Alert

Chapter 51

The next dawn’s early light found Emily and me on Nineteenth Avenue in East Elmhurst, Queens.

Near the on-ramp of the bridge to the Rikers Island jail, we had the unmarked tucked behind an abandoned truck trailer. To our right was an old chain-link fence with empty gin bottles and scraggly trees behind it. To our left was a four-square-block industrial zone of manufacturing firms and warehouses.

I glanced at my phone as the metal howl of an unseen airliner from nearby LaGuardia Airport ripped through the gray sky overhead.

“What time you got?” I said.

“Another five minutes,” Emily said, much more calmly than I felt.

I tucked my phone back into a pouch of my heavy Kevlar vest and blotted sweat off my face with a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin.

I’m sweating, all right, I thought as I blinked at the black barrel of the automatic M4 rifle propped upright on the dash beside my knee.

Sweating bullets.

We were about to hit one of the industrial buildings on our second antiterrorist raid in forty-eight hours. This newest lead had come in last night around midnight. It had been sifted out of the electronics that we had collected from al Gharsi’s dump upstate. It had been pulled from his kids’ Xbox, of all things. The Wi-Fi — linked gaming networks that allowed players to communicate with each other were being used by al Gharsi to make contact with the group of Queens-based terrorists to whom we were about to pay what we hoped was an unexpected morning visit.

This group of nefarious and dangerous American-hating losers was a new one for me. They were Nigerians, and it was speculated that they were members of an offshoot of al Qaeda based in Nigeria called Boko Haram. A hasty surveillance operation on the locale had spotted at least six to eight Nigerian men working, and apparently living, inside a massive carpet- and rug-importing warehouse.

Two of the Nigerians had been identified from photographs as being on student visas. What had really set off alarm bells were the cell-phone records of one of the two students, who had apparently been in contact with a man overseas named Abubar Kwaja. Kwaja was a wanted Nigerian-based wealthy arms dealer who supplied Boko Haram with weapons.

That a half dozen likely heavily armed jihadist jackwads were in such close proximity to LaGuardia Airport was blood-chilling. That’s why the brass had let the leash off on a tactical raid immediately. We needed to go on this and go on this now.

Although the new lead was a godsend after such a lack of progress, it was actually a rough setup in terms of takedown. Our target, two blocks away, was an old one-story brick industrial building that covered the whole block from 47th to 46th Streets. The fortresslike building had closed steel shutters over both its doorway and driveway and rusted wire mesh over its windows. It was also somewhat isolated, sandwiched between two storage yards, which put a damper on any kind of flank stealth approach.

There were more than a hundred cops and agents about to swoop in, but I still had a bad feeling. You wanted to model and game a raid for a bit before going into such a heavily fortified target; have backup plans for backup plans; be as prepared as possible. But we didn’t have time for all that. Getting in there was not going to be quick or easy by any stretch.

“If there’s anything good to say about things,” I mumbled to Emily, “at least there aren’t a lot of people around.”

“Besides me.” Emily nodded with her eyes closed and her hands clasped as she said the Lord’s Prayer under her breath.

I decided to join her when her phone suddenly pinged with a text.

“Hit it, Mike,” she said. “It’s a green light. All units converge.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice. I pinned it, peeling out behind a half dozen other units waiting up and down the desolate block.

Two BearCat armored personnel carriers filled with FBI hostage rescue agents and NYPD ESU cops were already on target by the time I made the corner of 46th. Over the convoy of cop cars, I watched the two formidable black commando trucks swerve into the brick building’s driveway, the chug of their big turbo-diesel engines roaring. Two jarheaded commandos in olive-drab Kevlar popped out of the left side door of the lead truck and quickly attached the cable of the truck’s winch to the gated doorway. A moment later, there was a high-pitched whine followed by an enormous ripping sound.

“Now, that’s what I call a no-knock warrant,” I cheered as the entire housing of the target building’s rolling gate was torn from the facade.

But I’d spoken too soon. Way too soon.

The wrecked gate had just clattered onto the driveway when the heavy drumroll bang of automatic gunfire erupted from the now gaping hole in the building. The agents on the sidewalk dove behind cars and the balaclava-clad agent in the BearCat’s rotating roof turret turtled down as a swarm of bullets and tracers exited the building and raked the truck’s thick metal plate.

Then a moment later, I watched in jaw-dropped awe as a series of whooshing, smoking orange flares streaked out from the black, cavelike gap in the building. Smoking contrails accompanied the light streaks as they skimmed inches from the sides of the now rapidly reversing BearCats. Then a string of thunderous explosions ripped chunks off the brick warehouse across the street from the target.

Glass and bricks rained on cop cars as a huge cloud of pale dust billowed, instantly obscuring and darkening the entire narrow street.

“Shit! Back it up! Back it up! We have rockets! RPGs! RPGs!” screamed a voice through the crackling radio.

My mind wobbled as the pale fog billowed over the windshield of my unmarked, leaving behind a pink-sugar dusting of pulverized brick on the hood.

This can’t be happening, I thought. It’s impossible. Am I dreaming? Am I still home in bed?

But I wasn’t home in bed. No matter how much I wanted that to be true.

War had come to Queens.

Chapter 52

I snapped out of it as a bullet hit the asphalt just to the right of the car. I bailed left, keeping low, as I put a parked car between me and the gunfire ripping out of the rug warehouse. When there was a pause in the shooting, I bolted out from behind the parked car and across the sidewalk, pressing myself against the building’s brick.

I’d just made it when our side recovered and began returning fire. I’d never heard anything like our return fire before in my life. It seemed like a single sound — one ragged, deafening, smashing death wall of gunfire as fifty or sixty agents and cops went full auto at the building at the same time.

I was hunkered down against the brick, thinking that maybe I should head back to my car before I was hit with friendly fire, when someone blew past me in the brick-dust fog. The tall, dark figure flashed past me so fast that I was just able to recognize that instead of a raid jacket he was wearing a light-brown sweat suit with the hoodie pulled up.

And carrying a small AK-47.

Had he come out of a window? Hadn’t anyone else seen him? How had he avoided getting shot in the barrage? I wondered as I gaped at his fleeing back.

As if it mattered. I leaped up and bolted after the figure.

It was only as the speeding suspect turned the near corner that my adrenaline kicked down enough for me to realize that I’d left my radio and long gun back in the car. No time to go back now, I thought as I turned the corner, pumping my drawn Glock handgun like it was a relay baton.

I knew per the raid plan that the surrounding blocks were supposed to be in lockdown, patrolled by the local precinct, but someone must have lost the script, because the running Nigerian and I were all by our lonesomes.

When the lean, sprinting Nigerian shifted out into the street, I could see he was almost three-quarters of a block away and getting more distant by the moment. I tried valiantly to keep up, but being past forty and non-Kenyan and wearing Kevlar, I had my work cut out for me.

I cursed when I got to the corner of the next block and saw that the industrial area had become a residential one. As small houses blurred past, I pictured buses and kids going to school.

“Get down! Stay where you are!” I screamed at a woman coming out of her house with a baby in a stroller. How could this thing have gone wrong so quickly?

I’d just made the next corner when I saw the Nigerian start firing at a tow truck passing through the intersection. The driver didn’t have a chance as his side window blew in. The truck jumped the curb and smashed into the side of a C-Town supermarket.

The Nigerian wasn’t trying to get away, I realized as he ran into the supermarket. He was on a suicide mission, out to kill as many people as possible.

I’d just made the corner past the honking crashed tow truck when automatic gunfire boomed from inside the supermarket and the glass on the market’s sliding doors shattered into a million pieces. I dove headfirst beside the truck as screams came from inside, followed by more gunfire.

Wait or go? I thought. Then I climbed back up on my feet, keeping low as I crunched over the broken glass into the store. I swung my Glock over the open produce section on the left. Nothing. No one. I peeked into the first aisle. Again nothing — just cereal boxes.

I broke into another run when I heard screams and then gunfire at the back of the store, in the far right-hand corner. When I got there, I saw the Nigerian raking gunfire over the butcher and fish counters.

I fired my Glock — emptied it at the figure so fast I thought maybe I’d forgotten to fully load the fifteen-round magazine. I reloaded and trained it on the Nigerian as I walked over.

He was down on his back wheezing as he lay in the refrigerated meat case. The hoodie had come down now, and I could see for the first time that it was a woman.

I couldn’t believe it.

A tall, regal black woman. Smooth, dark skin shining with sweat and blood from the bullet wound in her jaw. She was still alive. She looked at me, dazed. Then she seemed to notice that the small AK-47 was still in her lap.

“Don’t do it!” I said. “Don’t!”

But she wouldn’t listen.

She went for the gun, and I shot her twice more as the gun in her hand fell over the rim of the meat case and clattered to the worn linoleum.

“Mike! Mike!” said Emily at my back when I knelt in front of the woman a minute or so later. “Mike, are you okay? Are you hit?”

“No,” I said. “What happened out there? Did we get them?”

“We got them, all right. Our intel was FUBAR. There were twenty of them, Mike. They all fought to the death. They’re all dead.”

“Did we lose anyone?”

“No, thank God. An agent was shot in the calf, but he’s going to be fine. Are you sure you’re okay?”

I nodded, sweat pouring off my chin and cheeks. I shook my head at the Nigerian woman’s brains on the glass of the meat case, her blood on the plastic-wrapped packages of sausages and drumsticks.

I stood there searching her face, her expression, her eyes for something — anything — that might explain any of this.

But even after another minute, I didn’t see a damn thing.

Chapter 53

Apprehensive, angry, and still very much stunned numb, I peeled myself away from the incredible Queens crime scene at a little past one in the afternoon. I looked out at the rubble and the pockmarked, bullet-scarred brick walls as I put the unmarked into drive.

“Welcome to Beirut, Queens,” I said to myself as I peeled out around a just-arriving news van.

I decided to head home.

First I showered, then I threw my clothes into the wash, since they were making the apartment smell like a firing range. As the machine filled with water, I poured myself a stiff measure of Wild Turkey and cracked open a bottle of Bud and sat on the couch in the blessedly silent apartment.

Probably not what four out of five doctors would recommend at quarter to two in the afternoon, but it actually did the trick. My hands stopped shaking, and I was momentarily able to get the image of the dead Nigerian woman’s brains out of my mind.

I was well into my next round of Irish therapy when the phone rang. It was Chief Fabretti. I sipped bourbon and listened idly as he chewed my ass about the raid. I wasn’t completely sober, but somewhere in there I caught the implication that he thought I might have been responsible for all the deaths.

I decided to hang up on him and shut off my phone.

“There. Much better,” I said as I poured another drink.

I was busy making dinner when Seamus came in around two thirty. Corned beef was on the menu tonight. Being an Irishman from New York, I of course did it the Jewish way, deep-sixing the cabbage and replacing it with rye bread — heavy on the caraway seeds — and mustard to make huge Carnegie Deli — style sandwiches.

I wasn’t really in the mood for eating, but it was Chrissy’s favorite dinner. After what I’d seen today, I wanted to make my baby happy for some strange reason.

“Corned beef? Is it Saint Paddy’s Day again?” Seamus said when he peeked into the pot.

“’Tis,” I answered as I poured a measure of Wild Turkey into a tumbler for him. “And lucky you: you’re just in time for the parade.”

He took a sip and smiled and rolled his eyes. He looked good. Still kicking, which was good, because I loved the old man.

“Ye can stop with the eagle-eye treatment, ya know.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I see you watching me like I’m going to fall over and die. That little incident was a one-off. I’m fine.”

“I wasn’t worried about you, Father, so much as the glass you’re holding,” I said as I patted him on his white-haired head. “That Waterford crystal is a family heirloom.”

“Little early for the bar to be open, eh?” Seamus said. “Was it that thing in Queens?”

Boy, was the old codger still on the ball.

He hugged me then. Wrapped me in his frail arms like I was five years old again, though I was twice his size. As he did it, I could see the woman lying there in her meat-case coffin. I tried not to cry about it, but I failed.

“God bless you, Mike. It wasn’t your fault,” Seamus said.

“God bless us all,” I whispered through my falling tears.

Chapter 54

At four minutes past 3:00 a.m., the image appeared on the tablet’s touch screen with the light press of a finger.

It was a live video feed, a grainy picture of a dimly lit downtown alley. With a flick of the touch-screen controls, the camera moved forward, zooming in on the dark face of one of the alley’s shabby apartment buildings. Then, with another flick, the image teetered suddenly as apartment building windows began to scroll vertically, as if the camera were attached to a crane and someone were raising the boom.

The screen showed a window with a yellowed lace curtain, then, on the floor above it, a window covered by some old broken blinds. The next floor’s window was shadeless and showed a bedroom in which a lean Asian woman was in the process of unbuttoning her blouse in a lit bathroom doorway.

The camera went up to the next dark window for a moment before it reversed itself to the disrobing woman.

“Mr. Beckett, please,” Mr. Joyce whispered harshly. “We have a schedule, you know. If you can’t resist distractions, then promptly hand over the controls.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Beckett, smiling sheepishly as the camera-equipped drone returned to its ascent.

They were wearing EMT uniforms now and were standing in the back of an idling ambulance parked in a little alley off Worth Street in the heart of downtown Manhattan. They needed to be in the area overnight, and, after some research, they realized that no vehicle was less suspicious or more ubiquitous than an ambulance waiting for a call.

Mr. Joyce nervously wrung his hands as Mr. Beckett piloted the large quadcopter drone over two blocks of buildings and lights. Down at the far end of the alley, across Worth, was some kind of underground dance club. It must have been ’70s night or something, because there was a constant muffled thrum of disco music.

He massaged his temples as the drone approached the imposing, almost industrial-looking square office building that was their target. All they would need was some fool spilling out of the club to take a piss and see the drone.

He knew their attack plan was unprecedented and therefore almost impossible for the enemy to guard against. He’d thought of it himself after much deliberation — had gamed it twenty times, looking for every possible glitch. He knew in his well-informed gut that it would work. But still. Any damn thing could happen in this city. There was knowing it, and then there was actually doing it.

With the drone finally alongside the target, Mr. Beckett swung it right until it was around three feet away from the building’s northeast corner, the best route for avoiding detection from the windows. It continued to ascend. Five more floors scrolled past, then ten, and then a few more, and they were finally there. They were finally up on the roof!

“There it is,” said Mr. Joyce, pointing at the top left corner of the screen.

“All over it,” said Mr. Beckett as he piloted the drone over to the teal-colored metal box that housed the air-conditioning unit.

He pressed a button, and the image on the screen shifted to the camera at the bottom of the drone, beside the power screwdriver they’d installed.

Mr. Joyce held his breath as Mr. Beckett took the drone down slowly toward the edge of the grate covering the AC unit’s fans. He maneuvered it carefully, hovering over the first of the Phillips-head screws holding the grate in place. Closer and closer, and then... yes! He was there. The tip of the drone’s magnetic screwdriver was snug in the groove of the first screw.

“The Eagle has landed,” Mr. Beckett said happily as he hit another button.

Forty minutes of meticulous maneuvering later, seven of the eight screws were off, and Mr. Beckett engaged the drone’s small grabber, hooked it on the grate, and began shifting the grate little by little. Five minutes after tugging it millimeters at a time, he disengaged the grabber and hovered the drone up to take a look.

Mr. Joyce smiled through the streaks of sweat dripping off his face.

About a third of the AC unit’s intake opening had been exposed.

They were in. The door was open. They now had access to the entire iconic building through the HVAC ducts. Every floor and every room!

Mr. Joyce looked away from the screen at the other four large quadcopter drones on the floor of the fake ambulance. Attached to each one of them were the four corners of a dark plastic tarp. Inside the bulging tarp were hundreds and hundreds of cubelike mobile minibots.

Each one of the bots had been filled to capacity with several ounces of the precious plastic explosives, along with a radio-controlled detonator. Once the bots were poured into the AC ducts, they would distribute and maneuver the eighty pounds of explosives to appropriate areas of the building’s most vulnerable struts and trusses.

Then, tomorrow morning, just as the enemy sat down at their cubicles with their no-whip nonfat cappuccinos, the two men were going to press a button and blow it up. They were going to blow up the building with everyone in it in the most spectacular way possible.

Mr. Joyce opened the rear doors of the ambulance, then powered up the four big drones using another tablet. He and Mr. Beckett took a step back as the swarm of drones began spinning their quietly whirring blades. It took another thirty seconds, then slowly, with incredible coordination and precision, they began lifting the payload out of the back of the ambulance and upward into the air.

His sweat cooling in the rotor wash, Mr. Joyce giggled as he realized that he actually recognized one of the disco songs that was playing from the other end of the alley.

“I love the nightlife,” he sang, bopping his head.

Then he and Mr. Beckett were both laughing as the drones ascended through the dark alley toward the night sky.

Chapter 55

Up and at ’em at 7:00 a.m., I saw from my e-mail that another massive VIP emergency meeting had been called, this time at One Police Plaza.

Though I had snagged an invite, I hadn’t been asked to speak at the meeting for some strange reason. Actually, I knew the reason all too well. My boss, Miriam, had called at dawn and told me that I’d been taken off as lead in the case and would now be taking orders from and reporting to Lieutenant Bryce Miller.

I arrived early enough to score a precious visitor parking spot at One Police Plaza, which was no small feat, considering how many people worked in the neighborhood’s courthouses and government buildings. On the crowded eighth floor of the brown brick monolith, I spotted Chief Fabretti in the hallway. Instead of giving me his usual hail-fellow-well-met routine, he blew past me with his iPhone glued to his ear and an evil look glued to his face, like I was empty air.

I actually didn’t really care or really even blame him. The situation and the stress level everyone was under had reached the impossible zone. I knew we all wanted the same thing — for the killing to stop and for this horror to be over.

I had a little time before the meeting, so I hit the break room, where I managed to score the last three survivors in a box of cinnamon Munchkins. There was no more coffee, so I had to settle for green tea that I made semitolerable once I poured in a lot of half-and-half and sugar.

I took my grub over to a corner window overlooking the Foley Square courthouses to the northwest and gave Emily a call.

“Hey, Agent. There you are,” I said when she answered. “I tried to call you earlier, but you must have been in the shower or something. I’m down here at One PP at the latest big emergency meeting. Are you heading over or what?”

“Not this time,” Emily said. “Like dogs and people without shirts, feds aren’t allowed, apparently. The press is asking questions about what they’re calling ‘shortsighted and brutal’ tactics at the Queens raid yesterday, and now everybody involved is working overtime to throw anyone they can grab under the bus. So much for our happy task force. Looks like the feds and the department are so pissed at one another this morning they’re no longer talking.”

I laughed grimly.

“Great. Dissension and infighting are just what we need while the city is being dismantled brick by brick. So what are you doing?”

“I’m at our VIP emergency meeting, of course. Just a couple of blocks from you at Twenty-Six Fed.”

“So close and yet so far,” I said, looking at the federal building two blocks away, above the courthouses. “Hey, after our respective ass-covering sessions, how about Chinese for lunch? Wo Hop. My treat.”

“Wo Hop?” Emily said. “How could I turn that down?”

Chapter 56

So... how’s your morning going?

Gary Friedman smiled as he dropped his mop in the corner of the stairwell landing. He sat down, light-headed, as he looked at the text that had just come in on his phone from Gina.

He couldn’t stop smiling. Or reading the text.

“Thank you, Lord,” he said, kissing his Galaxy.

He really wasn’t one for screwing off and getting lost in his phone like a lot of the other guys on the maintenance crew. Especially after his rat bastard of a boss, Freddie, busted him playing Angry Birds two weeks back and chewed him out in front of everybody. Just because they worked in a law enforcement building, Freddie thought he was in law enforcement, the stupid jackwad.

But after last night, after the best night of his life, Gary didn’t care, he thought as he reread Gina’s text. Things were changing in the life of Gary Irving Friedman — for the better, finally.

Like a lot of his classmates at Brandeis, he’d moved to Brooklyn from Boston straight after graduation. With his cinematography degree and his award-winning short film under his belt, he’d thought it’d be just a matter of hooking up with other young artists in the borough’s vibrant arts scene, then it would be Hollywood, here I come.

But he soon woke up and smelled the fair trade coffee, because practically everybody he knew in Williamsburg had a cinematography degree and a short-film award or was in a band or had a writing MFA. What none of them had were connections. Or jobs in their respective winner-take-all fields.

Six months in, when his summer job money ran out and the janitor job came up through a friend of a friend, he was dumbfounded. A fucking janitor? It was a government job, with job security and benefits and all that, and it actually paid pretty well, but his father was an eye doctor, for the love of Pete, and he was going to be scrubbing urinals?!

But in the end, he took it. Swallowed his pride. Because it was either start mopping or go home to Dr. Friedman’s musty beige basement in Brockton. He’d decided to stick it out and mop it up.

And the whole time he’d been trying to meet girls, but it had been one depressing strikeout after another. Until last night. There he was, wallowing in the misery of his Xbox as usual, when the doorbell rang and the black-haired Katy Perry look-alike from downstairs was standing there, drunk. She’d broken her key in her door, and could he help her? Why, yes, as a matter of fact he could! Five minutes later, he was knight-in-shining-armoring it down the fire escape into her apartment window.

In thanks, she poured him a Grey Goose, and they started talking, and the rest of the night was a blur of vodka shots and telling her his life story and showing her his short and her going gaga over it and then they were making out on her bed. They didn’t go all the way but damn close. Damn, damn close.

And now she was texting him!

Gary stared at the screen again, still not completely convinced it wasn’t a mirage. There was probably some advice about what to do next, play hard to get or something, but he didn’t give a shit. She was hot and she liked him. Told him he was talented and funny, and it was like his Brooklyn dream was finally coming true and—

That’s when Gary heard it. It was a weird sound. It seemed to be coming from above him, on the ceiling of the stairwell. It was a little whirring sound followed by a couple of metallic clicks.

He looked up as he heard it again. It seemed like it was coming from inside the rectangular AC duct above him. Then there were more of the sounds. A lot more. “What the hell?” Gary said, standing. It sounded like someone had dumped a box of Chiclets into the aluminum duct, only weirder.

“Freddie?” Gary said, keying his radio.

“What now?” said his perpetually surly bastard of a boss, who was outside hosing the sidewalk.

“I don’t know. There’s something weird up here. I’m on the sixth floor in stairwell C.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know, but you should come up.”

“This better be good,” Freddie replied.

Chapter 57

The ambulance was on Park Row beside a coffee cart when the sun came up. They’d had to move twice during the night to avoid suspicion. It didn’t matter where they were as long as they were within the two thousand feet of the bots’ radio receiver.

“Hey, what the hell is that?” said Mr. Beckett around a crumbling apple turnover as he suddenly saw something on the screen.

The tablet screen was divided into a grid of hundreds of little boxes now, a view from the camera on each individual bot. Mr. Beckett didn’t know how Mr. Joyce was keeping track of them all. It looked like a lot of gobbledygook to him, but then again, he wasn’t a mathematical genius with an IQ of 170, like Mr. Joyce.

“Which? Where? What?” said Mr. Joyce, who was as frazzled as Mr. Beckett had ever seen him. The guy had been a ball of sweat and nerves all night as he clicked at the keyboard, moving all the bots around. It was a miracle he didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.

“It’s a face, I think. In this one. Can you make it larger?” Mr. Beckett said.

Mr. Joyce hit a button and, lo and behold, a confused-looking Hispanic guy wearing a maintenance uniform appeared on the screen, as if he’d just snapped a puzzled selfie.

“Maintenance!” Mr. Beckett cried. “They must have heard the bots in the duct. Shit! Detonate now! It’s our only chance!”

“No,” Mr. Joyce said, clicking the man off the screen and going back to his typing.

“What are you talking about?”

“I need more time,” he said calmly. “It’s not ready yet.”

“Time just ran out,” Mr. Beckett cried as he shook Mr. Joyce’s shoulder. “We’re discovered. We need to go with what we got now!”

“No,” said Mr. Joyce more firmly. He flipped a page in the pile of the building’s schematics on the workbench beside the tablet and began typing even faster.

“I need ten minutes,” he said. “We’re that close. My calculations do not lie. We can still get it done. Think about it. They don’t know what the bots even are. It will take time for them to call the bomb squad and piece it together and sound the alarm. By then I’ll be ready. I promise.”

“Well, hurry up already, would you please?” Mr. Beckett said, going to the aluminum blinds on the ambulance window that faced the target.

Chapter 58

I immediately spotted the commissioner and the acting mayor, Priscilla Atkinson, in attendance when I entered the huge, crowded conference room. As I glanced up to the nosebleed section of the amphitheater seating, I was happy to see Brooklyn Kale and Arturo and Doyle and climbed up and sat down next to them.

Down on the floor in the center of the room, I could see my new fair-haired leader, Lieutenant Bryce Miller, going over his notes. I was almost glad I’d been taken off as case lead. It was high time to allow another Christian to be fed to the lions.

Someone dimmed the lighting, and a satellite image of the Queens warehouse from yesterday’s raid appeared. Bryce had just stepped to the podium and was still adjusting the microphone when the conference room doors burst open and two uniformed cops rushed in.

One of them made a beeline for the commissioner and whispered in his ear. I sat up straight when the puzzled, annoyed look on the commissioner’s face became one of intense concern.

“Ms. Mayor, everyone, excuse me,” the commissioner said, standing as the lights came back on.

Brooklyn and Arturo and Doyle and I all looked at each other with the same wide-eyed expression.

“Good grief. What the hell now?” Brooklyn said.

“Something has come up,” the commissioner said. “I’ll explain in a minute, but right now I’m going to need everyone to please stand and calmly head for the stairwells and proceed outside.”

He cleared his throat as everyone started freaking out.

“Quiet, now, everybody, okay? Head for the exit immediately. We have a problem. A red terrorist alert has been issued. We need to evacuate the building.”

Chapter 59

“I told you, you stupid bastard,” Mr. Beckett said from the window, where he looked at the building through binoculars. “They’re coming out now! They’re evacuating! Blow it now!”

“One more minute,” said Mr. Joyce.

“No! Now!” Mr. Beckett cried. He watched as a truck pulled up in front of the building and a guy leaped out with a black Lab in tow.

“It’s the bomb squad! Do it now!”

“One second,” said Mr. Joyce, clicking away at the keyboard like a jazz piano soloist. “Just a couple more adjustments.”

Mr. Beckett tore a schematic in half and kicked the cooler.

“You’ve adjusted it enough! It’s now or never!”

Mr. Joyce ignored him, eyes on the screen, clicking buttons like mad.

Mr. Beckett looked through the binocs again, then started banging his head against the ambulance’s metal wall.

“Blow it,” he whimpered. “Blow it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Mr. Joyce said. “It’s all about the placement, otherwise it’ll do cosmetic damage at best.”

“I don’t give a shit! Blow the damn thing now!”

“Fine,” said Mr. Joyce. “You win. Just so you know, it’s not ready.”

“Blow it!”

“First say that it’s your call,” said Mr. Joyce. “I don’t want you blaming this on me later.”

“It’s my call! It’s my call!” Mr. Beckett cried.

Mr. Joyce set off the detonators on the eighty pounds of plastic explosives with a soft press of his thumb.

Chapter 60

We were in the stairwell, nervous, feeling as powerless as schoolchildren in a teacher-led fire drill. It wasn’t the weird sound we suddenly heard that was that concerning. It was the hard shudder that a moment later came up through the ground and wrenched through the stairs and walls into the marrow of our bones.

Everyone stopped dead on the stairs with a collective gasp as the concrete drunkenly swayed back and forth under our feet. I looked up immediately at the ceiling, along with everyone else, suddenly feeling the hard beating of my heart as I wondered if it was about to drop down on top of us.

“Oh, my God, Mike! Look!” said Brooklyn, elbowing me in the neck as she pointed up at the stairwell window.

I looked.

Behind the courthouses, up on Broadway, about two long blocks away, I saw 26 Federal Plaza, the huge, monolithic FBI headquarters building. Something was wrong. Smoke was rising in the air above it. The smoke seemed to be coming from many of its seemingly blown-open windows.

Emily!

I watched helplessly as more of its windows blew out simultaneously, almost in a left-to-right diagonal line, flashing with a blinding white light.

I looked silently at what happened next.

The top floors of 26 Fed seemed to tremble and waft back and forth. There was a thunderclap crack of concrete and a horrid creak and groan of shearing steel. Then the top stories of the building freed themselves from their blown moorings and slowly slid away into empty air.

“Dear holy God,” I said. The building around us rocked again as most of 26 Fed’s million-pound avalanche of glass and stone crashed down onto the streets below.

When I peeled my eyes away from the mushrooming dust cloud out the window, I could hear somebody crying. It was the mayor, two steps above me. She was bawling her eyes out.

“They’re dead,” she kept saying as she crumpled to the floor. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

Every cop there turned and looked at each other as the dust plume rose into the sky. Doyle and Arturo and Brooklyn and Chief Fabretti. The shock was fine. What wasn’t so fine was the fear. The pale and shivering crazed looks of fear.

“Déjà vu all over again,” said Doyle, licking his lips. He had his gun in his hand. I gently helped him put it away.

“This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy,” said Arturo hysterically.

I put my arm on Arturo’s shoulder. I opened my mouth, but I was speechless. He was in shock, the same as me. He was also right.

Then I was running down the stairs two by two, speed-dialing Emily as I began to pray that she miraculously might still be alive.

Chapter 61

I hit the street and ran as fast as I could up narrow Saint Andrew’s Plaza toward the destruction.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sky above the buildings. A misty cloud of gray dust was above it. It kept billowing wider and wider. Within the expanding gray cloud was a confetti-like, glittering mass of debris that I realized after a moment was paper.

I kept trying to call Emily as I ran, but her phone kept kicking into voice mail.

Maybe she’s just on the phone, I thought with desperate hope. Or her phone needs charging. Or the cell sites are down.

As I neared Foley Square, the Irish prayer to Saint Michael, the patron saint of cops, which Seamus had made me memorize when I graduated from the academy, suddenly popped into my head.

Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in this hour of conflict. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and... something, something... thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.

“And please let Emily be okay, God,” I whispered. “Let me have this one. You have to let me have just this one, please. Amen.”

Fire-truck horns blatted and blasted in the distance as I finally sprinted past the row of Corinthian columns fronting the Thurgood Marshall courthouse into Foley Square. I was going at a pretty good clip, but when I glanced up and got my first good look at 26 Fed, I immediately slowed, then abruptly stopped in my tracks and just stood there in the street staring up, completely overwhelmed by what I was seeing.

Twenty-Six Federal Plaza’s normally perfectly sleek rectilinear forty-one-story glass-and-stone slab now looked like a giant cereal box that had been chewed up by a rabid pit bull. I grimaced at the grid of exposed offices in the horrifically wrecked upper half of the skyscraper. Everything was completely pulverized. Every ruined nook and cranny was filled with smoking wreckage.

An even harder pulse of dread shuddered through me as I suddenly noticed that what remained of the structure was still visibly swaying back and forth. I gripped down hard on my cell phone, wondering if I was about to watch the rest of it go, about to see it start pancaking down like the Twin Towers on 9/11.

When it didn’t happen immediately, I started racking my brain, trying to remember the one or two times I had been in the FBI building. I tried to think what floor Emily’s office or morning meeting room might have been on, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember. All I could do was stand there feeling numb as I stared up at the torn-apart office tower.

I wasn’t the only one. All over Foley Square, I suddenly noticed people standing silently out on the steps of the courthouses and on the sidewalks in front of the government buildings. The ones who weren’t filming with their smartphones were like me — just standing there frozen, a regiment of jaw-dropped statues staring up.

Somehow, after a minute or two, I shook myself out of my stupor and continued haltingly up Lafayette Street. When I got to the next corner, at Worth Street, I looked to the left — west, toward Broadway.

When I saw the devastation up close for the first time, I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it.

How could anyone?

It looked like the entire top half of 26 Federal Plaza had fallen into Worth Street, filling it up like dirt in a trench. Through the concrete dust, I could make out a dark, immense, almost three-story mound of debris that completely blocked the street and both sidewalks.

At its top, a half dozen steel girders stuck up crookedly like a stand of burned, branchless trees. Around the girders, huge folded sections of the office building’s distinctive facade were slumped over on themselves like unspooled bolts of cloth. In the warm breeze that hit my sweating face, I smelled the acrid, industrial stink of burned metal and plastic.

A falling, flapping sheet of paper suddenly hit me in the temple like a tap, and I began shuffling forward at the terrible mound through the haze.

Chapter 62

There was a soft flapping sound as a steady rain of printer-paper sheets fell down around me. The dust above must have been doing something to the light, because everything was tinted with a strange, unreal bluish tinge.

I walked up the wide sidewalk around a haphazard maze of splintered desks, smashed office chairs, and cracked computer screens. I blinked down at an intact framed bachelor’s degree from Tulane University propped up against the gutter as if someone had placed it there.

As I continued my approach, a tall, skinny black bike messenger with a scratched face silently staggered past in the street, covered in a pale-gray coating of dust.

Then I came closer and saw something really amazing.

People were already up on the mound of debris, a dozen or so people. There were a few uniformed cops, but mostly they were civilians — office workers, a guy in a white doctor’s coat, a loose line of people silently passing down debris and rubble.

I climbed up over some chunks of concrete, immediately joining them. As the dry, stale taste of concrete and drywall dust filled my nostrils and mouth, I accepted a huge hunk of concrete from a short, Italian-looking guy in a ruined pinstriped suit above me. As I turned to heave it, I saw that a burly uniformed security guard had arrived behind me, waiting to accept it.

“What happened?” the guard said to me as I passed him the concrete.

I squinted at him. He was a really distinctive-looking guy. He had longish brown hair under his navy ball cap and bright, light-blue eyes. He must have played football in college or something, because he was jacked.

“Someone said it was a plane,” he said as I continued to stare at him stupidly. “Was it a plane?”

After he handed the concrete to the next person down the line, I shook my head and carefully passed him the two-yard length of fractured rebar I’d just been handed.

“It was explosives,” I finally said. “I saw it. They blew it. Someone took it down with high explosives or something. Demo’d it, like. I didn’t see a plane.”

That’s when my cell phone went off in my pocket. I crouched down in the wreckage, frenziedly wiping the dust-covered screen to see who was calling.

I closed my eyes with relief as my heart somersaulted in my chest.

All was not lost. There was still hope. A tiny drop.

“Emily?!” I yelled as I put the phone to my ear.

“Mike! Are you okay?” she said. “We got hit. I just made it out of the building. Someone said you guys were hit as well. Are you okay?”

Thank you, God. You came through. Thank you. And Saint Michael. You guys came through. I owe you.

I clenched back my tears of relief. Then I couldn’t anymore.

“Yes,” I said, wiping dust and tears off my face. “I’m fine. Perfect now. Where are you?”

“On the west side of Broadway near Worth.”

“Okay, stay where you are. I’m coming to you.”

When I stood and turned around again to ask the muscular security guard to take my place in line, I stopped and just stood there blinking.

Because all of a sudden the guy, whoever he had been, whatever he had been, was gone.

Chapter 63

The next three days were some of the most tumultuous in New York City’s history.

Twenty-two people had died in the blast. Eleven special agents (one of them the direct assistant to the head of the New York office), three civilian clerks, and eight maintenance and security people. More than a hundred were still in the hospital, many with internal injuries from being crushed under heavy debris when the building collapsed. Many people were missing fingers, arms, eyes, feet. The fact that half of Manhattan’s hospitals were still out of commission after the EMP blast in Yorkville did not help the situation at all.

The initial investigation into the bombing showed that it had been as ingenious as it had been devastating. Incredibly, robots had been used. Investigators had found three unexploded robots in the pile. They looked like miniature children’s blocks, but inside they had intricate flywheels and radio receivers and electronics that allowed them to be moved around remotely, like a swarm of insects. In addition to the electronics, the bots had been laden with explosives and had been inserted probably through the AC unit on the roof into the air ducts.

Experts were speculating that whoever had radio-controlled the bots into position must have been an engineer or a demolitions expert, because each unit had been precisely placed alongside the building’s support struts for maximum destruction.

As in the aftermath of 9/11, the governor of New York had issued a citywide state of emergency, and the National Guard was called in. Soldiers armed with rifles stood at multiple checkpoints throughout the city, with countersniper teams on various rooftops. There were even rumors that there was a CIA surveillance drone high in the air above New York City 24-7. It was truly unreal.

But instead of committing the mentally unhealthy act of dwelling on things, Emily and I and my Ombudsman Outreach squaddies busied ourselves by doubling down, trying to shake out everything we could on the investigation. It was all dead ends so far, but something would break. It had to. Or at least we couldn’t stop believing that it would.

“If they’re terrorists, Mike, then why won’t they contact us, claim credit?” said Noah Robertson, starting up our Friday morning team meeting at the Intelligence Division building in Brooklyn.

We were all camped around my desk — Emily and Arturo in commandeered office chairs, which were in high demand since about a hundred cops had been reassigned to the case. Doyle and Brooklyn and Noah were actually sitting on the floor against the partition wall among the stacks of paper and coffee cups and pizza boxes that were strewn around the once-fancy office space.

Everyone was in jeans and hoodies and T-shirts — even Emily, who was usually in her FBI-mandated fancy office clothes. Nonstop sixteen-hour days tend to make everyone a little less formal.

“Because that would be the conventional thing,” Emily said, picking one of the little bots they’d found in the rubble off my desk.

“These guys don’t do conventional,” she said, tossing the bot into the air and catching it.

“They figure it’s even more terrifying to not claim credit, to continue to stay in the shadows being a faceless menace,” I said.

“I think they might be right,” said Arturo around the straw of his blue Coolatta.

“But they are terrorists, right? I mean, they have to be, considering how well financed they are,” Brooklyn said. “Only a team of computer experts could have come up with that robot swarm bomb, or whatever the hell you want to call it.”

“Or built those EMP devices,” said Doyle, yawning. “Hell, we’ve all heard the rumors. It’s most likely being sponsored by a foreign government.”

“No,” I said as I stared up at the ceiling.

“Earth to Mike,” Doyle said after a beat of silence.

“It’s not a government or even a team of terrorists. It’s too... elegant,” I said, snatching the bot Emily was tossing out of the air.

“For all its destruction, this is handcrafted,” I said. “It’s one or two people. This is being done to precision. The attacks. The head fakes. And if you want something done this right, you have to do it yourself.”

Chapter 64

“One or two people are systematically leveling New York City?” said Arturo as he made an annoying squeaking sound with his drink straw. “How? It’s impossible.”

“In 2000, there was a famous article in Wired magazine,” I said. “Some computer genius sat down and mapped out how all these new computer-assisted breakthroughs in technology will pan out. The potential pitfalls of things like artificial intelligence and nanotech and robotics and biotech.”

“I think I read it,” Noah said. “It was written by the guy who cofounded Sun Microsystems and created Java, right?”

“That’s the guy,” I said. “One of the theories in the article is that as computer tech gets more powerful for regular folks and makes their lives easier, this more powerful tech could also put power into the hands of disgruntled individuals.”

I rolled the bot in my palm like it was a die.

“That’s what I think is happening here,” I said. “We’re seeing the pivot where cutting-edge technology, being very well utilized by two or even just one motivated nut job, can kill a massive amount of people.”

“One guy is doing all this?” Arturo snorted. “C’mon.”

“You don’t believe me?” I said. “Then what about the Unabomber?”

“Who?”

“Ted Kaczynski. For twenty years, this guy went on a nationwide bombing campaign from a cabin in Montana that didn’t have electricity or running water. What he had instead was an extremely keen intelligence that he used to make incredibly intricate letter bombs. And that was in the seventies and eighties. Imagine what he could do today if he was free.

“What I think we have here is a Kaczynski-level intelligence running amok.”

“I can’t believe you just said that,” Emily said, suddenly frantically thumbing her phone.

“What?” I said.

“Ted Kaczynski. Two days ago, I got an e-mail from the Washington office,” she said, tapping her cell screen. “Here it is. The Bureau of Prisons sent a request from Kaczynski to the FBI. He said he saw the news of the bombing and put in a request through his lawyer to help us.

“Which I and everybody at the Bureau dismissed as crazy. Until now. I think you’re right, Mike. About the intelligence involved here. It’s very similar to Kaczynski’s. Maybe we should interview him.”

“Interview the Unabomber?”

“Yes,” Emily said. “Why not? He’s completely brilliant and crazy. Just like the person we’re trying to catch. Maybe he can give us some insight.”

“How is the Unabomber still alive?” said Brooklyn. “Didn’t the feds execute him?”

“You’re thinking of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber,” said Doyle.

“Doyle’s right. Kaczynski is alive,” Emily said. “He’s in his seventies now and housed at the fed supermax in Florence, Colorado. So what do you say, Mike? My bosses couldn’t be more ready to do something. This is the worst loss of life in the Bureau’s history. Let’s go talk to him.”

“When?” I said.

“Ain’t no time like the present,” she said. “There’s a Bureau plane at Teterboro that flew in the director for all the funerals. I’ll get us on it. What do you say?”

I rolled the strangely heavy little bot across the blotter of my cluttered desk and peered at it.

“I say let’s go to Colorado.”

Chapter 65

It was evening when the FBI Gulfstream V bounced down hard onto the tarmac of the Fremont County Airport in Colorado.

Two young male agents were standing beside a black Ford Explorer outside the aircraft’s dropped door. They speedily helped move us and our files and bags into the backseat before spinning the roof lights as they floored it out of the rural airport and onto the service road.

As we got onto a highway, outside my window in the distance, I could see the blood-orange glow of the sun that must have just settled behind the dark, serrated peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

“Well, what do you know?” I said to Emily through a yawn as we looked over the piles of Unabomber case files. “Those mountains actually do look like the ones on the beer cans, huh? Speaking of which, where is the Coors brewery? Close by? Do they give tours? With tastings?”

“Unfortunately, that’ll have to be the next trip, Mike. The warden is waiting on us,” Emily said as she opened a laptop. “But believe me, when this is over, the first six-pack of Silver Bullets will be on me.”

Known sometimes as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, ADX Florence is a 490-bed concrete-and-steel hotel that the feds reserve for its system’s most notorious and most extremely violent prisoners. In addition to Kaczynski, it houses convicted foreign and domestic terrorists, spies like the ex — FBI agent scum Robert Hanssen, and leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood and the Gangster Disciples.

“So, Mike, what do you think? You’ve read the files. You ready to talk to Ted?” said Emily as our SUV went up the long driveway and was buzzed in at the gate, flanked by towers manned with armed guards.

“I don’t know,” I said as we rolled in past the twelve-foot-high fencing, topped with razor wire. “The guy isn’t your regular perp, is he? I never interviewed a killer who went to Harvard at sixteen or was a Berkeley math professor at twenty-five. Why do you think he wants to talk to us now? He’s never offered his help before.”

Emily shrugged.

“I guess we’re about to find out.”

The assistant warden was a tough, matronly Native American woman named Marjorie Greene. She met us at the administration building’s sally port and helped us get through processing, where we handed over our service weapons.

The inside of the prison was like no facility I’d ever been to. Everything was made of smooth poured concrete — the floors, the walls, the ceiling. There wasn’t a window in sight. Prisons are usually loud, with slamming gates and people yelling, but here it was quiet and almost bizarrely serene.

“Like walking into a spaceship or something, isn’t it?” Marjorie Greene said as she led us with four guards down a meandering corridor to the interview room. “They designed it that way on purpose, so the prisoners don’t know where they are in relation to the outside. I don’t even know myself half the time, and I’ve been here seven years.”

“Seems like overkill, no?” said Emily. “Aren’t they locked down in their cells twenty-three hours a day at a supermax?”

“Well, it’s not so much that the inmates will escape from in here per se,” Marjorie explained as we walked. “It’s that some of these guys are heads of the kinds of organizations that actually might try to break them out from the outside.”

“What’s Kaczynski like as a prisoner?” I said.

“Tidy cell. Nice rapport with staff. Reads a lot. Figures, his being a genius and all. Never caused any kind of trouble. Quiet as a church mouse, really. He’s... different. You’ll see.”

We came down some steps into another concrete corridor with a lower ceiling and a frosted, probably bulletproof, Plexiglas door at the far end. One of the four guards slipped a long tubelike key into a metal box beside the door as Marjorie Greene spoke into her radio. A moment later, there was an electric buzz and the crack of a lock snapping open.

I took a deep breath as the guard opened the door.

And then I was standing there looking at the Unabomber in the flesh.

He didn’t look like the famous crazy-mountain-man picture of him taken when he was arrested. He was clean-shaven and just looked sort of oldish, with age spots on his forehead and skin drooping off the sharp bones of his face. You wouldn’t know who he was — just some sickly-looking man in a baggy orange jumpsuit.

It was actually bordering on ridiculous that this scarecrow of a man, who looked as threatening as a kitten, was cuffed to a concrete desk behind a set of thick steel bars that divided the room.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling weakly, as one of the guards slammed the door closed and locked us in. “I didn’t think you’d take me up on my offer. I’m surprised, not to mention hopeful.”

Chapter 66

“I’m agent Parker. This is Detective Bennett. We don’t have a lot of time here, so why don’t we get to it?” Emily said, clicking her phone to record the conversation as we sat in the two folding chairs in front of the bars. “Why did you want to talk to us today, Mr. Kaczynski?”

He looked at us with his lips pursed for a second, like he was mulling something over.

“They’re going to destroy New York City — you know that, right?” he finally said. “That’s going to be next. The next step. The entire city will be destroyed.”

Emily and I exchanged a glance.

“Um, how do you know that?” I said. “Do you know the people who are doing this?”

“It isn’t people,” Kaczynski said. “There is one person behind this. One genius, and he’s good. And he’s toying with you. Punishing you. Unless you get a bead on this person in the next few days, I would recommend evacuating New York City. Because the loss of life will be like nothing ever seen.”

We stared at him. What was disturbing was the dead certainty in his tone. He seemed incredibly sure of what he was saying.

“You didn’t answer our question. Do you know these people?” Emily repeated.

“No. I don’t know them personally, of course,” Kaczynski said, “but I know what they’re like. I used to be this person. Technically gifted, highly intelligent, dedicated, and very, very angry. You should be looking for someone like me. Someone who knows advanced math and computer science, maybe a chess master or a think-tank guy. Whoever it is, he is highly analytical and lives alone, most likely in a messy place. Look for a hoarder, probably someone on the autistic spectrum, a man who lives exclusively inside the expansive confines of his own head.”

“What do you think will happen to the city?”

“Something huge and unexpected — something biological, perhaps. Or who knows? Even something to do with nanotechnology. Schopenhauer said that a smart man can hit a target that others can’t reach, but a genius can hit a target that others can’t see.

“I think you’re up against a genius here, unfortunately. God help all of us if this guy knows nanotech. He could come up with an artificial virus that destroys the world’s vegetation or oxygen or water supply. You really have to catch this guy!”

Chapter 67

“Why do you think total destruction will be next?” I asked.

“Because it’s the next logical step,” Kaczynski continued. “The last and final upping of the ante. The perpetrator hasn’t asked for money, has he? He hasn’t claimed credit for some cause. That’s because the man behind this doesn’t have any ulterior motive. He just wants to destroy New York City — or who knows? All of humanity, maybe.”

“Why do you care about all this, Mr. Kaczynski?” I said. “I mean, three people were killed and many others maimed, and the entire country was terrorized by your campaign. You even tried to blow up an airliner. I’d think if anything you’d be rooting for the destruction of New York City.”

He took a deep breath and looked down at the floor. His bony fingers began to drum loudly on the concrete desk.

“How many times do I have to explain this? In the beginning, all I wanted to do was to live freely by myself in Montana. I didn’t want a damn thing from anyone. Just to be left alone. But one day I went for a hike, and I saw that industrial society would never leave me alone. I’ll admit I was angry and motivated by revenge against the system. But quite quickly, I began to see my bombing campaign as a way to wake people up to the existential threat posed by technology, which I detailed in my Times article.

“The fact that someone is now blowing up New York with advanced technology is the very outcome I was trying to warn everyone about. Your bomber wants to destroy New York City and maybe the world. I never wanted that! Don’t you see? I wanted to stop humanity from killing itself. I wanted to stop things so a guy like the one you’re dealing with here would never have the power to do what he’s doing. My campaign was to see the world saved.”

He was referring to his antitechnology manifesto, which the New York Times and Washington Post had agreed to publish in 1995 in order to stop him from sending mail bombs. I’d read it on the plane, and though it was definitely bonkers in parts, I found it surprisingly well written.

“So you still think technology is going to destroy the world?” Emily said.

“Going to?” he said, wide-eyed. “It’s happening right before our very eyes! How much time do you spend with your smartphone? A lot, I bet. More than you spend with your spouse. Than with your children. Even the guards here. I see them. They’re good men set to keep watch and protect the world from some of the worst criminals on earth, and here they are sneaking little peeks at the screen. It’s here. We’re already dependent on the machines.”

He winced as he rubbed a hand through his hair nervously.

“It’s simple, really. The more we ask technology to do for us, the more power we have to give it. Right now, the world’s most brilliant minds are designing artificial intelligence and robots that they think will solve all our problems but will only spell doom for the entire human race! Human beings can’t handle this kind of power. Who could? Once AI and robots are in place, they will either destroy humanity outright or give one person — the head of Google, say — a measure of godlike power that Caligula never dreamed was possible.

“Right now, who is really more powerful? Google or the NSA? How about tomorrow? I tried to stop all this from happening. I saw what was coming. Now, if you actually solve this case and prevent this nut from wiping everyone out, I think you have another chance to finally make the threat visible to the world. You have to open people’s eyes!”

“But I don’t understand. How does what you’ve said relate to the bombings in New York?” Emily said.

“Can’t you see what you’ve got here?” Kaczynski said, starting to rock back and forth in his chair. “This case is an opportunity for you guys in the political system and law enforcement to do your jobs and protect the public. You need to highlight the dire danger that computer technology is posing.

“You need to use this as a lever to urge politicians to pass cautionary laws to put a stop to drones and especially robotics and artificial intelligence. People urge gun control after a school shooting, right? Well, we won’t have to worry about a school shooter in the near future because he’ll be cooking up a genetically engineered supervirus in his basement, and everyone on earth will be dead. You need to ensure that these technologies are treated like radioactive nuclear material, because that’s how dangerous this is, and—”

“Thanks for the advice, Mr. Kaczynski, but unfortunately, we didn’t come out here to sit and talk the politics of technology. Do you have any more specific information on our case?”

“Well, no,” he said, gaping at Emily.

“Okay, this interview is over, then. Thanks for your help, Mr. Kaczynski,” I said, standing with a sigh.

Tears sprang into his eyes as we knocked on the door to summon the guard. Kaczynski rapidly tapped at the concrete desk with a gaunt finger.

“We’re at the precipice, don’t you see?” he said. “The precipice! Only you guys can slam on the brakes here! You have to! This is bigger than New York City! It may be our last chance.”

Chapter 68

“Sorry, Mike. That was pretty fruitless,” Emily said as we were driving back into Manhattan from Teterboro Airport after our return flight the following evening.

“What do you mean?” I said as I tapped impatiently on the steering wheel. We sat at a dead stop after going through the George Washington Bridge tolls. Up ahead on the span, blue and red emergency lights flashed around a broken-down charter bus they were trying to tow away.

“I should have anticipated that Kaczynski would only use this as an opportunity to spew his warped ideology. We probably would have done better if we’d hit the Coors tour, like you said.”

“Chin up, Parker,” I said. “We took a stab. Besides, I think he gave us some insight into our perpetrator or at least confirmed what we were already thinking. And oddly enough, some of the stuff he said about technology I think is actually true. These military robots they’re starting to build really are scary.

“And this self-driving smartcar idea? Maybe it’ll make some things cheaper, but won’t it also put every truck driver and cabbie and FedEx and UPS worker in the world out of work? For what? So college kids can drink and drive safely? That you can do something amazing is amazing, but when is it too much?”

“You got me,” she said. “Come to think of it, his comments about the perpetrator’s anger and introversion are actually pretty interesting. Kaczynski left the world to live in his cabin until the world intruded upon him in a way that truly pissed him off. Maybe that’s what happened with our guy. He’s sitting there hoarding and counting buses or what have you, and suddenly the world — or, more specifically, New York City — hurts him in a deep, fundamental way. Name some ways the city can hurt you.”

“Gee, that’ll be hard,” I said, gesturing at the unbelievable traffic. “Let me count the ways. Taxes, tickets, traffic, red tape, fines, towed cars, broken buses, broken trains, stuck elevators, jury duty, getting mugged, no place to park, homeless people urinating on your doorstep. How am I doing so far?”

“You’re on a roll,” she said. “Maybe this guy is an ex — city employee who got fired without justification. Or he lost a lawsuit. Got screwed on a business deal by a city councilman. Maybe he was hurt on the subway, considering the first blast.”

My cell rang. I glanced at the screen.

“Open the window. Maybe I’ll start my Luddite conversion after all by chucking my phone into the Hudson. It’s my angry boss, Fabretti.”

Instead, she lifted my phone and hit the Accept Call button and handed it to me.

“Hey, Chief. Just got off the plane,” I said.

“Good. Get over to City Hall as fast as you can. They just called.”

“Who just called?” I said.

“The bombers. They just called the acting mayor. We have first contact. Get over here now.”

Chapter 69

I took the West Side Highway and drove all the way south, until it turned into West Street.

Half a block east of our exit, we had to stop abruptly at a checkpoint where a massive Bradley Fighting Vehicle was parked sideways in the intersection. After we showed our ID, a young bespectacled National Guardsman in khaki camo mirror-checked the underside of my cop car for a bomb.

We’d heard that there were similar National Guard units at Times Square and in Rockefeller Center. The whole borough of Manhattan was suddenly in lockdown, apparently.

Coming up onto Broadway, we saw heavy dump trucks and front-end loaders were still sweeping up what was left of 26 Federal Plaza. There was even more security around City Hall’s little fenced-in park off Broadway. I counted at least twenty cops and National Guard guys as we slowed alongside the bomb-shield concrete planters by the gate.

As we were ID’d again and finally let in through the wrought iron, I remembered the last time I was here. It was in 2009, and I was with the kids at the ticker-tape parade along the Canyon of Heroes, where the Yankees were being honored by the mayor. It had been a great day: Chrissy was up on my shoulders, laughing and swatting at the shredded business-paper confetti as the Yankees went by on a flatbed truck.

Way back in the days when ticker tape wasn’t paper raining down from blown-up buildings.

FBI technical analyst Ashley Brook Clark and Dr. Michael Aynard, the NYU physics professor, who’d both helped us on the EMP portion of this case, were already inside City Hall’s grand foyer.

“You can cool your heels, guys,” the ever-acerbic Aynard said with an epic eye roll as he looked up from his iPad mini. “They said we’d be granted an audience with Her Honor in ten minutes — oh, I’d say almost half an hour ago. I’m so glad I’m volunteering my time here. It’s not like I have a life or anything.”

Instead of responding, I decided to take a peek around. Through a threshold, I could see a massive life-size oil portrait of George Washington on the wall of a darkened room. A brass plaque on the wall said that the museumlike building was the oldest city hall in the country that’s still being used as a city hall.

“Hey, Mike, you want to check out the upstairs?” Emily said, reading another plaque. “It says Lincoln lay in state up there after his assassination.”

“Nah, I’m good,” I said, glancing at the unlit landing beneath the rotunda. “I find history much less interesting when it starts to repeat itself before my very eyes.”

Chief Fabretti appeared about ten minutes later and led us through a wood-paneled space that once might have been a chapel. The pews had been replaced with a warren of cubicles and desks, and at them, half a dozen wiped-out-looking mayor’s deputies and staff were mumbling among themselves, trying to stay awake.

Three more staffers were conferring quietly by a corner desk when we finally made it to the mayor’s office. Acting mayor Priscilla Atkinson, in yoga clothes and with her sneakers off, sat in a club chair beside a huge stone fireplace talking on her cell phone. Though she was dressed casually, the heavy concern on her tired face was anything but.

“Would you like anything? We don’t have coffee, but there’s green tea,” said one of her slim majordomos as he came over.

The mayor got off her cell and stood before we could answer.

“Thank you for coming, everyone,” she said, padding over to her desk in her No-See-Um socks.

“This came in about a half an hour ago,” she said, opening an audio file on a laptop.

“We are the ones who bombed the subway and killed the mayor,” said an electronically disguised voice. “We are the ones who set off the EMPs and blew up Twenty-Six Federal Plaza. Do we have your attention? On the northwest corner of Thirty-First Street and Dyer Avenue is a mailbox. Inside the mailbox, you will find a FedEx envelope that will prove we are who we say. We will call back tomorrow with what you are to do next.”

“We grabbed the package half an hour ago,” said Fabretti as he handed out a short stack of papers. “There were no prints on the package or the papers. This is a copy of what was in it.”

“What’s the drop site looking like?” I said.

“We’re canvassing, but it’s just old office buildings and warehouses around the drop.”

I shuffled through the stack of papers. There were blueprints, technical schematics on the cube robots, some computer programming stuff, and a diagram that looked like one of the EMPs next to a series of mathematical equations.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, really. Neither, apparently, could anyone else, as all eyes were on Dr. Aynard. He licked his thumb and flipped quickly through the papers, mumbling from time to time. We all stood and stared and waited as he rattled through page after page.

“This is fascinating,” he whispered to himself.

“Screw fascinating,” said Fabretti sharply. “Is it real? Are these the people?”

The NYU professor looked up and nodded vigorously at Fabretti, his eyes very wide.

“Without a shadow of a doubt,” Aynard said.

Chapter 70

As we left the mayor’s office, I didn’t know what to think about the contact the attackers had made. By that point, I was too tired to even try. Luckily, Robertson and Arturo were pulling the night shift at the intel division, so I sent an e-mail of the schematics over to them to see what they could make of it.

I dropped off Emily at her hotel and headed home. I gauged that I was about 10 percent awake when I stumbled in through the front door of the Bennett Estate half an hour later. Make that 5 percent, I thought as I almost tripped ass over teakettle on a Frozen princesses lunch box in the hall.

I wasn’t the only sleepy one, apparently. I found Martin on a stool in the kitchen with all the lights on. He was facedown, snoring lightly between some engineering textbooks open on the counter. He woke up as I crouched down and lifted a worn paperback of the science fiction classic Ender’s Game that had fallen on the floor beside his stool.

“Mr. Bennett!” he said, sitting up suddenly, stifling a yawn. “There you are. You’re back from your travels, I see. What time is it?”

“Eleven thirty.”

“Eleven thirty so soon?” Martin said, checking his phone. “Well, let’s see. The kids are all fed, teeth brushed, and sacked out, et cetera. I got the boys’ laundry done. The girls didn’t have any. They never do. Funny. I had the boys running sprints down in the park. While I had Trent doing calisthenics, Eddie lost the soccer ball. We looked and looked but couldn’t for the life of us figure out where it had gone to. The Hudson River? But I told Eddie not to worry. I have plenty of practice ones I can bring from my dorm tomorrow.

“I wanted to do vegetarian for the crew, but Seamus came by and insisted on making turkey clubs. He’s quite a heavy on the mayo and bacon, if you want my opinion. Especially for a man of the cloth. That’s about it. So if there isn’t anything more, I’ll be on me way.”

“Nice try, Martin,” I said, my head still spinning from his dispatch. “Only place you’re going, kid, is the couch,” I said, pointing toward the living room. “There’s blankets and a pillow on the top shelf of the hall closet.”

“I couldn’t impose,” said Martin, yawning again. “Besides, I have an eight o’clock exam.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll wake you up and drive you to campus.”

“In your cop car?” said Martin, excited. “Get out! Never been in a fuzzmobile. That’ll be a gas, so it will. Will you hit the siren and lights?”

“If you’re good, Martin. Now, good night.”

I smiled as he left. There was at least a little silver lining in all the current chaos. Seamus had hit one out of the park by finding Martin.

He really was a great kid. It was especially funny how he was running the couch potato out of the boys. They griped, but if Ricky’s request for a FIFA Soccer PlayStation game for his birthday was any indication, Martin was starting to grow on them as well.

I made the mistake then of glancing at the mail table.

There was a letter on top addressed to me, and I stood there staring at Mary Catherine’s familiar perfect handwriting.

One part of me wanted to tear it open immediately and devour it, but something else told me, “Not so fast.” Maybe it was just my exhaustion, but I suddenly felt like there was something ominous about it, as if the news in it actually might not be so good.

Mary Catherine and I had become so close recently. Closer than ever. And yet here we were, still with an ocean between us. Her last call especially spooked me, how comfortable she seemed running her mom’s hotel. I couldn’t stop thinking that somehow we were drifting farther and farther apart.

Bottom line was I couldn’t deal with bad news. Definitely not now.

I left Mary Catherine’s letter on the mail table untouched and quietly turned off the light in the hall as I headed to bed.

Chapter 71

As it turned out, I actually ended up using my lights and siren to deposit Martin back at Manhattan College after all.

We didn’t have time to stop for coffee as I slalomed the Chevy at speed through the West Side Highway traffic, but I could see by the size of the whites of Martin’s eyes when I screeched to a stop under the elevated subway tracks on Broadway and 240th Street, near the Leo Engineering Building, that he was pretty wide awake.

There was actually a method to my mad dash to Riverdale. There’d been a breakthrough on the case. Robertson had done it. He had found a plate on a surveillance camera near the drop.

Thirty-First Street and Dyer Avenue was a boxed-in intersection; 31st Street, like most of the odd-numbered cross streets in the Manhattan grid, runs one-way to the west. If a car had come to drop off the package, it had three options when leaving: west, north, or south.

As it turned out, two of the exit routes — the ones to the west and to the north — actually had surveillance cameras pointed at the street. The camera aimed at the western route was highly visible on the corner. The camera to the north was much less visible, so that’s where Robertson had concentrated his search.

The last pickup on the box had been at 5:00 p.m., so Robertson had recorded the plate of every car that had stopped at the intersection since then. More than two hundred plates. From the DMV database, he got a list of names, then cross-referenced them with everything we had on all three outstanding cases, every lead and tip. Finally, at six fifteen this morning, something popped. A name.

A Russian name.

Dmitri Yevdokimov was a Russian immigrant with no priors. His name had been on the list of the more than nine hundred anonymous tips that had come in after the publication of the subway bomber stills.

The anonymous caller had said that Yevdokimov resembled the younger of the two subway bombers from the paper and that he was a chess genius with such a negative, unpleasant, antisocial personality that the Russian-accented caller said he “wouldn’t put it past the bastard to blow up the city.”

The note on the follow-up report by the FBI agent who’d worked the lead stated that Yevdokimov had been interviewed and had provided a solid alibi for the morning of the subway bombing.

But now that his car had been found a block from the drop site, it was time for a follow-up interview, I thought as I ate a light on Bailey Avenue and roared east.

Arturo and Robertson were already on scene with an ESU breach team at Yevdokimov’s last known address, in the East Bronx. The entire block and most of the neighborhood were slowly and meticulously being surrounded by half the department. Since the bloody fiasco in Queens, we were expecting the unexpected, and no one was taking any chances.

I’d gotten as far as East Tremont Avenue when my cell rang with Arturo’s number.

“What?!” I yelled.

“We bagged him, Mike! We were just setting up when a car turned the corner, and Doyle verified the plates. We swooped in as he was getting out of his car. Not a shot fired. ESU has him on the ground, and Mike, listen. There was another guy with him. It could be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We may have just ended this!”

“Great job, Arturo. I hope you’re right. I’m about five minutes out. Where are you taking him? The Four-Five?”

“Yep. The Four-Five. We’ll meet you there,” said Arturo.

Could it be that we actually caught this guy? I wondered as I tossed my phone into the passenger seat. I screeched around a double-parked fish truck and turned on the jets, the siren screaming.

“Let it be. Let it be. This must be the answer. Let it be,” I sang hopefully as I pinned it up East Tremont.

Chapter 72

The forty-fifth Precinct station house, near City Island, was on Barkley and Revere Avenues. I parked and flew up the stairs to the DT department on two and found Arturo and Robertson outside the detective CO’s crowded office. I happily greeted them as well as Brooklyn and Doyle, who were just inside with an ESU sergeant and the precinct captain.

“It looks like them, Mike,” was the first thing out of Arturo’s mouth. “No facial hair, but they look like the suspects from the subway bombing.”

“Anything on the other guy yet?” I said. “Tell me there’s a Facebook selfie of him holding a bunch of plastic explosives.”

“His name is Anatoly Gavrilov,” said Brooklyn. “Like Dmitri, he’s claiming he doesn’t know what the hell is going on — that they’re just cousins who work together as computer programmers and were coming back from a night on the town. They claim they’ve worked for plenty of Wall Street firms, which, from our preliminary look into it, might actually be true. Odd, though, since I wouldn’t exactly peg these two on first glance as Goldman Sachs consultants.”

“You had to see the guy’s house, Mike,” said Arturo. “Hoarders, except organized. Stacks upon stacks of labeled plastic containers of comic books, chess magazines, newspapers — mostly Daily News dating back to the fifties.”

“Exactly,” said Doyle. “Real strange shit.”

I remembered what Kaczynski had said about the bomber being a hoarder. And that he might play chess. Had we actually caught these guys?

I looked at the two men on the interview-room monitor on the lieutenant’s desk. The resemblance was there. They easily could have shaved their goatees because of the manhunt.

“It’s them. Has to be, right?” said Arturo.

“Nothing has to be, Lopez,” I said. “But so far, not bad.”

Chapter 73

I spoke to Yevdokimov first.

“What the fuck is this? Russia?” were the first words out of the Russian’s mouth as I opened the door.

He was not a handsome man, but his casual clothes were expensive — a fastidious sandwashed silk T-shirt; tailored jeans.

“Why’d you do it?” I said.

“Blow up the subway?” he said, staring at me with bulging eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. I was bored. No, wait. I thought I’d start the Fourth of July off early this year, that’s it. Plus of course my mother didn’t really love me.”

His chair creaked as he attempted to shift his weight with his hands cuffed behind him.

“How many times do I have to say it?!” he cried as he began rocking back and forth. “It wasn’t me. I have a lot of enemies, okay? That happens when you’re a genius. Most people are stupid, and when they come into contact with a towering intellect, they become fearful and jealous. I was at work when that bomb went off. I have twenty witnesses who will testify to it.”

“Where were you last night around six fifteen?”

He stared at me as he rocked.

“I was at Orchard Beach in the Bronx. I walk my dog there. Why?”

“Bullshit. You were at the corner of Thirty-First and Dyer Avenue in Manhattan, Dmitri. Your genius must be slipping a bit, because you didn’t think about that second camera on the corner past the box.”

He laughed as he rocked, shaking his head.

“The box? What box? The jack-in-the-box? You’re unbelievably wrong,” he said as he started squeaking around again in his cheap hard plastic chair like the world’s largest hyperactive four-year-old.

“That’s the spirit, Dmitri,” I said. “Rock that boat, but remember, just don’t tip the boat over. Get real comfy, because we’re going to be here for a long, long time.”

He whimpered.

“This is unreal,” he said. “Let me guess. You guys are out of ideas, and since you have no clue who’s doing this and never will, the plan now is to find a scapegoat.”

“Your car was there, Dmitri,” I said. “A gray Civic. Your car, your plates. You were there.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said sadly as he finally stopped squiggling around. He shook his head and looked down at the floor.

“Someone is framing me.”

“Oh, a frame job,” I said. “I haven’t heard of one of those since television came in black-and-white. Tell me more.”

He lifted his head.

“Do you play chess?” he said.

“No. I put murderers on death row.”

“Ah, very funny,” he said with a pained grin. “New York City is one of the most competitive chess arenas in the world, especially for big-money underground games. I haven’t lost a game in six years — six years — and I play every day. They set them up, and I knock them down. Some people are gracious winners. I’m not one of those people.

“I crow. Sometimes I laugh. It’s emasculating to get owned. At least I suppose so, because I wouldn’t know. And now I guess one of those very bright people I beat has had enough. This is their moment to make their mark or whatever. Why not get me back, right? School the master. Revenge! Now, please take off these cuffs. I want my lawyer. Let me out of here. I have to feed my dog.”

Chapter 74

I thought about what Dmitri had said as I came out of the interview room into the bull pen. Some of it actually made sense. Anyone who blew up 26 Fed with robots and all the rest of it could easily have framed this guy. A thought that was pissing me off. Were we being played again? Was this loser actually being framed?

I turned to see Emily Parker coming up the precinct-house stairs.

“I just heard, Mike. You have these guys in custody? Do you think it’s them?”

“Maybe, Emily,” I said as Brooklyn and Doyle came out from questioning Anatoly Gavrilov.

“He’s not talking, Mike,” Brooklyn said. “At least not in English, except when he demands a lawyer.”

“What about your guy, Mike?” Doyle said.

“Same,” I said.

“What now?” Doyle said.

“There’s no way we’re letting them go anywhere until we can confirm their whereabouts in the last few weeks. And months and years,” I said. “We need a full background on these guys. Immigration records, educational background, political affiliations, finances, any recent upheavals in their life that might have set them off.”

That’s when my cell phone rang.

“Mike, what the hell is going on? I thought your team grabbed these guys,” Fabretti said when I picked up.

“So did I. What’s up?”

“The bastards just made contact again five minutes ago.”

I closed my eyes. Shit. Not again.

So the Russians we had weren’t involved? What the hell was this?

“They’ve listed their demands, Bennett. I can’t talk about it over the phone. You need to get back to City Hall now.”

Chapter 75

We were coming over the Macombs Dam Bridge near Yankee Stadium when a lot of frenzied chatter started up on the NYPD-band radio.

I turned it up. They were shifting roadblocks, apparently, and rerouting traffic in midtown. Traffic crews were being mobilized in various precincts and, for some unknown reason, they seemed to be shifting all traffic flow to the north.

“I just got a text from my brother-in-law, who works at Midtown South,” said Doyle from the backseat. “You gotta be kidding me! They’re calling in everyone. And I mean everyone. Every Tom, Dick, and Sally in the NYPD is being told to get their ass in to work!”

I looked at Emily anxiously. The only time I’d ever heard of that happening before was on 9/11.

The first thing the Unabomber had said to us rang in my head.

They’re going to destroy New York City — you know that, right?

“Something must be up,” said Arturo, shaking his head in the seat next to Doyle.

“Ya think, Lopez?” Doyle said, rolling his eyes.

We were thrown another curve as we were coming up on City Hall on lower Broadway twenty minutes later. Fabretti called and told us that they’d moved the mayor six blocks northwest, to the Office of Emergency Management’s new crisis center, at the western end of Chambers Street.

It was a crisis, all right. By the time we got to the new twelve-story glass building on the shore of the Hudson, they’d cordoned off the entire block. Past the roadblock, there was pandemonium on the street outside the building, where cops and National Guardsmen and techs were moving boxes and equipment in and out of trucks.

When it was finally our turn at the checkpoint, the tall, middle-aged female sergeant told me in no uncertain terms to turn around, as no one was being allowed in. I actually had to call Fabretti three times before he radioed the gate and told the hard-ass lady cop it was okay.

There was a city park beside the facility filled with dozens of cop and fed cars and SUVs parked haphazardly up on the grass. We left the car in front of an idling Office of Emergency Management bus, and as we got out we looked up and watched as an NYPD Bell helicopter landed on a helipad beside the building.

The chopper dumped out a half dozen people who looked like feds and civilian professor types. Beside the helipad, at a dock, an NYPD Harbor Unit boat was unloading more smart-looking folks. One of them had on a blue Windbreaker with yellow letters on the back.

“NHC?” I said to Emily. “What the heck is the NHC?”

“National Hurricane Center?” she said, staring at me wide-eyed.

“What? We’re going to have a hurricane now? These guys can make it rain, too? That can’t be!” Doyle said.

“All hands on deck and batten down the friggin’ hatches,” Arturo said as the Harbor Unit boat sped past in the water with a roar.

Chapter 76

Inside the sleek, low-ceilinged lobby of the building, it was even worse.

Every political staffer and cop we saw rushing to and fro was looking completely freaked. I stepped aside when a tall balding guy grunted, “Out of the way!” as he hustled past with a stack of printouts. I even tried to wave down Lieutenant Bryce Miller, who appeared at the end of the lobby, but he blew right past me with his phone glued to his ear and a bewildered look on his face.

“Well, at least everybody is keeping it together,” Doyle cracked.

As Bryce Miller left, Fabretti popped out of a stairwell door and rushed over to us.

“Bennett, tell me you got something — anything — on these Russians that you just picked up.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “They’re claiming that they were framed. I’m not sure if I believe them, but their alibis look pretty solid so far. But even if they were framed, we’re definitely getting closer now, Chief. Because the real bombers — whoever they are — had to know the Russians in order to frame them. We just have to find the link. What the heck is going on here? Why is all hell breaking loose?”

“Because it is. C’mon,” he said, leading us down the crowded hallway. “These bastards FedExed a video this time. They’re showing it in the press room.”

“A video?” said Arturo.

“Don’t get your hopes up, buddy. I doubt it’s from Netflix,” Doyle said.

The video was rolling on a screen set up on the stage as we came into the crowded press room.

It showed what looked like stock news footage — people running on a beach as waves crashed at their backs.

As the terrified people ran for their lives, the same strange electronic voice from the first phone call started up like a documentary voice-over.

“During the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, two hundred thirty thousand people died within minutes as a thirty-foot-high wave struck coastal areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, and the Maldives. It was caused by a massive undersea megathrust earthquake. But that isn’t the only way tsunamis are created.

“Welcome to an undisclosed location,” said the voice as the image on the screen shifted.

Up-to-date digital film was showing what looked like some type of cave or mine corridor. A beam of light moved along a rough, brownish-grayish rock wall in a descending, low-ceilinged shaft. When the light and camera panned left, a thin braided-steel cable hanging from rock bolts embedded in the wall came into view. Running alongside it was a red plastic-coated cable of some kind — electrical, maybe.

The camera stopped as the red cable suddenly led into a large rectangle of strange white blocks. It looked like explosives — a charge the size of a kitchen cabinet stuck to the rock wall. The camera shifted to the center of the shaft, where the length of cables running down the seemingly endless corridor revealed charge after charge after charge stuck to the wall.

“This is Semtex,” the voice said as a hand clad in a black work glove patted the explosives. “The red cable is detcord, and the steel cable beside it is for spreading the force of the blast nice and even, to maximize shear. It’s not the most elaborate bomb I have ever made, but it is certainly the biggest. After all, there is an elegance in simplicity sometimes.

“As I have possibly convinced you with the subway bombing and the razing of 26 Federal Plaza, I am actually pretty good at blowing shit up, no? I like to think that no one has ever been as good at it as I am, but that is for history to decide, I guess.”

As the cameraman turned all the way back around, in the distance, up the shaft, we could see a bright opening in the tunnel, thin clouds in a pale-blue sky.

The camera guy started walking up toward the opening, and then as he reached it, everybody in the room gasped.

Through the cave mouth or mine shaft or whatever it was, the camera showed a bunch of dark, jagged volcanic peaks and a sheer drop-off down an immense cliff into a crashing ocean. The cave mouth was insanely high up — a hundred stories, maybe two hundred. Far below, down the dizzyingly immense slope of the mountain, there were dozens of little moving dots — seabirds flying above the spraying surf.

“Here’s what you need to know now,” said the voice. “If my calculations are right, and I believe they are, when I carefully detonate my network of explosives, I will peel off this entire peak and send a landmass roughly the size of Manhattan Island into the Atlantic Ocean at more than a hundred miles an hour.

“According to my computer models, this slide will create a tsunami a little more than twice as powerful as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and send it directly into the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Six hours from the time I detonate, Manhattan Island will be inundated with an unstoppable seventy-five-foot wave.”

“No,” said Arturo, beside me, in a whisper to the screen. “Just no.”

“New York City will be destroyed. As will Miami and Baltimore and Boston.”

There was a pause in the narration.

“I have one simple demand. Within twenty-four hours, I want three billion US dollars deposited into a list of numbered accounts that I have already sent to the mayor’s office by e-mail. That this amount is roughly the equivalent of the mayor’s personal fortune is not accidental. She can divert her money easily in the time allotted. The question is, will she? Your city’s fate lies solely in her hands.

“There will be no negotiation. The money will either appear in the accounts in the time allotted, and tomorrow will be just another day. Or it will not appear, and I will wipe New York City, along with the rest of the eastern United States, off the map.”

There was a second pause.

“Please know that, of course, any attempt to find and approach the place where the bombs are now located will result in immediate detonation. I will not contact you again. That is all.”

Chapter 77

Half an hour later, we were in the insanely crowded OEM’s seventh-floor war room. The packed, open room had monitors everywhere. Monitors on desks, monitors built into a long cherrywood conference table in the center of the room, and a movie screen — like monitor that took up an entire wall.

The wall screen was actually composed of a grid of smaller screens that showed different parts of the city — Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, the street out in front of the UN. As I watched, the screen changed into a still of the cave or mine housing the explosives.

At the head of the U-shaped conference table packed with scientists and government officials, the acting mayor looked pale. It was impossible to know what she was feeling, but it couldn’t have been good. It was incredible that all this — the bombings and assassination — was about cleaning her out financially.

Or at least that was what was being said now. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case.

“Please, someone, anyone, tell me what the hell is going on here,” the mayor said.

The scientists at the table stared at each other until a tan, lean, white-haired man who reminded me a lot of the famous college basketball coach Bobby Knight stood up, along with a pretty woman with chin-length chestnut hair.

“Everyone, my name is Larry Duke, and this is Dr. Suzan Bower, and we’re the coheads of the American Geophysical Union,” he said.

“Tell me this is a joke, Mr. Duke,” said the mayor. “It’s a bluff, right? Dr. Evil, James Bond bullshit? It’s too implausible. There are no islands near New York City in the Atlantic. How is this even a threat?”

“Actually, ma’am,” Larry said, “off the west coast of Africa, there are dozens and dozens of volcanic islands.”

“Africa! That’s what? Three or four thousand miles away!” she screamed.

Dr. Bower smiled calmly as she raised her palm.

“Allow me to explain,” she said politely. “The potential destructive force of a truly massive landslide into a seabed is almost impossible to comprehend. In Lituya Bay in Alaska in the fifties, after an earthquake, a one-mile-by-half-mile chunk of rock slid off a coastal mountain into the water, causing a wave the size of a one-hundred-and-seventy-story building.

“Think about that. If a similar incident happened in the Atlantic basin, even from as far away as Africa, a tidal wave the size of the Indian Ocean tsunami would hit the Eastern Seaboard six hours later, just as the man on the tape said.”

“And nothing could stop it?” said the OEM head.

Larry shook his head sadly.

“Nothing,” he said. “For years, Suzan and I have been advising the government of exactly the problem here — that some of the West African islands are potential tsunami dangers from eruption-caused landslides.”

“But you said the landslide in Alaska was caused by an earthquake, an incredible geologic event,” said the mayor. “You can’t cause an earthquake or erupt a volcano with explosives, can you?”

“No, you can’t. But you can cause a landslide with explosives, especially if an area is already unstable, like many of the areas on some of these islands,” said Dr. Bower.

“Bullshit,” somebody said.

“I wish it was,” Larry said. “In 1903, there was a disaster called the Frank Slide in Canada. A segment of mountain about the same size as the one in the Lituya Bay incident fell and flattened a mining town. How did it happen? By miners blasting in one of the mines.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Bower. “Today, demolition experts are so good with explosives, they can blow things up so buildings fall wherever they want. For example, demo guys took down a half-mile-long section of nine bridges in Ohio with only one hundred and thirty-eight pounds of plastic explosives. You get a geologist together with a demo expert and place the pow in the right place, and you just might be able to do it. You simply need to give it a push, and millions and millions of pounds of rock and gravity do the rest.”

“Shit,” I said to Emily. “Just like Twenty-Six Fed. A little bit of explosives placed perfectly took that building down pretty as you please. They know how to do it.”

“So you think it’s possible for these terrorists to actually use explosives to cause a landslide to create a tsunami?” said the mayor.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Larry said with a sad smile. “But the answer is yes.”