Alert

Chapter 1

Up, up, and reluctantly away four hours later, I sat mid-cabin in my Aer Lingus flight’s Airbus A330 feeling pretty darn sorry for myself.

Forgoing the movie on the little TV in the seat back in front of me, I leaned my forehead against the cold plastic window, staring at the rags of dirty clouds and the gray North Atlantic sailing away beneath the long, slender wing.

What I had said to Mary Catherine still held very much true. I did not want to be on this plane. Not without her. Not after the previous week. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the wind in her hair atop that white-rock cliff. The moonlight on the curve of her back in those cold farmhouse rooms night after night.

I mean, was my brain broken? No matter the complications, parting just didn’t make sense. You flew toward a woman like that. Not away.

This plane is heading in the wrong damn direction, I thought, shaking my head as I squinted down at the gray sea and sky.

I was going into my pocket for some gum I’d bought at the Shannon duty-free shop to ease the ratcheting pressure in my ears when I found the folded note.

MICHAEL it said on the outside in Mary Catherine’s perfect script.

She must have slipped it in my jeans pocket before she chucked the pants out the window. I quickly unfolded it.

“Dear God, woman,” I whispered as I reread the note.

Dear God, I thought as I turned and looked out at the world rushing by through my tears.

Chapter 2

Pretty much everything was gray as we made our final approach to New York City. The city skyline, the raining sky, the depths of my soul. I mean, I guess it was possible that things could have been more depressing as the plane touched down on the puddled tarmac.

But I doubt it.

I hadn’t slept a wink, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Mary Catherine still wasn’t with me. What else was there to say? Or think? Or do? Not much. In fact, nothing at all.

“Jet lag and a broken heart,” I mumbled as the flight attendant spouted some peppy “Welcome to New York” crap over the plane’s intercom. “Winning combination.”

Half an hour later, finally having escaped from the happy people over at customs, I was at a grim JFK-concourse fast-food joint trying to keep down a lukewarm burrito when I remembered to power my phone back on.

I yawned as the message bell went off like a slot-machine win. Then I stopped yawning. There were six text messages and five missed calls, all from HOME.

A dark swirl of panic ripped immediately through my jet lag. Because of the egregious cell-phone charges, I’d left explicit instructions for my family to call only if there was a true emergency. Something was up. I thumbed the Return Call button. Whatever the hell it was, it couldn’t be good.

“Hello?!” came Juliana’s panicked voice on the first ring.

“Juliana, it’s Dad. I just got off the plane at JFK. What is it?”

“Thank God you’re home. It’s Gramps, Dad. He’s missing. He was supposed to come over here last night to babysit around ten, but when we called the rectory at eleven, they said he’d left at nine thirty. He never made it back last night, Dad. Seamus is missing. We don’t know where he is!”

“Is the rectory housekeeper, Anita, still with you?” I said, grabbing my bag and hustling immediately back onto the concourse.

“No. I told her to go home last night, Dad. Don’t worry: I’m watching everybody.”

“I know you are, Juliana. You’re a good girl,” I said as calmly as I could as I tried to read the impossible terminal signs to find the exit. “What am I saying? I mean young woman. Don’t worry about Gramps. I’m sure he’s okay. Probably met an old friend and stayed over with him. I’m going to find him right now. I’ll call you the first I hear from him.”

“Okay, good. I’m so glad you and Mary Catherine are home,” she said.

I decided to leave out the fact that Mary Catherine was still stuck in Ireland for the time being. One catastrophe at a time.

“And don’t worry. Things are under control on this end. I love you so much, Dad,” Juliana said.

“I love you, too,” I said before I hung up.

My next call, as I finally spotted an actual exit sign, was to my buddies at the Ombudsman Outreach Squad on 125th Street.

“Brooklyn, hi. It’s Mike Bennett,” I said when Detective Kale answered. “I need a favor. You ever do a missing persons case?”

“Sure, plenty of them. Why? What’s up?”

“I just got off a plane out at Kennedy. My grandfather, Seamus Bennett, has been missing since around ten last night. He’s eighty-one, white male, white hair, five seven, around a hundred and seventy-five pounds, probably wearing black priest’s clothes. He left the Holy Name rectory on West Ninety-Sixth and Amsterdam last night around nine thirty, probably heading west for my building on West End and Ninety-Fifth. We’re especially worried about him because he recently had a stroke.”

“Seamus?” Brooklyn said. “Oh, no. I remember meeting him at Naomi Chast’s wake. I’m on it, Mike. I’ll check all the local hospitals and precincts.”

I finally went through some sliding doors into the cold, grim predawn street. Above the curbside taxi stand, rain pelted off a fading rusted sign from maybe the eighties-era Koch administration.

WELCOME TO NY. HOW YA DOIN’? it said.

Luckily, I didn’t have my service weapon with me because I might have emptied a magazine into it in reply.

“I’m stressed-out, New York,” I mumbled. “As usual. Fuhgeddaboudit!”

Chapter 3

I was stuck in my taxi on the 59th Street Bridge staring at the towers of Manhattan in the honking suicide evening rush-hour traffic when Brooklyn called me back.

The good news was that she thought she’d found Seamus, but the bad news was where she’d found him. I had the cabbie take me straight to West 106th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Brooklyn was actually waiting for me on the sidewalk twenty-five minutes later, when my cab finally made it to the Jewish Home Lifecare facility.

“He’s fine, Mike. I was just in there. He’s up on eight, and he’s fine,” Brooklyn said in greeting as I flew from the taxi to the facility’s front door.

“He’s in a nursing home, Brooklyn!” I snapped at her as I went inside and showed the security guard my shield. “I don’t call this fine. What the hell happened?”

“Twenty-Fourth Precinct was called at around ten fifteen,” Brooklyn said as we maneuvered around an old lady in a wheelchair and another one lying on a bed in the hallway. “Somebody reported a confused old man on the uptown platform of the Ninety-Sixth Street number one subway line.”

I shook my head picturing it. Seamus helpless on a subway platform, wandering around as the trains blew past. Dear Lord, did that hurt. No, please, I thought, not wanting it to be true.

“He wasn’t wearing his priest’s clothes, Mike. He was in sweats, and he didn’t have any ID on him. When police questioned him, he got emotional, so they brought him here. It’s the biggest old-age home in the area, so they thought he might have wandered away from here. They also have an Alzheimer’s special care unit, so it was actually a smart move,” she said as we arrived at the elevator.

“Alzheimer’s?” I said, panicking some more as I pushed the elevator’s call button about eighty-six times. “Seamus does not have Alzheimer’s.”

“I know, Mike,” Brooklyn said. “I just spoke to him. He just woke up. They sedated him when he came in, but he’s lucid now. You’ll see.”

Brooklyn surprised me by squeezing my hand.

“Listen, Mike. My grandmother is ninety-one. She’s usually fine, but every once in a while, she forgets things. Stuff like this is going to happen going forward. It’s natural.”

“Dad?” called a voice.

I turned around and saw Juliana coming in through the doorway of the facility with her siblings in their school uniforms. Behind her were Ricky, Eddie, Trent, Jane, Fiona, and Bridget, holding Chrissy and Shawna’s hands.

“Look! Daddy really is home!” Chrissy said, grabbing Shawna as she jumped up and down.

“Juliana, what are you doing?” I said as I hurried toward the children and convinced the utterly confused guard that they were all with me.

“I thought everybody was supposed to be in school,” I said to Juliana.

“They are, but then when you texted me about Seamus being here, I went and got everyone out. Brian just left from Fordham Prep, too. He’s on the train now. We all need to be here for Gramps. Is he sick?”

“Is Gramps going to die?” Shawna said, tears springing up in her eyes.

“No, no. He’s okay, honey. He just got a little confused, and they brought him here. He’s upstairs on eight,” I said as I lifted up Shawna and gave her a kiss.

“Where’s Mary Catherine? Upstairs with Gramps?” Juliana said after I thanked Brooklyn profusely and convinced her that I had things under control so she could go back to work.

“Wait,” I said, changing the subject. “How did you get everybody out of school?”

“I cannot tell a lie, Dad. I had to forge a note with your signature. Well, actually two of them. One for me and one for all the munchkins. You have to call Sister Sheilah, by the way. She didn’t want to release them to me, but I was kind of pushy, I guess, and she finally relented.”

Under normal circumstances such chicanery would, of course, be a no-no, but this was a four-alarm Bennett family emergency. Juliana knew as we all did that rule-bending was allowable when it came to being there for a family member in need. Especially Seamus.

I gave my oldest daughter a hug and a quick fist bump as we walked toward the elevator.

“Forgery and lying to nuns?” I whispered to her. “Right out of the old Bennett playbook. I admire your technique.”

Chapter 4

“Michael Sean Aloysius Bennett!” Seamus said as we came through his eighth-floor room’s open doorway to find him sitting in a chair laughing with a pretty young black woman in Tiffany-blue hospital scrubs.

“And the whole squad! The Lord save us all, you’re all a sight for sore eyes! You’ll not believe what’s happened to me, gang. I headed to your apartment house yesterday evening and lost my way, and now here I’ve woken up Jewish!”

We all laughed as we surrounded him in a group hug.

“Well, it’s nice to see you, too, Father. Believe me,” I said, choking back tears as I hugged this old man whom I loved as dearly as anyone on earth. I could admit to myself now that I was convinced that he was dead. Bonked on the head by a mugger or fallen down into a Con Edison manhole. To see him in one piece was truly a miracle.

“I hope everyone wasn’t worried. I must have given you all quite a scare. I tried to call the house when I woke up, but it just kept kicking into voice mail.”

“It’s fine, Seamus. It’s all going to be fine. First let’s get you out of here, okay?”

“Mr. Bennett?” the nice young black woman said to me. “I’m Dr. Blair Greenhalgh, head of the special care unit. Can I speak to you in the hall?”

“Sure,” I said. “Kids, keep Seamus company while I talk to the doctor.”

“Mike, wait. Come here,” Seamus said, embracing me again. “I knew you’d come and get me.”

A scared look came over his face. I hated seeing it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know what happened to me. I just got confused. It won’t happen again. Please don’t stick me in this place or any other place, okay? I’m fine.”

“I’ve got you covered, Gramps,” I said, giving him another hug. “I promise.”

I finally got out into the hallway with the doc.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bennett. I know this all must be quite a shock,” Dr. Greenhalgh said. “I saw from your grandfather’s preliminary medical history that he recently had a stroke in the right hemisphere of the brain. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “About three weeks ago.”

“Stroke survivors often experience multiple types of memory loss — verbal, visual, informational. They sometimes wander and get lost even in familiar places. Is Mr. Bennett on any medications?”

“Just cholesterol stuff.”

“Okay,” Dr. Greenhalgh said, nodding. “This could have been an anomaly. Sometimes memory problems just go away as part of the healing process, but in the meantime, you should try to really help your grandfather with establishing routines. Perhaps you could draw up a small notebook with emergency numbers in it to keep on his person in case he gets confused again. Exercise is great, as is keeping him engaged. That’s about it. I’ll get the nurse to give you my contact info and get you guys out of here.”

Oh, he’s engaged, all right, I thought, watching him through the glass in the door after the kind doctor left. He and all the kids were standing in a circle holding hands, heads down, their lips moving in prayer. I smiled as I stood there watching them. You can’t keep a good man down.

Thank you, God, I prayed along with them as I closed my own eyes. For all of us being safe and back together again.

Almost all of us, I thought, patting the note in my pocket.

That’s when it happened. Right then and there in the corridor, jet-lagged out of my mind.

I opened my eyes and was suddenly home.

Chapter 5

The forty-foot-long utility truck called a Supervac gave off a low grumble as it weaved slowly through the Broadway traffic in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights around noon.

The size and appearance of a high-tech garbage truck, with a huge hose attached to one side, the fifty-thousand-pound industrial vehicle was used to clean manholes and construction sites. Fully loaded, it was tricky to maneuver in the congested city traffic, especially in terms of braking, which was why the driver was keeping it at a slow and steady twenty-five miles per hour.

The truck itself was about ten years old and on its last legs from wear and use. The newest thing about it was the fake decal on its cab door that said it was from Con Edison, the New York City — area gas and electric company.

The driver was a doughy, vaguely Italian-looking guy in his forties wearing a blue Con Ed hard hat with matching baggy blue Con Ed coveralls. The con was definitely on, he thought, raising his stubbled jowls with a quick grin.

Then, as the truck finally approached its destination at the southeast corner of bustling 168th Street, he suddenly pointed ahead through the windshield.

“Uh-oh. Problem, Mr. Joyce,” he said to the man in the passenger seat beside him. “There’s a cop car parked right over our manhole. What do I do? Keep going?”

Mr. Joyce glanced up from the cluttered clipboard in his lap. Like the driver, he also wore bogus baggy Con Ed — blue coveralls and a matching hard hat. With the Oakley Sport sunglasses he wore under his hard hat, all you could tell about him was that he was pale and had a dark, reddish-brown goatee.

“Of course not. We’re on a tight schedule, Tony. Just pull alongside,” Mr. Joyce said calmly.

“Pull alongside?” the driver, Tony, said nervously. “Are you sure we shouldn’t just come back a little later? It’s the cops!”

“Listen to orders, Tony. Just pull alongside and let me handle it,” Mr. Joyce said as he rolled down his window.

There was only one cop in the cruiser. He was a lanky middle-aged black officer, and he looked up none too happily as Mr. Joyce gave him a friendly wave from the truck window. The cop had his hat off and a sandwich unwrapped in his lap.

“Sorry to bother you, Officer, but you’re parked over a manhole we need to gain access to,” Mr. Joyce explained, trying to make his voice sound as American as possible.

“Gimme a break, would you?” the cop said, flicking some five-dollar-foot-long lettuce off his chin. “Why don’t you go and take a nap somewhere for half an hour? When you come back, I’ll be gone.”

“I wish I could, Officer, honestly. But this one’s a real red ball. Apparently there’s some kind of power problem at the hospital,” said Mr. Joyce as he gestured at the multibuilding NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center complex across Broadway.

The cop gave him a savage look, mumbling something about red and balls, as he lowered his lunch and finally pulled out.

After Mr. Joyce hopped out of the cab, it took them less than a minute to maneuver the massive truck into position. As Tony got the manhole open with the hook, Mr. Joyce removed a blueprint from his clipboard and knelt with Tony at the rim of the hole.

“Start jackhammering right there,” he said, pointing into the manhole, a little left of the center of its south wall. “Should be about six feet in. It’ll look like square aluminum ducting, the same you would see in an HVAC system. Text me immediately when you see it. Oh, and watch those electrical cables at your back while you’re working, if you don’t wish to get fried. Half of them are uninsulated, and all of them are quite live.”

“You got it, Mr. Joyce. I’m, uh... on it,” said Tony, repeating an advertising expression that Con Edison had used in their commercials a few years before.

“This is no time for joking, Tony. Just get to work,” Mr. Joyce said.

Chapter 6

When Mr. Joyce got to his feet, the other Supervac truck they had stolen was just pulling up to the curb. His partner, Mr. Beckett, climbed down from the cab in the baggy nondescript Con Ed getup with sunglasses. He could almost have been Mr. Joyce’s double, except his goatee was jackrabbit white instead of reddish-brown.

Without speaking, both men crossed the sidewalk and descended the steps into the 168th Street subway station. MetroCarding through the turnstile, they bypassed a sign directing them to the A train and found the concrete corridor for the number 1 line elevator.

“This station is one of the deepest in the entire system, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said as they stepped off the elevator onto the bridge that connects the uptown and downtown sides of the massive arched number 1 line’s underground station. “We’re presently ten stories below street level.”

Mr. Beckett nodded. He was pleased with his partner’s automatic use of their code names now that they were finally operational. All the exhaustive lessons he’d given his young partner about tradecraft had definitely sunk in.

“Why does it say ‘IRT’ here while upstairs, on the A line, it says ‘IND’? What do the initials mean?” Mr. Beckett wanted to know.

“It doesn’t matter for our purposes,” Mr. Joyce said, frowning. “You will find it boring.”

“No, I won’t. I promise. We have time to kill before that fool Tony gets to the air shaft. I’m curious. You don’t think I enjoy your little history lessons, Mr. Joyce, but I actually do.”

Mr. Beckett was right. Science was Mr. Joyce’s forte, but history was his true passion. Since he had arrived in the country years before, he had found the history of America, and especially New York City, surprisingly rich and fascinating. He was looking forward to delving into it more deeply at his leisure once all was said and done.

Especially, he thought, since he was about to make a great deal of the city’s history himself in the coming days.

“The abbreviations actually mean nothing anymore,” Mr. Joyce explained. “They’re just old subway nomenclature, remnants of the time when the city subway system was divided into lines run by separate companies instead of the current unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority. IRT stands for Inter-borough Rapid Transit, while IND stands for a company called the Independent Subway System. You may have noticed the abbreviation BMT on other lines, which stands for the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation. I could go into detail about the three lines and how they fit into the subway system’s famous color-coded numerical and alphabetical signage if you wish.”

“No, that’s okay. I need to stay awake,” Mr. Beckett said and laughed.

“I told you that you would find it boring,” Mr. Joyce replied with a sigh.

“On that, as on most things,” Mr. Beckett said as he clapped his protégé playfully on the shoulder, “you were annoyingly correct, my friend. How does it finally feel to be out of the lab and into the field?”

Mr. Joyce watched as a pigeon suddenly flapped out and down from a tunnel ledge above them and started pecking at some garbage between the uptown rails. Then he shrugged.

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t feel. I think.”

Mr. Beckett smiled widely.

“That is why you are so valuable. Now, give me damage estimates again in tangible human terms.”

“At the minimum, we’re looking at massive damage to the tunnel, shutting down service for months, and obviously terrifying this city like nothing since nine eleven.”

“And at the maximum?” said Mr. Beckett, hope in his bright-blue eyes behind the shades.

Mr. Joyce folded his hands together as he closed his eyes. Mr. Beckett thought he looked almost Asian for a moment, like a pale, goateed Buddha.

“We collapse a dozen city blocks, destroying the hospital complex, much of Washington Heights, and killing thousands,” Mr. Joyce finally said.

Mr. Beckett nodded at this pensively.

“And we go when, again?” he said.

“Tomorrow night.”

“So many decisions,” Mr. Beckett said, gazing north as a downtown-bound 1 train pulled, clattering, into the station. “So very little time.”

Chapter 7

“Dad, do I really have to wear this?”

Sunday morning around ten thirty, I waited until I heard the question repeated two more times before I looked up from an open old tin of black Kiwi shoe polish that I was using to teach Eddie how to shine his shoes.

The question was posed by Jane, who stood there in her lavender flower-print Easter dress. Her Easter dress from the previous year. Considering she’d grown about two inches in the meantime, she looked a little like Alice in Wonderland, suddenly enormous after consuming the “eat me” cake — or was it the “drink me” drink?

“It is a tad formal, I guess,” I said as I buffed at Eddie’s school shoes, “and, um, weird-fitting.”

“Gee, Dad. That’s really what a girl wants to hear. ‘What a weird-fitting dress you’re wearing.’ You really know how to pay a compliment.”

“Give me a break, Jane, will you, please? I’m up to my neck here. Do you have another nice dress?”

“Um, no. Mary Catherine was supposed to take all us girls shopping before she left, remember? Or maybe you forgot. Like the way you forgot to bring Mary Catherine home.”

I winced. I probably deserved that one. In fact, I knew I did. The fact that Mary Catherine hadn’t come home with me was still stinging to everyone. To me most of all.

“Figure it out, Jane, okay? Please? You can wear jeans, I guess, if they’re nice. We have to look really good, remember? That’s the point here. That’s the theme. Sweet and presentable and appropriate, okay?”

“Hey, everyone! Dad said we can wear jeans!” Jane shouted as she took off down the hallway.

“Dad, can I borrow your razor?” someone else asked a minute later.

This new query came from a groggy-looking Brian, still in his pj’s. I looked at his smooth, pale, sixteen-year-old cheeks. There was no hair to speak of. I didn’t say this, of course. Not passing on my observation was a no-brainer. Dad 101. Maybe his eyesight was better than mine. Make that definitely.

“In my medicine cabinet,” I said. “But hurry up. Please. We need to do this for Seamus. We need to pull together, or we’re all going to be late.”

Ten minutes later, I had everyone ready and gathered in the living room. Jane had actually found another dress and was looking quite spiffy, as was everyone else. Even I was wearing a tie for the special occasion. Everyone was present and accounted for except Seamus and Ricky and Juliana.

Which reminds me, I thought as I checked my watch. I nodded to Fiona, and at my signal she hit the stereo as the clock struck eleven precisely.

The door to the back bedroom opened just as the first strains of “Immaculate Mary” filled the room. Out the door came Juliana, holding a bookmarked Bible, followed by Ricky, wearing his altar-boy robe and holding a lit candle, then lastly, Seamus, wearing a surplice and clasping his hands in prayer.

As they arrived at the front of the room, I elbowed a daydreaming Trent to up the volume or, better yet, actually start singing from the lyric sheet I had printed out.

Since Seamus needed to take it easy after his stroke, I’d decided to turn the apartment into Saint Bennett’s Cathedral this Sunday and do Mass at home. He seemed to be fine enough since we brought him home, but I was still quite worried about him, of course. Not having Mary Catherine here to help me keep an eye on him, I decided to err on the side of caution.

The good news was that Gramps really seemed blown away when he saw the furniture rearranged in the living room and all the kids in their Sunday best.

“Good morning, parishioners,” he said, winking, as he stood smiling at the front of the room.

“Good morning, Father,” everyone said, smiling back.

Seamus stood there, then suddenly brought a finger to his open mouth as a vacant look glazed his eyes.

“Now, what’s next?” he said, looking down at the carpet, confused.

“Seamus?” I said as I stepped forward.

“Psych!” he said to me, snapping out of it after another moment as everyone laughed.

“Don’t worry: I’m not ready for the glue factory yet, Detective. Still a marble or two rolling around in this old gray head.”

“Very funny, Father,” I said, stepping back. “I’ll be the one with the stroke next if you keep it up.”

“Nonsense,” Seamus said. “Now, where was I? I know. Let us begin today as we begin every day. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Chapter 8

That evening, I was minding my own business, sheltering in place on the couch with a pint of Smithwick’s, about to watch the Yanks at Boston — ESPN’s game of the week — with Seamus and the rest of the boys, when I made the mistake of checking my phone for messages.

My boss, Miriam Schwartz, had sent a text about an hour before. In it she let me know that during the week I’d been in Ireland, the department had appointed a guy I’d vaguely heard of named Neil Fabretti to be its newest chief of detectives.

Chief Fabretti was trying to get up to speed before officially starting on Monday, Miriam explained, and was requesting a quick informal meet and greet with his transition team at his house up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. In the next half hour, I thought, groaning, as I checked my watch.

Get up to speed during a New York — Boston rubber game? I thought as I stared at my phone, dumbfounded. I’d been busting my hump all day with laundry and homework and getting dinner on the table. I’d even been to Mass — or at least Mass had been to us. I’d been looking forward to a little Sawx-crushing, male-bonding downtime all day.

Are you sure this guy is the new chief of detectives for the New York police department? I almost texted back.

Instead, I reluctantly put down my Smithwick’s and stood and found my keys.

“Excellent idea, Michael,” Seamus said as I headed out. “We could use some goodies for the game. And don’t forget another six of Smithy’s.”

“Sorry, Father. No goodies tonight. It’s all baddies, in fact. A.k.a. work.”

“Work, Dad? But it’s Yanks-Sox! That’s sacrilegious.”

“My sentiments exactly, Brian,” I said as I hit the door. “Keep me posted on the score. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Chief Neil Fabretti’s house turned out to be on Delafield Avenue in a ritzy section of Riverdale called Fieldston. It wasn’t a huge house, maybe two thousand square feet, but it had a slate roof and antique stained-glass windows between its Tudor beams. Not too shabby. Especially for a cop. It had to be worth well over a million bucks.

“Mike, I’m so glad you could make it,” said Chief Fabretti as he gave me a firm handshake.

Fabretti was a neat and trim fiftyish man in a brown golf shirt and khakis. He looked more like a corporate executive than a cop. I wondered if that was a good thing. A large black curly-haired dog ran around us in the foyer, woofing and sniffing.

“Down, Faulkner. Down!” Fabretti said. “I know — Faulkner? My wife’s idea, as is the house and pretty much everything in it. She’s the cultured one, an editor at Knopf. I’m just a lovable fool from Brooklyn who married up. Anyway, the other guys just left. I know this is a pain in the ass during the game. I actually have it on in my den. This won’t take long, I promise.”

He led me into a cozy, dark, wood-paneled room. Beyond a writing table were built-in bookshelves with actual books on them. I spotted a shelf of Hemingway. The Day of the Jackal next to Keith Richards’s Life. A section of military history.

The one thing I had heard about Fabretti was that he was political. But who knew? A real library was pretty telling in terms of character. Maybe this guy was okay, I thought.

“Can I get you a beer?” Fabretti said, opening a little fridge beside his desk. “Well, if you can call it that. My wife has me weaned down now to Beck’s light. It’s more like beer-flavored water.”

“No — that’s okay, Chief. What’s up? How can I help you?”

“You can help me by just continuing to do what you do, Mike,” Fabretti said as he cracked open a brew and sat behind his desk. “People complain that you’re overrated — a hot dog and a headline hound — but I’ve done my homework, and you’re obviously not. You’re just flat-out one of the department’s best detectives, if not the best. I’ve been following your phenomenal career, Mike. I’m a big fan.”

A fan? Hmm, I thought. Maybe the rumors were true. Politicians plus flattery equals what? Nothing good was a pretty sure bet.

“Where am I being reassigned?” I said.

Fabretti laughed.

“C’mon, Mike. It’s okay, I swear. I definitely want to keep you at Major Crimes. But I also need you to do what you’ve been doing. I want you to be flexible in terms of floating to local precincts occasionally to help on extra-pain-in-the-ass cases.”

“How can I be in Major Crimes plus be a precinct detective?” I said. “Who will I answer to? The precinct captains or my boss, Miriam, at Major Crimes?”

“You’ll answer to me, Mike,” Fabretti said after a moment. “You know I’ll always have your back. You’ll work out of Major Crimes for now. What do you say? This will be a little experiment. One we’ll correct as we go.”

Or, more precisely, make up as we go.

I definitely didn’t like it. A man without a home in the department was a good guy to scapegoat when the pressure got turned up. I didn’t want to be that goat, but it wasn’t looking like my opinion mattered.

The books had to be the wife’s, I finally realized.

“Whatever you need me to do, Chief,” I finally said as I turned to the flat screen above the fireplace, where Ellsbury was hitting into a double play.

Chapter 9

At 3:23 a.m., the two Supervac trucks turned off their headlights and pulled off the northbound FDR Drive into a junk-strewn abandoned lot beside the Harlem River across from the Bronx.

After he put the first truck into park, Tony took a bottle of orange Gatorade from the cooler they’d brought, cracked its lid, and commenced gulping. His stubbled face was filthy, and he was sweating profusely; he had in fact sweated through the back of his heavy coveralls.

“Hey, you want some of this, Mr. Joyce?” said Tony, coming up for air.

“No. All you, Tony. Truly, you broke your butt down in the hole. I’m proud of you,” Mr. Joyce said.

It was true. Tony had some heft on him and could use a few suggestions about his hygiene, but no one could say he wasn’t a worker. He’d been going at it hard for the previous three hours, shuttling between the two manholes, really hustling. He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot for every task without a word of complaint.

They were finally done now. At least with the prep work. It had gone off without a hitch. The truck tanks were empty, and the manholes were closed. Everything was set up and ready to go.

“How’s the link?” Mr. Joyce called into the radio he took from his pocket.

“Crystal clear,” Mr. Beckett, in the other truck, replied.

They had hacked into the MTA’s internal subway video feed, and Mr. Beckett was now monitoring the security cameras at every line station from Harlem to Inwood.

“Okay, I see it,” Mr. Beckett said over the radio a second later. “It’s pulling out of One Fifty-Seventh in the northbound tunnel. There. It’s all the way in. You have the green light, Mr. Joyce.”

Mr. Joyce took a cheap disposable cell phone from the left breast pocket of his blue coveralls. It was a Barbie-purple slide phone made by a company called Pantech, a simple phone one would buy a suburban girl for her middle-school graduation. He turned it on and scrolled to the phone’s only preprogrammed number.

Theory becomes reality, he thought. He thumbed the Call button, and the two pressure cookers preplanted in the train tunnel ten stories beneath Broadway twenty blocks away detonated simultaneously.

Chapter 10

The initial explosion of the pressure-cooker bombs, though great, was not that impressive in itself. It wasn’t meant to be. It was just the primer, the match to the fuel that the two trucks had been pumping into the air of the tunnel for the previous three hours.

The tunnel was dome-shaped, seventy-three feet wide at its base, twenty feet high, and a little less than four miles long. Within milliseconds of the blast, a powerful shock wave raced in both directions along its entire length. There were no people on the subway platforms that late at night, but in both stations, the wave ripped apart vendor shacks on the platforms, MTA tool carts, and wooden benches.

As the wave hit the south end of the 181st Street station, a three-ton section of the vaulted tunnel’s roof tore free and crashed to the tracks — as it would in a mine cave-in — while up on Broadway, the fantastic force of the blast set off countless car alarms as it threw half a dozen manhole covers into the air.

South of the main blasts, in the tunnel between the 157th Street station and 168th Street, the shock wave smashed head-on into the approaching Bronx-bound train that Mr. Beckett had spotted. The front windshield shattered a millisecond before the train tore from its moorings, killing the female train operator instantly.

As the train derailed, its only two passengers, a pair of Manhattan College students coming back from a concert, were knocked spinning out of their seats onto the floor of the front car. Bleeding, and still barely alive, they had a split second to look up from the floor of the train through the front window at a rapidly brightening orange glow. It was strangely beautiful, almost like a sunset.

Then the barreling twenty-foot-high fireball that was behind the shock wave slammed home, and the air was on fire.

Back at the abandoned lot near the Harlem River, Mr. Joyce had to wait seven minutes before he heard the first call come in on the radio scanner he had tuned to the fire department band. He clicked a pen as he lifted his clipboard.

“We did it, Tony,” he said, giving the driver a rare grin.

“Phase one complete.”

Chapter 11

More blue and red emergency lights than I could count were swinging across the steel shutters and Spanish-language signs at 181st Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue when I pulled up behind a double-parked FDNY SUV that morning around 4:30 a.m.

I counted seven fire trucks and an equal number of police vehicles and ambulances. As I hung my shield around my neck, I saw another truck roar up. Rescue, the FDNY’s version of the Navy SEALs. Holy shit, was this looking bad.

I found the pitch-black subway entrance and went down stairs that reeked of smoke. All I could hear were yells and the metallic chirp of first-responder radio chatter as I swung my flashlight over the tiled subway walls.

The initial report I received from my boss, Miriam, was that some kind of explosion and a subway tunnel fire had occurred. One memory kept popping into my head as I hopped a turnstile and ran toward the sound of radios and yelling.

Don’t tell me this is 9/11 all over again!

I went past a station booth and almost knocked over white-haired, blue-eyed fire chief Tommy Cunniffe, thumbing something out of his eye.

“Chief, Mike Bennett, Major Crimes, NYPD. What the hell happened?”

“Massive tunnel explosion of some kind, Detective,” Cunniffe called out in a drill-sergeant baritone. “Two stations, One Hundred Sixty-Eighth Street and here at One Hundred Eighty-First Street, are completely destroyed. We have the fire almost under control here, but there’s colossal structural damage, a large cave-in at the south end of this station. It’s like a mine accident down there. We’re looking for bodies.”

“Is anybody dead?”

“We don’t know. I heard over the horn there was a train that got fried a little south of One Sixty-Eighth, but everything else is still unknown at this point. I got two engine companies down there working a water line that we had to feed seven stories down through the elevator shaft. It’s an unbelievable disaster.”

“Chief,” came a voice from his chest-strapped radio. “We got movement. A heartbeat on the monitor.”

“Coming from where?” Cunniffe yelled back.

“Up near you, in one of the other elevator shafts.”

“Downey, O’Keefe: get me a goddamn halogen!” Cunniffe screamed at two firemen behind him.

I ran over with the firemen and helped them pry open the door to one of several elevator shafts. When we got the doors open, three huge rugby-player-size firemen appeared out of nowhere and tossed a rope.

“Hey, Danny, what the hell are you doing? It’s my turn,” said one of them as the biggest clicked his harness onto the rope and lowered himself into the darkness.

“Screw you, Brian,” the big dude said. “You snooze, you lose, bro. I got this. Watch how it’s done.”

I shook my head. These guys were amazing. Tripping over themselves to help. No wonder people called them heroes.

“Send down the rig,” said the fireman in the shaft a minute later. “We got two, a mom and a daughter. They’re okay! They’re okay!”

Everyone started cheering and whistling as a pudgy Hispanic woman, clutching her beautiful preschool-age daughter, was pulled up out of the shaft into the light.

“Okay, good job, everyone. Attaboys!” Cunniffe bellowed as EMTs took the mother and child up the stairs. “Now get the f back to work!”

An hour later, I was deep underground ten blocks south in full-face breathing apparatus and a Tyvek suit as I toured the devastation that had been the 168th Station with FBI bomb tech Dan Dunning, from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

“This is unbelievable,” he said, swinging the beam of his powerful flashlight back and forth over the vaulted ceiling.

“Which part?” I said.

“This was one of the grandest stations of the whole subway system, Mike. See the chandelier medallions next to the cave-in and the antique sconces in that rubble there? This used to be the station for the New York Highlanders, who went on to become the New York Yankees. A part of history. Now look at it. Gone. Erased.”

“Could it have been a gas leak?”

“Not on your life,” Dunning said. “Gas and electric are surface utilities. These are some of the deepest stations in the system. Ten stories down. Whatever blew them up was intentionally put here. I can’t say for sure yet, but you ask me, these goddamn bastards set off a thermobaric explosion.”

“A what?”

Dunning pulled off his mask and spat something out.

“Thermobaric explosions occur when vapor-flammable dusts or droplets ignite. They rely on atmospheric oxygen for fuel and produce longer, more devastating shock waves. As you can see, when they occur in confined spaces, they are catastrophic. They pumped something down here and lit it up. A gasoline mist, maybe, is my guess. Just like a daisy-cutter bomb. I mean, look at this!”

We hopped down off what was left of a platform and walked over the burned-to-a-crisp tracks toward a blackened train. As crime-scene techs took pictures, I could see that one of the train’s plastic windows had melted and slid down the side of one of the cars like candle wax. Inside, the driver was burned pulp, and the two other bodies in the front car were skeletal and black, like something from a haunted house.

“Look at that,” Dunning said, pointing his light at a half-burned sneaker in a corner.

“Wow, the shock wave must have knocked them out of their shoes,” I said.

“Worse, look at the sole of it. It’s almost completely ripped off. That’s how powerful this bomb was. It separated the sole off a sneaker! Think of the incredible violence that would take.”

I shook my head as I thought about it, breathing in the sweet gasoline smell of burning that the respirator couldn’t filter out.

What was this, and where was it going?

Chapter 12

Three hours later, our command post shifted four blocks northeast, to the NYPD’s new Thirty-Third Precinct building at 170th Street near Edgecombe Avenue.

When I wasn’t answering my constantly humming phone, I was busy upstairs in a huge spare muster room helping a couple dozen precinct uniforms set up a central staging area for what was obviously going to be a massive investigation.

Everywhere I looked throughout the cavernous space were stressed-out, soot-covered MTA engineers, FDNY arson investigators, and FBI, NYPD, and ATF bomb techs chattering into phones as they tried to get a grip on the scope of the disaster.

The biggest development by far was the discovery of shrapnel in two separate sections of the tunnel. Preliminary field reports seemed to indicate that the metal shards were from some sort of pressure-cooker bomb placed at the two main blast sites. We hadn’t released anything to the press as of yet, but it was looking like this was in fact a bombing, a massive and deliberate deadly attack.

At 6:05 a.m., the mayor suspended the city’s subway service systemwide. It was a huge, huge deal. Eight million people now had to find a new way to get to and from work and school. A mega meeting at the precinct command post had been called for nine thirty. The mayor and police commissioner were on their way, as were head honchos from federal law enforcement agencies and the MTA bosses who ran the subway.

I’d managed to get hold of my first coffee of the morning and had just declined a third call from some annoyingly persistent New York Times reporter when I looked up and saw the chief of detectives, Neil Fabretti, come through the command post door. I almost didn’t recognize him in his stately white-collar uniform. At his heels was a tall, clean-cut white guy in a nice suit whom I didn’t recognize.

“Detective, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you being all over this,” Fabretti said, giving my hand a quick pump. “I already spoke to Miriam. NYPD has the ball on this, and I want you to head up the investigation. The rest of Major Crimes is now at your disposal as well as any and all local precinct investigators, as you see fit. How does that sound? You up for it?”

“Of course,” I said, nodding.

“Do you know Lieutenant Bryce Miller? He’s the new counterterrorism head over at the NYPD Intelligence Division,” Fabretti said, introducing the sleek dark-haired thirtysomething cop at his elbow. “Bryce is going to be involved in this thing from the intelligence angle, so I wanted you guys to meet. You’re going to be working together hand in glove, okay?”

I’d heard about Miller, who was supposed to be something of a hotshot. He’d been an FBI agent and Department of Justice lawyer linked closely to the Department of Homeland Security before being hired splashily to show the new mayor’s seriousness in fighting the terrorists who seemed to love New York City for all the wrong reasons. But hand in glove? I thought as I shook Miller’s hand. I was in charge, but I also had a partner or something? How was that supposed to work? And who was to report to whom? I wondered.

Miller shook back briefly, as if he didn’t want my soot-stained jeans and Windbreaker to muss his dapper gray suit.

“Hercules teams have been deployed to Times Square and Wall Street,” Miller said in greeting.

I assumed Miller was talking about the Intelligence Division’s tactical units, used to flood an area to show any potential attackers the NYPD’s lightning-quick response capability.

“The helicopters are up, and there are boats in the water. Just got off the phone with the commissioner. We’re going full-court press in Manhattan, river to river.”

Weren’t such shows of force supposed to prevent attacks? I thought.

“Now, what is this thermobaric bomb stuff I keep hearing?” Miller continued. “That’s crazy speculation at this point, isn’t it? Something like that would take an incredible amount of technical know-how and meticulous planning. We would expect a blip of chatter activity from surveillance before such a large-scale attack, and my team and my contacts in Washington are reporting exactly nada. Couldn’t this just have been a utility screwup?”

“I don’t know about any of that, Bryce,” I said, eyeing him. “I was actually just with the bomb guys and saw the shrapnel from what looked like pressure-cooker bombs in two separate locations.”

My phone hummed again as I took a black piece of something out of the corner of my eye with a pinkie nail.

“No matter how little anyone wants to say or hear it, this was definitely no accident.”

Chapter 13

Later that morning, Mr. Joyce and Mr. Beckett and Tony were in a brand-new dark-green Ford F-150 pickup truck rolling south down Faile Street in a heavily industrial area of the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx.

Mr. Joyce took a long, soothing sip of his cold McDonald’s OJ and began humming to himself as he looked out at the sunny day. As he watched, a low LaGuardia-bound FedEx cargo jet came roaring in overhead. Mr. Joyce, being an avid plane spotter, took one look at the shape of its purple tail and knew immediately that it was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11F.

Searching for and finally spotting the exact location of the aircraft’s aft gas tanks, he vividly imagined shooting them with one of the refurbished FIM-92 Stinger missiles they had at the warehouse. He cocked his head to the left as he calculated the physics of a twenty-two-pound hit-to-kill blast-fragmentation warhead ripping into a six-hundred-thousand-pound plane’s fuel tanks at twice the speed of sound.

He took another sip of OJ. They continued to roll. All around was nothing but block after grim block of run-down brick warehouses and industrial buildings. There were no residential buildings or even gas stations in the desolate area, and many of its streets didn’t have so much as a sidewalk.

Which was precisely why they were operating out of this god-awful area. With no concerned citizenry for miles, it was a perfect place to base their operations.

After another block, Mr. Beckett, behind the wheel, hit a garage-door opener and they pulled under the rolling steel gate of an unremarkable but dilapidated two-story stucco structure wedged between an abandoned warehouse and a stinking recycling center.

When the steel shutter was closed behind them, they climbed out of the truck and came through the garage door into the lower floor of the small building. The dim, windowless space had black-painted walls and a long, fully stocked pinewood bar. There were neon signs, a jukebox in one corner, a pool table, and even several black-painted circular wooden booths along the far wall.

“Now, this is what I call a hideout!” Tony said, looking around in amazement. “This is awesome! And unexpected. I would never peg you smart guys for living in a dive bar.”

“I’m glad you like it, Tony,” said Mr. Joyce, going behind the bar and clicking a green neon Rolling Rock sign on and off. “It does have a certain ambience, doesn’t it? This building was once an illegal after-hours place. After we moved in, it was easier just to leave everything as is.”

“Where do you sleep? On the pool table?”

“Of course not,” Mr. Joyce said with a grin. “There’s an apartment upstairs. I’m going to hit the restroom for a pit stop. Why don’t you let Mr. Beckett fix you a drink? Sit and relax for a bit. I think we all need a well-deserved rest before we start phase two.”

Tony yawned and smiled back.

“What is phase two, anyway, Mr. Joyce? Same shit like with the trucks?” he said.

“All in good time, Tony. Relax now. I’ll be right back,” Mr. Joyce said with a wink as he headed down the hallway.

Chapter 14

Mr. Beckett sat Tony in the booth at the far end of the long room and placed a rum and Coke in front of him. Then he went to the floor safe behind the bar and came back with a white plastic Food Emporium shopping bag containing the agreed-upon twenty thousand dollars in twenties and fifties.

“Hey, thanks,” said Tony, smiling from ear to ear as he glanced at the money and lifted the drink. “You know, you guys are such gentlemen. I mean, I thought I’d never get a job with my record, but then I look up and there you guys are outside that homeless shelter like some kind of godsend. My whole life I’ve partnered up with sucker after sucker, and I just want you to know how privileged I feel to finally work with a couple of real smart players. You must have been, like, professors or something, am I right?”

“Well, Mr. Joyce is the real brains,” said Mr. Beckett as he headed back to the bar. “He’s a genius in mathematics as well as materials engineering. He used to be an actual rocket scientist — well, missile scientist, if you want to get technical. And here’s some advice from personal experience.”

“What’s that?” Tony said.

“Don’t play chess against him, especially for money.”

“Not a chance,” Tony said with a laugh. “Never touch the stuff, Mr. Beckett. Why don’t you pour yourself a drink and come and sit?”

“Sorry, Tony. I don’t drink. I like to be in control at all times,” said Mr. Beckett.

“You don’t drink? What do you do for fun?” Tony said.

Before Mr. Beckett could answer, there was a faint, flicking, whistling sound from the dimness on the other side of the room near the bathroom. Then there were two sounds, all but simultaneous. The first was the click of Tony’s dropped drink landing miraculously upright on the table. The second was the loud crack of his head as it slammed back violently into the plywood back of the booth.

Mr. Joyce emerged from the hallway with the compound hunting bow after Tony stopped twitching. He stood before the booth for a moment with his dark goatee cradled in his free hand, peering at the fletching and the twenty-seven-inch carbon shaft of the broadhead arrow that protruded from Tony’s left eye socket.

“That was just terrible,” Mr. Joyce said.

“Come now, Mr. Joyce. I liked Tony, too, but we have to cover our tracks,” said Mr. Beckett as he retrieved the bag of money and returned it to the safe.

“Please: you don’t actually think I care that Tony is dead, do you?” Mr. Joyce said with a laugh. “I’m just upset about this new bow I bought. I was aiming for right between the eyes, but one of the pulleys must be overtight. I booted it down and a little to the right at the last second.”

“Now, now, Mr. Joyce,” said Mr. Beckett as he came over. “You have to admit that this light is horrendous, and besides, no one is perfect one hundred percent of the time. Your little toy is quite effective, if you ask me. What’s the expression? ‘Close enough for government work?’”

Mr. Joyce took a pair of side cutters off the bar, reached behind Tony’s ruined skull, and cut away the carbon shaft embedded in the plywood. Tony landed faceup on the filthy concrete after Mr. Joyce kicked him off the booth seat. He slid the arrow out of Tony’s eye by the fletching, then lifted the dead man’s left hand and checked the cheap digital watch on his wrist.

“Look at the time, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said. “Grab his ankles, would you? We really need to get going. You know traffic is going to be a nightmare.”

Chapter 15

At a little after eleven o’clock, I was back on the streets of Washington Heights. Well, back under the streets of Washington Heights, to be exact.

“See? It’s over there, Mike,” said Con Ed supervisor Al Kott, a few rungs below me on the Saint Nicholas Avenue manhole ladder. He pointed his flashlight at a ruined section of fire-blackened brick in the north wall.

“That wall there isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s been jackhammered, by the looks of it. And not by my guys. I already checked the records. There’s been no maintenance in this hole for the last eighteen months.”

“You see anything that looks like an air shaft in there, Al?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said, pointing the beam of his flashlight into the gap. “I don’t know. It’s all burned and wrecked to shit, but I think I see some ripped metal about five or six feet in.”

I nodded as I thought about that. More details had been revealed at the precinct meeting by the bomb experts. Evidence was pointing to two bombs placed on the tracks just north of the 168th and 181st Street stations. Massive cratering above the blasts at two air shafts corroborated the thermobaric bomb theory. Some kind of fuel had been deliberately pumped into the tunnel.

That had to be it, I thought as I stared at the ripped-open wall and massively damaged Con Edison manhole. This spot was one of the locations where the flammable bomb fuel, or whatever the hell it was, had been pumped down.

We had our where, I thought as I climbed for the circle of daylight above me. Now we just needed to find our who.

Chapter 16

The building was a new thirty-two-story glass high-rise on Haven Avenue overlooking the Hudson River on the west side of Washington Heights.

The man was in apartment 32J. He was a junkie, thin and middle-aged, vampire pale, with long, gray ponytailed hair and a road-worn, angular face. In a wifebeater and once-black but now faded-to-gray pair of jeans, he sat on the gleaming oak floor of the small, high-end condo’s living room, his bony knees up and his back flat against a wall.

Despite this spartan sitting position, he appeared comfortable. Like he’d long ago become used to sitting on hard, bare floors.

There was no furniture in the room. Not a stick of furniture in the whole apartment, in fact. The only other object in the apartment was a white iPad, facedown on the floor between the gaunt man’s beat-up hiking boots. He sat there, staring at it steadily. As if, any second now, it were about to perform some sort of amazing trick that he didn’t want to miss.

Every once in a while, he’d flick a glance around the empty room. The bare white walls. The rectangle of cloudless, cornflower-blue sky showing through the big, curtainless window.

He wondered who owned this place. Would they actually have bought an apartment just for this? Or maybe it was rented.

He yawned, rolled his shoulders, stretched. As if that mattered. He didn’t need to know about all that. He only had to make sure his own part worked so he could get the rest of the money.

The instructions couldn’t have been simpler. He just needed to do it, leave the apartment, get into the rental car parked in the lot on Broadway, and head straight back to Florida.

He glanced at his watch. Three minutes. Hot damn! Three! he thought. Then he went back to staring at the tablet again.

He was trying to keep his mind blank, stay serene. But as the clock ticked down, it became exceedingly difficult.

He kept thinking about the craziest, most screwed-up shit he’d ever done in his life. How he’d broken into houses when people were home sleeping. How he’d knifed that kid who tried to take his shit that time when he was living on the beach in Key West. In the back of the neck, too. He had to have killed him. He sure hadn’t stuck around to find out.

The worst was in the midnineties, when, during a Christmas visit to his little brother Kenny’s house, he up and flat-out stole his brother’s new Toyota Echo, which had his two nieces’ car seats in the back and a woman’s new winter coat in the trunk that couldn’t have been anything but Kenny’s Christmas present to his wife.

But all that put together, thought the man as he rubbed his sweating palms on the soft, threadbare thighs of his Levi’s, couldn’t hold a candle to the act of certifiable insanity he was about to commit.

Literally, no one had ever done anything like this. No one. It was going to rearrange people’s minds.

Did he really want to be part of that? He didn’t know. Half of him was afraid, of course, especially about getting caught. That would not be good. But he really didn’t think he would. The plan was pretty much foolproof.

The other half of him was excited about it. Not just about the $150K he was due but also because it was so big-time. Monumental. Wasn’t like he was winning any Nobel Prizes anytime soon, so what he was about to do would definitely leave a mark.

The alarm on his cheap watch suddenly went off. The tinny blip-blip, pause, blip-blip was like an electronic amplification of his racing heart.

It was time.

He flipped over the iPad and propped it in his lap and pressed an app and the screen suddenly showed a live shot of upper Manhattan, to the east. Small buildings could be seen far below with Matchbox-like cars between them moving slowly in the congested streets.

It was the view from the camera he’d already mounted on the high-rise building’s roof that was connected to the iPad through Wi-Fi. In the corner of the screen, numbers showed the camera’s satellite GPS coordinates to the second decimal point and that its elevation was at 326.8 feet.

On the iPad screen, the tiny buildings began to grow in size as he remotely activated the camera’s zoom lens.

Zooming and meticulously searching and zooming again, the man swiped at the screen with his long fingers, zeroing in on the target.

Chapter 17

A sudden frantic call from Chief Fabretti redirected me immediately from the Saint Nicholas Avenue bomb site back to the command center at the precinct.

I was told that the mayor was about to speak for the first time about the attack to the press, and to the world, and I was needed to deliver an up-to-date briefing to him in person before he went on.

As I turned the corner of Broadway onto 170th, I could see that a portable stage and flag-flanked podium had been set up outside on the street in front of the Thirty-Third Precinct’s front door. Standing in the blocked-off street around the stage was a large crowd of FBI people and cops and mayor’s-office guys playing cops with coplike EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT Windbreakers over their shiny suits.

And still they were outnumbered by media people. Everywhere there were camera guys in plaid flannel shirts playing with light meters and tripods while their metrosexual news-producer bosses did that one-finger-in-the-ear thing as they gabbed into their cell phones.

In addition to regular news vans, I spotted a massive trailer-size national news satellite truck, like the ones you see outside events like the Super Bowl. I did a double take as I drove past a startlingly good-looking, tall brunette — a name-network reporter — with her head back, getting her eyeliner touched up by her assistant.

There’s a real buzz in the air, isn’t there? I thought as I parked and got out. Like we were at a red-carpet event.

I didn’t like it. I knew people were freaking out and needed to know what was happening, but this was nuts. It never failed. Every time these things happened, the circus atmosphere seemed to get worse. Less thought and emphasis seemed to be placed on the incredible human pain inflicted on the victims and their families and more on the hysterical contagious excitement generated by the knowledge that Something Big Is Happening.

I found Chief Fabretti with Lieutenant Bryce Miller on the sidewalk near the precinct’s front door.

“Just about to call you, Mike,” Fabretti said. “The mayor changed his mind about the briefing. He’s going on any second now, and he needs to, and I quote, wrap things up with his speech people.”

“His speech people, of course,” I said, nodding, as I looked out at the media horde. “You think this is the right approach here, Chief? Little on the splashy side, isn’t it?”

The mayor’s buddy, Bryce Miller, jumped in. “Mayor insisted it be outside,” he said. “Not holed up in a bunker somewhere. There’s a lot of scared folks out there. We need to project calm. It’s important people understand that everything’s okay. That we’re in control of things.”

In control of things? I thought, cocking my head. We are? I wanted to say.

Chapter 18

A moment later, accompanied by a barrage of camera clicks and flashes, the mayor, Carl Doucette, came out of the precinct with his five-man police security detail.

Normally a glad-handing, life-of-the-party type, the new mayor — tall, with curly gray hair — looked somber, serious, almost nervous as he stepped to the podium and took out his prepared statement. If he was faking looking shaken up, he was a fine actor, I thought.

“As everyone probably has heard by now, very early this morning there was a massive explosion in the number one train tunnel beneath Broadway in Washington Heights,” Mayor Doucette began.

“Three people have been killed that we know of, and I’d like to say first that our hearts go out to those victims and their families. We are still very much in the process of investigating the explosion, but from our initial review, we can say definitively that this was not a utility malfunction, nor was it industrial in nature.”

The clicking of the cameras increased as he looked up from his notes.

“At this point, we can only conclude that this was an intentional act, of what exact nature we cannot say. It seems as if a flammable material was pumped into the tunnel at some point last night, and that the built-up material was ignited with one or perhaps two explosive devices, causing catastrophic damage to a large segment of the tunnel as well as to the Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street and Hundred and Eighty-First Street subway stations.

“This part of the tunnel is ten stories down, one of the deepest in the entire system, and we have engineers still assessing the risk of further collapse. Though we are planning to bring back train service on a rolling basis this afternoon into the evening rush, people can expect that number one train service will be down in both directions for well into the foreseeable future.”

He paused again, took a breath.

“But though our train service is shut down,” the mayor said, staring at the cameras now with a calm and steady seriousness and intensity he’d never before displayed, “I want to let whoever committed this cowardly, murderous act know once and for all that the spirit of this city and its citizens will never be shut down.”

There was a smattering of spontaneous applause.

“We will continue as we have always done, and you will be found and brought to justice.”

“Yeah!” somebody with a deep voice called out from the media pit, and more people began to applaud.

“Try as you will, neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to shut down our city or the American people.”

Maybe doing a big press conference like this was a good idea after all, I thought as the clapping increased. I hadn’t voted for the mayor, because he seemed soft on crime, but he was surprising me. Watching him operate up close for the first time, I could see he was a natural leader with an ability to lift people’s spirits.

The mayor smiled gently as he raised his hands to wave down the applause. He brought the microphone in a little closer to himself as a chant of “USA! USA!” started from somewhere.

The mayor smiled at the chanting and was waving his hands for calm when there was a glow of something pink behind his head.

It was rose-colored, a strange, halolike mist that I first thought was some kind of weird television lighting, because as it appeared, the side of the mayor’s head suddenly looked like it was covered in shadow.

But then the tall mayor staggered oddly forward and to his left, and my mind finally caught up to my unbelieving eyes.

I watched in horror as the mayor dropped straight down behind the podium like a bridge with its pilings blown out.

Chapter 19

The next few moments were beyond strange. Frozen and dumbstruck, I stood there unable to do anything but stare down at the fallen mayor and the blood pumping out of him. My mind must have still been a little shell-shocked, because as he bled out, all I could do was keep looking him over, again and again, harping on the most useless details.

Like how he’d come out of one of his shoes, a new cordovan loafer. How though he was married, I saw he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. How there were little pink anchors on his navy-blue socks.

Though there were more than a hundred people standing around — cops, reporters, photographers, neighborhood residents — none of them seemed to be moving, either. It was suddenly impossibly quiet, as if someone had just called for a moment of silence. I distinctly remember hearing birds chirping in the park across from the precinct, and off in the distance on Saint Nicholas Avenue there was the brief grumble of a passing bus.

Then out of the dead silence, someone in a shrieking voice that was so high and loud it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman suddenly yelled.

“Sniper!”

The spell broke instantly. Everyone in the vicinity of the fallen mayor, including me, broke away like a stampeding herd from his body.

I didn’t know where Lieutenant Miller had gotten to, but Chief Fabretti and I dove immediately between a couple of cruisers parked out in front of the precinct. I could hear several cops crying out, “Where? Where? Where?” simultaneously over the chief’s radio as we crawled on our hands and knees in the gutter.

“Unbelievable! This isn’t happening! You hear the shot, Mike? I didn’t hear jack shit!” Fabretti said beside me, where he gripped a short-barreled.38 he had pulled out of somewhere. “Damn it! We have a sniper team covering the rooftops. What just happened?!”

I shook my head and was about to take a peek out at the rooftops myself when there was a loud, thunking crack of wood as another bullet ripped into the podium.

“Down!” I yelled. “We’re still under fire!”

I noticed that there wasn’t even a hint of a gun crack for the second shot, either. Which meant one of two things — either the shooter was using a suppressor, or he was really far away. I was going with the latter. The mayor’s massive wound indicated a large-caliber round probably shot from a rifle with a long range. I shook my head. Like Kennedy, I thought in horror. The mayor had just been assassinated!

“That second shot just hit the front of the podium, Chief,” I said after a moment. “Tell your men that it seems to be coming from dead west, up a Hundred and Seventieth.”

Fabretti was calling it in when I heard a woman’s friendly voice.

“Excuse me, Officer. Over here, please. Excuse me.”

I looked up and squinted into a painfully bright light above the sidewalk. Next to it materialized a tall, attractive woman. It was the statuesque network reporter I’d seen previously, her painted eyes huge and dark and almond-shaped, her thick pancake makeup a garish, yellowy tan. Her camera guy was a short, stocky, friendly-looking bearded Hispanic guy who gave me a wink with his free eye.

We were still being shot at, and they wanted a sideline report?

I guess I wasn’t the only one in full-out shock.

“Get down!” I yelled as I grabbed them and yanked them behind the car.

Chapter 20

Twenty minutes later I was in my Impala, hammering it toward the west side of Washington Heights behind a trio of commando-filled NYPD Emergency Service Unit trucks. The trucks were military surplus BearCat armored personnel carriers; I used to think using them was overkill — at least I did up until I saw the mayor get blown away. The countersniper team in position near the precinct had triangulated the shot with their gunshot echo system, and we were headed now toward a high-rise building on Haven Avenue, where it seemed like the shots had come from.

I almost didn’t believe it when one of the SWAT cops pointed out the suspected building to me. It was so far away. On the other side of Manhattan. Easily three-quarters of a mile. The chill that had gone down my spine had stayed there. Because only a world-class sniper could have made a shot like that, I knew.

Which raised the question: Who, or what, were we dealing with?

“Dude, I blame the media. It’s all their fault, damn it!” cried out an uncharacteristically pissed-off Arturo in the front seat beside me as we roared west toward the building. The young Puerto Rican cop, whom I met on the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, was usually pretty even-tempered.

Along with half the department, my crew had responded immediately to the shooting. I’d grabbed them and taken them with me the moment the decision had been made to raid the suspected building.

And no wonder Arturo was freaking out. The mayor had been rushed to Columbia Presbyterian, but everyone knew he was dead. First a bombing and now an assassination? We were in a new territory of spooky, and the adrenaline couldn’t have been running higher.

“What did you just say?” said Brooklyn Kale from the backseat. “The media? What are you talking about, Lopez?”

“Exactly, Arturo,” said Doyle, sitting beside her. “When you open your mouth, it would be nice if you maybe made some sense from time to time.” Jimmy Doyle, another young cop from the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, had become my right-hand man.

“Use your brains, fools,” Arturo insisted. “The media are right now in the process of doing millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of free PR work for whoever is doing this. Such over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage just sets the bar higher and higher each time for the nut jobs and terrorists to get everybody’s attention.

“Which means bigger explosions, more bodies, and more atrocities. They should take their cue from the baseball media, which nipped fan stupidity in the bud when they wisely decided to stop showing people who run onto the field.”

“So don’t tell people there’s terrorism? That’s your solution?” said Brooklyn.

“How about at least not sensationalizing it so much?” Arturo said. “This is a bloodbath. Stop selling the frickin’ popcorn.”

“Congrats, Arturo,” Doyle said as we skidded to a stop in the driveway of the Haven Avenue building’s underground parking garage. “I think you actually might have made your first-ever good point.”

“Shut up, people, please,” I said, turning up my radio as a just-arriving NYPD helicopter swooped in from the south and hovered over the building.

“There’s something on the east side of the building,” the pilot said after a minute. “It looks like some sort of a rifle.”

The ESU cops spilled out into the driveway and busted out their ballistic riot shields and submachine guns. We stayed behind them as we went across the pavement toward the side door of the building. Having neither the time nor the inclination to find and ask the super for the key, the ESU breach team unhesitatingly cracked the door open with a battering ram.

After dismissing the elevators as dangerous because of potential tampering, the ESU guys left a small contingent in the new building’s sleek marble lobby as the rest split up into the building’s two stairwells.

My team and I followed the ESU team in the north stairwell. Despite being pumped up with adrenaline, we had to stop twice for short breathers to get up the thirty-two floors.

We were the first team there. An alarm went off as the lead ESU guy hit the roof door, and we were out in the suddenly cool air with the roaring, hovering NYPD Bell helicopter right there almost on top of us. The pilot pointed to the top of a little structure that housed the elevator equipment.

I ran across the tar paper to its ladder and climbed up and just stood there staring at it.

Chapter 21

I’d never seen anything like it before. I wasn’t an expert, but the long black rifle looked huge, like a sniper rifle, perhaps a.50 caliber. It was bolted into two strange, bulky stands that could have been motorized.

But the strangest thing was what was attached to the top of the rifle. Perched where the scope should have been was a bulky device about the size of a hardcover book that looked like a robotic owl. It had a single viewfinder in the sighting end and what looked like greenish-tinged binoculars in the front.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said ESU sergeant Terry Kelly as he arrived behind me.

“What the hell is it?”

The short, muscular cop spat some chewing tobacco as he knelt and carefully tilted the gun over on its side.

“One of those damn things!” he said. “On a.50-caliber Barrett! Of course. Why not? It’s like the training video said. Only a matter of time.”

“What are you talking about, Sergeant?” I said.

“We saw a Homeland Security video about this three weeks ago,” Kelly said. “See this scope thing on top? It’s a computerized targeting system. It has a laser range finder in front, like rich golf guys have to get exact distances.”

I nodded.

“Well, you get behind it and sight your target through the system’s long-range zooming video camera and just tag it with the laser. Then the computer calculates all the factors of the shot — the air density, Magnus effect, even target movement — and puts them through the computer. Then the computer — not you — robotically positions the gun and fires it.

“Anyone, a three-year-old child, can become a world-class sniper with it. All you have to do is tag the target. What am I saying? You don’t even have to be behind the gun! It has Wi-Fi.”

“So this was probably done remotely,” I said.

“Without a doubt,” he said. “Why expose yourself on a rooftop when all you have to do is set the gun up beforehand and just do it from cover? All you would need is to be within Wi-Fi range.”

“Call the other team and tell them to go straight to the top floor,” I told him. “We need to get the super up here and start searching every single apartment.”

We rushed off the roof and down onto the thirty-second floor and started banging on doors like it was Halloween for cops. Only three of the residents were home. After we were done searching their apartments, the super, a tall, middle-aged guy who looked like a stoner, finally showed up in a brown bathrobe, holding a set of keys.

“Listen, man,” he said, “I’m still waiting to hear back from the management office. I don’t even know if I should be letting you into people’s apartments. Don’t you need a warrant or something?”

“Tune in, bro,” Kelly yelled in his face. “While you were busy watching Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, the mayor just got blown away with a rifle we found on your roof.”

“What? Okay, okay. Give me a second,” he said, fumbling with the keys.

One by one, we searched seven apartments, but there was nothing.

“What about this apartment?” I said to the super. “Where’s the key?”

“Uh... that one’s vacant,” the stoner said. “It’s for sale, so I don’t have the key. The management company has it, I think.”

“Don’t worry about the key,” said Kelly as he led the way, holding the battering ram. “Fortunately, we brought our own.”

The ESU men blasted open the door of 32J and rushed inside.

When they gave the all-clear and we went in, the first thing I noticed was the shattered living room window. The second was the skinny guy with a gray ponytail sprawled out in front of the kitchen’s breakfast bar with the top of his head missing. There was an iPad beside him.

I turned and looked west, out through the broken window at the Hudson.

On the Jersey side of the river, about a mile away, there was another high-rise.

Where someone else had shot the mayor’s shooter with another computerized rifle, I thought. I would have bet my paycheck on it.

This isn’t good, I thought as I radioed aviation to hit the roof of the building on the Jersey side to see what they could see.

“Mike, you really think this is the guy who killed the mayor?” asked Brooklyn as she stood over the body.

I nodded.

“And who killed him?” asked Arturo.

I stared out the window as the chopper appeared overhead on its way across the Hudson. The sound of the rotors was almost deafening through the broken glass.

“The nut job who’s trying to show us how smart he is,” I yelled.

Chapter 22

At exactly 1:23 p.m., thirty-seven minutes after the mayor’s assassination, a hundred blocks almost directly south, a white delivery van turned west onto 81st Street from York Avenue on Manhattan’s famous Upper East Side.

“Dude, four-two-one. That’s it. Up there,” said the preppy white college kid in the van’s passenger seat.

The handsome young Hispanic driver beside him squinted ahead out the windshield.

“That old church there?” he said.

“No, stupid,” said the white guy. “The church? How we gonna put it on the pointy roof of a church? Next to the church there. That crappy white brick building.”

The white guy’s name was Gregg Bentivengo. His handsome Hispanic buddy was Julio Torrone. They were recently graduated New York University students, now roommates and partners in a start-up marketing and promotional firm they’d dubbed Emerald Marketing Solutions.

“A church?” Gregg said again, rolling his eyes. “There’s even a picture of the building on the instructions. Didn’t you see the picture of it?”

“That’s your job,” Julio said, coming to a dead stop as a green pickup two cars ahead parallel-parked. “You’re the navigator, bro. I’m the pilot. Where should I park us, anyway? This block is jammed.”

“Too bad we didn’t pick one of those blocks where it’s easy to park,” said Gregg, rolling down his window and sticking his head out. “The building’s got an underground garage. Maybe they’ll let us leave the van off to the side in the driveway there for a second while we unload. You know, I would have asked for more if I’d known how bulky these damn things are. Plus they weigh a ton.”

“You can say that again. I’m not lugging it across the street again, especially the way you almost let it bail when we were getting it over the curb.”

“I almost let it bail? I beg to differ, my friend. You’re the one who didn’t tighten the hand truck’s strap,” Gregg said as he rolled the window back up and removed a small navel orange from the pocket of his white North Face shell.

Gregg was always doing that, thought Julio, annoyed. Grossly hoarding food in his pockets like a squirrel or something. Peanuts, little candies. Drove him nuts all through school.

“Besides, you’re the muscle in this little caper,” Gregg said as he began peeling. “I’m the sweet-talking, persuasive guy.”

“The what?” Julio said. “You were tripping over your tongue with the concierge mama at the last place so much I thought you were doing an impression of that ‘That’s all, folks’ pig dude in that old-timey cartoon.”

“Screw you,” Gregg said, flicking a piece of orange peel at him. “When she looked up, she was so hot that I got a little startled is all. I was lovestruck. Besides, I recovered quick enough.”

“That’s true,” said Julio, smiling. “I almost pissed myself laughing when you told her it was the new flux capacitor for the roof, and she was like, ‘Oh, okay, elevator back to your right.’”

“Hey, you know my motto. If you can’t bowl them over with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit.”

“Hey, traffic’s moving now,” Julio said. “Let’s get this over with.”

It was even easier than the last drop. The middle-aged Asian guy at the garage must have been new or something, because not only did he let them park in the driveway, he also let them into the side door of the building with his key without calling the super or even seeming interested in what the hell they were doing there.

It took them exactly eleven minutes to position the green metal box that was about the size and weight of a large filing cabinet on the southeast corner of the six-story building’s roof, as per the instructions.

It must have some internal battery or something, Gregg thought idly as they were leaving the roof, because, like the first metal box they’d dropped off at the hotel on Lexington and 56th, it didn’t need to be plugged in or turned on or anything.

“What do you think they are, anyway?” Julio said as they got back into the van.

“Weren’t you listening? They’re carbon meters,” said Gregg, picking up the half-peeled orange he’d left on the dashboard. “The clients are environmental activists who want to take readings of this one-percent-filled area but were denied by the city and the building boards. Enter us, underground marketing heroes extraordinaire, to the rescue.”

“Carbon meters, my ass,” Julio said. “Whoever heard of a freaking carbon meter?”

“Do I know?” said Gregg. “You can call it a fairy-dust-reading meter if you give me five grand cash to sneak it onto some dump’s roof.”

“Probably some sketchy guerrilla data-collection thing hoovering up the whole block’s passwords and data or monitoring people’s online porn habits,” Julio said.

“I peg this guy for a hot Asian nurses fan,” Gregg said as the stupid parking attendant gave them a friendly wave and they began to back out onto the street.

“Who knows?” Julio said after they were rolling. “Maybe our clients are NSA.”

“I doubt those two bastards were NSA,” said Gregg.

“They were definitely bastards, but smart ones,” Julio reminded him. “Don’t forget, nerdy NSA types are computer geniuses and shit.”

“Right,” Gregg said skeptically. “You play too many video games.”

“True,” Julio said. “Anyway, it’s done. What do you want to do now? Hit the gym?” asked Julio.

“Too early,” Gregg said. “Pizza?”

“Okay, but then we need to get this truck back or we have to pay for eight more hours.”