Alert

Chapter 78

Two hours later, we were sprawled out in a corner of the OEM building’s third-floor cafeteria. We sat at a new folding table — which still had a sticker with the Walmart bar code on it — washing down vending-machine candy with coffee. I had my feet on a chair by the window and was sharing glum looks with Doyle and Arturo and Emily.

“Gosh, it’s tiring to beat your head against the wall,” said Arturo.

He was right. We’d just gotten off the phone with Robertson and Brooklyn. They’d called to let us know that Dmitri Yevdokimov and Anatoly Gavrilov had lawyered up.

Not just with any lawyers, either. Two seven-hundred-dollar-an-hour mouthpieces from a white-shoe Wall Street firm had actually shown up at the precinct house raising hell until the precinct captain relented. The fact was we didn’t have enough on them to charge them with anything. Not yet, anyway. Like it or not, they’d been released, and our best leads just walked out the door.

To add insult to injury, we’d put surveillance on them, but they seemed to have shaken it. We’d also just received a forensics report from the FBI on the Russians’ credit cards and cell phones and Internet searches. There was nothing. They had no electronic trail of any kind. The two computer experts were Luddites, apparently.

I groaned as I looked out the window at the Hudson and Jersey on the other side. Then I looked south at the Statue of Liberty in the harbor and imagined a wave coming over her.

In the silence, Arturo got up and made himself another coffee.

“Look on the bright side, guys. They’ve got free K-Cups up here. Yummy. I love K-Cups,” he said sarcastically.

“Yeah. Nothing like a smooth, soothing K-Cup to while away the afternoon before the destruction of your city,” said Doyle, flicking a coffee stirrer at him.

I stared out the window down to the courtyard, where soldiers were setting up cots.

Were the cots for the soldiers? Were they expecting refugees? What the hell were cots going to do when the water came? Become flotation devices?

I only knew that we had to keep our heads about us in this whirling dervish of a mess. I sat up.

“Okay, let’s do this again. Theories,” I said to Emily.

“I almost can’t believe it’s a ransom,” she said as she swirled her coffee. “I was really leaning toward a Unabomber-style suspect. One man on a mad mission, like you said. This now? Three billion? This is a real curveball.”

“It’s the Russkies. Has to be,” said Doyle as he rolled out of his chair onto the floor and started doing push-ups. “Think about it. The fed forensic report shows they have no credit cards or computer records, yet they’re computer experts? They have stuff. They just know how to hide it. They’re in on this.”

Then the real chaos began.

Chief Fabretti came into the cafeteria talking on his phone.

“You’re kidding. Jeez. Wow, just like that. Okay, thanks.”

“What’s up, Chief?” said Doyle as he hopped to his feet.

“Turn on the TV,” Fabretti said, pointing to the set in the cafeteria’s corner. “This is unbelievable.”

Doyle ran over and clicked on the set. I stood up as I saw something there I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.

There was a blue screen with two words in yellow.

STAND BY.

Doyle changed the channel. It was on every one. A long and bright beep sounded out, followed by a squawk of radio feedback. Then it did it again.

“This is not a test,” said a calm, feminine voice. “I repeat, this is not a test of the Emergency Alert System. Please stand by. Please stand by.”

“What is this?”

“The mayor just came out of another meeting with the scientists. She’s doing it. She’s pulling the trigger.”

I listened to the beep repeat.

“This is not a test,” said the voice. “I repeat, this is not a test of the Emergency Alert System.”

“Pulling what trigger?” said Lopez. “You mean she’s going to give them the money?”

“No. She’s going to evacuate, right?” I said as I stared at the stand by on the screen.

Fabretti nodded.

“That’s right. God help us all,” said Fabretti. “The mayor is going to call for the complete evacuation of New York City.”

Chapter 79

Chief Fabretti received a text from the deputy mayor, and we followed him up the four flights of too-warm stairs and then through a corridor crowded with cops and suits into the main war room again.

In a fishbowl office in the corner, beyond a row of printers, stood the mayor, along with the glaring lights of the small camera crew that was filming her live for the emergency broadcast.

I watched as the blue screen on the wall was replaced by an image of the mayor.

“Fellow New Yorkers, hello. I am sorry to tell you this, but we have received word that an undersea earthquake in the Atlantic may be imminent within the next six to eight hours. It is believed by experts that this quake may cause an Atlantic Ocean tsunami large enough to be a serious threat to people throughout the city. We are not one hundred percent sure that this is the case, but for the sake of caution and the preservation of life, I have signed an order to evacuate the entire city.”

“Why is she lying and talking about an earthquake?” said Arturo. “Like people have been sleeping through the bombings and assassination?”

“Who knows?” Doyle said. “Maybe she—”

“Shut the fuck up, both of you!” said Fabretti, standing behind them.

“This evacuation is a legal order not a recommendation. All the people of the city — in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island and the Bronx — must leave their homes as soon as possible and head inland. If you have a car parked in Manhattan, we are asking you to leave it where it is, as roads will soon become impassable with traffic. Please use public transport.

“The MTA and Port Authority have already been ordered to mobilize the mass transit system. All buses, trains, subways, and ferries will be open to the public at no charge in order to move people inland. Shelters in New Jersey and northern Westchester have already been set up, and we are working on opening more shelters farther north and inland as the number of people increases.

“We urge any and all of you to stay with family, but remember to stay away from all coastal areas within thirty miles of the shore. Please do not panic. We need to have as orderly an evacuation as possible. You have time to pack, and everyone will be given transportation and shelter. Stay tuned to local media. If you have not done so already, prepare a go bag.”

The mayor was saying that the fire department had been mobilized to help the hospitals when I stepped over into a corner and called Martin.

“Mike, how goes it?”

“I guess you’re not watching TV.”

“No. What is it?”

“Listen to me carefully, Martin. This isn’t a joke. They think an Atlantic Ocean tsunami is coming, so they’re evacuating the city. Do you have a driver’s license?”

“Not a New York one,” he said. “I can drive, though.”

You had to hand it to the kid. I thought he sounded alert yet calm. I just told him the world was ending, and he was immediately ready to deal.

“Good,” I said. “In the front hall closet is our seventy-two-hour kit — a big knapsack containing food and water, first aid, maps, flashlights, glow sticks, a crank radio, and five hundred bucks in cash. There’s also an extra set of van keys in it. The van’s in the lot at Ninety-Eighth, just off West End. I want you to go get it and pick up the kids and Seamus at Holy Name.

“When you get everybody, don’t get on the highway. Go north up Broadway and over the Broadway Bridge into the Bronx. Keep going north until Broadway becomes Route 9A up in Westchester. Just keep going then, okay? Call me when you have the kids.”

“How far do you want me to go?” said Martin.

I thought about what the geophysical experts had said about the 170-story wave.

“I have a cousin in the Catskills. You should head there.”

“The Catskills! That’s, like, a hundred miles. What the hell is coming? A meteor? Is Ireland going to be hit, too?”

“Don’t panic, Martin. It may be nothing, honestly, but better safe than sorry. Now hop to it. Grab the kids and call me back.”

Chapter 80

Half an hour later, I sat at a desk in the OEM war room quietly watching the big screen. It was divided up into a grid of nine screens, just like it was at the beginning of The Brady Bunch, but instead of seeing Carol and Mike and the gang smiling, various parts of the city were visible. The center was losing hold, and things were falling apart.

What looked like war footage was being beamed in from the traffic-light cameras. In SoHo, Times Square, Central Park, Harlem, and everywhere else, the streets were packed with cars and the sidewalks were filled with people carrying things. Knapsacks, rolling suitcases, paintings, dogs. On the screen that showed Broadway and 72nd Street, I watched as a short black guy in a gray business suit pushed a shopping cart up the middle of Broadway with an old black woman, probably his mother, lying in it.

I’d never seen so many people in Grand Central Terminal. They were packed in like sardines, a lot of them pushing and shoving. As I watched, a tall, curly-haired old lady by the information booth went to the floor as her cane was kicked out from under her by a group of stupid kids pushing past her. She was trampled by three or four other thoughtless jerks before some nice Asian teen boy stepped in. I was almost heartened as he dragged her back to her feet, but then as I watched, blood began gushing from her nose.

Then there was the eighteen-wheeler on fire in the middle of the Verrazano Bridge. The whole thing — the cab and the trailer — just blazing along. It would continue to do so, I knew, until it burned out, because a fire truck had as much chance of getting through the stalled traffic as I had of becoming the starting power forward for the Knicks this season.

No one was listening about not panicking, and who could blame them? It was every man for himself now, as hard as that was to believe.

From time to time, I looked away from the sickening screens to just stare at the items on the desk I was sitting at. I blinked at a bottle of hand sanitizer, a LEGO Movie mouse pad, a tube of ChapStick. All of it was going to be underwater in a few hours?

Beside the computer was a framed picture I couldn’t stop staring at. Two coltish girls and a tall blond mom smiling as they waded among the rocks of a river.

It looked like it was taken in New England somewhere, with autumn-yellow leaves on the trees. The girls were adorable, with braces, and the smile on the mom’s face was room-brightening. It looked like an old Coca-Cola ad or something. Americans being happy. It was time to say sayonara to that now?

Squinting angrily at the photo, I suddenly didn’t want to just catch the sons of bitches responsible anymore. I wanted to hunt them down and kill them with my bare hands.

When I called Martin for the twentieth time in the last twenty minutes, it kicked into voice mail. Martin was on the road now. Everyone was with him except Brian. They were in northern Manhattan, trying to get across the Harlem River to meet up with Brian at Fordham Prep. The problem was that Brian wasn’t picking up his phone, which meant he had forgotten to charge it. But Martin had called the school and left word to have Brian stay there for pickup, so maybe all was still good.

I balled my hands into fists as they started to shake.

Who was I kidding? I felt completely helpless.

I looked up as Emily came in.

“Did you get your kids out?” she said.

“Almost. How about you? Are you near the coast in Virginia?”

“No, thank God. My brother got Olivia out of school, and they’re at Costco stocking up,” she said glumly.

Emily’s face lit up suddenly as she got a text.

“Mike, get up! C’mon!” she said, grabbing my hand.

“What?”

“Arturo and Doyle are at the scientist meeting on six. They say they might have something.”

Chapter 81

“They know where the bombs are!” said a wide-eyed Arturo, grabbing my shoulders as I stepped into the doorway of the sixth-floor conference room.

“Where?” I said.

“Árvore Preta,” said Doyle, looking every bit as pumped as Arturo. “It’s Portuguese for ‘black tree.’ It’s a volcanic island just south of the Cape Verde archipelican.”

“Archipelago, you mean, moron,” said Arturo.

We all backed out into the hallway.

“Slow down, fellas,” said Emily. “Where is this island?”

“The Cape Verde island chain is off the coast of Africa,” said Doyle. “They said it’s roughly three hundred and fifty miles to the west.”

“Why do they think this particular island is where the bombs are?” I said. “Didn’t they say there’s a bunch of different island chains in the area?”

“Well, these two rock scientists were in there arguing endlessly,” said Arturo. “They kept looking at the video, and this guy from UC Berkeley—”

“Cut to the chase, Arturo,” I said, trying to be patient.

“All of a sudden, this little guy, a Brit, in the corner of the room stands up and points at the screen and says, ‘Excuse me, but are those petrels?’”

“Petrels?” I said.

“They’re freaking birds!” said Doyle. “Those little birds you see in the video when the guy pans the camera down the cliff. They’re an endangered seabird that nests on this Cape Verde island, Árvore Preta.”

“That’s when Larry Duke and Dr. Bower went bonkers,” said Arturo. “Árvore Preta has an active volcano that last erupted in 1963. They actually knew all about it. They’d listed Árvore Preta in a paper they did in the late eighties about potentially unstable volcanoes.”

“Bottom line is they think this is it, Mike,” said Doyle. “We know where the bombs are.”

Chapter 82

Four hours later, at a little after 11:00 p.m., Emily and I came out the OEM building’s side entrance alongside the dark Hudson River with Larry Duke and Dr. Bower. A moment later, a loud roaring sound drew our eyes upward, and we watched as a huge helicopter appeared over the lip of the building.

“Oh, my! It’s like from that movie. What’s it called? Black Hawk Down?” said Dr. Bower as we ducked back from the whining turbo-rotor wash.

“Yeah, well, let’s hope this one stays up,” I said as it touched down on the concrete pad twenty feet in front of us.

The imposing military chopper, bearing an emblem of a rearing winged white centaur, was from the army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers. The 160th worked hand in glove with the Navy SEALs and had actually been on the mission that had killed Osama bin Laden.

All stops were now officially pulled out. After a tense closed-door teleconference with the US president himself, the mayor had pulled the trigger. We had only one option left on the table, and the mayor was taking it.

The Night Stalkers were here to give us a ride to the airport. We were heading to Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, with the military to find the explosives.

Though it was probably a buzzer-beating long shot that we would find them before the terrorists’ deadline, it was definitely the right move, I felt.

Because what if the three billion dollars were paid? What was to stop them from blowing up the cliff anyway? Or charging another three billion next week?

Though it wasn’t announced, the mayor had also decided that, deadline or no deadline, she wasn’t going to give them a single penny of her or the city’s money. Which, again, was exactly right, in my humble opinion. Terrorists needed to be dealt with head-on. Whoever was doing this to us needed to be found and stopped, not negotiated with.

After a quick strap-in by the Black Hawk’s crew chief, the chopper took off and stayed low as we headed north up the Hudson. Through cold air blasting in my face from a half-open window, I stared out at the glittering strings of Manhattan’s lights on my right.

The glittering, unmoving strings of Manhattan’s lights.

Despite the mayor’s directive not to drive, it was obvious that the streets were completely impassable because of traffic.

Staring at the sea of dead-stopped cars, I thought about Martin and the kids. The last message I had received from them, about an hour and a half ago, was that they were all together and crossing into Westchester.

Were they far enough away? I wondered, looking north up the lightless river. They had to be, right? Or at least they would be far enough away by the deadline tomorrow.

At least that’s what I was going to keep telling myself, I decided, as I took out my phone again.

“Mike? Hello? Are you there?” said Seamus as my call, surprisingly, went through.

“Yes, Seamus. It’s me,” I said straining to hear over the engine whine. “Where are you? Did you get out? Where are you?”

“We’re—”

Then the signal went screwy.

I ripped the phone off my ear and stared at the screen. It was still connected.

“Seamus?” I said. “Seamus?”

Then I looked at the screen again and cursed.

The line was dead.

Chapter 83

“Mike? Are you there, Mike?” said Seamus as he lifted the phone off his ear and stared at its screen.

“It cut off,” he said.

“Ah, the cell sites are just melting, Father. Must be millions trying to get through now,” Martin said as he let out an extra-large breath.

Martin’s glance went from the standstill traffic to the needle of the gas gauge, which was at the halfway point now, then back to the traffic again. He wiped his sweating forehead. He’d give it another minute, then turn off the engine to conserve gas, he decided.

They were on Broadway in Yonkers. It was a sketchy part of town — run-down houses and buildings and stores. They’d been stopped for almost five minutes, which meant God only knows what was happening up ahead. In the last hour, they had probably traveled less than a mile.

As Martin watched, two stocky young Hispanic kids zoomed past on a Kawasaki dirt bike. The one on the back was seated backwards, and he gave Martin and the good Father the finger as his buddy threaded between the cars.

“Did ya see that, Father?” Martin said. “That wasn’t very neighborly, now, was it?”

“We’re not on the old sod anymore, Martin,” Seamus said, shaking his head. “It’s probably best to pretend you’re blind.”

Martin turned to his left and looked beyond an empty parking lot as the Metro-North Hudson Line train went slowly by. It was incredibly packed with people in and even standing between the cars. On the last car, there were several people sitting on the roof!

It was like something out of news footage from the Great Depression or a science fiction film, Martin thought. This crazy country. He’d just wanted to make a little pocket money with the nanny job, and now look where he was. Wandering the set of The War of the Worlds 2.

When the train finally passed, he could see the Hudson River. Great, he thought, drumming his fingers on the wheel. They were right next to water, the one place Mike had specifically told them not to be.

Should they leave the van and try to get on a train? Martin thought, staring at the gas gauge again. He let out another long breath as he bit at his lower lip. It was impossible to know what to do.

“Martin?” Jane called from the back, distress in her voice.

“What is it?” Martin said, trying to keep his tone light for the children.

“Bad news, Martin,” she said.

“How is that even possible?” Martin said under his breath.

“It’s Jasper. I think... well, I think he has to tinkle.”

“You want to walk the dog out there in the ’hood?” Seamus said, turning around in the passenger seat with a flabbergasted look.

“It’s either out there, Gramps,” said Jane, shrugging, “or right here in the van.”

“Okay, okay. Brian and Eddie and Ricky and — what the heck — you, too, Trent. Look lively and get the leash. I have an important mission for you boys. You’re all on Jasper tinkle patrol,” Seamus said.

“Yes!” said Brian, putting the now-moaning Jasper on the leash. “Finally something to do!”

“Buddy system, okay, boys?” Martin said. “Leave no man behind.”

“Or dog!” said Chrissy frantically. “Or dog!”

“Exactly. No man or dog, okay? Now hit it!”

They burst out of the van and ran with Jasper through the traffic to a concrete wall beside a run-down tenement.

“I see them,” said Bridget, cupping her hands over her eyes and looking out the window. “He’s tinkling! Jasper is tinkling!”

“Yay!” said Fiona.

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day, isn’t it, Father?” said Martin.

Seamus rolled his eyes.

The van burst into applause as the boys arrived back, breathless, with the pup. The happy, excited dog started barking like mad as Chrissy grabbed him to her chest in a bear hug while Socky, the cat, remained aloof, snuggled in one of Shawna’s sweatshirts on the floor of the van.

“We’re clear,” said Brian, slamming the door. “Quick! Martin! Hit the gas!”

If only, Martin thought as he stared out at the sea of brake lights.

Chapter 84

There had to be well over a hundred military people scurrying around three large cargo planes on the tarmac of Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey when we landed in the helicopter ten minutes later.

And it wasn’t just men being moved in and out of the C-130s. As we landed, I watched a Jeep drive up a ramp into the plane’s belly, followed quickly by a small tractor towing in a Black Hawk helicopter with its rotors folded back.

“The US military is truly incredible, isn’t it?” I said to Emily. “I mean, the mayor made the call — what? Four hours ago? Now look at this! It’s unbelievable how quickly this thing is being mobilized.”

“Let’s just hope it’s fast enough,” Emily said.

We asked around, then met up with Lieutenant Commander Nate Gardner, the leader of the SEALs team that had been assigned to head up the mission. Nate was a tall, fit, clean-cut guy around thirty, with light-blue eyes and black hair. He was sitting on a four-wheeler under the wing of one of the planes eating pizza with his team of commandos.

He and his thirty or so SEALs were sitting beside their weapons and kit bags talking quietly with one another or napping. They seemed to be the only still and calm people in the whole airport.

Make that the tristate area, I thought as we walked up.

“NYPD!” Nate said, smiling and wiping pizza grease on the thighs of his olive-drab desert-camo uniform before standing up to shake our hands. “Now we’re talking. I love you guys. I’m from Rochester, but I lived in a shit hole in Alphabet City with my friends after college and saw up close how you guys operate. I was actually on the cop list before deciding to join the navy.”

“Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant Commander,” Emily jumped in. “But what are we supposed to do now?”

“Please, it’s Nate,” the soldier said, grinning. “Or Commander Nate, if you must. Basically, ma’am, we’ll board after the toys are packed. You got my two teams as well as five of the army’s explosive ordnance disposal teams en route.”

“Right, but how are we going to play this?” she said. “What’s the strategy? Just head to Árvore Preta and start looking?”

“The US ambassador to Cape Verde will meet us at the airport on the other side to smooth things out with the locals,” Nate said. “They will provide us with island guides, and we’ll locate these bombs. Once we find them, we let the EOD teams do their thing disarming them. My team will provide security for everybody. I recommend you guys try to get some sleep on the flight.”

“That’s it?” said Dr. Bower.

“That’s all she wrote, ma’am,” Nate said, winking one of his baby blues.

“How to save the world in three easy steps,” Emily said as the tall, energetic SEAL rejoined his men. “I admire his confidence. If only I shared it.”

“You and me both,” I said as I took out my phone to check on my guys for the eleven billionth time.

Chapter 85

Coming on six hours later, I woke up sweating as someone two or three seats down along the vibrating metal wall of the loudly buzzing cargo plane started coughing uncontrollably.

More than seventy people were strapped into the benches along both walls of the military plane. There were SEALs, army explosives techs, a fully staffed medical unit, several plane refueling techs, and pilots and crew from the 160th.

I didn’t know what the weight limit for the C-130 was, but it had to be massive, since between the rows of soldiers, tied down with heavy canvas straps in the middle of the plane, was a Black Hawk helicopter bookended by a couple of Jeeps.

It was the same deal in the two other planes flying alongside us. More than a hundred highly trained men and women along with who knows how many millions of dollars’ worth of equipment.

When the US military went for it, they apparently went all the way.

I glanced over at a wired-looking Emily beside me. She was reading the Cape Verde info packet the CIA had provided for the hundredth time. She looked like she hadn’t slept at all. She glanced at her watch, then back at me uneasily. I checked the time on my phone and joined her in wincing.

We had just eight hours left before the 1:00 p.m. deadline, and we hadn’t even landed yet.

I checked my phone for any messages from Robertson or Brooklyn. About an hour into the flight, they had contacted me with the great idea to cross-reference our suspects with the manifests from any and all flights from the New York City area to Cape Verde over the previous six months.

It only made sense. If the bombs were on Cape Verde, that is.

In the front of the plane, past the nose of the Black Hawk, daylight was spilling into the cabin through the open door of the cockpit. I unclipped my belt and decided to join SEAL commander Nate, who was standing by the cockpit door.

As I got to the doorway, the plane swung left, then down below, through the windshield, islands suddenly appeared — small oblong islands with rims of beach standing very white against the dark teal of the Atlantic.

“Fifteen minutes!” the female pilot called back.

I stared down at the bright, sandy flat strips of land. I’d already read the info packet. It said that, like a lot of the islands in the eastern Atlantic near Africa, Cape Verde had originally been settled in the 1500s by the Portuguese. Once an important hub of the African slave trade and a notorious haunt of pirates, it had gained its national independence in the early 1970s, when a Marxist revolutionary — a Fidel Castro — like figure named Amilcar Cabral — had fought for its independence.

Now, with all that in its rearview, the packet said Cape Verde was actually thriving. It was an up-and-coming, laid-back, beachy island vacation destination with microclimate vineyards and eco tours.

Too bad I didn’t feel that laid-back as the plane began its descent. The video showing all those bombs in the cave wouldn’t stop replaying in my head.

Maybe the pirates had come back, I thought.

We received permission to land at Amilcar Cabral International Airport on an island called Sal ten minutes later. It certainly looked like a vacation destination, I thought as we came in low over whitewashed stucco houses and colorful fishing boats in an ultramarine bay. As we touched down, I spotted a small passenger plane on a distant runway — bright green, yellow, and red, like a parrot.

Too bad the cheery welcome-to-the-Bahamas feeling lasted about a New York minute. When we were walking down the plane’s ramp into the bright glare, several vehicles shot out from around the terminal building.

There were three pickup trucks with a dozen or more armed uniformed men standing in the beds. The long stretch Mercedes limo that followed the trucks had Cape Verde flags flying from each corner.

“Is it the ambassador?” one of the SEALs said to Nate Gardner.

Nate suddenly frowned as the cars came right at us.

“Olender, get Colorado on the horn,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of this. These guys look pissed. Something must have gotten screwed up. Find out what.”

“I am Vice President Basilio Rivera!” yelled a short and sleekly handsome brown man with a little mustache as he leaped from the Benz. “What the hell is going on here? Why are those men armed? You are US military, yes? Who gave you permission to land? I demand to know what you are doing here!”

“Mr. Vice President,” Nate said, smiling warmly at the little tin-pot dictator and his soldiers. “My name is Lieutenant Commander Nate Gardner of the US Navy. There must have been a mix-up, sir. Everything is okay. We have permission to be here from your government. It was very last-minute, though, so perhaps not everyone was informed. I’m calling my people right now to get confirmation. I encourage you to do the same, sir.”

The tense, silent soldiers hopped down, palming their automatic rifles. They flanked the limo as Nate and Vice President Rivera walked back toward its open door. Emily and I stood next to each other in the sweltering wind, sweating as the small man spoke in Portuguese into his phone.

“This is all we need,” I said, checking my phone to see exactly zero messages from my kids. “I wasn’t expecting mai tais with little umbrellas in them, but this is ridiculous.”

The VP hung up, and he and Nate spoke tensely for a minute. Then suddenly they were laughing.

“What are you waiting for?” Nate yelled to his guys as he jogged back. “Don’t just stand there. Let’s get these planes unpacked.”

Chapter 86

Outside the tilted-open door of the Black Hawk, the sun glittered off the flat sapphire surface of the Atlantic, blurring by less than fifty feet below.

It had been a little more than an hour since we had landed, and we were twenty miles south of Sal, heading in two Black Hawks for Árvore Preta. The choppers were packed. The SEALs sat clipped by safety harnesses to the aircraft’s deck, their feet dangling out the open door, while everyone else had to sit on one another’s laps. It was dead silent but for the whirring whine of the rotor. I saw a SEAL check his watch, so I decided to check my own. We had seven hours to the deadline, I saw.

Seven hours to find the needle, I thought as I slowly let out a breath, and we haven’t even arrived at the haystack yet.

Vice President Rivera actually turned out to be extremely agreeable and helpful once he was brought up to speed on the threat. He had his men race off in one of the trucks and bring us back a man named Armenio Rezende.

Rezende, one of only two government-licensed nature guides on Árvore Preta, readily agreed to show us around the island. The happy-seeming middle-aged black man with dyed blond dreads told us he hadn’t seen any suspicious activity on Árvore Preta but confirmed that there were several vent caves very high up on the ocean side of the unstable northern rim of the volcano’s caldera.

I looked over at Rezende, sweating across from me in the Black Hawk’s jam-packed cabin, then out at the water as a hopeless, horrible thought occurred to me.

What if we’re wrong? What if this is just another head fake and the threat is coming from somewhere else altogether?

Bursts of white water exploded off jagged black rocks as we finally drew alongside Árvore Preta’s desolate shore. It got a little cooler as we began to fly higher up the slope of the volcano toward the summit. Our two Black Hawks seemed tiny against the immensity of the volcanic black-rock mountain, like flies attempting the ascent of a cathedral roof.

Rezende directed the pilot over one of the jagged peaks near the summit, and we landed in a clearing of dull, light-brown dust at the bottom of a shaded gorge.

I closed my eyes against the pebbles and grit that stung my face as we piled out, and when I opened them, I just stood there gaping.

There had been some pines at the southern end of the island near the water, but up here there was nothing. In every direction was a dusky lunar landscape of black rock and black ash on which nothing moved.

“These are the four caves that I know about,” Rezende said as he knelt and began drawing a crude outline of their locations in the dirt with his finger.

We decided to split up into four teams. Emily and I and Mr. Duke went with Nate’s team west, up a slope of loose, black, sandlike volcanic dust. When we arrived at the top of a ridge, we climbed up an outcropping and looked down into the caldera of the volcano itself.

Mr. Duke had just pointed out what looked like a cave opening in the dried lava bed a couple of hundred feet below when Nate’s radio started popping, chattering frantically.

“Commander Nate! Nate!” came over the radio.

“What is it?”

“The island guide, Rezende. He just went nuts or something! He tried to shove Olender off a cliff, and now he’s running up the hill! He’s almost near the top. What do I do?”

“Drop his ass!” said Nate without hesitation. “In the legs if you can, but drop him. He could be going for the explosives!”

We heard the crackle of gunfire as we quickly headed for the eastern slope. When we got to its top, we saw a cluster of SEALs about a football field away, standing near the edge of a cliff, looking down. When I got to the edge of the cliff, I was hit with vertigo. It was insanely high up, a sheer hundred stories or so straight down to the sea.

“Mike! Look! This is it! This looks like the still from the video!” Emily said.

“What the f happened?” Nate said to his guys.

“I did like you said, Commander,” one of them said. “I put two in him, one in the back of each knee, but then he crawled to the edge and just rolled off.”

“He committed suicide, sir,” said another SEAL. “I swear on a stack of Bibles. It was completely deliberate.”

“But why?” said Mr. Duke.

“He must have been in on it is why,” I said, looking around. “He was one of only two licensed guides, right? He had the run of the island basically to himself. He must have been paid to help the bombers. Damn it, I didn’t even think of it.”

Then I saw it. Off to the left, down the ledge of the cliff, about a hundred feet away was a fissure in the rock wall. A familiar one.

I stared at the almost circular opening in the wrinkled black rock, then way down the cliff, where petrels were flying this way and that like confetti. Emily was right. This was the place from the video. We’d actually found it.

The needle in the haystack.

Chapter 87

The swirling lines in the rock at the mouth of the volcanic cave reminded me of the mouth of the weird-looking guy in that famous painting The Scream. I felt like doing some screaming myself as we sat on our hands waiting and waiting.

We’d found the bombs.

One of the army bomb techs had done a recon, and there they were, just as the video had shown. Fifteen individual twenty-pound charges of Semtex had been found down the sloping three-hundred-yard channel of the cave. A three-football-field-long daisy chain of death and destruction connected with detcord and a shitload of wires and cables and who knew what else. Trip wires? Motion detectors?

Or maybe something new. With these bombers, if we’d learned one thing, it was to expect the unexpected. Anything could happen now.

I stared down the cliff and imagined an explosion, the ground sliding as we rode half the mountain into the sea.

“You know, you really shouldn’t be here,” said Commander Nate, crouching down next to me.

“I know,” I said as I stared at the silent radio in my hand. “I should be home making pancakes.”

“No — I mean right here. We should get back.”

“Nate, if those bombs in there go off, this whole mountain is coming down. Here is as good a place as anywhere to be blown into the bottom of the sea.”

I stared at the mouth of the cave again. It was up to the army bomb squad guys now. Into that mouth thirty minutes before had gone five three-man army EOD teams with their spaceman bomb suits and remote-controlled robots known as wheelbarrows.

The wheelbarrows were armed with cameras, sensors, and microphones along with a “pigstick” device that could shoot an explosive jet of water to disable a bomb’s firing-train circuitry. They’d even set up a cell-phone-jamming device connected to one of their Toughbook laptops to thwart any cell-phone triggers.

But even with all their high-tech gear, they had their work cut out for them and then some.

I stared at my radio, which had been completely silent for the last ten minutes, then I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood and walked over to the cave and stuck my head in. Inside the entrance, it began to slope sharply down. It was oddly uniform. It looked almost man-made, like a subway tunnel to hell. Mr. Duke had explained that the cave, known as a lava tube, was a channel in the rock formed during a previous eruption. There was a raised stringy pattern in the floor and benchlike ledges along both walls where the explosives had been placed.

The radio I’d left behind me finally crackled for the first time, and I ran over to it.

“Render safe one. I repeat, render safe one. We got the first one,” came over the radio.

“Two. Render safe charge two.”

I looked up at a smiling Nate as he arrived.

“We got three. Three is down,” said a voice as Nate gave me an amped-up high five.

“Mattie, this is Alpo,” came an urgent voice over the radio a moment later. “We see something smoking up the cave to our left. I repeat. We see something smoking over by you along the wall.”

There was a pause then a one-word reply.

“Down!” screamed a voice as the rumble of an explosion went off deep inside the cave.

In super slow motion, I turned toward the mouth of the cave as I felt the shudder through the rock around me. It was the same shudder I felt when 26 Fed had come down, and I stared up at the blue of the sky waiting for the world to end.

Chapter 88

Great. Just great, Martin thought, looking out the van’s windshield as he woke up.

It was 6:00 a.m., and, no bones about it, his Escape from New York bid with the kids had failed spectacularly.

He was on I-95, but not outside the city, as per the plan. No, he was heading the wrong way — back into the city — in the East Bronx, parked off the side of the road, pointing south.

How it had happened he couldn’t say. He had tried valiantly to get upstate, like Mike had told him, but everywhere they had gone the roads had been blocked by accidents or police. All night long he kept getting shunted this way and that. Bottom line, he’d been forced back in exactly the wrong direction.

It got worse. They were now on a concrete bridge above a body of water, an inlet of some sort. The last sign they had passed before he had gone to sleep said CITY ISLAND.

He didn’t know too much about the Bronx, but even an Irishman knew that City Island was a place where there were seafood restaurants and fishing boats you could charter. Things really couldn’t be more dire. They were now stuck in the Bronx right by the not-so-beautiful sea.

He looked in the rearview mirror at the sleeping kids. At least they had finally zonked out. They were fed and watered after a stop at a gas station around three. There was no gas at the station, of course, as all the tanks were empty, but he’d let them go to town on sweets in the store.

They’d come out with Pringles, Combos, sodas, every variety of M&M’s known to man. Anything to keep them blissfully unaware of — what? Coming disaster? Apocalypse?

“Unbe-shighting-lievable,” he mumbled as he stared out at the graying sky, then at the E on the gas gauge.

“What was that?” said Seamus, sitting up.

“Nothing, Father,” said Martin. “Go back to sleep. We’re good.”

“Actually, Father...” he added as he glanced out the window to his right.

“What is it, son?” said Seamus, yawning.

“Father, I was just thinking. We weren’t able to make it upstate, right?”

“I’ll say,” Seamus said, looking around. “We didn’t even make it out of the Boogie Down.”

“Well, look over there,” said Martin, pointing out the window at a stand of high-rises a couple of miles west on the horizon.

“That’s Co-op City,” said Seamus. “What about it?”

“Well, you know how in the tsunami videos from Indonesia a lot of people on the beach didn’t do so hot? But you can see plenty of folks on the roofs of the hotels and what have you doing seemingly okay. What do you say we head over there to those buildings and see if we can’t gain some higher ground?”

“But I thought you said that we still had some gas,” Seamus said.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. The tank is dry, I’m sorry to report. We need to get off this bridge, at any rate. For all we know the wave could be heading toward us right now.”

Seamus turned to the rear of the van.

“Kids, kids! Wake up! Wake up now!”

“What now?” said Eddie with his eyes still closed. “Is the van on fire?”

“No,” said Seamus. “Grab your things. We’re all going for a walk.”

“A walk on the highway?” said Brian.

“In the Bronx?” Juliana joined in.

“Rise and shine, Bennetts. One and all,” said Seamus. “It’s time to abandon ship!”

Chapter 89

But the world didn’t end.

The world and the mountain held. We didn’t know how. All we knew was that the echoes of the blast finally dissipated and the shudder slowly subsided in the rock. Miraculously, the mountain and the molecules of our bodies all decided to stay happily together.

“We got it!” came over the radio. “Coming out!”

Twenty minutes after they had gone in, the EOD guys came out of the godforsaken cave in their green astronaut bomb suits. The last guy out was a tight-lipped bomb tech, a short and wiry Italian-looking fortysomething guy with dark, hooded eyes. His buddies helped him take off the tool smock hanging down the center of his chest and pull off his spaceman helmet. His sweat-soaked hair was plastered to his forehead as if he’d just gotten out of the shower.

He put down the red-and-black portable X-ray machine they used to check for booby traps, then rolled onto his back in his eighty-pound suit like a dusty upended turtle. One of his buddies handed him something, and he began expertly rolling a cigarette with his oversize, muscular mechanic’s hands.

His name was First Sergeant Matthew Battista of the 789th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company. He taught at the EOD school at Eglin Air Force Base, near Destin, Florida, and was said to be the best and most technically proficient and experienced bomb tech in the army and perhaps the world.

“Okay, Mattie, what’s the story? If we all weren’t currently having heart attacks, the suspense would be killing us,” Commander Nate said, handing him a baby wipe.

Mattie wiped at his sweaty face as he lay against the rock, staring up at the cloudless sky. He smoked his cigarette in the corner of his mouth without touching it.

“The blast was from a disposal failure,” he finally said. “We were pulling out pieces of detcord through the ring bolts next to cables in the walls, and something must have screwed up — probably a bad piece of deteriorated cable. It’s the same really old Soviet shit we saw in Iraq. Bad cable coupled with some friction burn is my guess. Only a small piece went off, though. About four feet. Thank God we cut it up beforehand.”

“So you were able to defuse everything else?” said Emily. “Did you find the detonator? Was it on a cell-phone trigger? A mechanical timer?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s all wired up, ready to go. We found this.”

He reached over and took two items out of his smock. He held up a small black box with some wires sticking out of it and a brown plastic device with three buttons on it.

“Is that a garage door opener?” I said, looking at it.

He nodded.

“And the black box is a garage door receiver,” he said. “Seen them before. You press the opener, and it sends a signal to the receiver, just like a cell-phone trigger. The whole daisy chain in there was wired up to this receiver except for one crucial detail. The receiver also has to be wired up to a battery in order for it to set off the detcord. There was no battery. Also, there was no battery for the opener, either.”

“So there was no way to set it off,” Emily said.

Battista shook his head.

“They left out the final piece. Makes sense in terms of safety. I wouldn’t want any juice within twenty square miles of this much explosive. Much safer to bring the final pieces together right when you want to blow it.”

“So what do you think, Mike? Rezende had the batteries on him?” Emily said. “Remember how he insisted on hitting his house and throwing on his hiking boots before getting on the bird? The first thing we need to do is retrieve Rezende’s body and begin scouring his records. He didn’t do this by himself.”

“No, that’s the second thing we do,” I said, taking out the satellite phone. “First we call New York City and cancel the evacuation.”

Chapter 90

Thirty-eight nautical miles due north of Árvore Preta, back at Amilcar Cabral International Airport on Sal, the first-class passengers on a flight from Munich had cleared customs and were entering the main terminal.

The terminal was very modern — clean and bright, with white walls and polished glass and floors. The in-flight magazine had said its recent remodel was evidence of Cape Verde’s growing appeal to vacationing Europeans looking for an exotic tropical experience.

As he walked, Mr. Beckett remembered what the place looked like in the early ’70s, when he arrived on his first field assignment during the rebellion. The Portuguese military helicopters behind sandbags out on the tarmac; the bullet holes in the barred windows; the nervous-looking troops and press. It had been an exotic experience then as well.

“Gorgeous day. Truly breathtaking,” Mr. Joyce commented, staring at the shining squeaky-cleanness of the glass terminal.

They were both dressed casually now, Eurosporty, with tailored sport coats over Adidas tops, expensive jeans, and Chanel aviator sunglasses.

“Indeed,” said Mr. Beckett as he pulled his rolling Gucci suitcase around a group of Africans and Western travelers sleeping and reading magazines in a row of pleather airport seats. He gazed up at the beams of light spilling down from one of the many overhead skylights.

“One might even call it a momentous day,” he said.

They laughed together as they walked. Then Mr. Beckett yawned. He hadn’t been able to sleep on the flight. Then he smiled again as he took a deep breath.

That was okay. He felt a second wind coming. One last sprint left for the final mile.

“Where is Katarina?” Mr. Joyce said as they approached the airport exit. “I specifically told her to be waiting for us up ahead, at the car-for-hire. I don’t like this.”

“Don’t be paranoid, Mr. Joyce,” said Mr. Beckett, grinning at his companion. “We’re here. It’s done. You need to enjoy it. In an hour, we call Armenio, who will rig the detonator. All we need to do now is go to the hotel and order Champagne. We dial the number and sit back on the seaside balcony and watch.”

“Watch the fun?” said Mr. Joyce.

Mr. Beckett nodded vigorously.

“Yes. There’ll be so much fun the entire world won’t know what to do.”

“For Mikhail?” said Mr. Joyce, looking at his partner.

Mr. Beckett agreed with a solemn nod. “All for poor Mikhail.”

They were near the exit, and Mr. Beckett was turning his phone off airplane mode, when a plain, petite, dark-haired woman in chic business wear and heels burst through the terminal’s entrance and made a beeline for them.

“Katarina! What is it? What’s wrong?” said Mr. Joyce.

“Everything!” Katarina said, swallowing. “Everything is wrong!”

Chapter 91

“Slow down, Katarina, before you run us off the road,” said Mr. Beckett as they sped out of the airport in her tiny pale-green Fiat.

“I’ve been calling you since this morning,” she cried. “It’s a disaster!”

“Slowly, Katarina. What happened?”

“What happened? I should be asking you that,” she said. “You said this would be discreet and that no one would ever know. Why did you contact the authorities? You never said anything about a ransom.”

“A what?”

“A ransom! Don’t give me that. Like you don’t know! It’s all over the news! The BBC! Where have you been?”

“We’ve been out of contact on an airplane,” said Mr. Beckett. “What’s all over the news?”

“You really don’t know? They’re evacuating New York!” she shrieked.

Mr. Beckett and Mr. Joyce looked at each other in horror.

“No,” Mr. Joyce groaned. “Not now. We’re so close.”

“You said a ransom. What ransom?” said Mr. Beckett.

“The BBC said the Americans said they were evacuating New York and the Eastern Seaboard because of a tsunami warning,” Katarina said as she screeched around a traffic circle, nearly on two wheels. “But the BBC said that was an unlikely story and that there were rumors about an impending terrorist attack and a ransom demand.”

“We didn’t ask for a ransom,” Mr. Joyce said. “Who would do that if we didn’t?”

“Two words. Dmitri Yevdokimov,” said Mr. Beckett after a long thirty seconds.

“That son of a bitch we bought the aluminum dust and the pump trucks from?” said Mr. Joyce.

“He’s the only one clever enough,” Mr. Beckett said, looking out at the passing island countryside. “Besides, he’s a computer expert. I knew I shouldn’t have given him my fucking e-mail. He must have hacked us — saw our plans and the video we were going to show after. He put two and two together, copied the video, and tried to pull a ransom deal.”

“I’m going to handcuff him to a radiator and snip out his liver with a pair of kitchen scissors!” Mr. Joyce said, screaming, as he punched at the door of the car. “He ruined our entire plan!”

“It gets worse!” Katarina yelled. “The fucking Americans are here! Armenio texted me two hours ago with this,” she said, handing Mr. Beckett her phone.

American soldiers just arrived in the village. I will do my best to keep them away but I will set it off manually if I can’t. Whatever happens the deal is still on.

“I keep trying to call him back, but he doesn’t respond. He must be under arrest by now. Or dead. It’s over. What are we going to do now? I’m all over Armenio’s phone. We need to get out of Cape Verde now.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters,” said Mr. Joyce, starting to cry in the backseat.

“Katarina, stop the car!” said Mr. Beckett, suddenly clutching his chest. “I’m not kidding. My chest. I’m having chest pains! I need my medication! In my bag in the trunk. Pull over! Please! Oh, it hurts!”

Katarina pulled over on the side of the deserted two-lane country road beside a stubbled field with baby sheep and goats roaming over it. Mr. Beckett stumbled out onto the shoulder and went to the trunk.

“Katarina! Help me — over here!” said Mr. Beckett a second later.

When she arrived at the trunk, Mr. Beckett without preamble smashed Katarina in the face with a tire iron. Blood poured out between her fingers, clutched to her face, as she began immediately to backpedal.

He hit her again in the back of the head as she turned, then she fell backwards into an irrigation ditch filled with muddy rainwater that ran parallel to the road.

She was beginning to crawl back up onto her knees when Mr. Beckett arrived to finish up. Right there in broad daylight, with three more blows to the head, he beat her to death with the tire iron as the baby sheep looked on.

A minute later, he was back on the road next to the car. He wiped the tire iron with a thin pink sweater that had been draped on the back of the driver’s seat before he chucked it back in the trunk, tossed the sweater in after it, and closed the lid. Crushing her cell phone under his heel, he found and pocketed its SIM card before he checked his watch. Then he got into the driver’s seat and made a U-turn back toward the airport.

He wriggled his wet toes in his muddy shoes as he drove. He’d have to hit the gift shop for some socks.

He hadn’t killed Katarina because she had disappointed him. On the contrary, she’d been loyal and competent to a fault in helping to set everything up. He’d even been good friends with her father back during the Cape Verdean revolution he’d helped bring about.

He killed her simply because he always covered his tracks. That’s why he had been in business for so long. It was the secret of his success.

In the backseat, Mr. Joyce was still sobbing.

“I know it’s disappointing after all our hard work,” said Mr. Beckett. “All the money, all the planning. We got rooked — they were ahead of us by a few measly hours. It was the ambitiousness of the plan. The more people, the more moving parts, the easier for one to malfunction.”

“But that city! That city deserves to be destroyed! What about Mikhail? What about Mikhail?!” sobbed Mr. Joyce.

“This isn’t over. Not by a long shot,” Mr. Beckett said reassuringly. “We need to regroup and go to the backup plan. We’re still ahead of them. We’ll use the Dutch passports and be back in New York by tomorrow.”

Mr. Beckett looked up at the narrow-bodied DC-9 airliner on takeoff that roared low over their car as they turned into the airport access road.

“There is more than one way to skin a cat, my son,” he said.

Chapter 92

“I have to admit, Mike, the homebound leg of this trip is starting to grow on me a little,” Emily said, yawning, as she placed her seat in the way-back position on the other side of the maple-paneled cabin.

“I’ll say,” I said, swirling the glass of Pinot Noir in my hand. “You think Yelp has a corporate jet section? I don’t know about you, but I’m giving this puppy five stars all the way.”

Things were looking up, for a welcome change. The mayor was so pleased with our finding the explosives that she insisted on sending her personal aircraft to give Emily and me and the two geophysical experts a lift home.

And what a plane. It was a sleek, brand-new eighty-million-dollar Bombardier Global 7000, with a custom interior that looked like a Park Avenue apartment. There were built-in flat screens everywhere, an Irish linen — covered dining table, Oriental rugs.

I couldn’t tell which was softer or more soothing, the classical music playing on the overhead speaker, the heated leather seat, or the dimmed lights. I yawned, too, and wriggled my aching shoeless feet against the expensive carpet as I drained my glass.

I’d actually buzzed back my own seat to catch a little sleep when my aggravating brain started bringing stuff up. Stuff like how though we’d finally put some points on the board, this wasn’t over. How it wouldn’t be over until the bombers were dead or behind bars. Mostly I couldn’t stop thinking how my kids, along with everyone else in New York, were still extremely vulnerable, and soon my finger found the seat switch and I was heading back into the upright position again.

I asked the flight attendant for some coffee and took out my laptop. A moment later, I had my e-mail open and for the tenth time started reading through the detailed brief that the excellent Cape Verde Judicial Police had put together about the island guide Armenio Rezende.

Police divers had found Rezende dead in the surf on the southwest side of the volcanic island about three miles away from the cliff he’d jumped off, and what they recovered from his pocket chilled me every time I thought about it.

Four twelve-volt garage door opener batteries.

So our theory was actually true: Rezende had tried to set off the bombs. He’d been dead set on killing himself and all of us there.

And only the Lord knew how many other innocent people would have died had the entire mountain shaken loose and crashed down into the sea.

I thought about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that had killed 230,000 people. Five Yankee Stadiums of human beings, old and young, innocent after terrified innocent, suddenly caught in the flood. Schoolchildren washed out of their desks and drowned in their classrooms. Commuters on trains looking up from their papers to see the ocean coming in the window. Mothers made to watch as their babies were whisked away in the flood or crushed by debris.

And someone wanted that? Rezende wanted that? I thought as I glanced out the dark circle of the plane’s window. He wanted countless homes and factories and churches and cities and towns destroyed? He wanted 230,000 last gulps of breath from people he didn’t even know? How? Was Rezende a space alien? A zombie from a crypt? Because it didn’t compute, that much hate. Not in human terms. How could a human be okay with a quarter million murders on his soul?

Yet it was true. Rezende did want it. Had in fact died trying to make it happen. Rezende had wanted it, along with whoever else was involved.

Because it was obvious that Rezende wasn’t the mastermind. We’d sat down with the Cape Verde cops before we left, and they told us Rezende didn’t even have a passport and that he had never been anywhere — let alone New York City.

No, Rezende was low-level, I thought, going over the report. He had several assault arrests as a young man, some domestic violence incidents, a 2010 burglary charge that didn’t stick. He definitely didn’t have any industrial or military experience with explosives.

What he did have, though, was a recent radical conversion to Islam. On his computer, they found records of time spent on jihadist websites. Time spent in chat rooms known to be frequented by people from al Qaeda and ISIS.

I thought about the low-level American criminal turned to Islam who recently beheaded a woman in Oklahoma. Maybe that was where all the hate was coming from. Islamic jihad was certainly no stranger to inhuman acts of barbaric violence these days.

That wasn’t all. What was even more curious was the fact that Rezende had an uncle on his father’s side who was one of the most violent of the revolutionaries during the Cape Verde independence movement.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Cape Verde, along with the African continental nation of Portuguese Guinea, fought for independence from Portugal in a bloody jungle guerrilla war that many people called Portugal’s Vietnam. The Marxist rebels, led by Amilcar Cabral, had about a third of the troop strength that the Portuguese had, but the rebels were heavily supported by the Soviet Union with supplies and weaponry, including jet aircraft.

We’d learned from the Cape Verde cops that Rezende’s late uncle, Paulo Rezende, who raised him, was a colonel in that rebel army and was actually trained to fly MiGs in Russia.

The Russians again, I mumbled at the screen. It keeps coming back to the Russians.

“Who am I kidding?” Emily said, suddenly sitting up across from me. “I can’t sleep, either, with these maniacs still running loose out there. Is there any coffee left, Mike?”

Chapter 93

“Let’s run through it again from the very beginning,” I said after the flight attendant, Patricia, had poured a coffee for Emily.

“Okay,” Emily said, tucking her stockinged feet underneath her. “We land at Rezende’s village.”

“We land at Rezende’s village,” I repeated with a nod. “What I don’t understand is, if he was planning to detonate the bombs by the deadline, why wasn’t he on Árvore Preta already?”

“That’s an excellent point, Mike,” Emily said. “According to the deadline described in the video threat, he should have had all the batteries in place already — had everything ready to go.”

“But he didn’t,” I said, drumming my fingers along the edge of my Toshiba laptop. “We definitely seem to have surprised him. His attempt to manually set off everything with the batteries proved that. All the meticulous planning and money and expertise required to wire up the mountain came down to some sloppy and desperate last-ditch ploy to insert the batteries? No way. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“So what happened? Rezende was definitely involved in the planting of the explosives,” Emily said, biting her lip. “Did he wake up late? There was some communication screwup? Why the hell was he surprised if the deadline was only two hours away?”

“Maybe...” I said, tapping my forehead as I stared down at my socks.

“Maybe what?” Emily said after a moment.

I snapped my fingers as I looked up.

“Maybe the people who set the bombs up weren’t the ones who called for the ransom. Maybe we’re looking at two different groups.”

“What do you mean? How? The guys on the phone actually sent a video of the bombs being set up.”

“True, they sent a video, but did they make the video?” I said.

“You’re losing me.”

“I keep thinking about our initial read that the bombing campaign is the idea of one person — one very angry, very motivated, very meticulous person — who is solely out to terrify and to destroy the city. That still makes the most sense to me.”

“Me, too,” Emily said with a nod. “The first thing the Unabomber told us out in Colorado was spot-on: ‘They’re going to destroy New York City — you know that, right?’”

“Precisely,” I said. “The ransom-money play never corresponded to that. What if someone found out about the plot, found the video of the real people setting it up, and decided to try to make money off of it?”

“A piggyback!” Emily said. “That’s entirely possible. Someone co-opting it.”

“Somebody Russian or who runs around in Russian circles,” I said.

“You’re right,” Emily said, putting her coffee down. “The mayor’s sniper had Russian ties, there were Russian explosives on the island, and now the direct Russian connection to Rezende through his uncle.”

I glanced out at the cloudy night rushing past the large porthole window beside me again as I racked my brain. Then it hit me. Right between the eyes, forty thousand feet above the dark Atlantic.

“Dmitri Yevdokimov!” I yelled, suddenly sitting up. “The Russian we had in custody. Not only can we place Yevdokimov at the drop where the video was picked up, he’s also a computer expert.”

“That’s it,” said Emily excitedly. “Yevdokimov must have hacked the real Russian bomber, copied the video, and cooked up the ransom deal!”

“Yevdokimov’s the link. We needed to find him yesterday,” I said as I almost knocked over my china coffee cup while fumbling out my phone to call New York. “He’s the only one who knows who the real bombers are.”

Chapter 94

The line of massive steel pylons forming the truck-bomb barrier were built directly into the asphalt across the width of Broad Street. They glinted dully in the morning sun as we pulled up in front of them eight hours later.

Beyond them to the north, up the man-made slot canyon of Broad Street, you could see the reason for all the security — the iconic columned edifice of the New York Stock Exchange.

We were down here in lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes territory not for a ticker-tape parade or to engage in insider trading but to head into the new FBI headquarters across the street from the exchange, at 23 Broad.

The whole block around the exchange already had incredible security, so it was a no-brainer after the fall of 26 Federal Plaza for the FBI to rent out space at what had to be one of the safest blocks in the entire city, if not the planet. Still, as we waited for our turn at the checkpoint, I frowned at the oak-trunk-thick steel rods that formed a line across the street. There was something depressing and barbaric about them, something medieval.

“You know you’re living in some interesting times,” I said to Emily, riding shotgun, “when they’ve actually brought back the drawbridge.”

The pylons retracted into the street after we showed our creds to federal cops manning the checkpoint, and we drove up and parked in 23 Broad’s underground lot. We’d been able to catch some sleep and actually shower on the mayor’s incredible plane, so we weren’t looking too bad as we rode the fancy financial building’s mirrored elevator up to the thirty-first floor.

I looked down at my suddenly vibrating phone to see that Fabretti was trying to call me. He’d texted me earlier to try to coordinate a media strategy, of all things. The raid on the island had been leaked to the press, apparently, and they wanted details.

Leaked by whom? I wondered. I hadn’t texted him back, nor did I answer his call. He didn’t seem to understand that we were still very much in the middle of this. It wasn’t mission-accomplished time.

Emily smiled at me in the elevator mirror as I looked up. We held eyes for a moment. Then two moments. Her eyes were nice to look at.

“What?” I finally said.

“Your kids,” she said.

“Oh, them,” I said, smiling back.

After we’d gotten off the plane, we’d been by my apartment to squeeze in a happy-reunion-slash-power-breakfast with my kids. Seamus had done God’s work by having piles of scrambled eggs and toast and Irish sausages hot and ready for us. As we devoured them, the gang had regaled us about their incredible failed Escape from New York odyssey in the van. I laughed the hardest when they said they had to practically carry poor Martin, completely exhausted, into his dorm room back at Manhattan College.

He was probably still sleeping, I thought. Or looking for a new job.

“What about my little tykes?” I said to Emily as we ascended. “What did they do this time? Was it Eddie?”

She shook her head and smiled. “They’re just terrific. All of them. So alive and funny and happy and good. They actually care about each other. No one even has kids anymore, and you have ten. Ten! That’s a lot of love. They’re so lucky.”

“I’m the lucky one,” I said. “They practically take care of me now.”

Off the elevator in the hall on thirty-one, there was an incredibly stunning airplane-like view of the city. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass on the east side, you could see the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, and down the corridor was a clear shot of the gleaming Freedom Tower and Lady Liberty out in the harbor.

“This city doesn’t quit, does it?” Emily said, walking over and pressing her forehead to the glass like a little kid.

“All the people and motion and money and work and art and history. Dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper after dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper everywhere you turn. I mean, look at it. It’s... a wonder.”

“It sure is,” I said, looking down with her at the slants of light on the buildings and the ant-size people on Broadway. Out in the wide, sparkling bay, a bath-toy tugboat was drawing alongside Liberty Island, chugging earnestly toward Bayonne.

“But you know what the bigger wonder is?” I said after a beat.

“What’s that?”

“Why all these losers keep lining up to destroy it.”

Chapter 95

I followed Emily around a corner, where she pressed some buttons on an electronic keypad beside an unmarked door. On the other side of it was a huge busy bull pen of desks and cubicles with phones ringing and FBI agents tapping at computers and running around.

Without saying anything to anyone, Emily guided me through the office maze and around another corner to another unmarked door beside another keypad. She typed in another combo, and then we were in a cramped, too-bright windowless room where there were rows of servers on shelves and wires on racks and eight or nine people typing at computer terminals.

Emily introduced me around to the agents of the FBI New York office cyber investigative squad. CIS supervisory agent Chuck Jordan was a young, intense, clean-cut guy who, in his sharp Tiffany-blue button-down dress shirt and gray slacks, looked more like a young finance guy than a cop.

Jordan had called Emily as we were finishing breakfast. He said he might have found a possible lead on Yevdokimov’s whereabouts.

“So you think you have something for us, Chuck?” said Emily.

Instead of saying anything, Chuck handed us a photograph. It was a shot of a cluttered table with papers and books piled on it. There was a pair of glasses, a magenta Sharpie, and a crumpled napkin on an egg-crusted paper plate. Beyond the messy table was a room with bare, paint-chipped plaster walls and dirty hardwood floors. The space struck me as vaguely industrial.

In the top left-hand corner of the photo, you could see a shadeless window. In the window was the stone edifice of an old office building on the other side of a narrow street.

“This is the PC where the ransom demand originated from,” Chuck said. “This shot is from the PC’s webcam.”

“Where is it?” I said.

“That’s the rub,” Chuck said. “We don’t know. They sent the signal through Tor, the underground computer network. It bounces things around so you don’t know the actual physical location or owner of a particular computer. Basically, we can find the original computer. Unfortunately, we just don’t know whose it is or where it is. That’s why we turned on the PC’s camera to get a clue from the room.”

“You turned on the camera on the bad guy’s computer? How?”

“After the judge gave us a warrant, we sent in our Trojan horse,” Chuck said.

“Trojan horses are the investigative malware we use,” Emily explained. “It looks like a regular program on the surface, but behind the scenes, it’s secretly able to contact the PC’s internal controller to allow backdoor access to the target PC.”

“Like a virus or something?” I said.

“Technically, no,” said Chuck. “Technically, a virus attempts to inject itself into other files. A Trojan is its own file.”

“But how do you get in?” I said. “What about firewalls and stuff?”

“Most people have one or two popular antivirus programs, so we usually send the Trojan through a pretend update to one of them,” Chuck said. “But in this case, the target didn’t seem to have an antivirus program on the list, so we used an exploit in their browser’s PDF parser.”

“A what in the what?” I said.

Emily rolled her eyes.

“Does it matter, Mike? They went around it with some computer stuff. Bottom line, we can look at a bad guy’s files, even turn on his webcam and microphone, which is what they did here.”

“And you searched their files?” I said to Chuck. “Did you find the ransom video?”

“No, it’s not there. They must have removed it,” he said, squinting.

“What about encryption? This guy is a hacker himself,” I said. “He has to use encryption, right?”

“He had layers upon layers of it, but we looked at the PC’s recorded keystrokes and got the passwords to the encryption software he used.”

“Got it,” I said, gazing at the picture again.

I concentrated on the building beyond the window. It had setbacks and some fairly elaborate ornamentation in the stonework. Some stone wreaths and a lot of fleurs-de-lis. Where was this building? It definitely seemed familiar.

“Hey, wait. Did you get any audio?” Emily said.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Chuck said with a mischievous smile as he clicked a terminal’s button.

“We picked this up just three minutes ago,” he said. “This is a live feed. Listen carefully.”

We did. There were sirens and traffic, and then we heard it. A soft, rhythmic buzzing sound.

“No,” I said. “That’s not what it sounds like, is it?”

“Oh, yes, it is,” said Chuck, rubbing his hands together. “Someone is close to that computer, and they’re snoring. We heard a door open ten minutes ago, then somebody creaking down onto what has to be a bed or something.”

“Yevdokimov! Has to be!” Emily said. “He’s there right now!”

“Wherever the hell ‘there’ is,” I said as I gazed at the photo again. “This building in the window here. I feel like I know it. I just can’t place it.”

“It’s definitely in Manhattan, definitely somewhere below Ninety-Sixth Street,” Chuck offered.

“Old, dirty, once-grand office buildings. Where in the city do you have these old, dirty buildings? Basically all over the damn place,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Tribeca, maybe?” Chuck said. “Or SoHo?”

“Yes, kind of,” I said. “But in SoHo, the buildings are usually older and have elaborate fire escapes and all that painted castiron cladding. With all these setbacks, this building is prewar — classic-Superman era.”

“It looks huge,” said Emily.

“It also looks high up,” Chuck said. “Ten or twelve stories, maybe.”

“Wait. I got it!” I said, violently shaking the photograph. “The fleurs-de-lis!”

“The what?” said Chuck.

“The fleurs-de-lis. The intricate stonework design here under the windows. And the setbacks. I used to work in Midtown South. I know where this is!”

“You know the building?” Emily said.

“No, but I know the neighborhood. It’s the garment district. The West Side below Times Square,” I said, ushering Emily to the door. “Tell your buddies downstairs to lower the drawbridge, because we need to get uptown and pop this Russian clown before he wakes up and we lose him again.”

Chapter 96

Siren cranking, we raced up the West Side Highway all the way to midtown. I got off at 34th and gunned it five blocks to Macy’s. The light was red on Eighth Avenue, but there were no cars coming from the east or south, so I hooked a shrieking, fishtailing left around a shocked-looking DOT parking-ticket lady standing in the intersection.

I’d turned off the siren by the time we arrived to a skidding stop six blocks north, at 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. If Yevdokimov was in the area and still sleeping, the one thing I didn’t want to do was wake him up.

We parked by the southeast corner of the intersection, where the statues were. One was a bronze eight-foot structure called The Garment Worker that depicted a sad, old-looking, wrinkly guy in a yarmulke bent over a sewing machine, working on some fabric. Next to him was a gigantic button with a needle stuck through it. Between the two sculptures stood a dozen NYPD uniforms from the Midtown South task force, whom I’d called for help in finding Yevdokimov’s hideout.

We rushed over to them, and I quickly took a radio from the task force sergeant, Rowe, before handing out photographs of both Yevdokimov and the building in his window.

“Remember, guys. You need to look up,” I said. “This fleur-de-lis architectural design on the building we’re looking for is going to be on the tenth floor or so.”

We sectored out the district and split up on foot into two-person teams. Emily and I walked south down the east side of Seventh Avenue. We passed a gimcrack tourist gift place and a seedy-looking barbershop with a sign that said it bought gold. Fifth Avenue this was not.

As we walked, we looked east and west, up and down the side streets. Every one of them was extremely congested. Double-parked delivery trucks in the streets, loading and unloading. Guys on sidewalks pushing racks of plastic-wrapped clothes. It was coming on the lunch rush now, and clusters of workers were spilling out of the old buildings and jamming up the already crowded dirty sidewalks.

“These buildings are tremendous,” Emily said as we walked with our necks craned and eyes up, like Iowa tourists fresh off the farm. “They almost look like a cross between art deco skyscrapers and factories.”

“That’s exactly what they used to be,” I said. “All these buildings are mostly offices now, but back in the old days, they were vertical clothing factories. The art deco — like setbacks were required so workers on the upper stories would have light and air.

“It’s hard to believe, but before manufacturing went to Asia, New York City was an industrial powerhouse. In the thirties and forties, seventy-five percent of women’s clothes in the country were made right here between Sixth and Ninth Avenues, from Forty-Second down to Thirtieth. They were stitched up and put on racks and then rolled over to Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth for sale. Everything was centered around Penn Station, so people from out of town could come in and shop. The garment district here is why New York’s fashion industry still leads the world and Seventh Avenue means fashion.”

“But if these were just factories, why so elaborate? Why all the architectural stuff, especially on the upper floors? You can’t even really see it from down here,” Emily said.

“The people who built them were poor Lower East Side Jews who came up out of the sweatshops and made good,” I said, remembering something I’d read. “They wanted to make their mark by building factories that had over-the-top class. Also, they had a heart and wanted the mostly female workers stuck in the buildings all day to have something pretty to look at out the window, hence the stringcourses and volutes and egg-and-dart molding on the upper floors.”

“How do you know so much about all this?” Emily said, giving me a baffled look.

“I’m not all brawn. I actually have a library card,” I said with a shrug. “I also used to walk an evening beat here when I was fresh out of the academy, and I used to wonder about the buildings, so I did some homework. You quickly run out of things to look at after all the pretty secretaries go home.”

We were at 36th Street, staring up at the setbacks of an old telephone-company building, when Chuck Jordan called.

“Mike, we’ve been monitoring the room, and it sounds like the person snoring just woke up and left.”

“Is the laptop still there?”

“Yes,” Chuck said. “No change with that. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe he just went out to get something to eat.”

I’d just hung up with Chuck when one of the uniforms hailed me on the radio.

“Hey, Detective. This is Sergeant Rowe,” he said. “I think you should head over here to Thirty-Seventh Street near Eighth. I’m not positive, but I think I found that doodad you’re looking for on a building about a quarter of the way toward Seventh.”

“Good job, Rowe,” I said as I grabbed Emily’s arm and immediately started hustling her west toward Eighth Avenue. “We’re about a block away. Don’t leave yet, and try to stay out of sight. Keep your eyes peeled for Yevdokimov coming out of the building across the street. It looks like he’s on the move.”

We heard the yelling right as we made it to the corner of Eighth.

A block to the north, at the intersection of 37th, there was some kind of commotion in the street between a guy in a car and some guys on a motorcycle.

The car was a silver Mercedes double-parked beside a sidewalk construction shed, its bald driver half out of its window as he yelled. The two guys on the motorcycle beside him were dressed in black and wearing black full-face helmets. The big glossy orange Japanese motorcycle they sat on was so close to the Benz it seemed to be leaning on its left rear quarter panel.

Had the bike tapped the Benz? I thought, staring, as I started crossing 36th. A fender bender?

As I reached the other corner of 36th, the motorcycle’s engine suddenly screamed as it roared away from the Benz like a rocket east up 37th.

East up westbound 37th! I thought as the driver threw open his door.

“Down!” I yelled as I dove to the ground.

I was just able to pull Emily down on top of me on the sidewalk when the Mercedes exploded with a blast of light and a deafening boom.

Chapter 97

I got up off my knees a disoriented moment later. I stood there with my hands over my ears, waiting for them to stop ringing, before I realized the ringing was the piercing blare of a stuck car horn.

I looked north and saw that the sound was coming from the half-blown-apart Mercedes. Through what looked like billowing white smoke, I could see the car up on the sidewalk, its front end wedged under the wreckage of the now-collapsed sidewalk shed.

I called in the description of the motorcycle over the radio as I ran toward the wreckage, pushing through an already clustering crowd on the sidewalk and street. I squinted against the nasty tang of burned metal as I began pulling away the aluminum poles and wooden sheets of the destroyed construction shed, trying to get access to the car.

As I peeled away the last couple of splintered plywood sheets, I saw that some type of tarp from the shed had fallen perfectly over the side of the car, like a showroom cover. Then I pulled the cover away, and I got my first good look at the damage.

The car’s hood was folded in, and its front and rear windshields were completely shattered. All the interior air bags had gone off, and all the tires were blown flat.

I had to move one last sheet of wood to get a look at the driver. He gasped as he sat in the driver’s seat of the ruined car, clutching the wheel with his right hand. The driver’s door was missing. So was the driver’s left arm below the elbow. His striped polo shirt was scorched and sliced to tatters from bomb shrapnel, and when he turned, I could see a still-smoking piece of metal the size and shape of a Dorito embedded in his right cheekbone.

“You’re going to be okay,” I lied to him. “Just sit tight. What happened? Did you see who did it?”

He didn’t say anything. I watched his jaw suddenly clench and his lips begin to tremble. His whole face started shivering, like he was suddenly freezing. I was looking into his blue eyes when they glazed over and he stopped moving. I stepped back in startled horror, looking away. I knew I’d just watched him die.

I recognized his face when I peered back at him a split second later. It was Anatoly Gavrilov, the other Russian we’d brought in during the Bronx arrest of Yevdokimov.

Yevdokimov! I thought as I quickly looked past Gavrilov’s body to the passenger door on the other side of the car. Shit! It was open, and there was blood on the passenger seat and in the footwell.

“Yevdokimov!” I yelled to Emily as I scrambled out of the wreckage and headed into the street around the destroyed vehicle’s trunk. “He was in the car. He’s hurt and on foot. The real bombers must have tried to hit him. C’mon, he can’t have gotten far.”

Around the other side of the car, there was an actual blood trail on the sidewalk. A lot of blood. Yevdokimov was obviously hurt very badly. It was like we were tracking a gut-shot deer up Eighth Avenue.

“Back out of the damn way!” I said to all the looky-loos, trying to preserve the crime scene.

We turned the corner, and the trail ran smack-dab into a tall West African street vendor who was crouched down, picking up iPhone covers out of the gutter.

“Hey! Anyone come past here bleeding?” I said.

“Yes! A white man. A crazy white man,” said the vendor in a musical voice. “He had blood on his arm and pouring off his chin. I tried to get him to sit, but he pushed past me and knocked over all my stuff. He got into a taxi not a minute ago.”

I couldn’t see any taxi on 37th when I stepped into the street, so I radioed it in.

Officer Rowe and his buddies had arrived and were surrounding the scene when we went back around the corner to the wreckage. There had to be about a thousand people standing around now. Cars stopped in the street. Everybody had their phones out, immortalizing our bombing scene for the folks at YouTube to instantly globally disseminate.

“Fuck the police!” someone in the crowd threw out over the still-wailing horn to get a laugh. He got several, unfortunately.

“Isn’t this great? We’re going viral,” Emily said as we stood there gaping at the still-steaming, torn-apart car.

“Of course we are,” I said. “Who wants to watch Times Square Elmo beat the crap out of Times Square Spidey when you got a real live blown-up guy in a car?”

“So I’m going to take a wild guess and say we’re not the only ones looking for Yevdokimov,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Guess not,” I said as I moved back through the crowd into the street. I walked around Rowe and crawled back toward the front of the car and reached in over the dead Russian and found the keys still in the ignition.

People in the crowd actually booed as I finally cut the car’s engine and the horn.

“That’s all, folks,” I said.

Chapter 98

“So... anything yet?” I said for the twentieth time over Chuck Jordan’s shoulder as he sat at the desk, tapping at Yevdokimov’s laptop.

“Oh, plenty, Mike, but I’m keeping it to myself,” the young agent said, rolling his eyes.

“Why don’t we give Chuck a little space to work, Mike?” Emily said, yanking me out into the hallway.

We were in Yevdokimov’s flop now. We’d found it soon after the bombing. Sergeant Rowe had been spot-on. The building was just where he said it was, down the block from the bombing off Eighth Avenue on the north side of 37th. Yevdokimov’s crash pad was on the tenth floor, and it was filled with me and Emily and about twenty FBI agents who were scouring every nook and cranny for some sign of who the real bombers could be.

We still were unsure of Yevdokimov’s whereabouts. We’d told all the hospitals to be on the lookout for him, but so far, nothing was shaking. The good news was that we’d actually found three computers, which Chuck Jordan and his guys were now poking through.

“This isn’t exactly what people have in mind when they think ‘New York loft,’ is it?” Emily said, looking at the moldering plaster and probably asbestos-covered overhead pipes. “What did the building manager say? This used to be a sewing machine factory? Wasn’t there a famous fire in a sewing machine factory in New York in the eighteen hundreds or something? Because this place definitely looks haunted.”

“You’re thinking of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” I said. “That was down in the Village. After the fire started, more than a hundred garment workers died. People were jumping out windows. Because the kindly owners had gated and locked the exit stairwells to keep the workers on task.

“Some good actually came out of it, though, because the public went nuts, and it led to fire safety laws and sprinkler systems and fire escapes and the forty-hour workweek.”

“You’re just a walking Ken Burns documentary, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes, and my fee for this extended walking tour is the capture of a Russian homicidal bomber in handcuffs with a big shiny bow on his head.”

“Get in here! I think I found something,” Chuck Jordan bellowed.

We went back in. On the screen was a picture of three fat kids in an aboveground pool. It took me a couple of seconds to see Papa Yevdokimov sitting behind them on the pool ladder holding a Super Soaker water gun.

“These are Yevdokimov’s personal photographs. There are about a hundred that show him at the same seaside cottage,” Chuck said.

“It’s his dacha,” Emily said.

“His what?”

“I worked a Russian organized crime case a couple of years ago. Dachas are Russian vacation houses. All the mobsters have them back in the old country,” she said.

“So are we going to try to peg the location from the background again?” I said.

“No. These shots are JPEGs with Exif file formats, which means that they were taken with a smartphone. Smartphone cameras record GPS locations of where each picture is taken in a process known as geotagging. Give me a second,” Chuck said, clicking open some new screens.

“Here it is. The latitude and longitude,” he said a second later. “It’s Eleven Roseleah Drive, Mystic, Connecticut.”

“That’s where he’s headed — has to be,” said Emily.

“What are we waiting for, then? Let’s roll,” I said.

Chapter 99

We were back in the dingy building’s hallway, getting a move on so we could head up to Connecticut, when the elevator opened and Chief Fabretti appeared.

“There you are, Bennett. I’ve been trying to call you,” he said with an agitated look on his face.

“Sorry, Chief,” I said, fishing my phone out of my pocket. “Oh, here’s the problem. Left it on airplane mode.”

“Stop screwing with me, Bennett,” Fabretti said, pulling me over to a corner. “I’ve been getting calls from my bosses. Their counterparts over at the Bureau saw you traipsing around their new digs this morning. They said thanks but no thanks for your help. There’s no more task force. The feds are taking over the investigation from here.”

“What do you mean?” I said, agitated myself now. “We’re right in the middle of this. We’re about to grab the only guy who knows who the real bombers are.”

“No, Bennett. They’re about to grab him. Not you. The feds want to nail the bastards who blew up their building all by themselves.”

“What about the college kids who died on the train and the mayor and the people who died in the EMP attack? They were New Yorkers, right? The people we’re supposed to protect.”

“It’s already been settled. The FBI is going to get the credit for this.”

“They can have the damn credit, and if there’s any left over, you can have it. I’ll leave before the reporters show, I swear. C’mon, Chief. We’ve got a beeline on this guy. We just need to find this bastard now before the real bombers take him out.”

“It’s over, Bennett. So stop arguing,” Fabretti said, glaring coldly at me. “You’re off the case, and that’s an order. There were about a hundred robberies during the evacuation. We have plenty of work for you to do. Now drive me back to One Police Plaza.”

“Mike?” called Emily from down the hall, where all the FBI agents were packed into the elevator.

“Go,” I said. “Get this guy. It’s up to you now. Don’t lose him!”

“That’s the spirit, Bennett,” said Fabretti as the elevator door rumbled closed.

Chapter 100

Fabretti insisted on buying me a coffee at a Times Square Starbucks before we headed way back downtown to One Police Plaza.

“See, Mike? I’m not such a bad guy,” he said, tipping his nonfat latte at me as I chauffeured him down Broadway. “Listen, I know you’ve been neck-deep in this from the beginning, but this is coming from up high. The mayor — hell, the senior senator — is involved. We’re just small potatoes.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“Exactly. I’m doing you a favor. I heard the mayor sent her plane for you. That had to be sweet. A real ride on the gravy train. Or should I say ‘the gravy plane’? Honestly, you play your cards right, Mike, you keep playing ball, retirement is going to be smooth sailing for you.”

“Sure, definitely,” I said, checking my phone to see if there was anything from Emily.

After another excruciating twenty minutes of Fabretti’s pep talk, I dropped him off at the door of One Police Plaza. I told him I was going to park and meet him up at his office, but instead I actually squealed out of the lot and got immediately on the northbound FDR Drive.

I called Emily as I punched it.

“Where are you?” I yelled.

“We just crossed the Connecticut border, but we’re still about two hours away. Mystic is practically in Rhode Island. We have a team of agents out of New Haven almost at the house. What’s your status?”

“I’m on the highway about half an hour behind you.”

“What about Fabretti?” Emily said. “Aren’t you off the case?”

“I never heard him say that,” I said. “My ears are still ringing from that car bomb.”

“Mine, too, Mike,” Emily said with a laugh. “See you there.”

I hung up and asked Siri for directions and proceeded to put the pedal to the metal. I took the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge into the Bronx, then took the Bruckner to I-95.

It was coming on rush hour when I crossed into Connecticut and hit traffic. It was stop-and-go past Stamford when I saw the Chevy’s tank was almost empty, so I got off at the next exit and pulled into a BP gas station and filled up.

As I stood squeezing the nozzle, I looked at my phone and laughed when I saw that Fabretti had left twenty angry texts. Where the f are you? came his latest.

Taking a ride on the gravy plane, I texted back.

My phone rang a moment later.

“Hey, Robertson,” I said.

“Mike, big news!” he yelled. “We just got a bead on two Russians that might be our guys. Brooklyn and I have been going bonkers with these flight manifests, but we have two Russian immigrants who have been back and forth to Cape Verde from the States six times over the last year.

“Their names are Vladislav and Oleg Filipov. They’re father and son. Turns out they flew to Cape Verde out of Miami, not New York.”

“Miami?”

“Yes. The father, Vladislav, ran a brutal Russian prostitution and drug-dealing crew there for most of the eighties and nineties — allegedly, at least, since he never got caught for a damn thing. No fixed address.”

“What about the son?”

“We don’t have anything on him in terms of a record. He had a house in Queens up until six months ago, but since then, nothing. No address. No job. No visible means of support. I’m e-mailing you their photographs from their driver’s licenses as we speak. They could definitely be the guys on the video. One older, one younger. They’re looking good on this!”

“Sounds great,” I said. “Yevdokimov will be able to ID these guys once we catch up to him. Really good job, Robertson.”

I hung up and looked at the pictures of the two Russians. They didn’t have goatees in the pictures, but they both had lean, pale faces with sharp features and the same strong nose.

I left the pump still going and went inside to grab a Gatorade and some Pringles when I saw the clerk at the back of the store by the restrooms, standing with a mop by a pool of something that had spilled. I stopped in my tracks by a rack of magazines when I saw what he was mopping.

It looked like blood.

“Hey, what’s up, kid?” I said, rushing over. “Is that blood?”

“It ain’t tomato soup!” the blond college-age clerk said with a disgusted face. “Some guy was just in here, and when he leaves, the next customer comes out white as a ghost, screaming, ‘Ebola! Ebola!’ It looks like somebody hemorrhaged in here. I told my boss, and he said I should start mopping, but I don’t know. You think I should call the cops?”

“This bleeding guy, when was he here?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

I grabbed the mop out of his hand as I took out my shield.

“I am the cops. Show me the camera now!”

Chapter 101

“Emily, listen!” I screamed as I roared along the shoulder on I-95, scanning the stop-and-go traffic. “I just saw him! I just saw Yevdokimov on a gas-station video. I’m about five minutes behind him. He’s in a white Nissan Altima on Ninety-Five outside Stamford, heading north past exit ten. He’s probably heading toward you. New York plates two seven eight FRG. He’s bleeding heavily, and—”

I dropped the phone as I suddenly saw a white Altima ahead in the left lane. I drew alongside it across two lanes of traffic. I checked the plates. It was him.

“I see him!” I said to Emily as I snatched up the phone. “I’m on him. We’re between exits ten and eleven.”

“Stay on him, but wait for backup, Mike, before you try a traffic stop. Chuck’s on the horn with the Connecticut troopers. Hang back. We’re coming to you.”

A horn honked as I cut back into traffic, then Yevdokimov turned and saw me. He had some kind of bandage on his chin.

He immediately gunned it. He got out of the left lane ahead of the SUV in front of me. A second later, I saw him flash into the right lane and onto the shoulder, going for the exit ramp we were already passing.

At first it looked like he was going to make it, but then at the last second, he sideswiped the yellow water-barrel divider that cordoned off the exit ramp from the highway. I watched as he spun and hit the concrete divider on the other side of the exit with a horrible crunch of metal.

I got over to the right and braked and skidded to a stop on the shoulder and ran back toward the turned-around Altima, now almost completely blocking the exit.

I thought Yevdokimov was most certainly dead after this second incredibly violent incident of the day, so I was surprised when the passenger door opened and he staggered out.

“Down!” I yelled over the honking horns as I pointed my Glock at his head.

Because he was bleeding, I probably shouldn’t have cuffed and moved him, but we were in danger from the traffic, so I had no other choice.

I had him in my Chevy, down on his stomach in the backseat, while I was in the front passenger seat rifling through the glove compartment for the first aid kit, when the truck rear-ended us.

The passenger door was open, and I was thrown from the vehicle. It was the weirdest sensation of my life. One second I was sitting there reaching into the glove compartment, and the next I was out in the air banging the crap out of the back of my head as I skidded across asphalt.

I eventually ended up on a berm of newly mowed grass beside the shoulder. My head was ringing. I must have had a concussion. I felt numb as I lay on the grass facedown, not moving. I was definitely in shock.

Eventually I turned to look at my car.

We’d been hit by a big pickup, a Ford Super-something truck with an extended cab and a push bar in front and six wheels. Everything on it was black. The big tires and rims; the body; the tinted windows.

The two guys who climbed out of it were in black as well. They had ski masks on, and they rushed over and pulled Yevdokimov none too gently out of my smashed Chevy and put him into the cab of the truck.

Behind them, cars were just driving past normally. Some horns honked, but that was it. I couldn’t believe this was happening in broad daylight.

When I looked again, the guys in the ski masks were heading in my direction. That’s when I saw the guns they were carrying strapped over their shoulders — the nasty little black Heckler & Koch submachine guns that ESU guys have. I reached for my service weapon and drew air. That was not a great feeling. My Glock must have skidded loose when I was thrown.

I started backing up, scrabbling weakly on my unsteady feet on the grass. I couldn’t get my bearings. I felt off balance and floaty, like I was standing at the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool.

I thought that was it. They’d just shoot me. But instead they grabbed me and threw me back down onto the grass. I almost laughed. It was like we were all kids again, and they wanted to wrestle or play football right there on the side of I-95.

I didn’t feel like laughing anymore when one of them hit me hard across the side of my head with the metal top of the gun.

One of them was holding me down in a headlock and the other one was fishing for something in the pocket of his leather coat when the Connecticut state trooper vehicle skidded to a stop behind the truck.

“No!” I yelled as the two guys let go of me and without delay opened up on the gray police car.

I sat frozen, eyes closed, palming my ears as the two deafening Heckler & Kochs went off a foot from my face. When the gunfire ceased, I looked and saw that the patrol car’s windshield was now a smoking sheet of holes from the fifty rounds that had ripped through it in the space of five seconds.

As I tried to get up, they got me in a headlock again and slapped a wet cloth onto my face. It was really wet and clingy, like an antibacterial wipe. They smothered me with it. Stuck it in my nostrils. It felt like I was drowning. The smell of it was heavily astringent, medicinal, the scent of rubbing alcohol and something vaguely bitter.

The drug, whatever it was, was powerful. Almost immediately, I felt light-headed. The sky and traffic started fading in and out, like my eyes were on a dimmer switch some kid was playing with.

It took me a second to realize that I was being lifted again. I hardly felt it when my face slammed against the dirty carpet of the pickup a second or two later. I looked up at Yevdokimov sitting in the backseat above me with his eyes closed. Then I turned and, in my swimming vision, saw that my phone had fallen out of my jacket and bounced loose under the seat.

It felt like it was ten pounds as I pulled it out and looked around. There was a little alcove with a drink holder and maps in it beside Yevdokimov’s feet on the seat above me.

The front doors were popping open when, with my last bit of strength and consciousness, I reached up and dropped the phone in there and passed out.

Chapter 102

I woke sometime later. I was on my back on a cold, hard floor. I felt hungover, nauseated — that bitter alcohol scent still coating the insides of my nostrils. When I opened my eyes, the light was agonizingly painful, and when I tried to move, I got the spins. So I closed my eyes and lay still. After about ten minutes, I opened my eyes again in little slits, giving them time to get used to the idea.

After a minute or two, I made out that I was in a cramped room with rough stone walls and a raw-drywall ceiling. It was lit by a shop light on the floor whose cord snaked along the ground and out under a cheap wooden door. Across from me along one wall was a huge, cheap-looking leather couch, above which hung a big plastic roll of what looked like industrial Hefty bags on a cylindrical metal holder attached to the wall.

What the hell is this place? I thought groggily. A crash hangout for a janitor?

There was a strong musty smell in the air, which could only mean a basement. It comforted me somehow as I lay there. It was a happy smell. Suburban families, popcorn and videos on sleepovers, board games on a rainy day.

Those visions imploded as I heard the horrendous screams start in the distance. There were three in a row. Three impassioned shrieks of someone in hysterical, unholy pain.

Get out now! I told myself. But as I jumped up, it was like my feet had been pulled out from underneath me. I smacked the left side of my face pretty good on the concrete. What the hell? I thought. Then I looked down and felt like letting out some unholy screams myself as my mind kicked straight into adrenaline-pumping animal panic.

My left leg was handcuffed to an old galvanized steel heating pipe that was embedded in the concrete floor.

The door shot open. One of the ski-masked guys walked in. He had his jacket off and was wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt. Behind him came a second ski-masked guy wearing an army-green long-sleeved T-shirt, dragging something heavy.

He was dragging Yevdokimov, I realized a moment later. The Russian was naked and very dead. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone more dead. His face and arms and chest looked like they’d been worked on by a very motivated demolition crew. There didn’t seem to be a part of him that wasn’t black or blue or covered in blood.

The second guy walked over and, with a squeak, wheeled off a huge sheet of plastic over the couch. He slit the plastic off the roll with a box cutter that he pulled from his pocket, then the two of them lifted Yevdokimov up and tossed him onto the plastic-covered couch, wrapping him up like the largest, sorriest fish in the history of the world.

They taped the ends with a roll of duct tape they produced from beneath the couch, and when they were done they lifted him up like a rug and dropped him on the floor. The black-shirted guy sat down on the couch and put his feet on Yevdokimov like he was an ottoman. Then his buddy joined him.

Robertson was right, I saw as they peeled off their ski masks. It was Vladislav and Oleg Filipov.

I’ll have to congratulate Robertson, I thought. If I ever see him again.

Father and son Filipov sat there staring at me with their pale, sharp, nasty-looking faces and their feet up on Yevdokimov, not saying anything. Staring back, I’d never been so afraid in my life. My heart beat against my chest like that of a rat trapped in a corner, and when I swallowed, I realized that I didn’t have any saliva in my mouth.

Chapter 103

The older guy started laughing.

“And how are you?” he said in a deep Russian accent as he laboriously stood up. “Here. I have something for you.”

The old man took something out of his black cargo-pants pocket. It was a two-foot piece of flex pipe with a sharp-looking fist-size chunk of metal on the end of it. The metal part was a heavy brass hose bibb, I realized as he came forward and whipped me over the top of the head with the metal flail.

As I sat up, I felt a trickle of blood drip down from my scalp, a warm rivulet that fell over my forehead, along the side of my nose, over my closed lips, and off my chin. “Do you like my cop-be-good stick?” he said as I sat there in agony. “It’s the whipping action of the flex pipe that really delivers the groceries. I also love the way it smashes and cuts at the same time. All without putting too much strain on my wrist. I’m older and must consider such things. You will cooperate with us now.”

I glanced into my tormentor’s cold brown eyes as my skull throbbed.

“So here we are,” said the cruel prick as he sat down and crossed his legs on Yevdokimov’s body. “You wished to find us, yes, Mr. NYPD? Well, be careful what you wish for.”

“Aren’t you going to ask us who we are?” said the younger guy — the one in the green T-shirt — who, unsurprisingly, had a Russian accent as well.

“You’re the bombers. The terrorists,” I finally said with slow deliberation as I continued to bleed. With the drugs and the pain and the fear, it wasn’t easy to keep my voice steady.

“We are the bombers. This is true,” said the old man. “But we’re not terrorists.”

“No. More like pissed-off citizens, you could call us,” said the younger Russian, cutting in. “What’s the word? Disgruntled — that’s it. Call us disgruntled immigrants.”

“But enough about us,” said the old man, slapping the flail into a palm. “Let’s see what you know, okay? Question one.”

He lifted his booted foot over Yevdokimov and brought it down hard.

“Do you know why we killed this piece of shit?”

“The ransom,” I said carefully. “He found your video and tried to make money off it.”

The old pig looked surprised. “That’s right. Yevdokimov and I were associates. We actually used to work together in the KGB a lifetime ago. I contracted out a job for him, but he made a mistake. He tried to turn the tables.

“Now,” the old man said, stomping the body again with his combat boot, “Yev is my table.”

“When you were in the KGB, you worked with Rezende’s uncle,” I said, putting the pieces together. “In Cape Verde, to overthrow the Portuguese.”

“You know a little history, I see,” the old man said. “Which is saying a lot for an American. That’s exactly where I met Paulo Rezende and his tool of a nephew, Armenio. Paulo was there when I came up with the tsunami project back in 1971.”

Now I was confused.

“Yes. Surprising, isn’t it? This plan has been in the pipeline since before you were born, cop. The bureau called it Krasnyy Navodneniye.”

He smiled.

“Operation Red Flood,” he said.

Chapter 104

“It started out as a lark, really,” the old man continued. “One night, Paulo and I came back from a bombing run and were listening to the BBC news. A story about the latest volcanic threat on Árvore Preta and a geologist who speculated that one piece falling off the volcano might be a titanic tsunami threat to the United States.

“That got me thinking. Why not just get some dynamite and give that cliff a push? I put it over the wire back to the big boys in Moscow, and they just ate it up. A month later, they sent out a team of engineers and surveyors who concluded that it could be done. They commissioned and typed up a plan for exactly how to do it, down to the last detail. I actually got a promotion for think-tanking that attack. And why not? It was genius.”

“Why didn’t they do it?”

“They were thinking about it in late 1980, I heard. There was some seismic activity, so they were going to make it look like an accident, but then Reagan got elected, and they thought if the truth ever came out, he was just crazy enough to let the nukes fly.”

“Why now, then?” I said. “Why destroy New York now? Does Russia want to bring back the glory days and start World War Three?”

“No,” said the old man. “We have no political agenda. I gave up all that political shit years ago. I’ve been a good honest crook for the last twenty years.”

He looked over at the younger Russian.

“I did it for my son here,” said the old man, patting the other guy on the back. “For him and for my grandson.”

“Your grandson?” I said, panicking, thinking there was still another nut out there we hadn’t found yet.

“My son, Mikhail,” the younger Russian said, staring almost sadly at me. “We did it for Mikhail.”

Chapter 105

The younger Russian took a photo out of his wallet and walked over and crouched beside me.

“Do you recognize him?” he said.

The picture was of a pale young teenager with a slightly misshapen shaved head. His eyes weren’t exactly level with each other. He was more than a little loony-looking, but I kept that to myself.

“No. Should I know him?” I asked.

“Yes. He was on the cover of the Daily News last year.”

Too bad I read the Post, I thought, not knowing where this could be going.

“Did something happen to your son?”

“I’m a thinker, an introvert, a shut-in, some might say,” the Russian continued. “I like books. Math, physics, mechanics, engineering, abstract things. But back in my twenties, I was a little more outgoing, and I had a dalliance with a stripper.”

“One of my workers,” said the old man. “I owned four clubs in Miami at the time. It was his twenty-first birthday. The least I could do.”

Father of the year, I thought.

“So she got pregnant, and Mikhail was born. He had problems from day one. Birth defects, then a diagnosis of autism, then schizophrenia. All these stupid diagnoses just to say he was mentally not okay.”

“Years of psychologists and medication and my favorite — therapy,” said the old man, disgusted. “Bullshit! All of it!”

“They wanted to institutionalize him,” the son continued. “But I said no. I knew there was somebody in there. Somebody smart who could be funny and who just needed to be watched over. So I took care of him. I raised him by my side; he was with me all the time. He was a big pain in my ass, but he was smart. We would play chess and cards. He was so good at cards. Could add in his head almost as fast as me.”

The son looked down at the floor wistfully as he took a breath.

“In 2012, he was doing okay enough that I was able to leave him with an aide every once in a while. The aide, I thought, was a good man, but he turned out to be not so good. Because he smoked dope and fell asleep one morning while I was at an engineering conference in Philly, and Mikhail left the apartment alone.

“He got on the subway, and I don’t know what happened, but that morning in upper Manhattan, he pushed a woman in front of the number one train.”

“At a Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street,” I said, vaguely remembering the case now. “That’s why you blew it up.”

“Yes,” the son said. “You’re catching on. See, Mikhail was taken into custody. I’m away. Mikhail has no one, no ID. He can’t speak for himself, but he was obviously mentally sick. They should have taken him to a hospital, yes?”

“No,” said the old man bitterly. “Turned out the Manhattan DA knew the female victim and pulled strings to have Mikhail booked, put immediately into the system. Without learning the details about Mikhail’s condition. Without thinking about any of the consequences. Do you know the name of the man who was the DA at the time?”

“Mayor Carl Doucette,” I said.

He nodded, smiled.

“The late mayor Carl Doucette,” he said.

“So Mikhail is booked, and there’s no room in Central Booking to hold him, so they send him over to Rikers,” the son said. “My son cannot cope with this. He’s mentally sick, like I say, so he starts freaking. A corrections officer puts him in a room they have in the basement for people not cooperating. This room was over a hundred degrees. They said it was some boiler problem.

“It sure was a problem for Mikhail. They left him there for two days — my son. They forgot about him. My poor Mikhail. New York City boiled my mentally ill son alive.”

Chapter 106

“Why did you Emp Yorkville?” I said.

“Mayor Doucette had his mother at Sloan Kettering hospital,” said the old man, smiling again. “The precious old girl didn’t make it during the evac. Shame.”

“And Twenty-Six Federal Plaza?”

“The corrections officer who locked up Mikhail got a new job on the maintenance crew there,” said the old man. “I would have taken down an airliner if he was one of the passengers. To hell with him for slaughtering my grandson and to hell with this city and America. Oh, how you crowed when the Cold War was over; how much greater your country was than ours with your freedoms — or so you thought.

“And now look at yourselves. You have the freedom to land planes at the wrong airports, the freedom to shunt downtown trains onto uptown tracks, the freedom to kill prisoners by accident. Why? I don’t know. All I know is that you’re a pack of fools, and a fool and his civilization are soon parted.

“Because this isn’t over,” he said. “If it takes us twenty years, we’re going to make you bastards pay. I ran the Russian mob in Miami. I have millions of dollars and contacts and access to many interesting things. If you think Krasnyy Navodneniye is the only recipe in the old Soviet book of dirty tricks, think again. You should have thought twice before you fucked with my family!”

“I hear you,” I said, trying to buy some time. “I’m a father myself, and I can’t imagine how horrible it’s been for you. How angry you must be. What happened to Mikhail was a disgusting travesty that deserves justice. But think about all the other Mikhails out there who are going to die over this. You’re right about this decadent Sodom-and-Gomorrah direction we’ve taken of late. But there are still some good people out there.”

“What’s this? A Bible-thumping cop?” said the old man. “Spare the city for the sake of a few good people? Where are they? Who’s good? Wait. Let me guess. You?”

“Sure. I’m not so bad,” I said with a shrug. “Spare it for me. Why not?”

The old man dropped the flail and took out a Glock and pressed it to my forehead.

“If I were God, I might be tempted,” he said as he cocked the hammer. “Too bad for you: I’m the other guy.”

Chapter 107

That’s when we heard the noise. A heavy crunching sound followed by glass shattering.

It was coming from upstairs.

The old man still had the gun to my head as the two Russians stared at each other. The old man looked down at me with hate in his eyes, pressing the barrel hard against my head, but then there was another creak of wood. It was a footstep in the room directly above, and the younger man put a finger to his lips and the cold metal lifted away.

He cut a piece of duct tape and wrapped it around my mouth before the two of them went out the door. The massive shoot-out erupted thirty seconds later. Automatic gunfire in the next room starting and stopping and starting again. I hit the deck just before a round ripped a hole in the cheap wooden door.

Twenty seconds after that, I heard it. The three words I’d been praying for.

“He’s in here!” Emily said.

“How’d you find me? My phone?” was the first thing I said.

She nodded.

“That find-your-friend app comes in damn handy!” she said, smiling, as she unlocked my cuffed ankle.

“I’m glad we’re friends,” I said, finally standing. “There was an old guy and a younger one. Russians, like we thought. Did you get them?”

“The Filipovs. We heard. We got the younger one. He got hit and they found him a block away. They’d bugged out of a cellar door we missed.”

“What about the old bastard? He said he was KGB. Evil as a snake.”

“Not yet. But we have the whole neighborhood surrounded. He’s on foot.”

Emily handed me my Glock and I stumbled up the basement stairs behind her. Golly tamale, did it feel good in my hand at that moment. I could have kissed both it and her. They must have found it at the crash scene.

We went outside through the front door. I was shocked to see that the building was a small brick house at the dead end of a leafy residential street. To the right of it was a huge school or something — several dark buildings with a large empty parking lot beyond the guardrail at the end of the street.

“Where are we?” I said.

“Brooklyn. Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. That’s Kingsborough Community College right there. We think he ran in there. Don’t worry, we’re on it. A dozen agents are on his tail. We’re going door-to-door.”

I immediately hopped the guardrail and started running across the parking lot.

“Mike, stop! What are you doing?” Emily yelled at my back. “You need a doctor.”

I didn’t have time to explain. I was probably still half in shock or something after the accident and beating, but wherever he was I had to find the crazy old evil prick. There was nothing this guy wouldn’t do to get away — no depths he wouldn’t stoop to. He had no qualms about killing another innocent person. I had to find him if it was the last thing I did.

I passed a guard shack and came down some steps and was running past a building when I noticed one of its doors was slightly open. I creaked it open some more, then I heard feet pounding on the stairs inside.

I ran in and up and got to the second floor just as the person left the stairwell onto the third floor. I was coming through the third floor’s swinging door into a dark hallway five seconds later when I felt something on my face, and a wire was tightening around my neck.

I was just able to get my hands in as the old bastard tightened the garrote. It was a steel wire, incredibly fine, like titanium dental floss. Blood squirted as it slid deep into the edges of my palms above my wrists.

I bulled back into him. We went through the swinging door into the stairwell and tumbled backwards, banging down the stairs. The garrote slackened as I fell on him on the landing, and I ripped the wire away from my neck with a hiss of breath.

I crawled to my feet, blood freely pouring from the cut meat of my palms. I turned as the old Russian was taking something out of his pocket. It was a straight razor.

Before he could cut me again, I kicked him in the right ear. I center-massed my size-11 Nunn Bush wingtip oxford right in his ear. Hard. I booted him like I never kicked anything in my life. His head slammed back at the crushing impact and bashed off the radiator with a low gong as the straight razor went flying.

As he was sitting there, stunned, I lifted him by his lapels with my bloody aching hands, yanked him up and off his feet, and with every nanoparticle of panicked strength I had in me, threw the evil old prick as hard as I could backwards down the next flight of stairs.

He was facedown when I got to him, his nose bleeding. I lifted him up again. I thought of all the people he had come a hair-breadth from wiping out, people like my kids. How he’d tried to kill me a split second before.

I was about to send him flying down the stairs again when Emily and two other agents came running up.

“Mike, we got him! You got him!” she said. “It’s over!”

Chapter 108

It was around midnight when Emily and I arrived back at the Broad Street FBI building, across from the stock exchange. We were in the underground lot, and about half a dozen New York — office FBI guys were taking the old KGB bastard who’d just tried to kill me none too gently out of one of the other cars.

“Mike, you want to help book and interview this guy? You’re the one who found him,” Emily said.

“Nah, you guys take it,” I said, holding up my bandaged hands. “I’ve spent enough time with him. Believe me. Besides, I told Fabretti that I’d disappear before the reporters showed. He’s all yours. Tell the FBI they can’t say I never gave them anything.”

“You want me to drive you back to your apartment?”

“I’ll catch a cab. You need to debrief that snake.”

“You sure? You’ve been through hell today, Mike. It’s okay to have some help. Or at least some company.”

I went over and gave her a hug.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said in her ear. “You’ve done enough already, friend.”

I came up out of the ramp of the garage onto shadowed Broad Street. I made a drunk guy walking past in a suit laugh as I saluted the flag on the stock exchange and then the statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall. Then I proceeded to walk past Wall Street to Chinatown and then Little Italy until I found the Bowery.

It was a gorgeous night. It had rained a little as we were coming back from Brooklyn, but it was clear now. The neon signs in the bar windows and brake lights up the avenues were vivid as high-def against the night.

I walked through Nolita and smiled as I arrived at Astor Place, where I used to get New Wave haircuts with my buddies. Afterward we’d go to the pizza place on the corner, which had the greatest slices known to man. I remembered being a teenager, standing out on the plaza where the cube sculpture was, smoking cigarettes with my goofball friends, staring down the punk rockers as we tried to get girls’ phone numbers. The few numbers we’d scrape together we’d scrawl on scraps of paper and napkins and keep under our mattresses like precious medals.

All those years ago, I thought, smiling. It really was a wonder, like Emily had said. This city. How many ghosts? I wondered. How many memories and dreams and aspirations packed in and out of how many walls? Who knew what would happen tomorrow? But I was glad I’d been part of keeping this old wonder rolling for at least another day.

I went left on 14th Street to Union Square and walked through some skateboarders rolling around the empty farmers’ market and past the closed doors of the Barnes & Noble. I found Broadway and pushed north.

It was coming on 2:00 a.m. by the time I got to my building on West End Avenue and stepped off the elevator onto my floor.

I truly was bamboozled by all the noise coming from behind my closed apartment door. There was laughing and distinct whooping.

A party? I thought. Who was old enough to party till 2:00 a.m.? Seamus was too old, I thought as I turned the lock and pushed open the door.

“Michael! You’re home!” Mary Catherine said, standing there wide-eyed on the front-hall carpet, surrounded by the kids.

I stood there, stunned frozen, with my fingers still on the key in the lock.

How? I thought. Wasn’t she still in Ireland?

Then I wisely dispensed with all that and did the only sensible thing.

I let the door bang closed behind me as I slammed into Mary Catherine and hugged her for all I was worth.

“I love you, too,” she finally whispered in my ear.