ground, rolled…came up ready to fire-

As he did, somewhere in the distance, he heard a woman scream.

Ben Addison, Jr., knew that he’d gotten off at least twenty rounds at a single pull. Fuck that bullshit they tried to teach him at the range at the mujahideen camp upstate, the shit about the deep breath and the exhalation and the slow squeezing instead of pulling or jerking-this was a righteous piece he held in his hands, a thing that had never let him down, a death-dealer.

Which is why he missed the son of a bitch. That damn scream. Bitch threw him off. He’d take care of her right after he finished waxing this pig’s infidel ass.

Addison stumbled, caught himself. But he almost dropped his AK and, instinctively, he reached out with his right hand, his firing hand, his trigger finger, to grab the weapon before it clattered to the ground and, in so doing, he forgot another of the lessons the upstate Arabs had tried to teach him, which was never grab the gun barrel after you’d fired.

His voice joined the screams of the woman as the burning gun barrel flayed the skin off his palm.

Just as a parent also knows the sound of a child’s voice, a man can always hear a woman’s screams no matter what the surrounding auditory noise. Byrne had heard plenty of women scream in his life, of course, both privately and professionally, and it was the one sound that a cop, even a homicide dick as he had been for many years, could not abide. It meant a lot of things-pain, suffering, fear, anguish, torture, death-but more than anything it meant this: you were not doing your job. Cops knew that they could barely solve crimes, much less stop them, but they went out on the streets every day hoping to do the latter instead of having to do the former. You couldn’t tell how many people did not die today because of your presence, and you most certainly would never know them if you saw them, but they were there and you knew they were there. They were the good ghosts, the kind you hoped to meet someday, instead of the kind you actually did meet, every day, the ghosts of the people whose lives you were not there to save, the ghosts of the dead, their faces bloodied, their mouths open in agony, the ones who would haunt you, and rightly so, for the rest of your life. Until at last you joined them in whatever hell or purgatory was reserved for cops.

But one thing Byrne knew-the hot dog guy had put his last innocent victim in the grave.

Hope felt the dying building move, shift again. This was, she imagined, what it must be like to be in one of those California earthquakes. They were one of the reasons she and Jack had never gone to Disneyland, her fear of earthquakes. She’d seen enough movies, read enough books, seen enough articles in the Post-Dispatch to know that earthquakes shook buildings, sent the crockery flying, and worst-case scenario, split the ground asunder and swallowed up cars and houses and most certainly small children.

A voice in her ear: “There’s a fire escape out the back.” Danny. “Not on the AMC building itself, but on the one next door. You’re going to have to jump for it.”

Hope wasn’t sure how to process the information. “You mean in the building, right? One of those enclosed things.” In the distance she could hear the sound of gunfire, of wailing sirens, of explosions. This must be what hell is like, she thought.

“No, don’t use them. You won’t make it.”

“But-”

“Listen to me, Hope.” More formal now, the voice in command, in control. “You’re not going to make it. The building isn’t going to make it. It can’t withstand the fire down below. It’s going to collapse, and very soon. You’ve got to get off that roof or you’re all going to die.”

Hope looked around, trying to control her terror. Rory and Emma clung to her, hoping. “But-”

“Listen to me. It’s your only chance. How far is it?”

Hope drew as much breath as she could and looked at her son. “Rory,” she said as calmly as possible, “how far is that fire escape over there? You’re good at these things-tell me. ” she whispered into her cell phone: “Hang on, Danny.”

“No, you hang on, Hope. Say a prayer, and don’t worry.” She could hear the concern in his voice, which she knew, at that moment, was starting to turn to love.

She hadn’t even realized that Rory had left her side when he was back. “That building next door, Mom?” he said, trying not to show his fear. “It’s wrecked.”

Across the country, Danny heard that. “Hope-listen to me. Listen to me. It’s an old building. I’m looking at the plans right now. All they did was add on to it. There’s an old fire escape, a few floors down. You know, the kind you see in the movies. Look for it.”

“Over here, Mom!”

“Rory sees something.”

“Hurry.” She could hear the worry, and the urgency in his voice.

Hope ran to the spot where Rory was staring down. Much of the other building had collapsed. But there, just as Danny had predicted, was an old fire escape that had managed to survive the restoration and retrofitting. It had vanished into a disused air shaft, like the ones in the old dumbbell flats that used to populate this area, and if Hope had had time to think about it, she might have realized that it made perfect sense.

Originally, it would never have reached this high. But, in a fit of building-code observance, somebody-or, more likely, somebody’s brother-in-law-had gotten a contract to extend the redundant fire escape up the side of the new addition, and then sealed it off. The contractor billed the owner for twice his costs, probably billed the city for some give-back that only a lawyer could love, kicked back to his relative, and walked away with some nice money for building something nobody would ever use.

Until now. Thank God for honest graft.

“I see it,” she breathed to Danny. There was a slight roar in the background of wherever he was calling from.

“Then use it.” His voice was raised, loud.

“What if it won’t hold us?”

“It’s got to. It’s your only chance. Now go.”

Hope looked at her children. They were braver than she; they knew what to do. “I’ll go first, Mom,” said Rory. “It’ll be just fine.”

And then he was over the side and gone. Hope looked at Emma. “Your turn, young lady,” she said.

Emma hesitated, but only for a moment. “Well, I guess I’ve been through worse,” she said, and then she, too, disappeared.

Now it was Hope’s turn. She threw one leg over the side. “Where are you, Danny?” she said. “Please, after this is over-”

“We’re on our way,” he said. “All you have to do is stay safe for a few more hours.”

Hope thought she would cry. But she didn’t. Instead, she went over the side and down, into the smoke and darkness.

Byrne was on his feet now. The hot-dog vendor was hopping around, open, vulnerable. Byrne ran toward him, closing the distance fast.

Byrne had learned a lot on the streets of New York, streets he had known practically since the day he was born, since the days when he and Tommy had crawled around in the sewers of Queens, under the streets of Woodside and Middle Village when they were kids, playing hide-and-seek, playing sapper, playing city-bombing bad guys, playing the cops that had to hunt them down, the cops of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. There was no scenario he had not rehearsed a million times in his mind, no spot no matter how tight in which he had not imagined himself, no moment that he could not rise to.

He fired as he ran, emptying his father’s.38 into the man in front of him. Every shot found its mark. Each one tore through the gunman’s body in a pattern that even Byrne would have been hard-pressed to duplicate at the firing range.

His first shot hit Ben Addison, Jr., in the side, not enough to kill but plenty enough to hurt. The second bullet hit him square in the chest, the center of mass, just like they taught you at the Academy, and just as Byrne had learned to do on the streets many years before. The third hit the shooter a little lower, in the groin, and Byrne knew from experience watching gut-shot men die that it would be the killing blow, only just not fast enough. The fourth shot took off most of Addison ’s left hand, leaving only a single finger and half a palm, while the fifth slug caught him in the right shoulder, forcing him at last to drop the weapon. But not before he got off one last shot.

Byrne sensed it coming and threw his body to one side. He may not have been as fast as he once was, but his instincts were honed and his reflexes sharp. He felt the sear as the slug tore across his left shoulder, taking a chunk of flesh and a piece of his suit with it. That was what worried him-if he survived this encounter, he was going to have to get any material out of the wound quickly before it infected him. That was how 18th-century soldiers died, not necessarily from the ball or even the bloodshed, but from infection. That was why accounts of the old battlefields were always replete with the cries of the wounded, the screams of paralyzing agony, the gradual loss of the mental faculties, men being driven mad by the fever was that eating them alive from the inside.

He hit the pavement hard, landing on his wounded shoulder and striking his head against some of the rubble. He yearned for a breather, a brief respite from the shouts and screams and the din of war. But it was not to be.

Unbelievably, the hot dog man was still coming toward him.

“God is great,” the former Ben Addison, Jr., kept repeating to himself as he dragged himself toward the cop. Even surrounded by the stench of death, he could always smell a cop, and nothing spelled martyrdom to him more than this pig’s death. All his pent-up resentment-at the white man, at the law, at the Man-fueled him, fed his rage, and kept him moving. That and his faith. The Brothers had been right: this faith was more powerful than any drug, stronger than anything he had ever encountered on the streets. This was a thing of beauty, a synthesis of love and hatred, the nexus of life and death, the portal to paradise.

The killing blade was sharp, and if, Allah willing, he had the strength, he would carve the cop’s head off like the leg of a Thanksgiving turkey. Thanksgiving had always been Ben Addison, Jr.’s, favorite holiday and even after accepting the call to Islam, he had found no reason to change his opinion. Carving was fun.

Byrne tried to clear the cobwebs, but even with the adrenaline rush, it wasn’t going to be in time. His father’s.38 lay several feet away, out of reach, and he wouldn’t be able to get to it before the hot dog man would be upon him. Were he still a detective he would have carried an unauthorized piece in an ankle holster, or maybe even a drop 9 mm down the back of his pants, but Francis Byrne had been off the streets for nearly a decade. He was going to have to fight a wounded but crazed and still-powerful man, fight him long enough for his bullets to take effect, survive long enough that the man would finally die the way he was supposed to.

Funny what goes through your mind at a time like this. Everything was happening in slow motion, which gave Byrne plenty of time to think. His right hand reached out for a piece of brick or paving stone or whatever it was: this was the way his Irish ancestors had fought when they first came to the Island of the Manhattoes, with bricks and sticks and stones and lead pipes and beer bottles, whether they had been crooks or cops, pitched-battling on the west side, under the docks, in the railroad tunnels beneath the streets or on Death Avenue itself.

As shot up as the hot dog man was, something was still driving him forward, some combination of PCP and angel dust and religious fervor and God or Allah only knew what else, but whatever it was it was good enough, powerful juju, stronger than his God, and there was nothing left for Byrne to do but make a good act of contrition and get ready to meet his Maker.

The man was close to him now. Byrne rolled to face him. A knife had never looked so big. He gripped the piece of urban detritus tightly: get it over with, he thought.

He braced himself-

And then the man disappeared.

No valedictory, no trash talk, no last words. He simply vanished.

No time to think about the miracle; the whole point of miracles was that they were inexplicable, so there was no point in thinking about them. There would be plenty of time for reflection later, back in his flat at 50th Street and Tenth Avenue, assuming he got out of this alive. Which was still at this point not at all a sure bet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Dresden, Germany, February 1945

As Emanuel Skorzeny awoke one morning from unquiet dreams, he found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous thing, unworthy of sacrifice but doomed nonetheless.

For a moment, he wasn’t quite sure where he was. Since July of last year, most of the beds he slept in were new to him, most of the houses unfamiliar. His life had been a series of courtrooms and judges, of soldiers and wardens, of prison cells. To find himself here, in Dresden, one of the most beautiful cities of the Reich, was like a dream. And yet he was having a nightmare.

The Elbe, the mighty river, was not far away, and perhaps in the summertime he might be able to smell it, but this was winter in Saxony, one of the coldest parts of Germany, and there was nothing to smell except his own breath before it froze upon exhalation. He dreaded getting out of bed, into the frigid morning air, the hot brick from the fire long since having cooled so that now he was snuggled up against something cold and unfeeling and indifferent. It was a feeling he would clutch to his breast for the rest of his life.

He fought for consciousness, trying to shake off the effects of the dream. But it stayed with him, and even though he knew it was inspired by Kafka, in a short story that he should not have been reading, in a place he should not have been reading it, he still found it hard to discriminate between fantasy and reality. His whole world, once so secure, was now one horrible, grotesque fantasy.

His father, his new father, stood in the doorway of the small attic room, looking at him with a mixture of obligation, fear, and disgust. “Get up, Kurt,” he said. “Today, we seek the enemies of the people. Of the Volk.”

Skorzeny arose and performed his ablutions as best he could. The chamber pot went back under the bed; the water with which he washed himself was practically frozen. He dressed and went downstairs, his hair plastered and stuck to the sides of his head like small brown icicles. He didn’t mind being called Kurt, even though that was not his real name. When they let him go, released him from the Sippenhaft burden and resettled him and some of the others in new families scattered across the Reich, they had told him to forget his real name as quickly as he could, never to mention it again upon pain of death, to adapt and change and molt to his new circumstances until he became not only a man-which was fast approaching-but a new kind of man.

He would take a new name when the time came. A name that would signify something. For now, though, he would answer to whatever name they gave him, and execute whatever task they assigned to him. They had spared him, after all. Which is more than he would do to them or anyone like them when he got older, and at the first possible opportunity. This he had sworn to himself on that day in front of Freisler in the Volksgericht, the day his real father was condemned to death…

“What have they done, Papa?” asked the boy. He was still young, not yet a teenager, but already was treated as the future man of the house. After all, although he was Sippenhaft, he was also one of the future leaders, accepted into the Adolf-Hitler-Schule, the school for the best and the brightest Germany had to offer. He would show them. He would show them what a terrible mistake they had been to accuse his real father, and what an even more terrible mistake they had made to antagonize the son.

“Nothing yet,” replied his new father. “That is for us to discover.”

Emanuel Skorzeny respected his new father for one simple reason: he had survived. That was good enough for him. After all, families came and went but allegiances were transferable.

Unternehmen Eiche, whispered his father, and he knew what that meant. Every good German youth knew what that meant: Operation Oak. The rescue of comrade Mussolini from the red partisans and the revanchist forces of the King from the mountaintop hotel, Campo Imperatore, where il Duce was being held.

“And what did I say to il Duce?” his father asked. In just short time together, it already become a ritual with them. He liked rituals.

“Duce, the Führer has sent me to set you free!”

“To which il Duce replied?”

He only had to think for a moment: “I knew that my friend would not forsake me!”

His father smiled. They were out of the house, crossing the Elbe now. At times, Emanuel wondered why his father no longer resembled the photographs he had seen of him in his Waffen SS uniform, although from time to time he still wore the Iron Cross. After all, he was the man who had almost captured the NKVD headquarters in Moscow, before den zweiten Dolchstuss-the second stab in the back.

For Germany was finished, that he knew, even at his young age. Germany had given to him and Germany had taken away-the way of the world, for which he bore the country no ill will. This was war, and in war people did strange things, fought for strange goals, shifted alliances and allegiances, with only one purpose in mind-to survive. Whatever his father had done, whatever his stepfather had done, and whatever he would do in the future, would be as a consequence of this war. There was nothing he could do about it, and there were no tears he would shed over it. Let the dead bury the dead and the living go on, to extract their terrible revenge on the corpses of both friend and foe as best they could.

Vater Otto moved swiftly down the street. He knew exactly where he was going. And when they came to the door of No. 17 Marschnerstrasse, he didn’t wait for an answer to his knock, but instead as it half-opened, he kicked it in with one massive blow from his boot.

They caught the family unawares, still groping toward the fire for warmth, helpless when they should have been wary. Otto said nothing but walked smartly to the hearth, which had not yet begun to smolder, and brushed aside the embers. Then with one mighty wrench he pulled open the grate, the false grate, to reveal below a whole hidden room. “Juden, raus,” he barked.

And one by one they came up, with Otto lending a hand to haul them into the kitchen. One, two, three, four of them, a father and a mother and two children, the oldest not much older than himself, a boy and girl, standing there blinking in the light in the nightclothes, half-frozen and all dead.

That there were still Jews in Germany was an open secret. Despite the Kristallnacht and the Nuremberg Laws, despite the emigration of as many of the country’s half a million or so Jews to Britain and America and elsewhere, there were still Jews in the Reich, living hidden among the people, some protected by powerful men, as in the Bavarian countryside, some more or less living openly, as in Berlin, the capital city that had never taken to Hitler and his uncouth Bavarian and Austrian interlopers. But Dresden was still a small town, for all its accomplishment in music, porcelain, and the arts, and the few still here had been eking out a living as craftsmen and black-marketeers, while plotting their escape up the great river on one of the ships that still plied the waters, despite the Allied bombing.

“Enumerate,” said Vater Otto, and Emanuel knew what that meant. He gestured to the children, to the boy and the girl in their flannels, and without compunction asked them to turn over to him whatever fungible possessions they had. Even at this point in the war, when the sound of the British and the American planes overhead daily and nightly was an everyday occurrence, there was still business to conduct, and scores to settle.

The boy was about 15, the girl about 12. “Wie heisst du?” Emanuel asked them each in turn, and they replied: Heinrich and Eva. Good German names both, but there was no time for that now. He took their gold and their timepieces and their diamonds, because for some reason it was less humiliating for them to hand over the last things of value they had in the world to a boy rather than to a man. He could see by the looks on their faces that they knew they were done for, that no matter what the lies of the Reich about the mercy of Adolf Hitler, about the model camps at Theresienstadt, that somehow the word had filtered back, as it always does, to torment its future victims with fear as they struggled against the inevitable.

“Ihr Telefon,” demanded Vater Otto, who made the call, and that was that. Security forces would round them up shortly, the German family who had been harboring them would be shot, and life for the rest of them would go on. Emanuel knew better than to ask why them and why now. No matter how hard the regime, there were always cracks not only in the facade but in the floorboards. No matter how deep the hatred, there were always tasks that needed to be done, preferably by slave labor but when that was not up to snuff, then by the black market. There were always things that could be overlooked, until they couldn’t. This family, obviously, had been one of them.

Which is what Skorzeny didn’t understand. Why stay? Why wait? When doom is imminent, why not flee? And even at that age, he already knew the answer:

Because for most people it is easier to refuse to believe than to confront the truth.

It was not weakness, not stupidity nor cowardice nor even indolence, but the ancient human fallacy of believing that tomorrow will be pretty much like today, different in only the particulars but never in the general. Until one day it is not. And today, this early morning, that day had come for both Jew and Aryan.

He didn’t care. That day had come for him seven months ago and, as far as he was concerned, it could come for the rest of humanity and he would not shed so much as a tear.

That evening, his father took him to a tavern, where they both drank beer vom Fass and dined as best one could under the circumstances. Despite the nightly air raids over German air space, Dresden had been largely untouched and every day that the people woke up to an intact city was another day that convinced them the Allies would leave them alone. There were no military targets here, he could hear the women say in the marketplace, we are far from the front and the fighting.

There was more worry about the advancing Soviets than there was about the Americans or the British. Dresden was safe; indeed, he suspected, that was one of the reasons his father was here, planning the next operation, the next counter-strike. Dresden was the only place left in Germany where you could think.

His father didn’t drink much, but on this evening he ordered a second Mass for both of them. Emanuel could feel the first already going to his head, but didn’t want to be thought a sissy or a coward. He was sent here to learn, and learning is what he was doing.

“Also, Jungs,” his father began. “Wir müssen singen.”

Looking back on that moment, if you had asked to him to provide a suitable valedictory for his last moment with his father, that was hardly the one he would have chosen. Although Vater Otto was a man of almost no words-garrulousness was not a quality highly prized by the National Socialists-when he did speak he spoke to the point, so this notion of breaking into song was unusual.

At that moment the dream came back to him-that instant before thought and word, before his father could open his mouth in song, before the second beer had loosened his inhibitions just enough for him to hear the music. In that moment, instead of hearing the music, Emanuel saw the thing he had dreaded seeing since last summer, the thing that had been kept from his young eyes. The thing that, in his dream, had turned him into a monster unworthy even of ritual sacrifice:

Piano wire.

A more horrible way to die could hardly be imagined. Jesus on the Cross at Golgotha, writhing in His agonies, but on a wire. It was hanging, but worse. The garrote, but worse. Strangulation, but worse. It was Death, come calling, but worse, without the smiling face brimming with the false promise of surcease and repose, without-

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind

Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind

Er hat den Knaben wohl in den Arm

Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm

Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?

Siehst Vater Du den Erlkönig nicht?

Der Erlkönig mit Kron’und Schweif?

Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif

– the Erlkönig’s seductive lullaby.

Everyone knew the words, of course. This was Germany, and the words were by Goethe. This was the greater Reich, and the music was by Schubert. Next to Gretchen am Spin-nrad, this was the song by Schubert that everybody knew, and so it was no surprise when first one man, then another and then another picked up his father’s tune, and then someone went to the inevitable, ubiquitous piano in the corner and began pounding out the triplets in the right hand and fingering the ominous bass in the left, the bass line that had spawned a hundred, no a thousand, silent-movie scores, the motif that signaled danger, destruction, and death, as symbolized by the Erl-King himself: lethal but seductive, and always fatal.

It brought the ghosts. To everyone in the room, the song brought the ghosts, in the form of the pleading boy, who begs his father to ride faster and faster, to escape the lullaby of the Erl-King,

“Oh, father do you not hear what the Erl-King whispers so close to my ear?”

But he could hear it. Could hear it through the singing and alcoholic haze, through the cigarette smoke. That voice that whispered so smoothly and so sinuously in his ear, the voice of temptation. He could hear. He could always hear it. It never left him. But he would be damned if it would kill him.

The men were just finishing up the song, the last verse…

Dem Vater grauset’s, er reitet geschwind,

Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,

Erreicht den Hof mit Müh’und Not;

In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

…when he heard the air-raid sirens, and knew that the ghosts would soon once more be walking among them, the Erl-King leading them.

Friends would forsake you, but ghosts never would.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

42nd Street

Devlin had no idea who the black man was or who the white man was, and didn’t care, but it took him less than an instant to sort out the perp from the cop. As the man with the knife made his move, Devlin snaked out a hand and, with one powerful yank, dragged him into the shadows.

Deadweight was heavy, as every fireman knew. Much easier to lift a breathing 250-pound man than a dead 110-pound woman. The man with the knife was only half dead, which meant he was still slightly buoyant as Devlin yanked him into what had been a building entrance. As he’d learned long ago, you could always count on the cooperation of an obstreperous victim, who rather than resist would move toward you, to fight you, even though it would prove to be a fatal mistake, as indeed it did.

The knife was quickly knocked aside. Devlin applied the pressure of both thumbs to the base of the man’s throat, in the little hollow known as the supra-sternal notch; sexy on a woman, so vulnerable on a man. A sharp wrench of the neck and the job was done.

Which left the cop.

Devlin pulled a balaclava down over his face and approached the cop. He couldn’t risk exposure, but he didn’t want to leave the poor bastard there, bleeding. He had to get that shoulder wound cleaned, fast.

The cop was a lot faster than he looked. In a flash, he retrieved the old.38 and had it in the middle of Devlin’s chest. All it would take was a little pressure and Devlin would be gone.

He smashed the cop in his wounded shoulder, then clipped him on the jaw. From firsthand experience, he knew how much the blow to the bullet wound was going to hurt, and he counted on its causing the man to drop the gun or at least take his finger off the trigger. Thank God for double-action revolvers when the hammer was not cocked.

The cop sagged, then fell back. Quickly, Devlin got out a first-aid kit he had designed himself after years in the field. His flashlight had come in handy in New Orleans, and it was just as useful here: quickly, he cleaned the wound and tweezed out any foreign materials. Then he stabbed the cop with a quick hit of morphine, so that when he woke up, which wouldn’t be long, he wouldn’t hurt so much. And of course by then Devlin would be long gone.

He rifled through the man’s pockets to find his ID: Francis Xavier Byrne, Captain, and chief of the Counter-Terrorism Unit. What were the odds?

Actually, the odds were pretty good. Everyone who had ever lived or visited midtown Manhattan had had the experience of looking up and seeing an old friend from high school across the bar, or encountering a former boss on the subway, which begged the question of how many times could that have happened were it not for fate: that you miss the old flame by a matter of minutes or even seconds; that you turned your head and so didn’t see the guy who’d owed you money for ten years.

So here, in a mostly deserted Times Square, in the middle of a firefight, how unusual was it really that he should encounter the one man he needed to know, the one many who could really be of use to him down the line, either as an ally or as a decoy? Using a hand scanner, he quickly sucked up all Byrne’s personal information and uplinked it to CSS. He also got the numbers of the cop’s department phone and the personal cell phone they weren’t supposed to carry, but all of them did. He felt around for a drop piece, but didn’t find any. This guy was both very honest and very sure of himself.

Devlin cracked some smelling salts-that’s what they still called them-under Byrne’s nose and saw the man’s eyelids flutter. He was going to be fine. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and stuck it in the cop’s inside breast pocket, where he kept his shield.

Then he was gone.

Byrne took a deep breath and staggered to his feet. The noises and shouts and screams and gunfire from the direction of Times Square grew louder. There was no time for reflection, nor for wonderment at miracles. There were still ghosts who were not yet ghosts, and Frankie Byrne had to save as many of them as he could. Then he stopped-

His dad’s service revolver was in his hand, although he couldn’t really remember how it got there. So it was true: this really was the kind of gun they would have to pry from his cold, dead hands. Then he noticed that his wounded shoulder had been expertly field dressed, and that there was little or no pain. He had a vague memory of a man with his face concealed, a brief struggle…but that might have been the morphine talking.

Morphine? Since when were they dealing with terrorists who brought their own corpsmen with them? And why would a terrorist not just kill him, but save him?

So he wasn’t a terrorist then, even though, as memory returned, he was wearing a balaclava, just like the old PLO Fatah guys had worn back in the day. Which meant there was a foreign element in the city, that Manhattan wasn’t truly sealed, and that he could only be a fed of some kind. FBI? No, they weren’t that good…

Then-voices from behind. “Hey, mister,” said one of them and at first Frankie couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. He turned, ready for anything, gun trained-

A boy, then an older girl. Finally, a woman. All three were covered with soot and grime but no blood that he could see.

“Don’t shoot, mister,” said the kid.

“I’m Hope Gardner,” said the woman.

“I’m a cop,” said Francis Byrne. He hadn’t said that in years. It felt good.

And now to work.

The passage through the PATH train tunnel had been uneventful. The cameras might have picked up his presence, but in the half-light of the shut-down tunnel, no one would be able to make him out, even if they bothered to go back and look at the grainy security films, which they wouldn’t. In one of the service bays-the tunnel was lined with them every few hundred yards; they contained emergency equipment, oxygen, firefighting canisters, first-aid supplies-he had found what he was looking for: a spec-ops version of the Lewis Machine and Tool MRP semi-automatic AR rifle with a SOPMOD buttstock and firing the 6.8 SPC (“special purpose cartridge”) round. The rifle was broken down into five component parts, including a suppressor and a Schmidt und Bender 3-12x50 mm scope, which meant he could shoot the eyes out of anything at ranges up to one hundred meters and beyond. The best part was that, with a hex head torque wrench, you could sub different calibers and barrel lengths on the weapon, depending on availability and necessity. There were also a few concussion grenades and some climbing clips in case he needed them, as well as a netbook with a satellite uplink, with which he could access all but the most secure NSA databases.

As in Mumbai, the attackers were coordinating via cell phones, which meant his instincts had been right. The NYPD’s first reaction probably had been to shut down cell service, but his instructions to Seelye had obviously been executed, and he could read them clearly. No point in deactivating the bubble when it was going to be your best friend, and right now they might as well be wearing signs around their necks advertising their locations. As long as his uplink held, and they remained relatively stationary, he’d be able to identify and terminate any of them the cops didn’t get to first.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

In Mumbai, the cops had been hampered by a lack of technology: they could record the cell phone conversations of the attackers, but they couldn’t triangulate and track them in real time. As a result, the killers had been left free to roam throughout the city, shooting up the train station, the Jewish center, and the luxury hotel pretty much with impunity until they were finally surrounded and cut down by superior firepower. It was agonizing to listen to, these conversations between the delusional young men who thought they were fighting and dying for Allah and their handler in Pakistan, who so casually sent all but one of them to their deaths. The targets had been carefully selected for maximum object-lesson value, and each gunman had been kitted out not only with armaments but maps and building plans, so as to make his deadly work go as smoothly as possible. The quality of mercy had not been strained, since there was none; Indian, Jew, and foreign tourist alike had been gunned down without so much as a single act of mercy, since the word had no meaning in this context. With the killers on a quest for martyrdom, the victims were nothing more than means to an end, their lives as meaningless as the locks of hair and the scraps of flesh from his victims that a serial killer kept not as a memento but as proof of his own skill and moral rectitude.

The killers had gone to school on the Mumbai attack, that much was clear. The attack on Times Square had been well-coordinated, the timing of the subway explosion perfect, the sealing of at least the Holland Tunnel a masterstroke. In fact, Devlin was counting on their professionalism. Professionals were many things, but one thing above all was that they were predictable. Training had instilled in them discipline and with discipline came adherence to the rules-not arbitrary rules but rules that worked, rules that were proven to keep your ass alive in the toughest spots. Professionals could be dealt with, as he had dealt with Milverton in Paris and London; you might win or lose in direct hand-to-hand combat, but you knew the rules of the game.

Amateurs, however, were a different story. Most of them could be picked off rather easily, since their true-believer rage caused them to blunder time and again, as they hoped to make up for in anger what they lacked in basic tradecraft. Amateurs were like the guy who drove all the way across the country, took the Metro to the Pentagon, and opened fire at the guards at the civilian entrance; he managed to wound two before they cut him down and killed him. He’d made his point, but for what? He should have just shot himself back home in California and saved time.

Tyler had reacted exactly as the attackers had hoped he would, by sealing off the city and leaving the task to the NYPD. That’s what he would have done, thought Devlin, play it right down the middle, leaving it to the pros without making a federal case out of it, but inserting some agents just in case. How many hands Tyler was playing, of course, was known only to him and maybe to Seelye; no doubt there would be other Branch 4 ops involved, plus any military units, probably at the platoon level, that they might have in-filtrated. But there wasn’t going to be any big action-even a reporter would eventually notice that, and Tyler ’s only hope lay in ending this fast without hyping it, mourning the dead and rebuilding the city as quickly as possible. With any luck, he could spin the entire episode to his advantage, have Americans rally round the flag, hand out yellow ribbons to his heart’s content, have his Hollywood buddies organize a couple of telethons, and hope like hell the rebuilding effort didn’t turn out to be Freedom Tower II. It was his only chance if he wanted a second term.

In the end, of course, none of that really mattered to Devlin. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it or die trying. The weightier issues of state were best left to the men and women to whom they were assigned, however inept or unqualified they might be; the decisions he made in the field were tactical, not strategic. His failure to kill Skorzeny when he had the man in his grasp in Clairvaux was something he was going to have to live with, and Devlin had not the slightest doubt in his mind that whatever soup he was about to walk into had something to do with that failure. Emanuel Skorzeny was a sick, twisted individual animated in equal parts by greed and hatred, and he would continue his atheist’s war against God and civilization until the day somebody proved to him the reality of Hell.

They were swarming now, the enemies of America. For decades, maybe even centuries, they had lain in wait, hoping to take down the country and the civilizational ethos it represented. They had attacked from within and without. They had sent infiltrators disguised as philosophers, as artists, as educators, as clergymen, as patriots, and, the worst, as lawyers to manipulate the system, bore in, and hollow it out. They had created a mind-set by which up was down, black was white, and in was out. They had called into question every tenet of the American experiment and posited that it was illegitimate and inimical. They had used the failures of other societies as proof of the malfeasance of the American society. And now their handiwork lay all around him-the smoking rubble of Times Square.

And yet Devlin welcomed this challenge. Not solely for the thrill of the fight-that was a given. With his ticket out already punched, he could leave the fray whenever he wanted and, in the aftermath of Edwardsville, he had thought to depart and take Seelye down with him. But she had changed all that.

But his welcoming of the challenge had roots far deeper. Devlin engaged because by the very act of engaging, he was proclaiming the best of American values. Most of the time, the debate over the soul and the future of the country came where it properly belonged, in the classrooms, in Congress, in the newspapers and the blogosphere, and on the political stump. But war was politics by other means, and so when it came to that, as Jefferson knew it must, it had to be fought with the same passionate ferocity. As Al Capone famously said, “in my neighborhood you get farther with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.” The problem had been that, since the end of World War II, the poison had seeped into the body politic, Schopenhauer’s Wille zur Macht had been delegitimized as the intellectually and morally absurd doctrine of “proportionate” response had gained first a toe-hold, then a foothold and finally had become, if not accepted doctrine among war-fighters, then at least the media-fueled template that framed the issue and thus limited discussion.

All of this could be argued in the pages of one of Jake Sinclair’s newspapers. Devlin was prepared to argue it where the argument properly belonged: on the battlefield. Manhattan was now a petri dish of political pathology, a lab experiment into which he had now injected himself.

He stepped over some rubble and looked around. He was in the remains of what had once been a legit theater, but was now a heap of rubble. He ducked down behind a collapsed wall, popped open his netbook, and got a read on the situation. Using an advance logarithm that screened out legit subscribers, emergency workers, and governmental accounts from possible rogues, he counted thirteen separate suspicious entities in use within a ten-block radius. He wouldn’t have to take them all out-the cops would take care of some of them-so he would start with the most difficult targets, the ones whose locations made them feel the most secure, and make an example out of them. Against these adversaries, there was nothing like a head on a pike to focus their attention on what was about to happen to them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Midtown Manhattan

Alexander Stegmaier had never heard of Minsky’s, nor seen the movie about the famous raid, nor had any appreciation at all of the famous burlesque house, so the irony of the fact that he was standing inside the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street, which had once proudly been the Republic and the flagship of the Minsky empire, was completely lost on him. He wasn’t interested in naked women, except in the up-close-and-personal, but as he had no experience with the strange and exotic species, it was all theoretical.

Never mind. He was standing in the heart of the modern Gomorrah, the city of such wicked depravity that the Brothers had not stopped trying to take it down, and never would until it was leveled. The city that once gloried in its sinfulness, latterly become a home to “family entertainment,” as if that would save it from God’s wrath. This vile cesspool, from which was he was even now picking off pedestrians from his perch in the second-story window.

Alex Stegmaier was not a Muslim and would have been horrified at the thought. His alliance with the Brothers was pragmatic, not religious, but since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it was not hard for them to make common cause, at least temporarily, until such time as the apocalypse was well and truly summoned, after which it was up to beings far greater than himself to sort out the final conflict. His job was to bring it on.

At first, the cars had been his primary targets. It was so satisfying to pull the trigger, hear the glass shatter, and watch the effects as the car veered, accelerated, or simply stopped, depending on whether his bullet had found a home in flesh or metal. It was not that he was a crack shot exactly, but his periods of training in Oregon, in the mosques of Dearborn, and in the encampments in upstate New York had given him a self-confidence that he had always lacked back home in Marin County, California. There, he had always been a misfit, a nerd, a weakling who had never been much good either at science or math, not to mention hopeless at sports. He stuttered, which left him off the debate team, and after he’d been routinely beaten by a parade of underclassmen at chess, he’d stopped competing at pretty much everything.

He leaned out the window. The main action lay to the east, but the west was a target-rich environment of cop cars and emergency vehicles, clustered around the Eighth Avenue intersection. He looked through his 8x-power scope and found an unmarked vehicle, overturned. A man was trying to drag another man, obviously wounded, out of the wrecked car. Alex decided that they would be good target practice and was lining up a shot when his cell phone rang.

Damn!

He lowered his sights and glanced at the caller ID: Control. He didn’t know Control’s name, but that was what they all called him, all of the brave warriors on the operation, whose names and real identities were unknown to each other and known only to him. Control was as close as he ever hoped to get to God in this life.

“Tammy.” That was his code name, for Mount Tamalpais, the sleeping Indian maiden turned into a mountain that dominated Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. It was a girl’s name, and he resented it a little, but he was not about to let on about that now. Not in the middle of the most glorious moments of his life.

“Where are you?” The man had a slight foreign accent, although being a Californian, almost everybody sounded foreign to Alex.

“Base One,” he replied. “Neuer Sieg.” He liked to show off his knowledge of German, because he thought it made him sound more threatening; even if the grammar and the cases more often than not defeated him.

“Good. Hold in place, but get ready to fall back, to the east. A great vision of glory awaits you.”

Alex tried to control his excitement. The vision of glory was something he had sought for many years, the moment of transcendence that would allow him to lord it over, however briefly, his tormentors. That was all he ever asked of God when he was at prayer: that just for one brief instant, he would not only be in command but that the others, his antagonists, would be forced to acknowledge his dominance. He would see the looks in their eyes, the worm turned, the worm Ouroboros devouring its own tail, the perfect circle of life and death.

And he knew something the others didn’t, the swine. This was one of the things that was going not only to win him accolades and plaudits, but earn them: he knew, being German and all, that the word Worm didn’t mean worm at all, but Dragon. He’d seen the movie and read the book and even looked up the images of the paintings online, he knew all about Blake and his Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, and if he could not appreciate the visions for their artistic conception and execution, he could happily acknowledge their raw power, their controlled glimpse into the divine madness of Revelation.

Blake, however, was long gone, at one with the worms, small “w,” returned to the earth by being devoured and shat out the assholes of other creatures, rejuvenating Mother Gaia as they destroyed one another. Just as he was doing now.

Damn that woman. Even amid all this tumult, her shrieks had been driving him crazy. Once more he leaned out the window and peered through his scope. This time he found her.

She was across the street, on the roof of what had been the AMC Theaters. The building was on fire, so it was only a matter of time before she would finally shut the fuck up and take those two mewling brats with her, but there was no law that said he couldn’t hasten her demise along. It wouldn’t be an easy shot, but at least it was a free throw-no one would notice, and if he bagged her, so much the better. Practice made perfect.

He fired.

And missed.

At least he assumed he missed. There was no reaction from the woman, at least not that he could notice, and the damn kids were still hopping around like Mexican jumping beans. But they weren’t going anywhere. The flames were licking up the side of the building, the foundations were visibly shifting, and pretty soon their only choice would be to go down with the ship or stand there and let him put a bullet through their goddamn skulls.

He fired again.

And missed.

Shit.

He was lining up the third shot when the phone rang again. He didn’t want to take the call, but he was a good soldier, this was his duty, and the kill could wait. On an island of two million people, there was plenty of time and plenty of targets.

“Tammy.”

The voice again. “Bring as many souls to God as you can.”

“Where do you want me after that?”

“That is known only to God. But to you, brave warrior, it is given to defend the Brothers. You will shoot them as they come from the west. Do you see them, O my brother?”

Alex Stegmaier glanced down the street; the sun was hanging over Jersey now, lowering into his eyes.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Many are the police. They wish to kill you. You understand that, O my brother?”

“Of course I do. You think I am afraid?”

“I know you are not. But sometimes to a man comes fear unbidden, like a houri in the night, and he cannot resist her seductive beauty. You understand that, O my brother?”

“I do.”

“And you are willing to confront this temptress, this whore?”

“Of course I am. As I have many times before.” That part was a lie, of course, and perhaps Control knew that. But it was a brave lie, and when the time came, he knew that he would in fact have the courage to view Death’s handmaiden unflinchingly.

“Then go bravely to your reward, my son.”

“To the virgin?”

“Always to the virgin. Let her know pleasure only through you.”

“Thy will be done.”

“Not my will, but that of Allah.”

Alexander Stegmaier was about to say something clever, but he couldn’t think of anything. “Whatever,” he knew, would simply not do, not given the high-toned and -falutin level of this discourse, which was like something out of a Sir Walter Scott novel, maybe The Talisman. Cleverness had never been his long suit.

He was still trying to think of something when he realized he was looking down the barrel of a gun. There was obviously a man holding it, but in the darkness of the parterre of the New Victory, he couldn’t make out his face or his features.

“Do you know what this is?”

Alex Stegmaier thought hard. They had pointed a number of weapons at him during his training, and he thought he could still get most of them, but this one was a little different.

“It’s a Colt.45.”

“Very good.”

Alex felt himself swelling with pride. “Am I right?”

“No, but pretty close.”

The man lowered the sidearm a bit, so Alex could get a good look at it. He must be one of the Brothers, he thought, come to show him the way out of this place, and into the light. “Do you know who I am?”

“A Brother,” replied Alex, confidently.

The man gave a rueful laugh. At least it sounded rueful, although in this environment it could have been jocular or sardonic or any of those other words he had never quite learned the meaning of back in high school in Marin County. Nuance was for chumps with time on their hands. He was going places.

“This is a Judge,” said the Brother. “It is the last thing you will ever see. Do you understand that?”

Alex said he thought he did. It occurred to him that perhaps the Brother was going to give the weapon to him, for use in one final blaze of martyrdom. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m your angel.”

Now this was something Stegmaier could understand. He would never let on, not even to this Brother, but he’d just about had it with the other Brothers, the ones who were always spouting off about Allah and Akbar and all those other guys, who in the end might as well have been Vishnu or Durga or one of those other Hindu gods, not counting the cows. Angels were in his wheelhouse. He could sing the choirs: angels and archangels, thrones…

This was no time for the damn cell phone to ring, not with him so close to heaven, but it did. He was about to push the talk button, to speak with Control, when the Angel took the instrument from his grasp. Instead of speaking, though, he waited until he heard Control’s voice at the other end of the ether. Then he said: “Quels est-ce que sont les noms de Dieu?” followed by a stream of gibberish that sounded like the language the Brothers sometimes spoke, but different. Alex Stegmaier was never very good at languages, not even English.

The Angel hung up, but pocketed his phone. Well, this was war, so of course he would take it. Control had told him to kill anyone who tried to take his instrument away from him, but under the circumstances-and given that he was a Brother-there was not much he could do about it. After all, it was only a cell phone. Besides, he had more urgent, more pressing concerns.

“What kind of angel are you?” he asked. “Angel, archangel, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, powers, dominions, what? There are nine of them, you know, divided into three choirs.”

“Only one kind,” the angel replied. “The Angel of Death.”

Alex thrilled to this news. A real Brother at last, not one of those muttering fakirs with their beads and their dirty feet, the feet they were always washing, to no apparent end. How could you wash your feet when you hardly used any water? For him, a nice long hot shower was always the answer for what ailed him.

He was still thinking about, and anticipating, a hot shower when the Brother did something entirely unexpected, at least as far as Alex was concerned. He fired.

The shotgun shell blew through Stegmaier’s forehead, tearing off the top of his head and leaving behind only the mandible and one eyeball still attached to the stalk. Devlin had seen many men die before, and killed more than a few of them himself, but this death was different. This was not a wartime killing but an act of mercy, an act of deliverance. This was not a death to be mourned, or even to be received indifferently. This was a death to be appreciated.

He had the cell phone. He had the number. And now, just to be sporting, their runner knew he was on to them. What was the point of being the best at what you did if there was no one around to appreciate it? The poor boy on the floor had met his maker, and gone contentedly to his end. But something told Devlin that the man on the other end of the line-the Iranian, whom he had just threatened in Farsi-would not go quite so quietly, or happily.

Very well then. Let it be.

Night was falling, and darkness had always been his friend.