Any Means Necessary

Chapter 1

The phone rang.

Luke Stone lay somewhere between asleep and awake. Images flashed in his mind. It was night on an empty rain-swept highway. Someone was injured. A car wreck. In the distance, an ambulance approached, moving fast. The siren wailed.

He opened his eyes. Next to him on the bed table, in the dark of their bedroom, the phone was ringing. A digital clock sat on the table next to the phone. He glanced at its red numbers.

“Jesus,” he whispered. He had been asleep for maybe half an hour.

His wife Rebecca’s voice, thick with sleep: “Don’t answer it.”

A tuft of her blonde hair poked out from under the blankets. Soft blue light filtered into the room from a nightlight in the bathroom.

He picked up the phone.

“Luke,” a voice said. The voice was deep and gruff, with the slightest hint of a Southern twang. Luke knew the voice all too well. It was Don Morris, his old boss at the Special Response Team.

Luke ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah?”

“Did I wake you?” Don said.

“What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t have called you at home. But your cell phone was off.”

Luke grunted. “That’s because I turned it off.”

“We got trouble, Luke. I need you on this one.”

“Tell me,” Luke said.

He listened as the voice spoke. Soon, he had that feeling he used to get — the feeling that his stomach was in an elevator rapidly descending fifty stories. Perhaps this was why he had quit the job. Not because of too many close calls, not because his son was growing up so fast, but because he didn’t like this feeling in his stomach.

It was the knowing that made him sick. The knowing was too much. He thought of the millions of people out there, living their happy lives, blissfully unaware of what was going on. Luke envied them their ignorance.

“When did it happen?” he said.

“We don’t know anything yet. An hour ago, maybe two. The hospital noticed the security breach about fifteen minutes ago. They have employees unaccounted for, so right now it looks like an inside job. That could change as better intel comes in. The NYPD has gone nuts, for obvious reasons. They called in two thousand extra cops, and from where I sit, it’s not going to be nearly enough. Most of them won’t even get in until the shift change.”

“Who called NYPD?” Luke said.

“The hospital.”

“Who called us?”

“The Chief of Police.”

“He call anybody else?”

“No. We’re it.”

Luke nodded.

“Okay, good. Let’s keep it that way. The cops need to lock down the crime scene and secure it. But they need to stay outside the perimeter. We don’t want them stepping on it. They also need to keep this away from the media. If the newspapers get it, it’s going to be a circus.”

“Done and done.”

Luke sighed. “Assume a two-hour head start. That’s bad. They’re way out ahead of us. They could be anywhere.”

“I know. NYPD is watching the bridges, the tunnels, the subways, the commuter rails. They’re looking at highway tollbooth data, but it’s a needle in a haystack. No one has the manpower to deal with this.”

“When are you going up there?” Luke said.

Don didn’t hesitate. “Now. And you’re coming with me.”

Luke looked at the clock again. 1:23.

“I can be at the chopper pad in half an hour.”

“I already sent a car,” Don said. “The driver just called in. He’ll be at your place in ten minutes.”

Luke placed the receiver back in its cradle.

Rebecca was half awake, her head propped up on one elbow, staring at him. Her hair was long, flowing down her shoulders. Her eyes were blue, framed in thick eyelashes. Her pretty face was thinner than when they first met in college. The intervening years had lined it with care and worry.

Luke regretted that. It burned him to think that the work he did had ever caused her pain. That was another reason why he had left the job.

He remembered how she was when they were young, always laughing, always smiling. She was carefree then. A long time had passed since he had seen that part of her. He thought that maybe this time away from work would coax it to the fore again, but progress was slow. There were flashes of the real Becca, sure, but they were fleeting.

He could tell that she didn’t trust the situation. She didn’t trust him. She was waiting for that phone call in the middle of the night, the one he would have to answer. The one where he would hang up the phone, get out of bed, and leave the house.

They’d had a good night tonight. For a few hours, it had seemed almost like old times.

Now this.

“Luke…” she began. Her scowl was not friendly. It told him this was going to be a difficult conversation.

Luke got out of bed and moved fast, partly because circumstances demanded it, partly because he wanted to leave the house before Becca organized her thoughts. He slipped into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and glanced at himself in the mirror. He felt awake but his eyes were tired. His body looked wiry and strong — one thing all this time off had meant was he was in the gym four days a week. Thirty-nine years old, he thought. Not bad.

Inside the walk-in closet, he pulled a long steel lockbox down from a high shelf. From memory, he punched in the ten-digit combination. The lid popped open. He took out his Glock nine-millimeter and slid it into a leather shoulder holster. He crouched down and strapped a tiny .25 caliber pistol to his right calf. He strapped a five-inch serrated fold-out blade to his left calf. The handle doubled as brass knuckles.

“I thought you weren’t going to keep weapons in the house anymore.”

He glanced up and of course Becca was there, watching him. She wore a robe pulled tight around her body. Her hair was pulled back. Her arms were folded. Her face was pinched, and her eyes were alert. Gone was the sensual woman from earlier tonight. Long gone.

Luke shook his head. “I never said that.”

He stood and began to dress. He put on black cargo pants and dropped a couple extra magazines for the Glock into the pockets. He pulled on a tight dress shirt and strapped the Glock on over it. He slid steel-toed boots onto his feet. He closed the weapon box again and slid it back onto its perch near the top of the closet.

“What if Gunner found that box?”

“It’s up high, where he can’t see it and he can’t reach it. Even if he somehow got it down, it’s locked with a digital lock. Only I know the combination.”

A garment bag with two days of clothing changes hung on the rack. He grabbed it. A small bug-out bag packed with travel-size toiletries, reading glasses, a stack of energy bars, and half a dozen Dexedrine pills sat on one of the shelves. He grabbed that, too.

“Always ready, right, Luke? You’ve got your box with your guns and your bags with your clothes and your drugs and you’re just ready to go at a moment’s notice, whenever your country needs you. Am I right?”

He took a deep breath.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Why don’t you say: I’ve decided not to go. I’ve decided that my wife and son are more important than a job. I want my son to have a father. I don’t want my wife to sit up for nights on end anymore, wondering if I’m alive or dead, or if I’m ever coming back. Can you do that, please?”

At times like these, he felt the growing distance between them. He could almost see it. Becca was a tiny figure in a vast desert, dwindling toward the horizon. He wanted to bring her back to him. He wanted it desperately, but he couldn’t see how. The job was calling.

“Is Dad going away again?”

They both turned red. There was Gunner at the top of the three steps that led to his room. For a second, Luke’s breath caught in his throat at the sight of him. He looked like Christopher Robin from the Winnie the Pooh books. His blond hair poked up in tufts. He wore blue pajama pants covered with yellow moons and stars. He wore a Walking Dead T-shirt.

“Come here, monster.”

Luke put his bags down, went over, and picked up his son. The boy clung to his neck.

“You’re the monster, Dad. Not me.”

“Okay. I’m the monster.”

“Where are you going?”

“I need to go away for work. Maybe a day, maybe two. But I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Is Mom going to leave you like she said?”

Luke held Gunner out at arm’s length. The boy was getting big and Luke realized that one day soon he wouldn’t be able to hold him like this anymore. But that day hadn’t come yet.

“Listen to me. Mom isn’t going to leave me, and we’re all going to be together for a long, long time. Okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

He disappeared up the steps and toward his room.

When he was gone, the two of them stared across at each other. The distance seemed smaller now. Gunner was the bridge between them.

“Luke…”

He held up his hands. “Before you speak, I want to say something. I love you, and I love Gunner, more than anything in this world. I want to be with you both, every day, now and forever. I’m not leaving because I feel like it. I don’t feel like it. I hate it. But that call tonight… people’s lives are at stake. In all the years I’ve been doing this, the times that I’ve left in the middle of the night like this? The situation was a Level Two threat exactly twice. Most of the time, it was Level Three.”

Becca’s face had softened the tiniest amount.

“What threat level is this?” she asked.

“Level One.”

Chapter 2

“Sir?” someone said. “Sir, we’re here.”

Luke snapped awake. He sat up. They were parked at the gate of the helipad. A light rain was falling. He looked at the driver. It was a young guy with a crew cut, probably just out of the military. The kid was smiling.

“You dozed off, sir.”

“Right,” Luke said. The weight of the job settled on him again. He wanted to be home in bed with Becca, but he was here instead. He wanted to live in a world where murderers didn’t steal radioactive materials. He wanted to sleep and dream of pleasant things. At the moment, he couldn’t even imagine what those pleasant things might be. His sleep was poisoned by knowing too much.

He climbed out of the car with his bags, showed the guard his identification, and stepped through the scanner.

A sleek black helicopter, a big Bell 430, sat on the pad, rotors turning. Luke crossed the wet tarmac, ducking low. As he approached, the chopper’s engine kicked into another gear. They were ready to leave. The door to the passenger compartment slid open and Luke climbed inside.

There were six people already on board, four in the passenger cabin, two up front in the cockpit. Don Morris sat next to the closest window. The seat facing him was empty. Don gestured to it.

“Glad you could come, Luke. Have a seat. Join the party.”

Luke strapped into the bucket seat as the chopper lurched toward the sky. He looked at Don. Don was old now, his flat-top hair gone gray. The stubble of his beard was gray. Even his eyebrows were gray. But he still looked like the Delta Force commander he once was. His body was hard and his face was like a granite bluff — all rocky promontories and sharp drop-offs. His eyes were twin lasers. He held an unlit cigar in one of his stone hands. He hadn’t lit one in ten years.

As the helicopter gained altitude, Don gestured at the other people in the passenger cabin. He quickly made the introductions. “Luke, you’re at the disadvantage, because everybody here already knows who you are, but you might not know them. You do know Trudy Wellington, science and intel officer.”

Luke nodded to the pretty young woman with the dark hair and the big round glasses. He had worked with her many times. “Hi, Trudy.”

“Hi, Luke.”

“Okay, lovebirds, that’s enough. Luke, over here is Mark Swann, our tech officer on this job. And with him is Ed Newsam, weapons and tactics.”

Luke nodded to the men. Swann was a white guy, sandy hair and glasses, could be thirty-five, could be forty. Luke had met him once or twice before. Newsam was a black guy Luke had never seen, probably early-thirties, bald, close-cropped beard, stacked and chiseled, broad chest, tattooed twenty-four-inch pythons bulging from a white T-shirt. He looked like he’d be hell in a gunfight, and even worse in a street fight. When Don said “weapons and tactics,” what he meant was “muscle.”

The helicopter had reached cruising altitude; Luke guessed about ten thousand feet. It leveled off and started moving. These things tapped out at about 150 miles per hour. At that speed, they were looking at a solid hour and a half to New York City.

“Okay, Trudy,” Don said. “What do you got for us?”

The smartpad in her hands glowed in the darkness of the cabin. She stared into it. It gave her face an eerie quality, like a demon.

“I’m going to assume no prior knowledge,” she said.

“Fair enough.”

She began. “Less than an hour ago, we were contacted by the New York Police Department counter-terrorism unit. There is a large hospital on the upper east side of Manhattan called Center Medical Center. They store a great deal of radioactive materials onsite, in a containment vault six stories below street level. Mostly, the materials are waste products from radiation therapy for cancer patients, but they also stem from other uses, including radiographic imaging. Sometime in the last few hours, unknown persons infiltrated the hospital, breached the security system, and removed the radioactive waste housed there.”

“Do we know how much they got?” Luke said.

Trudy consulted her pad. “Every four weeks, the materials are removed by truck and are transported to a radioactive containment facility in western Pennsylvania jointly controlled by the Department of Homeland Security and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The next delivery was scheduled for two days from now.”

“So about twenty-six days of radioactive waste,” Don said. “How much is that?”

“The hospital doesn’t know,” Trudy said.

“They don’t know?”

“They inventory the waste and track it in a database. The database was accessed and erased by whoever stole the material. The amounts differ from month to month, based on treatment schedules. They can recreate the inventory from treatment records, but it’s going to take several hours.”

“They don’t back up that database?” said Swann, the tech guy.

“They do back it up, but the backup was also wiped clean. In fact, records for the past year were wiped.”

“So someone knows what they’re doing,” Swann said.

Luke spoke up. “How do we know this is an emergency if we don’t even know what was taken?”

“Several reasons,” Trudy said. “This was more than a theft. It was a well-coordinated and planned attack. The video surveillance cameras in strategic parts of the hospital were turned off. This includes several entrances and exits, stairwells and freight elevators, the containment vault, and the parking garage.”

“Did anyone talk to the security guards?” Luke said.

“The two security guards who manned the video console were both found dead inside a locked equipment closet. They were Nathan Gold, fifty-seven-year-old white male, divorced, three children, no known ties to organized crime or extremist organizations. Also Kitty Faulkner, thirty-three-year-old black female, unmarried, one child, no known ties to organized crime or extremist organizations. Gold worked at the hospital for twenty-three years. Faulkner worked there eight years. The corpses were undressed, their uniforms missing. They were both strangled, with obvious facial discoloration, swelling, neck trauma, and ligature marks associated with death by garroting or similar technique. I have photos if you want to take a look.”

Luke held up a hand. “That’s okay. But let’s assume for the moment that it was men who did this. Does a man kill a female security guard and then put on her uniform?”

“Faulkner was tall for a woman,” Trudy said. “She was five foot ten, and heavyset. A man could easily fit into her uniform.”

“Is that all we have?”

Trudy went on. “No. There’s a hospital employee who was on shift and is currently unaccounted for. That employee is a custodial staff member named Ken Bryant. He’s a twenty-nine-year-old black male who spent a year in pre-trial detention on Rikers Island, and then thirty months at Clinton Correctional Center in Dannemora, New York. He was convicted of robbery and simple assault. Upon release, he completed a six-month jail diversion and job training course. He’s worked at the hospital for nearly four years, and has a good record. No attendance issues, no disciplinary issues.

“As a custodian, he has access to the hazardous waste containment vault, and may have knowledge of hospital security practices and personnel. He once had ties to drug traffickers and to an African-American prison gang called the Black Gangster Family. The drug traffickers were low-level street dealers in the neighborhood where he grew up. He probably affiliated himself with the prison gang for personal protection.”

“You think a prison gang, or a street gang, was behind this?”

She shook her head. “Absolutely not. I mention Bryant’s affiliations because he’s still a loose end. To access and erase a database, as well as hijack a video surveillance system, requires technical expertise not generally associated with street or prison gangs. We’re thinking the level of sophistication and the materials stolen suggest a terrorist sleeper cell.”

“What can they do with the chemicals?” Don said.

“It has radiological dispersion device written all over it,” Trudy said.

“Dirty bomb,” Luke said.

“Bingo. There’s no other reason to steal radioactive waste. The hospital doesn’t know the amounts that were taken, but they know what the stuff was. The chemicals include quantities of iridium-192, caesium-137, tritium, and fluorine. Iridium is highly radioactive, and concentrated exposure can cause burns and radiation sickness within minutes or hours. Experiments have shown that a tiny dose of caesium-137 will kill a forty-pound dog within three weeks. Fluorine is a caustic gas dangerous to soft tissue like the eyes, skin, and lungs. At very low concentrations, it makes eyes water. At very high concentrations, it inflicts massive lung damage, causing respiratory arrest and death within minutes.”

“Wonderful,” Don said.

“The important takeaway here,” Trudy said, “is high concentrations. If you’re a terrorist, for this to work, you don’t want a wide dispersal area. That would limit exposure. You want to pack a bomb with the radioactive material and a conventional explosive like dynamite, and you want to set it off in an enclosed space, preferably with a lot of people around. A crowded subway train or subway station at rush hour. Commuter hubs like Grand Central Terminal or Penn Station. A large bus terminal or airport. A tourist attraction like the Statue of Liberty. The enclosed space maximizes radiation concentrations.”

Luke pictured the narrow, claustrophobic stairwell that climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty. On any given day, it was mobbed with people, often school children on field trips. In his mind’s eye he saw Liberty Island filled with ten thousand tourists, the ferries jammed with even more people, like refugee boats from Haiti.

Then he saw the subway platforms of Grand Central Terminal at 7:30 a.m., so crowded with commuters that there was nowhere to stand. A hundred people would be lined up on the stairs, waiting for a train to come in and the platform to clear so the next group of people could descend. He pictured a bomb going off amongst that crowd.

And then the lights going out.

A wave of revulsion passed through him. More people would die in the panic, in the crush of bodies, than in the initial explosion.

Trudy went on. “The problem we face is there are too many attractive targets to watch them all, and the attack doesn’t have to take place in New York. If the theft happened as long as three hours ago, then we’re already looking at a possible operations radius of at least a hundred fifty miles. That includes all of New York City and its suburbs, Philadelphia, and major cities in New Jersey like Newark, Jersey City, and Trenton. If the thieves remain at large for another hour, you can expand that radius to include Boston and Baltimore. The whole region is a population center. In a radius that large, we could be looking at as many as ten thousand possible soft targets. Even if they stick with high-profile, big-name targets, we’re still talking about hundreds of places.”

“Okay, Trudy,” Luke said. “You gave us the facts. Now what’s your gut?”

Trudy shrugged. “I think we can assume this is a dirty bomb attack, and that it’s sponsored by a foreign country, or possibly an independent terrorist group like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. There may be Americans or Canadians involved, but operational control is elsewhere. It’s definitely not a homegrown domestic group, like environmentalists or white supremacists.”

“Why? Why not domestic?” Luke said. He already knew why, but it was important to air it, to take things one step at a time, to not overlook anything.

“The leftists burn down Hummer dealerships in the middle of the night. They spike logging forests, and then paint the spiked trees so no one gets hurt. They have zero history of attacking populated areas or murdering anyone, and they hate radioactivity. The right-wingers are more violent, and Oklahoma City demonstrated they will attack civilian populations as well as symbols of government. But neither group likely has the training for this. And there’s another good reason why it probably isn’t them.”

“Which is?” Luke said.

“Iridium has a very short half-life,” Trudy said. “It’ll be mostly useless in a couple of days. Also, whoever stole these chemicals needs to act fast before they get radiation sickness themselves. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins tonight at sunset. So I think we have an attack designed to coincide with the start of Ramadan.”

Luke nearly breathed a sigh of relief. He had known and worked with Trudy for a few years. Her intel was always good, and her ability to spin scenarios was exceptional. She was right far more often than she was wrong.

He looked at his watch. It was 3:15. Sunset was probably around eight o’clock tonight. He did a quick calculation in his head. “So you think we have more than sixteen hours to track these people down?”

Sixteen hours. Looking for a needle in a haystack was one thing. But having sixteen hours to do it, with the most advanced technology and the very best people, was quite another. It was almost too much to hope for.

Trudy shook her head. “No. The problem with Ramadan is it starts at sunset, but whose sunset? In Tehran, sunset tonight will be at 8:24 p.m., which is 10:54 a.m. here. But what if they pick the start of Ramadan worldwide, for example in Malaysia or Indonesia? We could be looking at something as early as 7:24 a.m., which makes some sense because that’s the start of the morning rush hour.”

Luke grunted. He stared out the window at the vast lighted megalopolis below him. He glanced at his watch again. 3:20. Up ahead, on the horizon, he could see the tall buildings of Lower Manhattan, and the twin blue lights cutting high into the sky where the World Trade Center once stood. In three hours, the subways and train stations would begin filling up with commuters.

And out there, somewhere, were people planning to make those commuters die.

Chapter 3

“It looks just like rats,” Ed Newsam said.

The chopper came in low over the East River. The dark water was beneath them, flowing fast, tiny swells rising and falling. Luke could see what Ed meant. The water looked like a thousand rats running under a black shimmering blanket.

They dropped slowly down to the 34th Street heliport. Luke watched the lights of the buildings to his left, a million twinkling jewels in the night. Now that they were here, a sense of urgency surged through him. His heart skipped a beat. He had stayed calm during the long flight because what else was he going to do? But the clock was ticking, and they needed to move. He could almost jump out of the helicopter before it landed.

It touched down with a bump and a shudder, and instantly everyone in the cabin unbuckled. Don wrenched the door open. “Let’s go,” he said.

The blast gate to the street was twenty yards from the pad. Three SUVs waited just outside the concrete barriers. A squad of New York SRT guys ran to the helicopter and off-loaded the equipment bags. A man took Luke’s garment bag and his bug-out bag.

“Careful with those,” Luke said. “The last time I came up here, you guys lost my bags. I’m not going to have time for a shopping trip.”

Luke and Don climbed into the lead SUV, Trudy sliding in with them. The SUV was stretched to create a passenger cabin with facing seats. Luke and Don faced forward while Trudy faced backward. The SUV rolled out almost before they sat down. Within a minute they were inside the narrow canyon of FDR Drive, racing north. Yellow taxis zoomed all around them, like a swarm of bees.

No one spoke. The SUV raced along, hugging the concrete curves, passing through tunnels beneath crumbling buildings, banging hard over potholes. Luke could feel his heart beat in his chest. The driving wasn’t what made his pulse race. It was the anticipation.

“It would have been nice to come up here for a little fun,” Don said. “Stay in a fancy hotel, maybe see a Broadway show.”

“Next time,” Luke said.

Outside his window, the SUV was already exiting the highway. It was the 96th Street exit. The driver barely paused at a red light, then turned left and floored it down the empty boulevard.

Luke watched as the SUV roared into the circular driveway of the hospital. It was a quiet time of night. They pulled directly in front of the bright lights of the emergency room. A man in a three-piece suit stood waiting for them.

“Sharp dresser,” Luke said.

Don poked Luke with a thick finger. “Say, Luke. We got a little treat for you tonight. When was the last time you put on a hazmat suit?”

Chapter 4

“Not too tight,” Luke said around a mouthful of plastic thermometer.

Trudy had placed the sensor of a portable blood pressure monitor on Luke’s wrist. The sensor squeezed his wrist hard and then harder still, then slowly released it in stages, making gasping sounds as it did so. Trudy tore back the Velcro on the wrist sensor and in almost the same motion, pulled the thermometer from his mouth.

“How does it look?” he said.

She glanced at the readouts. “Your blood pressure is up,” she said. “138 over 85. Resting heart rate 97. Temperature 100.4. I’m not going to lie to you, Luke. These numbers could be better.”

“I’ve been under a little stress lately,” Luke said.

Trudy shrugged. “Don’s numbers are better than yours.”

“Yeah, but he takes statins.”

Luke and Don sat together in their boxers and T-shirts on a wooden bench. They were in a sub-basement storage facility beneath the hospital. Heavy vinyl drapes hung all around them, closing off the area. It was cold and dank down here, and a shiver raced along Luke’s spine. The breached containment vault was two stories further below them.

People milled around. There were a couple of SRT guys from the New York office. The SRT guys had set up two folding tables with a series of laptops and video displays across them. There was the guy in the three-piece suit, who was an intelligence officer from the NYPD counter-terrorism unit.

Ed Newsam, the big weapons and tactics guy Luke had met on the chopper, pushed through the vinyl curtains with two more SRT guys behind him. Each SRT man carried a sealed clear package with bright yellow material inside.

“Attention,” Newsam said in a loud voice, cutting through the chatter. He pointed two fingers at his own eyes. “Don and Luke, eyes on me, please.”

Newsam held a bottle of water in each hand. “I know you’ve both done this before, but we’re going to treat it like the first time, that way there’s no mistakes. These men behind me are going to inspect your suits for you, and then they’re going to help you put them on. These are Level A hazmat suits, and they’re solid vinyl. It’s going to get hot inside of them, and that means you’re going to sweat. So before we begin, I need you to start drinking these bottles of water. You will be glad you did.”

“Has anyone been down there before us?” Luke said.

“Two guards went down after the security breach was discovered. The lights are knocked out. Swann has tried to bring them back on, but no luck. So it’s dark down there. The guards had flashlights, but when they found the vault open and canisters and drums strewn around, they backed out in a hurry.”

“They get any exposure?”

Newsam smiled. “A little. My daughters are going to use them as nightlights for a few days. They didn’t have suits on, but they were only there for a minute. You’re going to be down there longer.”

“Will you be able to see what we see?”

“Your hoods have mounted videocams and LED lights. I’ll see what you’re seeing, and I’ll be recording it.”

It took twenty minutes to get dressed. Luke was frustrated. It was hard to move inside the suit. He was covered head to toe in vinyl, and it was already getting hot inside. His face plate kept fogging up. It seemed like time was flying past them. The thieves were far out ahead.

He and Don rode the freight elevator together. It creaked slowly downward. Don carried the Geiger counter. It looked like a small car battery with a carry handle.

“You guys hear me okay?” Newsam said. It sounded like he was inside Luke’s head. The hoods had built-in speakers and microphones.

“Yeah,” Luke said.

“I hear you,” Don said.

“Good. I hear you both loud and clear. We’re on a closed frequency. The only people on here are you guys, me, and Swann up in the video control booth. Swann has access to a digital map of the facility and those suits are outfitted with tracking devices. Swann can see you on his map, and he’s going to direct you from the elevator to the vault. You with me, Swann?”

“I’m here,” Swann said.

The elevator lurched to a stop.

“When the doors open, step out and turn left.”

The two men moved awkwardly down a wide hallway, guided by Swann’s voce. Their helmet lights played against the walls, throwing shadows in the dark. It reminded Luke of shipwreck scuba dives he had done in years past.

Within a few seconds, the Geiger counter started to click. The clicks came spaced apart at first, like a slow heartbeat.

“We have radiation,” Don said.

“We see it. Don’t worry. It’s not bad. That’s a sensitive machine you’re carrying.”

The clicks started to speed up and grow louder.

Swann’s voice: “In a few feet, turn right, then follow that hallway maybe thirty feet. It will open into a large square chamber. The containment vault is on the other side of the chamber.”

When they turned right, the Geiger counter began to click loud and fast. The clicks came in a torrent. It was hard to tell one from the next.

“Newsam?”

“Step lively, gentlemen. Let’s try to do this in five minutes or less.”

They moved into the chamber. The place was a mess. On the floor, canisters, boxes, and large metal drums were knocked over and left randomly. Some of them were open. Luke trained his light on the vault across the room. The heavy door was open.

“You seeing this?” Luke said. “Godzilla must have passed through here.”

Newsam’s voice came in again. “Don! Don! Train your light and your camera on the ground, five feet ahead. There. A few more feet. What’s that on the floor?”

Luke turned toward Don and focused his light in the same place. About ten feet from him, amid the wreckage, were sprawled what looked like a pile of rags.

“It’s a body,” Don said. “Shit.”

Luke moved over to it and trained his light on it. The person was big, wearing what looked like a security guard’s uniform. Luke kneeled beside the body. There was a dark stain on the floor, like a bad motor oil leak under a car. The head was sideways, facing him. Everything above the eyes was gone, his forehead blown out in a crater. Luke reached around to the back of the head, feeling for a much smaller hole. Even through the thick chemical gloves, he found it.

“What do you have, Luke?”

“I have a large male, 18 to 30 years old, of Arab, Persian, or possibly Mediterranean descent. There’s a lot of blood. He’s got entry and exit wounds consistent with a gunshot to the back of the head. It looks like an execution. Could be another guard or it could be one of our subjects had an argument with his friends.”

“Luke,” Newsam said. “In your utility belt, you’ve got a small digital fingerprint scanner. See if you can dig it out and get a print off that guy.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be possible,” Luke said.

“Come on, man. The gloves are cumbersome, but I know where the scanner is. I can walk you to it.”

Luke pointed his camera at the man’s right hand. Each finger was a ragged stump, gone below the first knuckle. He glanced at the other hand. It was the same way.

“They took the fingerprints with them,” he said.

Chapter 5

Luke and Don, dressed in street clothes again, walked quickly down the hospital corridor with the sharp dresser from the NYPD counter-terrorism unit. Luke hadn’t even caught the guy’s name. He thought of him as Three-Piece. Luke was about to give the guy his orders. They needed things to happen, and for that they needed the city’s cooperation.

Luke was taking charge, like he always tended to do. He glanced at Don, and Don nodded his assent. That’s why Don brought Luke on: to take charge. Don always said that Luke was born to play quarterback.

“I want Geiger counters on every floor,” Luke said. “Somewhere away from the public. We didn’t hit any radiation until six levels down, but if it starts to move upward, we need everyone out, and fast.”

“The hospital has patients on life support,” Three-Piece said. “They’re hard to move.”

“Right. So start putting those logistics in place now.”

“Okay.”

Luke went on. “We’re going to need an entire hazmat team down there. We need that body brought up, no matter how contaminated, and we need it done fast. The clean-up can wait until after we have the body.”

“Got it,” Three-Piece said. “We’ll put it in a lead-lined casket, and bring it to the coroner in a radiation containment truck.”

“Can it be done quietly?”

“Sure.”

“We need a match for dental records, DNA, scars, tattoos, surgical pins, whatever we can find. Once you have the data, pass it on to Trudy Wellington on our team. She’s got access to databases your people won’t have.”

Luke pulled out his phone and speed-dialed a number. She picked up on the first ring.

“Trudy, where are you?”

“I’m with Swann on Fifth Avenue, in the back of one of our cars, on our way down to the command center.”

“Listen, I’ve got…” He looked at Three-Piece. “What’s your name?”

“Kurt. Kurt Myerson.”

“I’ve got Kurt Myerson from the NYPD here. He’s with the counter-terrorism unit. They’re going to bring the body up. I need you to connect with him for dental records, DNA, any identifiers at all. When you get the data, I want this guy’s name, age, country of origin, known associates, everything. I need to know where’s he been and what he’s been doing for the past six months. And I need all of this yesterday.”

“Got it, Luke.”

“Great. Thank you. Here’s Kurt, he’s going to give you his direct number.”

Luke handed Kurt the phone. The three men pushed through a set of double doors, barely slowing down. In a moment, Kurt handed the phone back to Luke.

“Trudy? You still with me?”

“Would I ever be anywhere else?”

Luke nodded. “Good. One more thought. The surveillance cameras are off here at the hospital, but there’s got to be cameras all over this neighborhood. When you get to the command center, grab a few of our people. Have them access anything they can find within a five-block radius of this place, and pull video from, let’s say, 8p.m. until 1a.m. I want to get a look at every commercial or delivery vehicle that came near the hospital during that time. Highest priority is small delivery vans, bread trucks, hot dog trucks, anything along those lines. Anything small, convenient, that can carry a concealed payload. Lower priority is tractor trailers, buses, or construction vehicles, but don’t overlook them. Lowest priority is RVs, pickup trucks, and SUVs. I want screen captures of license plates, and I want ownership of the vehicles tracked. If you find one that looks fishy, you search more cameras for that vehicle on an expanding radius, and find out where it went.”

“Luke,” she said, “I’m going to need more than a few people for that.”

Luke thought about it for two seconds. “Okay. Wake up some people back home, bring them in to SRT headquarters, and forward the license plate data to them. They can track ownership down there.”

“Got it.”

They hung up. Luke reoriented himself to the present moment, and a new thought occurred to him. He glanced at Kurt Myerson.

“Okay, Kurt. Here’s the most important thing. We need this hospital locked down. We need the employees who were on shift tonight gathered up and sequestered. People are going to talk, I understand that, but we’ve got to keep this out of the hands of the media for as long as we can. If this gets out, there’s going to be panic, there’s going to be ten thousand false leads called in to the police, and the bad guys will get to watch the entire investigation unfold on television. We can’t let it happen.”

They pushed through another set of double doors and into the main lobby of the hospital. The entire front face of the lobby was glass. Several security guards stood near the locked front doors.

Outside was a mob scene. A crowd of reporters pushed up against police barriers on the sidewalk. Photographers pressed against the windows, taking interior shots of the lobby. News trucks were parked ten deep on the street. As Luke watched, three different TV reporters filmed segments directly in front of the hospital.

“You were saying?”

Chapter 6

Eldrick was sick.

He sat in the rear passenger seat of the van, hugging his knees, wondering what he had gotten himself into. He had seen some bad shit in prison, but nothing like this.

In front of him, Ezatullah was on the phone, shouting something in Farsi. Ezatullah had been making calls for hours now. The words didn’t mean anything to Eldrick. It all sounded like gibberish. The real deal, Ezatullah had trained in London as a chemical engineer, but instead of getting a job, he had gone to war. In his early 30s, a wide scar across one cheek, to hear him tell it, he had waged jihad in half a dozen countries — and had come to America to do the same.

He screamed into the phone again and again before he got through. When he finally reached someone, he launched into the first of several shouted arguments. After a few minutes, he settled down and listened. Then he hung up.

Eldrick’s face was flushed. He had a fever. He could feel it burning through his body. His heart was racing. He hadn’t thrown up, but he felt like he was going to. They had waited at the rendezvous point on the South Bronx waterfront for over two hours. It was supposed to be a simple thing. Steal the materials, drive the van ten minutes, meet the contacts and walk away. But the contacts never showed.

Now they were…somewhere. Eldrick didn’t know. He had passed out for a while. He was awake again, but everything seemed like a vague dream. They were on the highway. Momo was driving, so he must know where they were going. A technology expert, Momo, skinny with no muscle tone, looked the part. He was so young the smooth skin of his face didn’t have a single line. He looked like he couldn’t grow a beard if Allah himself depended on it.

“We have new instructions,” Ezatullah said.

Eldrick groaned, wishing he was dead. He didn’t know it was possible to feel this sick.

“I have to get out of this van,” Eldrick said.

“Shut up, Abdul!”

Eldrick had forgotten: his name was Abdul Malik now. It felt weird to hear himself being called Abdul, he, Eldrick, a proud black man, a proud American for most of his life. Feeling as sick as he did now, he wished he’d never changed it. Converting in prison was the dumbest thing he’d ever done.

All that shit was in the back. There was a lot of it, in all kinds of canisters and boxes. Some of it had leaked out, and now it was killing them. It had killed Bibi already. The dummy had opened a canister when they still were down in the vault. He was immensely strong and he wrenched the lid off. Why did he do that? Eldrick could picture him holding the canister up. “There’s nothing in here,” he’d said. Then he’d held it to his nose.

Within a minute, he started coughing. He just sort of sank down to his knees. Then he was on all fours, coughing. “I have something in my lungs,” he said. “I can’t get it out.” He started gasping for air. The sound was horrible.

Ezatullah walked up and shot him in the back of the head.

“Believe me, I did him a favor,” he’d said.

Now, the van was passing through a tunnel. The tunnel was long and narrow and dark, with orange lights zooming by overhead. The lights made Eldrick dizzy.

“I have to get out of this van!” he shouted. “I have to get out of this van! I have to…”

Ezatullah turned around. His gun was out. He pointed it at Eldrick’s head.

“Quiet! I’m on the phone.”

Ezatullah’s sliced up face was flushed red. He was sweating.

“You gonna kill me the way you did Bibi?”

“Ibrahim was my friend,” Ezatullah said. “I killed him out of mercy. I will kill you just to shut you up.” He pressed the muzzle of the gun against Eldrick’s forehead.

“Shoot me. I don’t care.” Eldrick closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, Ezatullah had turned back around. They were still in the tunnel. The lights were too much. A sudden wave of nausea passed through Eldrick, and a great up-rushing spasm gripped his body. His stomach clenched and he tasted acid in his throat. He bent over and threw up on the floor between his shoes.

A few seconds passed. The stench wafted up into his face, and he wretched again.

Oh God, he begged silently. Please let me die.

Chapter 7

Luke held his breath. Loud noises were not his favorite thing, and one hell of a loud noise was coming.

He stood completely still in the bleak light of a tenement building in Harlem. His gun was out, his back pressed to the wall. Behind him, Ed Newsam stood in almost the exact same pose as his. In front of them in the narrow hallway, half a dozen helmeted and flak-jacketed SWAT team members stood on either side of an apartment door.

The building was dead quiet. Dust motes hung in the air. Moments before, a small robot had slid a tiny camera scope beneath the door, looking for explosives attached to the other side. Negative. Now, the robot had retreated.

Two SWAT guys stepped up with a heavy battering ram. It was a swing-type, an officer holding the handle on each side. They didn’t make a sound. The SWAT team leader held up his fist. His index finger appeared.

That was one.

Middle finger. Two.

Ring finger…

The two men reared back and swung the ram. BAM!

The door exploded inward as the rammers ducked back. The four others swarmed in, suddenly shrieking, “Down! Down! Get DOWN!”

Somewhere down the hallway, a child started crying. Doors opened, heads peeped out, then ducked back in. It was one of those things around here. Sometimes the cops came and broke down a neighbor’s door.

Luke and Ed waited about thirty seconds until SWAT had secured the apartment. The body was on the floor in the living room, much as Luke suspected it might be. He barely looked at it.

“All clear?” he said to the SWAT leader. The guy glared at Luke just a little bit. There had been a brief argument when Luke commandeered this team. These guys were NYPD. They weren’t chess pieces for the feds to move around on a whim. That’s what they wanted Luke to know. Luke was fine with that, but a terrorist attack was hardly one man’s whim.

“All clear,” the team leader said. “That’s probably your subject right there.”

“Thank you,” Luke said.

The guy shrugged and looked away.

Ed kneeled by the body. He carried a fingerprint scanner with him. He took prints from three of the fingers.

“What do you think, Ed?”

He shrugged. “I preloaded Ken Bryant’s prints from the police database on here. We should know if we have a match in a few seconds. Meanwhile, you’ve got obvious ligature marks and swelling. The body is still somewhat warm. Rigor mortis has set in, but is not complete. The fingers are turning blue. I’d say he died the same way as the security guards at the hospital, of strangulation, roughly eight to twelve hours ago.”

He looked up at Luke. There was a glint in his eyes. “If you want to take his pants down for me, I can get a rectal temperature reading, and narrow the time a little better.”

Luke smiled and shook his head. “No thanks. Eight to twelve hours is fine. Just tell me: is it him?”

Ed glanced at his scanner. “Bryant? Yeah. It’s him.”

Luke pulled his phone and dialed Trudy. On the other end, her phone rang. Once, twice, three times. Luke glanced around at the dreary bleakness of the apartment. The living room furniture was old, with ripped upholstery, and stuffing coming out of the arms of the sofa. A threadbare rug was splayed on the floor, and empty takeout boxes and plastic utensils were strewn across the table. Heavy black curtains were tacked over the windows.

Trudy’s voice came on, alert, almost musical. “Luke,” she said. “What’s it been? Half an hour?”

“I want to talk about the missing janitor.”

“Ken Bryant,” she said.

“Right. He’s not missing anymore. Newsam and I are at his apartment. We have a positive ID on him. He died about eight to twelve hours ago. Strangled, like the guards.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I want you to access his bank accounts. He probably had direct deposit from his job at the hospital. Start with that one and work your way out from there.”

“Um, I’m going to need a warrant for that.”

Luke paused. He understood her hesitancy. Trudy was a good officer. She was also young and ambitious. Breaking the rules had derailed many a promising career. But not always. Sometimes breaking the rules led to fast-track promotions. It all depended on which rules you broke, and what happened as a result.

“You have Swann there with you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then you don’t need a warrant.”

She didn’t answer.

“Trudy?”

“I’m here.”

“We don’t have time to execute a warrant. There are lives at stake.”

“Is Bryant a suspect in this case?”

“He is a person of interest. Anyway, he’s dead. We are hardly violating his rights.”

“Am I right that this is an order from you, Luke?”

“This is a direct order,” he said. “This is my responsibility. If you want to take it that far, this is me telling you that your job depends on this. You do what I say, or I will initiate disciplinary proceedings. Is that understood?”

She sounded petulant, almost like a child. “Fine.”

“Good. When you access his account, look for anything out of the ordinary. Money that doesn’t belong there. Large deposits or large withdrawals. Wire transfers. If he has a savings account or investments linked, take a look at those. We’re talking about an ex-con with a custodial job. He shouldn’t have that much money. If he does, I want to know where it came from.”

“Okay, Luke.”

He hesitated. “How are we doing on license plates?”

“We are going as fast as we can,” she said. “We accessed overnight video footage from cameras at Fifth Avenue and 96th Street, as well as Fifth Avenue and 94th Street, and a few others around the neighborhood. We are tracking a 198 vehicles, 46 of which are high priority. I should have an initial report from headquarters in about fifteen minutes.”

Luke glanced at his watch. Time was getting tight. “Okay. Good work. We’ll be down there as soon as we can.”

“Luke?”

“Yes.”

“The story is all over the news. They have three live feeds on the big board here right now. They’re all leading with it.”

He nodded. “I figured.”

She went on. “The mayor has scheduled an announcement for 6a.m. It sounds like he’s going to tell everyone to stay home today.”

“Everyone?”

“He wants all nonessential personnel to stay out of Manhattan. All office workers. All cleaning workers and store clerks. All school children and teachers. He is going to suggest that five million people take the day off.”

Luke put his hand to his mouth. He took a breath. “That should do a lot for morale,” he said. “When everyone in New York stays home, the terrorists just might hit Philadelphia.”

Chapter 8

Eldrick stood alone, about ten yards from the van. He had just thrown up again. It was mostly dry heaves and blood now. The blood disturbed him. He was still lightheaded, still feverish and flushed, but with nothing left in his stomach, the nausea was mostly gone. Best of all, he was finally out of the van.

Somewhere over the dirty horizon, the sky was just starting to brighten, a pale sickly yellow. Down here on the ground, it was still dark. They were parked in a desolate parking lot along a bleak waterfront. A highway overpass soared twenty stories above their heads. Nearby was an abandoned brick industrial building with twin smokestacks. Its windows were broken black holes like dead eyes. The building was surrounded by a barbed wire fence with signs posted every thirty feet: KEEP OUT. There was a visible hole in the fence. The area around the building was overgrown with bushes and tall grass.

He watched Ezatullah and Momo. Ezatullah peeled off one of the large magnetic decals that said Dun-Rite Laundry Services, carried it to the water’s edge, and hurled it over the side. Then he came back and peeled off the other side. It never occurred to Eldrick that the signs came off. Meanwhile, Momo kneeled at the front of the van with a screwdriver, removing the license plate and replacing it with a different one. A moment later, he had moved to the back, doing the same with the rear plate.

Ezatullah made a gesture toward the van. “Voilà!” he said. “Totally different vehicle. Catch me now, Uncle Sam.” Ezatullah’s face was bright red and sweaty. He seemed to be wheezing. His eyes were bloodshot.

Eldrick glanced at their surroundings. Ezatullah’s physical state had given him an idea. The idea flashed in his mind like lightning, here and gone in an instant. It was the safest way to think. People could read thoughts in your eyes.

“Where are we?” he said.

“Baltimore,” Ezatullah said. “Another of your great American cities. And a pleasant place to live, I imagine. Low crime, natural beauty, and the citizens are all healthy and wealthy, the envy of people everywhere.”

In the night, Eldrick had been delirious. He had passed out more than once. He had lost track of time, and of where they were. But he had no idea they had come this far.

“Baltimore? Why are we here?”

Ezatullah shrugged. “We are on our way to our new destination.”

“The target is here?”

Now Ezatullah smiled. The smile seemed out of place on his radiation-poisoned face. He looked like death itself. He reached out with a trembling hand and gave Eldrick a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry I was angry with you, my brother. You’ve done a good job. You delivered everything you promised. If Allah wills it, I hope you are in paradise this very day. But not by my hand.”

Eldrick just stared at him.

Ezatullah shook his head. “No. Not Baltimore. We are traveling south to strike a blow that will give joy to the suffering masses throughout the world. We are going to enter the lair of the Devil himself and cut off the beast’s head with our own hands.”

Eldrick felt a chill all over his upper body. His arms broke out in goose bumps. He noticed that his own shirt was soaked in sweat. He didn’t like the sound of this. If they were headed south and they were in Baltimore, then the next city was…

“Washington,” he said.

“Yes.”

Ezatullah smiled again. Now the smile was glorious, that of a saint standing at the gates of heaven, ready to be granted entrance.

“Kill the head and the body will die.”

Eldrick could see it in Ezatullah’s eyes. The man had lost his mind. Maybe it was the sickness, or maybe it was something else, but it was obvious he wasn’t thinking clearly. All along, the plan had been to steal the materials and drop off the van in the South Bronx. It was a dangerous job, very difficult to pull off, and they had done it. But whoever was in charge had changed the plan, or had lied about it since the beginning. Now they were traveling to Washington in a radioactive van.

To do what?

Ezatullah was a seasoned jihadi. He must know that what he was hinting was impossible. Whatever he thought they were going to do, Eldrick knew they weren’t even going to come close. He pictured the van, riddled with bullet holes, three hundred yards from the White House or Pentagon or Capitol Building fence.

This wasn’t a suicide mission. It wasn’t a mission at all. It was a political statement.

“Don’t worry,” Ezatullah said. “Be happy. You’ve been chosen for the greatest honor. We will make it, even though you cannot imagine how. The method will become clear to you in time.” He turned and slid open the side door of the van.

Eldrick glanced at Momo. He was finishing up the rear license plate. Momo hadn’t spoken in a while. He probably wasn’t feeling too well himself.

Eldrick took a step backwards. Then he took another. Ezatullah busied himself with something inside the van. His back was turned. The funny thing about this moment was another one like it might never come. Eldrick was just standing there in a vast open lot, and no one was looking at him.

Eldrick had run track in high school. He was good at it. He remembered the crowds inside the 168th Street Armory in Manhattan, the standings on the big board, the buzzer going off. He remembered that knotted up feeling in his stomach right before a race, and the crazy speed on the new track, skinny black gazelles jockeying, pushing off, elbows high, moving so fast that it seemed like a dream.

In all the years since, Eldrick had never run as fast as he did back then. But maybe, with one focused burst of energy and everything riding on it, he could match that speed right now. No sense in hesitating, or even thinking much more about it.

He turned and took off.

A second later, Momo’s voice behind him:

“EZA!”

Then something in Farsi.

The abandoned building was ahead. The sickness came roaring back. He wretched, blood spurting down his shirt, but he kept going. He was already out of breath.

He heard a clack like a stapler. It echoed faintly against the walls of the building. Ezatullah was shooting, of course he was. His gun had a silencer.

A sharp sting went through Eldrick’s back. He fell to the pavement, skinning his arms on the broken asphalt. A split second later, another shot echoed. Eldrick got up and kept running. The fence was right here. He turned and went for the hole.

Another sting went through him. He fell forward and clung to the fence. All the strength seemed to flow out of his legs. He hung there, supporting himself with the death grip of his fingers through the chain links.

“Move,” he croaked. “Move.”

He dropped to his knees, forced the ripped fence aside and crawled through the hole. He was in deep grass. He stood, stumbled along for a few steps, tripped over something he couldn’t see, and rolled down an embankment. He didn’t try to stop rolling. He let his momentum carry him to the bottom.

He came to rest, breathing heavily. The pain in his back was unreal. His face was in the dirt. It was wet here, muddy, and he was right along the riverbank. He could tumble into the dark water if he wanted to. Instead, he crawled deeper into the underbrush. The sun hadn’t come up yet. If he stayed here, didn’t move, and didn’t make a sound, it was just barely possible…

He touched a hand to his chest. His fingers came away wet with blood.

Ezatullah stood at the hole in the fence. The world spun around him. He had become dizzy just trying to run after Eldrick.

His hand held the chain link of the fence, helping him stand. He thought he might vomit. It was dark back in those bushes. They could spend an hour looking for him in there. If he made it into the big abandoned building, they might never find him.

Moahmmar stood nearby. He was bent over, hands on his knees, breathing deeply. His body was shaking. “Should we go in?” he said.

Ezatullah shook his head. “We don’t have time. I shot him twice. If the sickness doesn’t finish him, the bullets will. Let him die here alone. Perhaps Allah will take pity on his cowardice. I hope so. Either way, we must continue without him.”

He turned and started back toward the van. It seemed like the van was parked far away. He was tired, and he was sick, but he kept putting one foot after the other. Each step brought him closer to the gates of Paradise.

Chapter 9

“Luke, the best thing to do is get your people together and go back to Washington,” the man in the suit said.

Luke stood inside the swirling chaos of the command center’s main room. It was already daytime, and weak light filtered in from windows two stories above the working floor. Time was passing too quickly, and the command center was a clusterfuck in progress.

Two hundred people filled the space. There were at least forty workstations, some of them with two or three people sitting at five computer screens. On the big board up front, there were twenty different television and computer screens. Screens showed digital maps of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, live video streams of the entrances to the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, mug shots of Arab terrorists known to be in the country.

Three of the screens currently showed Mayor DeAngelo, at six-foot-three dwarfing the aides that flanked him, standing at the microphone and telling the brave people of New York to stay home and hug their kids. He was reading from prepared remarks.

“In a worst-case scenario,” the mayor said, his voice coming from speakers located around the room, “the initial explosion would kill many people and create mass panic in the immediate area. Radiation exposure would cause widespread terror throughout the region and probably the country. Many people exposed in the initial attack would become sick, and some would die. The clean-up costs would be enormous, but they would be dwarfed by the psychological and economic costs. A dirty bomb attack on a major train station in New York City would cripple transportation along the Eastern seaboard for the foreseeable future.”

“Pleasant,” Luke said. “I wonder who writes his material.”

He scanned the room. Everyone was represented here, everyone jockeying for position. It was alphabet soup. NYPD, FBI, NSA, ATF, DEP, even CIA. Hell, the DEA was here. Luke wasn’t sure how stealing radioactive waste constituted a drug crime.

Ed Newsam had gone to track down the SRT staff among the crowd.

“Luke, did you hear me?”

Luke turned back to the matter at hand. He was standing with Ron Begley of Homeland Security. Ron was a balding man in his late 50s. He had a large round gut and pudgy little fingers. Luke knew his story. He was a desk jockey, a man who had come up through the government bureaucracy. On September 11, he was at Treasury running a team analyzing tax evasion and Ponzi schemes. He slid over to counter-terrorism when Homeland Security was created. He had never made an arrest, or fired a gun in anger, in his life.

“You said you want me to go home.”

“You’re stepping on toes here, Luke. Kurt Myerson called his boss at NYPD and told him you were at the hospital treating people like your personal servants. And that you commandeered a SWAT team. Really? A SWAT team? Listen, this is their turf. You’re supposed to follow their lead. That’s how the game is played.”

“Ron, the NYPD called us in. I assume that’s because they felt they needed us. People know how we work.”

“Cowboys,” Begley said. “You work like rodeo cowboys.”

“Don Morris got me out of bed to come up here. You can talk to Don…”

Begley shrugged. A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “Don’s been recalled. He caught a chopper out twenty minutes ago. I suggest you do the same.”

“What?”

“That’s right. He’s been kicked upstairs on this one. They called him back to do a situation briefing at the Pentagon. Real high-level stuff. I guess they couldn’t get an intern to do it, so they’re bringing in Don.”

Begley lowered his voice, though Luke could still easily hear him. “A word of advice. What does Don have, three more years before retirement? Don’s a dying breed. He’s a dinosaur, and so is SRT. You know it and I know it. All of these little secret agencies within an agency, they’re going by the wayside. We’re consolidating and centralizing, Luke. What we need now is data-driven analysis. That’s how we’re going to solve the crimes of the future. That’s how we’re going to catch these terrorists today. We don’t need macho super-spies and aging former commandos rappelling down the sides of buildings anymore. We just don’t. Playing hero ball is over. It’s actually a little ridiculous, if you think about it.”

“Great,” Luke said. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

“I thought you were teaching college,” Begley said. “History, political science, that kind of thing.”

Luke nodded. “I am.”

Begley put a meaty hand on Luke’s arm. “You should stick with that.”

Luke shook the hand off and plunged into the crowd, looking for his people.

“What do we got?” Luke said.

His team had set up camp in an outlying office. They had grabbed some empty desks and built their own little command station with laptops and satellite uplinks. Trudy and Ed Newsam were there, along with a few of the others. Swann was off in a corner by himself with three laptops.

“They called Don back,” Trudy said.

“I know. Have you talked to him?”

She nodded. “Twenty minutes ago. He was just about to take off. He said keep working this case until he personally calls it off. Politely ignore anyone else.”

“Sounds good. So where are we?”

Her face was serious. “We’re moving fast. We’ve narrowed it down to six high-priority vehicles. All of them passed within a block of the hospital last night, and have details that are funky or don’t match up.”

“Give me an example.”

“Okay. One is a food vendor truck registered to a former Russian paratrooper. We were able to follow him on surveillance cameras, and as near as we can tell, he’s been cruising around Manhattan all night, selling hot dogs and Pepsi to sex workers, pimps, and johns.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s parked on 11th Ave, south of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. He hasn’t moved in a while. We’re thinking he might be asleep.”

“Okay, sounds like he just became low priority. Pass him on to NYPD, just in case. They can roust him and toss his truck, find out what else he’s selling in there. Next.”

Trudy ran down her list. A minivan operated as an Uber car by a disgraced former nuclear physicist. A forty-ton tractor trailer with an insurance claim that it was demolished in an accident and scrapped. A delivery van for a commercial laundry service, with license plates registered to an unrelated flooring business in Long Island. An ambulance reported stolen three years ago.

“A stolen ambulance?” Luke said. “That sounds like something.”

Trudy shrugged. “Usually it’s the illegal organ trade. They harvest from newly deceased patients within minutes of death. They have to harvest the organs, pack them, and get them out of the hospital quickly. No one looks twice at an ambulance waiting around in a hospital parking lot.”

“But tonight, maybe they weren’t waiting for organs. Do we know where they are?”

She shook her head. “No. The only location we have is the Russian. This is still more of an art than a science. Surveillance cameras aren’t everywhere yet, especially once you get out of Manhattan. You see a truck pass a camera, then you might not see it again. Or you might pick it up on another camera ten blocks away, or five miles away. The tractor trailer crossed the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey before we lost it. The laundry van went over the 138th Street Bridge into the South Bronx and disappeared. Right now, we’re tracking them all down using other means. We’ve contacted the trucking company, Uber, the flooring company, and the laundry service. We should know something on those soon. And I’ve got eight people at headquarters sifting through hours of video feeds, looking for the ambulance.”

“Good. Keep me posted. What’s going on with the bank stuff?”

Trudy’s face was stone. “You should ask Swann about that.”

“Okay.” He took a step toward Swann’s little fiefdom in the corner.

“Luke?”

He stopped. “Yeah.”

Her eyes darted around the room. “Can we talk? In private?”

“You’re going to fire me because I won’t break the law for you?”

“Trudy, I’m not going to fire you. Why would you even think that?”

“It’s what you said, Luke.”

They were standing in a tiny utility room. There were two empty desks in here and one small window. The carpeting was new. The walls were white with nothing on them. There was a small video camera mounted in one corner, near the ceiling.

It looked like the room had never been used. The command center itself had been open for less than a year.

Trudy’s big eyes stared at him intently.

Luke sighed. “I was giving you an out. I thought you would understand that. If trouble comes down, you can blame it on me. All you did was what I told you to do. You were afraid you’d lose your job if you didn’t follow my orders.”

She took a step closer to him. In the confines of the room, he could smell her shampoo, and the understated cologne she often wore. The combination of scents did something to his knees. He felt them tremble the slightest amount.

“You can’t even give me a direct order, Luke. You don’t work at SRT anymore.”

“I’m on a leave of absence.”

She took another small step toward him. Her eyes were focused on him like twin lasers. There was intelligence in those eyes, and heat.

“And you left… why? Because of me?”

He shook his head. “No. I had my reasons. You weren’t one of them.”

“The Marshall brothers?”

He shrugged. “When you kill two men in one night, it’s a good time to take a pause. Maybe reassess what you’re doing.”

“Are you saying you never had any feelings for me?” she asked.

He looked at her, stunned by the question. He had always sensed Trudy flirting with him, and he had never taken the bait. There had been a few times, drunk at cocktail parties, after bad fights with his wife, when he had come close. But thoughts of his wife and son had always pulled him back from the brink of doing something stupid.

“Trudy, we work together,” he said firmly. “And I’m married.”

She came even closer.

“I’m not looking for a marriage, Luke,” she said softly, leaning in, inches away.

She pushed herself against him now. His arms were at his sides. He felt the heat from her, and that old uncontrollable urge when she was near, the excitement, the energy… the lust. She reached up to lay her hands on his chest, and as soon as her palms touched his shirt, he knew he had to act now or give in to her completely.

With one final act of supreme self-discipline, Luke stepped back and gently pushed her hands away.

“I’m sorry, Trudy,” he said, his voice raspy. “I care about you. I really do. But this is not a good idea.”

She frowned, but before she could say anything, a heavy fist banged against the wooden door.

“Luke? You in there?” It was Newsam’s voice. “You should come out and look at this. Swann’s got something.”

They stared at each other, Luke feeling guilty as hell as he thought of his wife, even though he hadn’t done anything. He peeled himself away before anything more could happen and couldn’t help wondering how this would affect their working together.

He also, worst of all, couldn’t help but admit, deep down, that he didn’t want to leave the room.

Swann sat a long table with his three video monitors arrayed in front of him. With his thinning hair and glasses, he reminded Luke of a NASA physicist at mission control. Luke stood behind him with Newsam and Trudy, the three of them hovering over Swann’s narrow shoulders.

“This one is Ken Bryant’s checking account,” Swann said, moving his cursor around on the center screen. Luke absorbed the details: deposits, withdrawals, total balance, a date range from April 28th to May 27th.

“How secure is this connection?” Luke said. He glanced around the room and out the door. The main room of the command center was just down the hall.

“This?” Swann said. He shrugged. “It’s independent of the command center. I’m connected to our own tower and our own satellites. It’s encrypted by our guys. I suppose CIA or NSA could have somebody trying to break it, but why bother? We’re all on the same team, right? I wouldn’t worry about that. Instead, I would focus on this bank account. Notice anything funny?”

“His balance is over $24,000,” Luke said.

“Right,” Swann said. “A janitor has a pretty sizeable chunk of money in his checking account. Interesting. Now let’s go back a month. March 28th to April 27th. The balance goes as high as $37,000, and he starts spending it down. There are transfers here from an unnamed account, $5,000, then $4,000, then, oh well, forget the whole IRS reporting problem… give me $20,000.”

“Okay,” Luke said.

“Go back another month. Late February to late March. His beginning balance is $1,129. By the end of the month, it’s over $9,000. Go back another month, late January to late February, and his balance never reached $2,000 the whole time. From there, if you go back three years, you see that his balance rarely went above $1,500. Here was a guy living month to month, who suddenly started getting large wire transfers in March.”

“Where are they coming from?”

Swann smiled and raised a finger. “Now for the fun part. They’re coming from a small offshore bank specializing in anonymous numbered accounts. It’s called Royal Heritage Bank, and it’s based on Grand Cayman.”

“Can you hack it?” Luke said. He glanced sidelong at Trudy’s disapproving look.

“I don’t have to,” Swann said. “Royal Heritage is owned by a CIA asset named Grigor Svetlana. He’s a Ukrainian who used to be in the Red Army. He got himself in deep with the Russians twenty years ago, after some old Soviet weaponry disappeared and then turned up on the black markets in West Africa. I’m not talking about guns. I’m talking about anti-aircraft, anti-tank, plus some low-altitude cruise missiles. The Russians were ready to hang him upside down. With nowhere to turn, he turned to us. I have a friend at Langley, and the accounts at Royal Heritage Bank, far from being anonymous, are in fact an open book to the American intelligence community. Of course, this isn’t something most Royal Heritage customers are aware of.”

“So you know who owned the account making the transfers.”

“I do.”

“Okay, Swann,” Luke said. “I understand. You’re very clever. Now get to the point.”

Swann gestured at the computer screens. “Bryant himself owned the account that was making the transfers. That’s the account on my left monitor there. You can see it has about $209,000 in it right now. He was transferring a little bit here and there from the numbered account to his local checking account, probably for his own personal use. And if we scroll back a few months, you can see that Bryant’s offshore account was created on March 3rd by a $250,000 transfer from another Royal Heritage account, the one on the right monitor here.”

Luke looked at the account on the right. There was more than forty-four million dollars in it.

“Someone got a bargain hiring Bryant,” he said.

“Exactly,” Swann said.

“Who is it?”

“It’s this man.” On the screen, a photo identification card appeared. It showed a middle-aged man with dark hair fading to white. “This is Ali Nassar. Fifty-seven years old. Iranian national. Born in Tehran to an influential and wealthy family. Studied at the London School of Economics, then Harvard Law School. Went home and got another law degree, this one from the University of Tehran. As a result, he can practice law in both the United States and Iran. He’s been involved in international trade negotiations for much of his career. He lives here in New York and is currently an Iranian diplomat to the United Nations. He has full diplomatic immunity.”

Luke stroked his chin. He could feel the short stubble growing there. He was starting to get tired. “Let me get this straight. Nassar paid Ken Bryant, presumably for access to the hospital, as well as information about security measures and how to circumvent them.”

“Presumably, yes.”

“So he’s likely running a terrorist cell here in New York, he’s an accessory to the theft of hazardous materials and at least four murders, and he can’t be prosecuted under American law?”

“It certainly appears that way.”

“Okay. You’re in the account already, right? Let’s see where else he’s been sending money.”

“It’ll take me a little while.”

“That’s fine. I have an errand to run in the meantime.”

Luke glanced at Ed Newsam. Newsam’s face was hard, his eyes flat and blank.

“Say, Ed? You feel like taking a ride with me? Maybe we should go pay Mr. Ali Nassar a visit.”

Newsam smiled, looking more like a scowl.

“Sounds like fun.”

Chapter 10

It was not easy to find.

Jeremy Spencer stood in front of a set of locked gray steel doors in a sub-basement of the Rayburn House Office Building. The doors were tucked away in a corner of the underground parking lot. Few people knew this place existed. Even fewer knew where it was. He felt foolish, but he knocked on the door anyway.

Someone buzzed him in. He pulled back the door, feeling that old familiar sense of uncertainty in his stomach. He knew that the Congressional Gym was off-limits to everyone but the members of the United States Congress. And yet, despite the breach of long-standing protocol, he had been invited inside.

Today was the biggest day of his young life. He had been in Washington for three years, and he was moving up.

Seven years ago, he was an upstate New York trailer park redneck. Then he was a student on a full scholarship at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Rather than kick back and enjoy the free ride, he became president of the campus Republicans and a commentator on the school newspaper. Soon he was posting on Breitbart and Drudge. Now, what seemed like a deep breath later, he was a beat reporter for Newsmax, covering the Capitol.

The gym was not fancy. There were a few cardio trainers, some mirrors, and some free weights on a rack. An old man in sweat pants and a T-shirt, with headphones on, walked on a treadmill. Jeremy entered the quiet locker room. He turned a corner, and in front of him was the man he had come to see.

The man was tall, mid-fifties, with silver hair. He stood at an open locker, so Jeremy saw him in profile. His back was straight, and his large jaw jutted forward. He wore a T-shirt and shorts, both soaked from a work-out. His shoulders, arms, chest, and legs, everything was muscular and defined. He looked like a leader of men.

The man was William Ryan, nine-term Representative from North Carolina, and Speaker of the House. Jeremy knew everything about him. His family was old money. They had owned tobacco plantations since before the Revolution. His great-great grandfather was a United States Senator during Reconstruction. He had graduated first in his class at the Citadel. He was charming, he was gracious, and he wielded power with a sense of confidence and entitlement so complete that few people in his party considered opposing him.

“Mr. Speaker, sir?”

Ryan turned, saw Jeremy there, and flashed a bright smile. His T-shirt was dark blue, with red and white letters. PROUD AMERICAN was all it said. He held out his hand for a shake. “Sorry,” he said. “Still a little sweaty.”

“No problem, sir.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “Enough with the sirs. In private, you call me Bill. If that feels too hard, call me by my title. But I want you to know something. I requested you, and I’m giving you an exclusive. Late this afternoon, I may end up giving a press conference with all the media. I don’t know yet. But until then, all day long, my thoughts on this crisis are going to be under your byline. How does that feel?”

“It feels great,” Jeremy said. “It’s an honor. But why me?”

Ryan lowered his voice. “You’re a good kid. I’ve been following you for a long while. And I want to give you a piece of advice. Totally off the record. After today, you’re no longer an attack dog. You’re a seasoned journalist. I want you to print what I’m about to say word for word, but starting tomorrow, I want you to become slightly more… nuanced, let’s say. Newsmax is great for what it is, but a year from now I see you at the Washington Post. That’s where we need you, and it will happen. But first, people need to believe you’ve matured and grown into a so-called fair and balanced, mainstream reporter. Whether you have or not isn’t important. It’s all about perceptions. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“I think I do,” Jeremy said. His blood roared in his ears. The words were exciting and terrifying all at once.

“We all need friends in high places,” the Speaker said. “Including me. Now fire away.”

Jeremy took out his telephone. “Recorder is on… now. Sir, are you aware of the massive theft of radioactive material that took place in New York City overnight?”

“I am more than aware,” Ryan said. “Like all Americans, I am deeply concerned. My aides woke me at four a.m. with the news. We are in close contact with the intelligence community, and we are monitoring the situation closely. As you well know, I have been working to pass a Congressional Declaration of War against Iran, which the President and his party have been blocking at every turn. We are in a situation where Iran is occupying our ally, the sovereign nation of Iraq, and our own personnel have to pass through Iranian checkpoints to enter and leave our embassy there. I don’t believe there has been a series of events so humiliating since the Iran hostage crisis in 1979.”

“Do you believe this theft was carried out by Iran, sir?”

“First off, let’s call it what it is. Whether or not a bomb goes off on a subway train, this is a terrorist attack on American soil. At least two security guards were murdered, and the great city of New York is in a state of fear. Second, we don’t have enough information yet to pinpoint who the terrorists are. But we know that weakness on the world stage encourages these sorts of attacks. We need to show our true strength, and we need to come together as a country, both right and left, to defend ourselves. I invite the President to join with us.”

“What do you think the President should do?”

“At the very least, he needs to declare a nationwide state of emergency. He should issue temporary special powers to law enforcement, until we track these people down. These powers should include warrant-less surveillance, as well as random search and seizure at all train stations, bus terminals, airports, schools, public squares, malls, and other hubs of activity. He also needs to act immediately to safeguard all other stockpiles of radioactive material, everywhere in the United States.”

Jeremy stared into Ryan’s fierce eyes. The fire there was almost enough to make him turn away.

“And here’s the main thing. If the attackers do turn out to be from Iran, or sponsored by Iran, then he either needs to declare war, or step out of the way and let us do it. If this is indeed an Iranian attack, and in the face of that information, the President continues to block our efforts to protect our country and our allies in the Middle East… then what choice does he leave me? I myself will initiate the impeachment proceedings.”

Chapter 11

Luke sat in the back of one of the agency SUVs with Ed Newsam. They were across the quiet, tree-lined street from a fancy high-rise, modern, with glass double doors and a white-gloved doorman at the entrance. As they watched, the doorman held the door open for a thin blonde woman in a white suit, who came out walking a dog. He hated buildings like this.

“Well, there’s at least one person in this city who doesn’t seem too worried about a terror attack,” Luke said.

Ed slumped way back in his seat. He seemed half asleep. With Ed’s beige cargo pants and the white T-shirt painted on to his chiseled features, his cue ball head, and his close-cropped beard, he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a federal agent. He certainly didn’t look like anyone this building would allow in.

As Luke thought about Ali Nassar, he was annoyed at his diplomatic immunity. He hoped that Nassar didn’t try to make a big deal about it. Luke had no patience to negotiate.

Luke’s phone rang. He glanced at it. He pressed the button.

“Trudy,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“Luke, we just got a piece of intel,” she said. “The body you and Don found in the hospital.”

“Tell me.”

“Thirty-one-year-old Ibrahim Abdulraman. Libyan national, born in Tripoli to a very poor family. Little if any formal education. Joined the army at eighteen. Within a short time, he was transferred to Abu Salim prison, where he worked for several years. He has been implicated in human rights violations at the prison, including torture and murder of government political opponents. In March 2011, as the regime began to collapse, he fled the country. He must have seen the writing on the wall. A year later, he turned up in London, working as a bodyguard for a young Saudi prince.”

Luke’s shoulders slumped. “Hmmm. A Libyan torturer working for a Saudi prince? Who then ends up dead while stealing radioactive materials in New York? Who was this guy, really?”

“He had no history of extremist ties, and doesn’t seem to have had strong political beliefs. He was never an elite soldier for any military, and appears not to have undergone any advanced training. It looks to me like he was an opportunist, hired muscle. He disappeared from London ten months ago.”

“Okay, give me that name again.”

“Ibrahim Abdulraman. And Luke? You need to know something else.”

“Tell me.”

“I didn’t find out this information. It’s on the big board in the main room. This guy Myerson at NYPD didn’t give me the identifiers when he had them, and they did their own search. They released the information to everybody without even telling us. They’re boxing us out.”

Luke looked at Ed and rolled his eyes. The last thing he wanted was to get involved in an interagency pissing contest. “All right, well…”

“Listen, Luke. I’m a little worried about you. You’re running out of friends here, and I doubt an international incident is going to help. Why don’t we pass the bank transfer details up the line, and let Homeland make this call? We can apologize for the hack, say we got overzealous. If you go see that diplomat now, you’re putting yourself way out on a limb.”

“Trudy, I’m already there.”

“Luke—”

“Trudy, I’m hanging up now.”

“I’m trying to help you,” she said.

After he hung up, he looked at Ed.

“You ready?”

Ed barely moved. He gestured at the building.

“I was born to do this.”

“Can I help you gentlemen?” the man said as they walked in.

A glittering chandelier hung from the ceiling in the front lobby. To the right, there was a sofa and a couple of designer chairs. There was a long counter along the left wall, with another doorman standing behind it. He had a telephone, a computer, and a bank of video screens. He also had a small TV set showing the news.

The man appeared about forty-five. His eyes were red and veiny, not necessarily bloodshot. His hair was slicked back. He looked like he had just stepped out of the shower. Luke guessed he had worked here so long, he could drink all night and do the job in his sleep. He probably knew by sight every single person who ever came in or out of this place. And he knew that Luke and Ed didn’t belong.

“Ali Nassar,” Luke said.

The man picked up his telephone. “Mr. Nassar. The penthouse suite. Who may I say is calling?”

Without saying a word, Ed slid over the counter and pressed the handle on the receiver, severing the man’s connection. Ed was big and strong like a lion, but when he moved, he was fluid and graceful, like a gazelle.

“You may not say anyone is calling,” Luke said. He showed the doorman his badge. Ed did the same. “Federal agents. We need to ask Mr. Nassar a few questions.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible at this moment. Mr. Nassar doesn’t accept callers before 8a.m.”

“Then why did you pick up the telephone?” Newsam said.

Luke glanced at Ed. That was a snappy answer. Ed didn’t seem like the debate team type, but he might have done well.

“You’ve been watching the news?” Luke said. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the radioactive waste that’s gone missing? We have reason to believe Mr. Nassar may know something about that.”

The man stared straight ahead. Luke smiled. He had just poisoned Nassar’s well. This doorman was a hub of communication. By tomorrow, every single person in the building was going to know the government had come to question Nassar about his terrorist activities.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the man began.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Luke said. “All you have to do is grant us access to the penthouse level. If you don’t, I will arrest you right now for obstruction of justice, and I will lead you away from here in handcuffs. I’m sure you don’t want that, and I don’t want to do it. So give us the key or the code or whatever it is, and then go on about your business. Also, know that if you tamper with the elevator once we are inside it, not only will I arrest you for obstruction, I will arrest you as an accessory after the fact to four murders, and the theft of hazardous materials. The judge will set bail at ten million dollars, and you will languish on Rikers Island awaiting trial for the next twelve months. Does that sound appealing to you…” Luke glanced at the man’s nameplate.

“John?”

“Were you really going to arrest that man?” Ed said.

It was a glass elevator, which moved through a round glass tube in the southwest corner of the building. As they rose, the view of the city became breathtaking, then dizzying. Soon, they could catch a vast sweep, the Empire State Building directly across from them, the United Nations building to their left. In the distance, a line of airplanes glinted in the early morning sun on their approach to LaGuardia Airport.

Luke smiled. “Arrest him for what?”

Ed giggled. The elevator kept moving, up and up.

“Man, I’m tired. I was just going to bed when Don called me.”

“I know,” Luke said. “Me too.”

Ed shook his head. “I haven’t done this round the clock thing in a while. I don’t miss it.”

The elevator reached the top floor. A warm tone sounded, and the doors slid open.

They stepped into a wide hallway. The floor was polished stone. Directly in front of them, ten yards ahead, two men stood. They were big men in suits, dark-skinned, perhaps Persian, perhaps some other ethnicity. They were blocking a set of double doors. Luke didn’t really care.

“Looks like our doorman called ahead.”

One of the men in the hall waved his hand. “No! You must go back. You cannot come here.”

“Federal agents,” Luke said. He and Ed walked toward the men.

“No! You have no jurisdiction. We refuse your entrance.”

“I guess I’m not going to bother showing them the badge,” Luke said.

“Yeah,” Ed said. “No reason to.”

“On my go, okay?”

“Sure.”

Luke waited a beat.

“Go.”

They were five feet from the men. Luke stepped up to his man and threw the first punch. He was surprised at how slow his own fist seemed to move. The man was five inches taller than Luke. He had the wingspan of a great bird. He blocked the punch easily and grabbed Luke’s wrist. He was strong. He pulled Luke closer.

Luke raised a knee to the groin, but the man blocked it with his leg. The man put a big hand to Luke’s throat. His fingers clenched like an eagle’s talons, digging into the vulnerable flesh.

With his free hand, his left, Luke jabbed him in the eyes. Index and middle fingers, one in each eye. It wasn’t a direct hit, but it did the job. The man let go of Luke and stepped backwards. His eyes watered. He blinked and shook his head. Then he smiled.

It was going to be a fight.

Then Newsam was there, sudden, like a ghost. He grabbed the man’s head in both hands, and banged it hard against the wall. The violence of it was profound. Some people banged an opponent’s head against the wall. Ed Newsam did it like he was trying to break through the wall using the man’s head.

Bang!

The man’s face winced.

Bang!

His jaw went slack.

Bang!

His eyes rolled.

Luke raised a hand. “Ed! Okay. I think you got him. He’s done. Let him down easy. These floors look like marble.”

Luke glanced at the other guard. He was already sprawled out on the ground, eyes closed, mouth open, head leaning against the wall. Ed had made short work of them both. Luke hadn’t made a dent.

Luke pulled a couple of plastic zip ties from his pocket and kneeled by his man. He bound the man’s ankles. He trussed them tight, like a prized pig. Eventually, someone would come and cut these things off. When they did, the guy probably wouldn’t have any feeling in his feet for an hour.

Ed was doing the same with his man.

“You’re a little rusty, Luke,” he said.

“Me? Nah. I’m not even supposed to fight. They hired me for my brains.” He could still feel the place on his throat where the man’s hand had been. It was going to be sore tomorrow.

Ed shook his head. “I was Delta Force, same as you. I came in two years after the Stanley Combat Outpost operation in Nuristan. People were still talking about it. How they dropped you guys up there and you got overrun. In the morning, only three men were still fighting. You were one of them, right?”

Luke grunted. “I’m not aware of the existence of…”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Ed said. “Classified or not, I know the story.”

Luke had learned to live his life in air-tight compartments. He rarely talked about the forward fire base incident. It took place a lifetime before, in a corner of eastern Afghanistan so remote that just putting some troops on the ground there was supposed to mean something. It was ancient history. His wife didn’t even know about it.

But Ed was Delta, so… okay.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was there. Bad intelligence put us up there, and it turned into the worst night of my life.” He gestured at the two men on the floor.

“It makes this look like an episode of Happy Days. We lost nine good men. Just before dawn, we ran out of ammo.” Luke shook his head. “It got ugly. Most of our guys were dead by then. And the three of us that made it… I don’t know if we ever really came back. Martinez is paralyzed from the waist down. Last I heard, Murphy is homeless, in and out of the VA psychiatric ward.”

“And you?”

“I have nightmares about it to this day.”

Ed was binding the wrists of his man. “I knew a guy who was on the clean-up detail after they cleared the area. He said they counted 167 bodies on that hill, not including our guys. There were 21 enemy hand-to-hand combat deaths inside the perimeter.”

Luke looked at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

Ed shrugged. “You’re a little rusty. No shame in admitting that. And you might be smart. And you might be small. But you’re also muscle, just like me.”

Luke barked laughter. “Okay. I’m rusty. But who you calling small?” He laughed, looking up at Ed’s enormous frame.

Ed laughed back. He searched the pockets of the man on the floor. In a few seconds, he found what he was looking for. It was a key card to the digital lock mounted on the wall next to the double doors.

“Shall we go inside?”

“After you,” Ed said.

Chapter 12

“You can’t be in here!” the man shouted. “Out! Get out of my home!”

They were standing in a wide open living area. There was a white baby grand piano in the far corner, near floor to ceiling windows with more spectacular views. Morning light streamed in. Nearby was a modern white sofa and table set, with accent chairs, clustered around a giant flat-panel TV mounted on the wall. On the opposite wall was a massive canvas, ten feet high, with crazy splotches and drips of bright color. Luke knew something about art. He guessed it was a Jackson Pollock.

“Yeah, we’ve been all through that with the guys out in the hall,” Luke said. “We can’t be here, and yet… here we are.”

The man was not tall. He was thick and stubby, and wearing a white plush robe. He was holding a large rifle and sighting down the barrel at them. It looked to Luke like an old Browning safari gun, probably loading .270 Winchester rounds. That thing would take down a moose at four hundred yards.

Luke moved to the right side of the room, Ed to the left. The man swung the rifle back and forth, unsure who to target.

“Ali Nassar?”

“Who is asking?”

“I’m Luke Stone. That’s Ed Newsam. We’re federal agents.”

Luke and Ed circled the man, moving in closer.

“I am a diplomat attached to the United Nations. You have no jurisdiction here.”

“We just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

“I’ve called the police. They will arrive in a few moments.”

“In that case, why don’t you put the gun down? Listen, it’s an old gun. You’ve got a bolt action on that thing. If you fire it once, you’ll never have time to chamber the next round.”

“Then I will kill you and let the other one live.”

He spun toward Luke. Luke kept moving along the wall. He put his hands up to show he was no threat. He’d had so many guns pointed at him in his life that he had long ago lost track of them all. Still, he didn’t feel good about this one. Ali Nassar didn’t look like much of a marksman, but if he did manage to get a shot off, it was going to put a big hole in something.

“If I were you, I’d kill that big man over there. Because if you kill me, there’s no telling what that guy’s gonna do. He likes me.”

Nassar didn’t waver. “No. I will kill you.”

Ed was already behind the man and within ten feet. He crossed the distance in a split second. He knocked the barrel of the gun upward, just as Nassar pulled the trigger.

BOOM!

The report was loud in the confines of the apartment. The shot tore a hole through the white plaster of the ceiling.

In one move, Ed snatched the gun away, punched Nassar in the jaw, and guided him to a seat in one of the accent chairs.

“Okay, sit down. Careful, please.”

Nassar was jolted by the punch. It took several seconds for his eyes to come back to center. He held a chubby hand to the red welt that was already rising on his jaw.

Ed showed Luke the rifle. “How about this thing?” It was ornate, with a pearl inlaid stock and polished barrel. It had probably been hanging on a wall somewhere a few minutes before.

Luke turned his attention to the man in the chair. He started from the beginning again.

“Ali Nassar?”

The man was pouting. He looked angry in the same way that Luke’s son Gunner used to look when he was four years old.

He nodded. “Obviously.”

Luke and Ed moved quickly, wasting no time.

“You can’t do this to me,” Nassar said.

Luke glanced at his watch. It was 7a.m. The cops could show up any minute.

They had him in an office just off the main living room. They had taken away Nassar’s robe. They had taken away his slippers. He wore tighty-whitey underwear and nothing else. His large stomach protruded. It was tight like a snare drum. They had him sitting in an armchair, his wrists zip-tied to the arms of the chair, his ankles zip-tied to the legs.

The office had a desk with an old-style tower computer and desktop monitor. The CPU was inside a thick steel box, which itself was anchored to the stone floor. There was no obvious way to open the box, no lock, no door, nothing. To get at the hard drive, a welder would have to cut the box. There wasn’t going to be any time for that.

Luke and Ed stood over Nassar.

“You have a numbered account at Royal Heritage Bank on Grand Cayman Island,” Luke said. “On March 3rd, you made a $250,000 transfer to an account held by a man named Ken Bryant. Ken Bryant was strangled to death sometime last night in an apartment in Harlem.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You are the employer of a man named Ibrahim Abdulraman, who died this morning in a sub-basement of Center Medical Center. He was killed with a gunshot to the head while he was stealing radioactive material.”

A flicker of recognition passed across Nassar’s face.

“I do not know this man.”

Luke took a deep breath. Normally, he would have hours to interview a subject like this. Today he had minutes. That meant he might have to cheat a little.

“Why is your computer bolted to the floor?”

Nassar shrugged. He was beginning to regain his confidence. Luke could almost see it come flooding back. The man believed in himself. He thought he was going to stonewall them.

“There is a great deal of confidential material in there. I have clients who are engaged in business deals involving intellectual property. I am also, as I indicated, a diplomat assigned to the United Nations. I receive communications from time to time that are… how would you call it? Classified. I am in these positions because I am known for my discretion.”

“That may be,” Luke said. “But I’m going to need you to give me the password so I can take a look for myself.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

Behind Nassar, Ed laughed. It sounded like a grunt.

“You might be surprised at what’s possible,” Luke said. “The fact is, we’re going to access that computer. And you’re going to give us the password. Now, there’s an easy way to do this, and a hard way. The choice is up to you.”

“You won’t hurt me,” Nassar said. “You’re already in a great deal of trouble.”

Luke glanced at Ed. Ed moved over and kneeled by Nassar’s right side. He took Nassar’s right hand in his two powerful hands.

Luke and Ed had met for the first time late last night, but they were already starting to work together without verbal communication. It was like they were reading each other’s minds. Luke had experienced this before, usually with guys who had been in special operations units like Delta. The relationship usually took longer to develop.

“You play that piano in there?” Luke said.

Nassar nodded. “I’m classically trained. When I was young, I was a concert pianist. I still play a bit for fun.”

Luke crouched down so he was at eye level with Nassar.

“In a moment, Ed is going to start breaking your fingers. That’ll make it hard to play the piano. And it’s going to hurt, probably quite a bit. I’m not sure it’s the kind of pain a man like you is accustomed to.”

“You won’t do it.”

“The first time, I’m going to count to three. That will give you a last few seconds to decide what you want to do. Unlike you, we warn people before we hurt them. We don’t steal radioactive material and aim to kill millions of innocent people. Hell, you’ll be getting off easy compared to what you’re doing to the others. But after the first time, there won’t be any more warnings. I’ll just look at Ed, and he’ll break another finger. Do you understand?”

“I will have your job,” Nassar said.

“One.”

“You are a little man with no power. You will regret ever coming here.”

“Two.”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Three.”

Ed broke Nassar’s pinky at the second knuckle. He did it quickly, with very little effort. Luke heard the crunch, just before Nassar screamed. The pinky bent out sideways. There was something almost obscene about the angle.

Luke put his hand under Nassar’s chin and tilted his head up. Nassar’s teeth were gritted. His face was flushed and his breath came in gasps. But his eyes were hard.

“That was just the pinky,” Luke said. “The next one is the thumb. Thumbs hurt a lot more than pinkies. Thumbs are more important, too.”

“You are animals. I will tell you nothing.”

Luke glanced at Ed. Ed’s face was hard. He shrugged and broke the thumb. This time it made a loud cracking sound.

Luke stood up and let the man shriek for a moment. The sound was ear-splitting. He could hear it echoing through the apartment, like something from a horror movie. Maybe they should find a hand towel in the kitchen to use as a gag.

He paced the room. He didn’t enjoy this sort of thing. It was torture, he understood that. But the man’s fingers would heal. If a dirty bomb went off on a subway train, many people would die. The survivors would get sick. No one would ever heal. Weighing the two, the man’s fingers and dead people on a train, the decision was easy.

Nassar was crying now. Clear mucus ran from one of his nostrils. He was breathing crazily. It sounded like huh-huh-huh-huh.

“Look at me,” Luke said.

The man did as he was told. His eyes were no longer hard.

“I see the thumb got your attention. So we’ll take the left thumb next. After that, we’ll start on the teeth. Ed?”

Ed moved around to the man’s left.

“Kahlil Gibran,” Nassar gasped.

“What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

“Kahlil underscore Gibran. It’s the password.”

“Like the author?” Luke said.

“Yes.”

“And what is it to work with love?” Ed said, quoting Gibran.

Luke smiled. “It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your own heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth. We have that on our kitchen wall at home. I love that stuff. I guess we’re just three incurable romantics here.”

Luke went to the computer and ran his finger across the touchpad. The password box came up. He typed in the words.

Kahlil_Gibran

The desktop screen appeared. The wallpaper was a photo of snow-capped mountains, with yellow and green meadows in the foreground.

“Looks like we’re in business. Thanks, Ali.”

Luke slipped an external hard drive he had gotten from Swann out of the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. He plugged it into a USB port. The external drive had huge capacity. It should easily swallow this man’s entire computer. They could worry later about breaking any encryption.

He started the file transfer. On the screen, an empty horizontal bar appeared. On the left hand side, the bar began to fill up with the color green. Three percent green, four percent, five. Beneath the bar, a blizzard of file names appeared and disappeared as each one was copied to the destination drive.

Eight percent. Nine percent.

Outside in the main room, there was a sudden commotion. The front doors banged open. “Police!” someone screamed. “Drop your weapons! On the ground!”

They moved through the apartment, knocking things over, blasting through doors. It sounded like there were a lot of them. They would be here any second.

“Police! Down! Down! Get down!”

Luke glanced at the horizontal bar. It seemed to be stuck on twelve percent.

Nassar stared up at Luke. His eyes were heavily lidded. Tears streamed from them. His lips trembled. His face was red, and his almost naked body had broken out in sweat. He did not look vindicated or triumphant in any way.

Chapter 13

Eldrick Thomas woke from a dream.

In the dream, he was in a small cabin high in the mountains. The air was clean and cold. He knew he was dreaming because he had never been in a cabin before. There was a stone fireplace with a fire going. The fire was warm and he held his hands to the flames. In the next room he could hear his grandmother’s voice. She was singing an old church hymn. She had a beautiful voice.

He opened his eyes to daylight.

He was in a lot of pain. He touched his chest. It was tacky with blood, but the gunshots hadn’t killed him. He was sick from radioactivity. He remembered that. He glanced around. He was lying in some mud and was surrounded by thick bushes. To his left was a large body of water, a river or a harbor of some sort. He could hear a highway somewhere close.

Ezatullah had chased him here. But that was… a long time ago. Ezatullah was probably gone by now.

“Come on, man,” he croaked. “You gotta move.”

It would be easy to just stay here. But if he did that, he was going to die. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be a jihadi anymore. He just wanted to live. Even if he spent the rest of his life in prison, that would be all right. Prison was okay. He had been in prison a lot. It wasn’t as bad as people claimed.

He tried to stand, but he couldn’t feel his legs. They were just gone. He rolled onto his stomach. Pain seared through him like a jolt of electricity. He went away to a dark place. Time passed. After a while, he returned. He was still here.

He started to crawl, his hands gripping the dirt and the mud and pulling him along. He dragged himself up a long hill, the hill he had fallen down last night, the hill that had probably saved his life. He was crying from the pain, but he kept going. He didn’t give a shit about pain, he was just trying to make it up this hill.

A long time passed. He was lying face down in the mud. The bushes were a little less dense here. He looked around. He was above the river now. The hole in the fence was directly in front of him. He crawled toward it.

He got caught on the bottom of the fence while pulling himself through. The pain made him scream.

Two old black men were sitting on white buckets not far away. Eldrick saw them with surreal clarity. He had never seen anyone so clearly before. They had fishing rods, tackle boxes, and a big white bucket. They had a big blue cooler on wheels. They had white paper bags and Styrofoam breakfast platters from McDonald’s. Behind them was an old rusty Oldsmobile.

Their lives were paradise.

God, please let me be them.

When he screamed, the men rushed over to him.

“Don’t touch me!” he said. “I’m contaminated.”

Chapter 14

Thomas Hayes, President of the United States, stood in slacks and a dress shirt at the counter in the family kitchen of the White House. He peeled a banana and waited for the coffee to brew. When he was alone, he preferred to quietly come in here and make himself a simple breakfast. He hadn’t even put on his tie yet. His feet were bare. And he was tormented with dark thoughts.

These people are eating me alive.

The thought was an unwelcome intruder in his mind, the kind of thing that occurred to him more and more these days. Once upon a time, he had been the most optimistic person he knew. From his earliest days, he had always been the top performer, everywhere he found himself. High school valedictorian, captain of the rowing team, president of the student body. Summa cum laude at Yale, summa cum laude at Stanford. Fulbright Scholar. President of the Pennsylvania State Senate. Governor of Pennsylvania.

He had always believed that he could find the right solution to any problem. He had always believed in the power of his leadership. What’s more, he had always believed in the inherent goodness of people. Those things were no longer true. Five years in office had beaten the optimism out of him.

He could handle the long hours. He could handle the various departments and the vast bureaucracy. Until recently, he had been on decent terms with the Pentagon. He could live with the Secret Service around him twenty-four hours a day, intruding on every aspect of his life.

He could even handle the media, and the lowbrow ways they attacked him. He could live with the way they mocked his “country club upbringing,” and how he was a “limousine liberal,” supposedly lacking the common touch. The problem wasn’t the media.

The problem was the House of Representatives. They were immature. They were moronic. They were sadistic. They were a mob of vandals, intent on dismantling him and taking him away, one piece at a time. It was as if the House was a student congress at a junior high school, but one where the children had elected the school’s worst juvenile delinquents to office.

The mainstream Republicans were a rampaging horde of medieval barbarians, and the Tea Partiers were bomb-throwing anarchists. Meanwhile, closer to home, the House Minority Leader was eyeing his own future run for the Oval Office, and made it no secret that he was willing to throw the current President under the bus. The Blue Dog Democrats were two-faced traitors — glad-handing country cousins one minute, angry white men railing about Arabs and immigrants and inner-city crime the next. Every morning, Thomas Hayes woke secure in the knowledge that his pool of friends and allies was growing smaller by the hour.

“You with me, Thomas?”

Hayes looked up.

David Halstram, his chief of staff, stood across from him, fully dressed, looking like he always did — awake, energetic, fully alive, in the battle and eager for more. David was 34 years old, and he had only been in the job nine months. Give him time.

“When did the story come out?” Hayes said.

“About twenty minutes ago,” David said. “It’s already trending on social media, and the TV stations are scrambling to line up guests to debate it on the 8a.m. shows. It has legs. Between Speaker Ryan and the Iran debacle and terrorists in New York, we are in a bad place right now.”

Hayes made a fist with his right hand. He had punched exactly two people in his entire life. Both had happened long ago, when he was a kid in school. At this moment, he would like to make Representative Bill Ryan number three.

“We were scheduled to have lunch tomorrow,” he said. “I thought that might be a step forward. Not that we would iron out everything in one meeting, but…”

David waved that idea away. “He caught us flat-footed. You have to admit it was a pretty savvy move. He basically calls for your impeachment because you won’t start World War Three. And he does it with a friendly reporter in an outlet like Newsmax, where there will be no critical commentary opposing it, no balance in the article itself, the whole thing can get tweeted and blogged by the conservative echo chamber all day, and he doesn’t have to say another word. It’s already taking on a life of its own. Meanwhile, we have to act like adults. We have to hold a press conference to address the threat of a terror attack, and the possibility it was sponsored by Iran. We have to answer questions about whether there’s a groundswell of support for your impeachment, and what we’re doing to safeguard radioactive materials across the country.”

“What are we doing?”

“About radioactive materials?”

“Yes.”

David shrugged. “That depends on what you mean. The policy is that radioactive waste is stored securely, but it isn’t always true. Okay, the vast majority of it gets dealt with reasonably well. There are places, like Center Medical Center by the way, that are pretty good about handling it and removing it to secure sites. But even they ship the stuff in containment trucks without security personnel, using public roads. Then there are the hospitals that store the radioactive stuff with the biohazard material. There are even a handful of hospitals, especially in the south, that appear to just throw it all out with the regular garbage. I’m not kidding. And don’t get me started on the nukes. Originally, all spent nuclear fuel rods were supposed to be transferred to secure storage facilities, but it never happened. The facilities were never developed. The vast majority of spent fuel rods in the United States, going back to the early 1970s, are stored onsite at the reactors where they were used. And there’s evidence to suggest that almost ninety percent of the reactors in the country are leaking, some of them into the neighboring groundwater.”

President Hayes stared at his chief of staff. “Why don’t I know about these things?”

“Well, technically, you do know about them. You’ve been briefed, but it’s never been a high priority before now.”

“When was I briefed?”

“You want me to get you the dates?”

“I want dates, personnel, content of the briefings. Yes.”

David’s shoulders dropped. He paused. “Thomas, I can do that for you. Then what? Are you going to reread a Nuclear Regulatory Commission briefing from three years ago? I think we’ve got bigger fish to fry right now. We’ve got an ongoing crisis in the Middle East, and a drumbeat for war in the media and in the halls of Congress. We’ve got stolen radioactive material and a potential terrorist attack unfolding in New York City. We’re losing the right flank in our own party. They may well go over to the other side en masse by this afternoon. And the second most powerful man in Washington just called for your impeachment. We are standing on an island, and the water is rising all around us. We need to take action, and we need to do it today.”

Hayes had never felt so lost. It was all too much. His wife and daughters were on vacation in Hawaii. Good for them. He wished he was there instead of here.

He reached for David Halstram like the man was a life preserver tossed to him in a stormy sea.

“What do we do?”

“We circle the wagons,” David said. “Your cabinet is still firm. They have your back. I took the liberty of calling a meeting for later this morning. We’re going to get all the big brains in here and build a unified front. Kate Hoelscher at Treasury. Marcus Jones at the State Department. Dave Delliger at Defense can’t be here for obvious reasons, but he’s going to call in on the secure line. And Susan Hopkins is flying in from the West Coast as we speak.”

“Susan,” Hayes began.

He couldn’t even get past the name. For more than half a decade, he had done everything in his power to distance himself from his running mate and Vice President. The whole situation with Susan, the reality of her, embarrassed him. She had begun life as a fashion model. When she retired from that at age twenty-four, she married a technology billionaire. When her kids reached school age, she launched herself into politics with her husband’s money.

People loved her because she was beautiful. She had stayed fit and healthy and enthusiastic into early middle-age. A woman’s magazine had recently photographed her out jogging in bright orange yoga pants and a tank top. She was a decent public speaker. She was unstoppable at ribbon-cuttings and cook-offs. Her issues were breast cancer awareness (as if somehow people were not already aware of breast cancer), lifelong exercise, and childhood obesity.

Eleanor Roosevelt she wasn’t.

David raised a hand. “I know, I know. You think Susan is lightweight, but you’ve never given her a chance. She was a two-term Senator from California, Thomas. She is the first female Vice President in the history of the United States. These are not small achievements. She’s smart, and she’s good with people. Most of all, she is on your side. You need all hands on deck right now, and I believe she can help you.”

“What can she possibly do? We’re not holding a beauty pageant.”

David shrugged. “Your most recent approval rating was 12 %. That was taken three days ago, before this latest disaster. You could be in single digits by next week. Your nemesis Bill Ryan isn’t doing too much better. He’s at 17 %, mostly because he’s been unable to ram through a declaration of war. He’ll probably get a temporary bump from threatening to impeach you.”

“Okay. People are unhappy with the government.”

David raised a finger. “Mostly true. Except for Susan. This Iran thing hasn’t touched her. Her overall rating is 62 %, and she’s rock solid among all women except the religious right. Liberal and independent men adore her. She’s the most popular politician in America, and it’s possible she can loan you some of that popularity.”

“How?”

“By being here in the White House, working side by side with you on the most pressing issues confronting this country, while we photograph it. By making public appearances with you, and quite literally looking up at you on the podium for leadership, as though you are her hero.”

“Jesus, David.”

“Dismiss it at your peril, Thomas. This is where we are. I talked to her on the plane just before I walked in here. She understands what’s at stake, and she is ready to do these things. She is also ready to take whatever statements we want to make, then stump them on the talking head shows and out in the countryside.”

Hayes stroked his chin. “I just have to decide if I’m willing to do this.”

David shook his head. “The time for deciding about Susan is long past. We need her, and the truth is you haven’t treated her very well. Frankly, you should be glad she’s still willing to speak to you.”

Chapter 15

“Down! Stay down!”

Luke was face down on the stone floor of Nassar’s office. They had taken the gun from his shoulder holster. A cop’s shoe was on the back of his neck. The cop was heavyset, over two hundred pounds. His bulk could snap Luke’s neck, if that’s what the man decided to do.

With one hand, Luke held his badge above his head. “Federal agents!” he shouted, trying to match the volume of the cops.

“FBI! FBI!” Ed screamed beside him. This was the dangerous moment, when good guys tended to shoot other good guys by mistake.

Someone snatched Luke’s badge away. Rough hands pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed him tight. He felt the cold steel bite into his wrists. He made no attempt at resistance. In other rooms of the apartment, cops were still surging through, screaming and shouting.

“Stone, what are you doing?”

Luke recognized the voice. He craned his head around to see who it was. Ron Begley of Homeland Security stood over him, surrounded by uniformed cops. He stared down at Luke with an expression probably calculated to convey disgust, or maybe pity. Begley wore a long trench coat. With his big gut and his coat, he looked like a TV producer’s idea of an alcoholic Irish detective. Standing with him was Three-Piece, the NYPD counter-terrorism officer from this morning, the one who didn’t like being treated like a servant. It took Luke a moment to remember his name. Myerson. Kurt Myerson.

In a sense, Luke was glad to see them.

“The man in the chair has been operating a terrorist cell located here in New York. We have evidence tying him to the group who stole radioactive materials from Center last night.”

Begley crouched near Luke’s head. “The man is no longer in the chair. We just cut him loose. I guess you must know that he’s a diplomat attached to the Iranian United Nations contingent, right?”

“He’s hiding behind diplomatic immunity,” Luke said. “That’s what allows him to—”

“We’re on the verge of war with Iran, Stone. That much is true. But starting the war is outside of your job description.” Begley paused. The squat seemed to take his breath away, but he stuck with it.

“Can you even imagine the amount of shit that’s about to come down from this? The United States of America is going to have to issue a public apology to Iran. This is because you took it upon yourself to invade a diplomat’s home, strip him to his underwear, and subject him to questioning that at first glance appears to meet the international definition of torture. The President is going to choke on his Wheaties when he hears about this. And a rogue agent from a secretive FBI unit no one has ever heard of is going to go around and around in the twenty-four-hour news loop, just in case there was anyone left in the country who thought government spying wasn’t out of control.”

“Ron, listen.”

“I’m done listening to you, Stone. What good does it do? You’re out of your mind. Right now, I’ve got people contacting Don Morris. Since he’s the only person you seem to listen to, he’s going to personally relieve you of your command. At this point, you’re way past worrying about job security. That man in the next room is very likely to press charges, and if he does, I think you’re going to see some jail time. No one is going to protect you. No one is going to stand up for you.”

Begley lowered his voice. “I’ll be honest with you. People are already questioning Don’s judgment for bringing you up here. The Special Response Team is Don’s pet project, right? The whole thing could get broken up and scattered to the winds faster than I even thought it would. You did me a favor today.”

Begley rose from his crouch. “Get the cuffs off these guys,” he said to someone nearby. “Then walk them out of here. Straight out to the elevator, then down to the street. No pauses, no chit-chatting, no looking right or left. If they give you any trouble at all, shoot them both in the head.”

“Sir?”

Begley shrugged. “That’s my little joke.”

Two men pulled Luke to his feet. He caught a glimpse of Begley and Myerson leaving the room. The cops uncuffed Luke, then handed him his gun and his badge. Ed Newsam stood just to his left, receiving the same treatment.

Luke glanced at the computer, his external hard drive still attached to it. The horizontal bar was almost entirely green. The file transfer was nearly done. Luke caught Ed’s attention. Ed’s eyebrows arched for a split second.

“Let’s go,” a cop said. “Out.”

Ed walked first, Luke following. Ed’s broad back filled Luke’s field of vision. They took two steps out of the room. To the right, Ali Nassar sat in an accent chair. He was back inside his plush white robe, talking on his cell phone. A female cop injected a local anesthetic into his hand, and immediately began setting his fingers in temporary splints. Nassar made exaggerated winces from the pain.

Suddenly Ed dropped to the ground. His head hit the floor with a thud. His eyes rolled back, showing the whites. A violent tremor went through his body. His head and arms jerked. Within a few seconds, a trickle of white foam began to flow from his mouth.

“Oh, Jesus,” Luke said. He kneeled by Ed’s side.

Begley had turned around. “Get out of there, Stone!”

Luke stood and backed away, his hands in the air. The cops moved in.

“What’s the matter with him?” Begley said.

“He has a seizure disorder. He was in a Humvee that took a direct hit in Afghanistan, and he sustained a serious head injury. Slight brain damage, altered brain waves. I’m not really sure. You just have to keep his airways clear. It should pass in a few minutes.”

“You guys have an agent in the field that gets seizures?”

“I don’t make these decisions, Ron.”

“Okay, step back. These guys know what they’re doing. They’ll take care of it.”

Luke took a step back. Then another. A circle of cops kneeled and stood around Ed. A few seconds passed, and Begley returned to his conversation with Myerson. Luke floated backwards slowly, as though he were standing still. He retreated into the office. He darted to the computer, pulled out his hard drive, and dropped it into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. He picked up a blue pen off the desk.

He turned. A cop stood in the doorway.

Luke held up the pen. “Almost forgot my pen.”

The cop gestured out the door. “Come on.”

In the main room, Ed had stopped foaming at the mouth. He lay on his side, barely moving. His eyes closed, and then slowly opened. A couple of cops helped him to a sitting position. He blinked his eyes again. He seemed like a person who did not know where he was.

“You okay?” someone said. “You hit your head pretty hard.”

Ed took a deep breath. He was clearly embarrassed to be vulnerable in front of all these macho cops. “I don’t know, man. The stress. The lack of sleep. This only happens when I’m rundown.”

Luke glanced around the room. To his right, Nassar was off the phone. He stood talking to the cop who had splinted his fingers. Luke made a beeline for him.

“Stone!”

Luke held out his left hand to Nassar, as though he wanted to shake hands. Nassar, grim-faced, ignored the gesture. Luke reached out, grabbed him by his robe, and pulled him close. They were face to face, close enough to kiss.

“I know what you did,” Luke said. “And I’m going to take you down.”

“You will be unemployed by this afternoon,” Nassar said. “I will see to it.”

Then the cops were everywhere, separating them. A big burly cop put Luke in a full nelson and swung him around.

“Enough!” Begley shouted. “Get these clowns out of here!”

In the elevator down, they were surrounded by cops. It was quiet, everyone watching the numbers descending rapidly.

“You okay?” Luke said.

Ed shrugged. “I’m tired. I haven’t had one of these in a couple of years. They wipe me right out. My whole body is still shaking.”

On the street, the cops let them go. They walked side by side along the tree-lined street, back to the waiting SUV. Luke didn’t speak until they were fifty yards away from the cluster of cops.

“A seizure?” he said. “You’ve never had a seizure in your life.”

Ed smiled. “Seizures are my standby. But to make it work, you have to sell it.”

“You sold it, all right. When I heard your head hit the ground, even I wasn’t sure. I swear I felt it in my feet.”

“Right. Good thing I have a hard head. And I always keep a couple of foaming pills on me to double it down. How’d you do?”

Luke shrugged. “I got the hard drive. And that last little bit? The confrontation with Nassar? That’s an old pickpocket move.” He reached into his cargo pants and pulled out a new smartphone in a white plastic case. “I took the man’s cell phone out of his robe.”

Chapter 16

“Gentlemen, the meeting will now come to order.”

Fourteen men had gathered in a quiet chamber deep beneath the surface of the earth. The chamber was mostly bare, with a large conference table in the center, a poured concrete floor, and rounded stone walls and ceiling. LED lights were mounted in recessed ceiling fixtures. Oxygenated air was pumped into the room through several small vents. The complete lack of windows gave the room the sense of being the dead end of a cave, which is exactly what it was. A claustrophobic wouldn’t last five minutes in there.

There was no audio or recording equipment in the chamber. An intercom attached to the facility-wide communications system had been removed a decade before. Built into one wall was an old interactive computer projection screen, which at one time would display both a map of the world and a map of the United States. It could be used to plot the location of troop deployments, aircraft, even missile launches. Theoretically, the device still worked, but the theory was untested. No one had turned it on since 1998.

The chamber was behind a double-thick steel door at the end of a metal catwalk. The catwalk teetered three stories above a dim and cavernous command and control room operated around the clock by a skeleton crew of military personnel. This was the deepest part of the sprawling facility, first opened in 1953, and hardened to withstand repeated direct hits from Soviet-era nuclear ballistic missiles.

Ten of the men sat in padded office chairs around the conference table. The men represented various intelligence organizations and branches of the American military, both traditional and special operations. Against one wall, four more men sat in folding chairs. These men represented four broad civilian industries, including coal mining, oil and natural gas, banking and finance, and aerospace and defense.

The group operated in secrecy, even from itself. No one in the room wore identifying markers of any kind. There were no name plates, no indications of rank, and no combat ribbons or medals in evidence. Indeed, there were no uniforms. The military men all wore dress shirts and slacks. Although most of the men knew one another to some degree, two of the men were strangers, and had affiliations that were unclear to the rest of the group.

A silver-haired four-star general, once a commander in the Army Special Forces, stood at the head of the table. He rubbed an old, long-faded scar on his forehead.

“You all know me,” he said. “You know my role here. So I’ll get right to it. Events have moved forward quickly in the past twenty-four hours, faster than we could have anticipated. In response to these events, and to ensure continuity in the event of a major attack or disruption, we have updated the evacuation plans for all high-level elected and appointed civilian government personnel. The plans are in effect as of 0600 hours, approximately one hour and twenty minutes ago. They will remain in effect until further notice. Please pay attention because they are a departure from previous plans.”

He glanced at a single sheet of paper in front of him on the desk.

“During an attack or disruption, President Thomas Hayes and Vice President Susan Hopkins will be evacuated by helicopter to the secure Mount Weather civilian government facility near Bluemont, Virginia. In the event of the death of President Hayes, Vice President Hopkins is number two in the line of succession and will take the Oath of Office at Mount Weather. Civilian cabinet members, including the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Education, will be evacuated to Mount Weather, either by helicopter or military convoy, depending on circumstances and availability of aircraft. These individuals represent numbers five, six, and eight in the line of succession, respectively.”

He glanced at his notes again.

“In an attack, the Speaker of the House of Representatives will be evacuated by helicopter to this facility, Site R. The Speaker is currently William Ryan of North Carolina. In the event of the deaths of both the President and Vice President, Speaker Ryan is number three in the line of succession, and will be administered the Oath of Office here as our guest.”

He looked around the room, meeting each set of eyes in turn.

“In the case of an attack or disruption, the Senate President Pro Tem will board the Airborne Communications Command aircraft, codename Nightwatch, at Joint Base Andrews. The aircraft will remain at a cruising altitude of forty thousand feet, with an escort of fighter jets, for the duration of the crisis. In the unlikely event of the deaths of the President, the Vice President, and Speaker of the House, the Senate President is number four in the line of succession, and will take the Oath of Office aboard the airplane. The Senate President Pro Tem is Senator Edward Graves of Kansas, current Chairman of the Congressional Armed Forces Committee.”

A hand at the table was raised. The general recognized a man much older than himself, a former Navy admiral, a man so ancient that once upon a time he led a Marine Corps unit through the shit storm at Pusan Reservoir during the start of the Korean War. There was an iconic photograph from the event, which had never been declassified, but which the general had seen. It showed the admiral at nineteen years of age, shirtless in a muddy trench, his eyes wild, his face and upper body painted dark red with the blood of dead communists.

“Yes?”

“You haven’t mentioned the Secretary of Defense. Normally, he would board the Airborne Command.”

The general shrugged. “The Secretary of Defense will come here.”

“Do you anticipate that will cause any problems?”

The general picked up the paper in front of him and began to carefully shred it into long narrow strips. “We don’t anticipate,” he said, “any problems at all.”

Chapter 17

“How the hell did Begley know where we were?”

Luke stood in the doorway of the small room SRT controlled at the command center. Trudy and Swann were here, along with a few guys from the New York office. They stared at him with big doe eyes. Someone in the room was playing innocent. That, more than anything, made Luke see red.

“What?” Trudy said.

“Begley. He turned up at the Iranian’s apartment with the police. Nobody called him. He just showed up. How did he do that?”

Swann shook his head. He gestured at his machines. “This stuff is encrypted. I’m on my own network. There’s no way Begley’s people could break the code in the short time we’ve been here.”

“Trudy?”

She put her hands in the air as if he had pulled a gun. “No way, Luke. Don’t even go there. I despise Begley. You think I’m going to rat you out to him?”

Ed slipped by him and into the room. “I think you want to stay focused, man. No sense chasing rabbits into holes in the ground. I don’t believe anybody here sold you down the river.”

Luke nodded. Ed had a point. “All right.” He walked over to Swann and placed the contents of his pockets on Swann’s table. “I copied the hard drive from his computer. This is his cell phone. I need you to pull the data from it, then destroy the phone and make it disappear. Do that first.”

Swann shrugged. “They’ll know anyway. It’s an iPhone. They’ll trace its location right to us. They probably already have.”

“That’s fine,” Luke said. “But let’s not be holding it in our hands when they come looking for it. Okay?”

“Okay, Luke.”

Luke glanced at the doorway, half expecting to find Begley standing there. “What have you found in the bank account?”

“A lot. Ali Nassar is a busy man. There are a ton of transactions going on with that account. Money comes in, money goes out. Geneva, Nassau, Tehran, Paris, Washington. A lot of it is anonymous, impossible to trace. Well, not impossible, but it would take more time than we have.”

“Anything interesting that we can see?”

“There’s this. Over the past six months, Nassar has paid more than eight million dollars to something called the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which is a company owned and operated by the Chinese government. They build military-grade robotic drones, pretty high-end stuff. The drones can carry air-to-surface missiles and bomb payloads, do surveillance, satellite data links, you name it. And China sells them dirt cheap, to people who probably shouldn’t have them. North Korea comes to mind. African dictators. Non-state actors. Their CH-3A drone is similar in mission capability to our MQ-9 Reaper, but has a price tag under a million dollars. You see the picture?”

Luke saw. “Could you put a dirty bomb on board one of those things, and say… crash it into something?”

Swann pursed his lips. “Maybe. But keep in mind it would be hard to fly a large payload drone in an area like Manhattan, with so many tall buildings around. These aren’t backyard hobbyist drones. They’re big. We’re talking about eight to ten meter wingspans, depending on the aircraft. These drones need room to maneuver. They take off, fly, and land like airplanes. They have three-mile ceilings, but if you flew one that high, air traffic control would pick it up on radar in a minute.”

Luke tapped the hard drive with Nassar’s computer files on it. “See if he’s got anything on it in here.”

“Before or after I do the phone?”

“Phone first, but move quickly.”

Swann sighed. “No one at this job has ever told me to move slowly. Relax, Swann. Take your time and do a thorough job. Those are words I never hear.”

“If you want to hear those magic words, I think you better go work in the private sector.”

Swann made a face. “What? And make five times the salary? I won’t hear of it.”

“Luke?” Trudy said.

He turned to her. Her eyes were wide. She held a cell phone out to him.

“It’s Don,” she said. “For you.”

Chapter 18

Luke held the phone to his ear and walked out into the hall. The buzz of conversation echoed to him from the main control room. He didn’t want to take this call. Part of the reason was he didn’t want to go home, not now, not after everything that had happened this morning, not when so much was at stake. But there was more to it than that, a lot more.

Luke remembered the day he met Don. Luke was a twenty-seven-year-old Army captain. He had made captain six months before, and he had just been accepted into Delta Force, the Army’s elite special operations and counter-terrorism unit. It was his first day, and Luke was nervous. Don was his new commanding officer. Don was giving him some instructions, as Luke stood at ease in front of Don’s desk.

“Yes sir, Colonel,” Luke said at one point.

Don sighed heavily. “Son, let’s get one thing perfectly clear. You’re not in the regular Army anymore. This is Delta Force. We’re going to live together, we’re going to fight together, and one day we might die together. So you call me Don, or you call me Morris. You can call me fuck-head. I don’t care. But two things you don’t call me are sir and Colonel. You save that for dealing with the other branches of the military. You understand?”

“Yes…” Luke caught himself before he said sir again. “Don.”

Don smiled. “Good. Fuck-head will come in time.”

Years later, when Don left Delta to form the Special Response Team, Luke was among his first employees.

“Don?” he said now.

“Luke. How are you holding up?”

“Good. I’m good. How did the briefing go?”

“It hasn’t gone yet. We just got off the chopper ten minutes ago. It looks like I’m going to be here a while before anything happens. You know how these things go. Hurry up and wait.”

“Right,” Luke said.

“I think they’re going to put me out to pasture,” Don said.

Luke nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

“The Director called me a little while ago. Ron Begley’s boss at Homeland called him. I heard all about the diplomat.”

“Don, I got a little carried away. If you lose SRT over it, I will feel badly about that. But I’m not sorry I did it.”

“Relax, son. Why do you think I called you last night? So you could come in and play by the rules? If that’s what I wanted, I would have let you sleep. We’ve got plenty of those guys in government. More than we need. No, I’m not concerned about that. I wouldn’t have expected any less from you.”

“Begley knew where I was,” Luke said. “He came waltzing in with the city cops.”

“Of course he did. We’ve had an internal leak for a while. Six months, maybe more.”

Luke ran a hand through his hair. A leak was bad news. He looked up and down the hallway. At the end of the hall, near the water foundations, a small knot of intelligence agents were gathered, murmuring quietly. One of them glanced his way, then covered what he was saying with his hand.

Luke was growing tired. He needed to find his bug-out bag. It was almost time for an eye opener.

“Who is it?” he said.

Don seemed reluctant to speak. “Luke…”

“Come on, Don. I’m a big boy. I can take it.”

“I haven’t been able to nail it down. But I have my suspicions. The writing’s been on the wall about SRT for months. We’ve got a couple of people who might be looking to jump ship before we go under.”

“Name one.”

“Trudy Wellington.”

“Don…”

Don cut him off. “Right. I know what you’re going to say. She’s our best intel officer. You’re right about that. And you were sleeping with her for a while. I know all about it. So was I. I regret that now. If Margaret ever found out, I think I would die. But it’s more than that. I told Trudy some things I shouldn’t have. Pillow talk. I assume you know how that goes. I’m afraid I might have made SRT an open book for others to read. Believe me, I feel very foolish.”

Luke didn’t respond. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“Luke, I feel old.”

“Don—”

“There may be others,” Don said. “Besides Trudy. Things have gotten out that even she couldn’t have known. We sweep headquarters for bugs every week. We encrypt all of our communications. Our network is locked down. And still…”

His voice trailed off for a moment.

“SRT has become a viper’s nest, Luke. There’s no one I can trust anymore. You know what? Part of why I called you last night was so we could ride together again. I wanted it to feel like old times. Maybe we would fly in and put the smack-down on the bad guys one last time.”

Luke took a deep breath. He felt like this phone call could go on for another hour, and he might not say another word.

“So here’s the part you’ve been waiting for,” Don said. “Know that I have no choice in this whatsoever. It comes from on high.”

Don’s voice changed. Suddenly, he sounded like he was reading from prepared remarks. “Luke, you’re suspected of committing multiple felonies in the course of performing your duties. As such, you are formally relieved of your command at the Special Response Team, effective immediately. You have been placed on administrative suspension pending an investigation into your actions. You may be subpoenaed to testify on your own behalf. Your salary and benefits are intact during this time, but that’s conditional and depends on your full cooperation with the investigation.”

Luke finally found his voice. “I was on a leave of absence,” he said.

“You’ve been the best investigator, the best counter-terrorism agent, and one of the best soldiers I’ve ever worked with,” Don said. “Please surrender your badge and your service firearm to Trudy. Any personal firearms in your possession will require the use of a private concealed carry license, if you have one.”

“I do,” Luke said.

“I’m sorry about this, Luke. I really am.”

The call ended. Seconds later, Luke couldn’t recall how he had signed off. He might have just hung up. He stood in the hallway for a few moments, the phone still pressed to his ear. Then he floated back into the office. He didn’t seem to be in control of his legs. His feet were far away.

Trudy was there. She stared at him.

“What did Don say?”

A war of emotions raged inside him, and he needed to get it under control. He didn’t want to be that person. Jealous. Angry. Hurt. But it was him. He was that person. He was a married man, and yet he felt burned by this woman. He had thought there was something between them. The idea that she was just maneuvering… The idea that she was also with Don, maybe even at the same time… Who else was she with? Where was she passing agency secrets? He needed time to digest all of this.

Luke faked a smile, and the smile, all by itself, rallied him a little. It almost felt real. “Don said to hang in there and keep plugging. They want to suspend me, but he’s decided to fight it. You know Don. He’s a tough old bird.”

“He did?” she said. “He decided to fight your suspension?”

Reading her face was almost too easy. She didn’t believe a word of it.

“Yeah,” Luke said. “He changed his mind about the whole thing while we were talking. He knows it’s wrong. Don and I go way back, and he’s not just going to let that history drop. So I’m still in the game, at least for now. What do you have for me?”

She hesitated. “Well…”

Luke snapped his fingers. “Trudy, our backs are against the wall. We need to stay sharp. Vans, trucks, what happened with all that?”

She picked up her smartpad. “There’s been movement. The local cops tossed the hot dog truck. You were right. The Russian was operating a full-service restaurant for pimps and prostitutes. Hot dogs, Italian sausages, potato chips, Red Bull, Pepsi, Mountain Dew. Also oxycontin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, tranquilizers, diazepam… you name it. They found him in the back of the truck on a mattress with two prostitutes. Don’t get too excited. All three of them were asleep with their clothes on.”

“What else?”

“The stolen ambulance turned up in the parking lot of a meat warehouse in Newark, New Jersey. The Newark police went in. Ghastly. The warehouse doubled as a storage facility for human organs, mostly livers and kidneys. In a room at the back, they found two sets of lungs being kept alive inside sealed plastic domes. An apparatus forced oxygenated air into the lungs and the lungs were breathing. One cop described it as”—she glanced at her pad—“like giant pink meat wings.”

“What about the laundry truck?”

“Nothing so far. We called the company, Dun-Rite Laundry Services. The owner was there. He went outside and counted his trucks. He said they were all accounted for. Twenty-one trucks. He also said they only use step-up vans — he bought an entire fleet of converted bread trucks. They don’t use small delivery vans like the one we picked up on video. He invited us to send someone out and take a look.”

“Did we?”

She nodded. “An agent is on his way out there now.”

“So someone copied his company logo and put it on their own van.”

“Yes. And Dun-Rite has a contract at Center. So a van with that logo wouldn’t necessarily arouse suspicion if it was parked at the hospital.”

“We need to find that van,” Luke said.

“We’re looking, Luke.”

“Look harder.”

He walked away from her. The move was abrupt and gave away too much. It told her everything she needed to know. He moved over to Swann’s station. Swann was still working three screens simultaneously.

“What do you got, Swann?”

“The plot thickens,” Swann said. “Ali Nassar has an entire folder in his computer dedicated to drone technology. He’s got PDF files of full-color brochures. He’s got hundreds of photographs and bird’s-eye point-of-view videos. He’s got spreadsheet comparisons of specs, payloads, weaponry, speed, altitude. He’s either been buying drones or writing a term paper on them.”

“How about the phone?”

Swann nodded. “The phone. His call history has been completely wiped. He’s got an app that erases his history automatically as he goes. We can get it back, but we’d have to go to his service provider with a warrant.”

“You can’t hack them?”

“I could, but what’s the point? It would take me twelve hours, and by then whatever’s going to happen will have already happened. Anyway, we’ve got a more pressing matter. Just after midnight last night, Nassar bought a one-way plane ticket to Venezuela. It’s for 2:30 afternoon, JFK nonstop to Caracas, executive class. The boarding pass was on his phone. The receipt and an extra copy of the boarding pass were on his computer hard drive.”

“Venezuela?” Luke said.

Swann shrugged. “We don’t have an extradition treaty with Venezuela.”

“Sure, but why not go home to Iran?”

Swann turned around. His eyes goggled behind his glasses. “What if the attack fails? Last I heard, they still have firing squads in Iran. That gives getting fired for incompetence a whole different meaning.”

“The point is he’s leaving the country,” Luke said.

“Yes he is. Today.”

“And he bought the ticket right around the time someone was stealing the radioactive materials.”

Swann nodded. “My guess is he bought it right after he learned they had successfully pulled off the heist.”

“We got him,” Luke said. He clapped Swann on the shoulder. “Good work.”

Luke turned, and Begley was standing in the doorway. Two large men in suits flanked him. Luke glanced around the room. Ed Newsam stood in a corner by the window, scanning the street below and drinking a bottle of orange juice. Trudy was simultaneously on her pad and her cell phone. A couple of local SRT guys were at desks, pecking away at laptops.

“Stone, why are you here?” Begley said. The room quieted when he spoke. Everyone looked at him.

Luke smiled. “Ron, for once I’m glad to see you. We’ve had a breakthrough. Ali Nassar made a quarter of a million dollar bank transfer from an offshore account to Ken Bryant, the dead janitor at Center. Nassar has been spending millions of dollars on military-grade robotic drones. And last night, while the thieves were hitting Center, he booked a plane ticket to Venezuela for this afternoon.”

Begley shook his head. “None of that impresses me.”

“We need to bring him in, Ron. We can’t let him leave the country. If he makes it to Venezuela, it’s going to be hard to get him back here.”

Begley looked at Ed. “A seizure, Newsam? That’s funny. I had them check your personnel record. You don’t have a seizure disorder. You were never even injured in Afghanistan.”

Ed barely moved. He raised his index finger. “Incorrect. I was injured twice. Cracked ribs, a concussion, and a broken arm one time when our Humvee hit an IED and rolled. The guy next to me lost his leg.” He shrugged. “Shot in the calf the other time. The bullet ripped a nice chunk out. They had to take meat from my ass to rebuild the muscle. To this day, the ass meat is a different shade of brown from the leg meat. You can see the line where they’re attached. You want to look at it?”

Begley said nothing.

“Anyway, those sound like injuries to me. I’ve got two Purple Hearts, so I guess Uncle Sam agrees.”

“I meant you never had a brain injury.”

Ed looked out the window again. “That’s different.”

“Begley, are you listening to me?” Luke said. “We have the man who bankrolled the terror cell. And we know what the delivery system is. It’s a drone attack. And that means there’s a good chance it won’t happen here. There’s no room in Manhattan to fly the kind of drones we’re talking about. We’re looking at a very targeted attack, a dirty bomb delivered to a specific enclosed place by a drone. And the drone will probably fly low, beneath radar detection.”

Begley smiled. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Stone. The whole thing would be funny if you weren’t so serious about it. We have the intel we need. We know what the targets are. Ibrahim Abdulraman, remember him? The man with no fingerprints? His cousin happens to be in prison in Egypt. They’ve been interrogating him for over an hour.”

“Torturing him,” Stone said.

“Not much different from what you two did, is it?”

“It is different,” Stone said. “We broke a man’s fingers to get a computer password, which was instantly verifiable information.”

“There are three possible targets,” Begley said. “The chosen target is up to the discretion of the attackers, and depends on conditions at the site of attack. The first target is the below-ground restaurant level of Grand Central Terminal at lunch time. It’s always wall-to-wall people. We’re treating this as the most likely scenario. We’ve got men with Geiger counters at every entrance to the terminal.”

Luke shook his head. “You can’t trust it. They waterboard people in Egypt. You know that. They electrocute them. They hang them from the wrists. They impale them on iron rods. The subjects will say anything to make it stop.”

Begley went on, ignoring him. “Second most likely is the PATH train from Hoboken to Manhattan. Those trains are crowded, and they’re under the Hudson River for a long time. Same deal. We have Geiger counters in place at all entrances on both sides of the river. The third target involves causing a car accident in the Midtown Tunnel, then setting off the bomb after the traffic backs up. We’re checking all cars on both sides of the tunnel, but this is the least likely target. There are really too many variables at play to make an attack feasible. See what I mean, Stone? We’ve got the whole thing under control.”

“You’re wrong, Begley. You can’t trust intel you get from torture.”

“No. You’re wrong. You know why I told you the targets? Just so you would see exactly how wrong you are. You’ve been chasing phantoms. You’re out of the loop, and you’re under suspension. So go home and let the grown-ups handle this, okay?”

Begley turned to the two men flanking him. “I want this man, and the man over by the window, escorted from the building. Give them three minutes to gather up whatever belongings they have, and then get them out of here.”

Begley left, leaving silence in his wake.

Luke stood in the middle of the room, staring at the two men who would escort him out. The men watched him, their faces impassive. Luke glanced around the room. Everyone was looking at him.

Chapter 19

“I guess we’re not high priority anymore,” Ed Newsam said.

The black SUV sat parked just outside the concrete barriers of the 34th Street heliport, where they had come in nearly five hours before. Morning traffic buzzed past them on FDR Drive. The chopper wasn’t on the pad, so they sat in the back seat of the SUV and waited. As they watched, a big white Sikorsky came in over the river, an executive helicopter.

It landed, and a group of outrageous young people climbed out. One man wore tight black jeans and no shirt. His hair was blue and spiked, and the entirety of his scrawny upper body was covered in tattoos. Another very thin man wore an electric blue suit, with a matching bowler hat on top. The three women with them were dressed like prostitutes from two decades before, in mini-skirts, halter tops, and five-inch heels. The whole group were stumbling, laughing, and dropping things. They seemed drunk.

Two very large older men, one white and one black, both completely bald, walked behind the young people. The big men were conventionally dressed in black T-shirts and blue jeans.

They all piled into a white stretch limousine. In a moment, the limo pulled into traffic and disappeared. Their helicopter was already gone. It had touched down, disgorged them, and taken off again.

“You worried?” Luke said.

Newsam was slumped back in the seat, his normal downtime look. “About what?”

Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. Losing your job?”

Newsam smiled. “I don’t think they’ll fire me. It’s politics, man. Somebody high up is protecting Ali Nassar, that’s all. Listen, we got the right guy. You know it and I know it. If a dirty bomb goes off today, God forbid, heads will roll, but they won’t be our heads. A couple of people in the Middle East will die in air strikes. Ali Nassar will turn up smoked in an alleyway in Caracas. None of it will make the newspapers. You and I will quietly get bonuses to help us keep our mouths shut. We’ll never understand any of it, mostly because it doesn’t make sense. And the person pulling the strings will go on the same as before.”

Luke grunted. Cynical talk was widespread among intelligence agents. It wasn’t something that Luke usually got into. He had always tried to keep it simple. We were the good guys. Over there were the bad guys. That worldview was the protective veil that he wrapped around himself. He had to admit it was getting a workout this morning.

“And if a bomb doesn’t go off?”

Ed’s smile broadened. “I guess they’ll say we worked over a nice man who’s just trying to make the world a better place. What does it matter? You saw those kids come in a minute ago? Rock stars, TV stars, who knows? My little girls would probably know them on sight. You see those big guys with them? Bodyguards. I did a little bit of that when I first came back stateside. The hours are terrible because the kids are like werewolves. They only come out at night. But the money is good. I would do it again, if I had to. A man like me, who doesn’t get rusty, has a lot of options in this world.”

Luke’s phone rang. He glanced at the number. It was Becca.

“It’s my wife. I’m going to take this.”

“Go ahead,” Ed said. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

“Hi, babe,” Luke said as he hit the green button. He tried to put on a cheerful voice, more for her benefit than his own.

“Luke?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Hi.”

“Sweetheart, it’s good to hear your voice,” she said. “I’ve been worried about you, but I didn’t want to call. It’s been all over the television. That’s your case, right? The stolen nuclear materials?”

“Yes. It is.”

“How is it going?”

“I’m off the case as of twenty minutes ago. I’m actually on my way home.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Is that good or bad?”

“It’s office politics, I guess you’d say. But it’ll definitely be nice to get back and put this night behind me. What are you up to?”

“Well, Gunner and I have decided to take the day off and have a play date. He had a lot of trouble getting back to sleep last night, and so did I. We want you here with us, Luke. We want you to quit that silly job once and for all. So I figured Gunner has missed a total of four days of school all year, and I have plenty of personal days, so why not call in as well?”

“Sure,” Luke said. “Why not? What are you guys going to do?”

“We were going to go downtown. I wanted to go to the Air and Space Museum, and he wanted to go to the Spy Museum, naturally.”

Luke smiled. “Of course.”

“But now with this whole terror thing, I don’t know. Apparently they’re doubling security everywhere, especially tourist sites. It’s kind of scary. So I’m letting him sleep in for another hour, while I figure out something else to do. I guess we’ll have a late breakfast and then… what? Go to the movies? I doubt the terrorists will attack a movie theater in the suburbs during a matinee. Right?”

Now he almost laughed. “Ah… yeah. I don’t think they’d go to all this trouble if that was their target.”

“Maybe we’ll go to the indoor climbing gym after that, then get some crab cakes for lunch.”

“It sounds like a nice day.”

“Should we wait for you?” she said.

“I’d love to. But I’m waiting for a helicopter. I can’t predict when I’ll get home. Anyway, I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours.”

After they hung up, Luke closed his eyes and allowed himself to doze. Was Ed snoring next to him? It sure sounded like it. Luke imagined his future. The college semester was over now. He had taught a couple of adjunct classes, and he had enjoyed it. He could picture doing more of that, maybe going back for a master’s degree, and picking up a full professorship somewhere. A man like him, a former 75th Rangers and Delta Force special operations commando with worldwide deployments and combat experience, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, there would be a place for him.

He pictured this upcoming summer. He and Becca had a small summer house on Chesapeake Bay. The house had been in her family for generations. It was in a beautiful spot, on a bluff overlooking the water. A rickety staircase hugged the bluff down to their boating and swimming dock. In the summers, Luke kept an old motorboat there. Gunner was an age now where Luke could teach him some things. Maybe Luke would get him out on water skis this year. Maybe he’d teach him how to drive the boat.

Luke created an image in his mind. It was of the three of them, sitting at the table on the back patio at the summer house, as the sun set over the water toward the west. It was the end of a long day of swimming and boating. They were eating steamed mussels, and a bottle of chilled white wine was open on the table. He could see it all in vivid detail. As they all sat and laughed, an air raid siren shattered the quiet. It howled and howled, the shriek of it rising and falling.

He opened his eyes. His phone was ringing.

“Are you going to answer that?” Ed Newsam said. “Or you want me to?”

Luke picked it up without looking to see who was calling.

“Stone,” he said.

“Luke, it’s Trudy. Listen, I know you lied to me. I know you’re suspended. That’s an issue for another time.”

“Okay.”

“Some information just came in. It’s up on the big board right now. A man was brought into Baltimore Memorial Hospital in critical condition about forty minutes ago. He has acute radiation poisoning and at least two gunshot wounds in his back. He was found by two fishermen under a highway overpass along the Baltimore waterfront.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Eldrick Thomas. Also known as LT. Also known as Abdul Malik. Twenty-eight-year-old African American. Born and raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Substantial rap sheet, with multiple prison sentences over the past ten years. Assault, armed robbery, weapons possession. He is one strike away from going inside for a long time.”

“All right, he’s been a bad boy,” Luke said.

“More to the point, he was incarcerated with Ken Bryant on two occasions. Once for five months at Rikers Island, and once for almost two years at Clinton Correctional Center. He was affiliated with the same prison gang as Bryant, the Black Gangster Family. He converted from Christianity to Islam while in prison, and took on the Abdul Malik name. He had three disciplinary infractions where fights broke out because he was proselytizing to other inmates, especially about the need for jihad within the borders of the United States. One of these landed him in solitary confinement for a month.”

Luke was becoming alert. He glanced at Ed. Ed had picked up on Luke’s body language and sat up straight in his seat.

“Here’s the kicker,” Trudy said. “Eldrick Thomas and Ken Bryant were friends in prison. Their appearances were so similar that the other inmates, and the guards, often referred to them as the Twins. I’m looking at mug shots of them on Swann’s screen. They could be brothers. In fact, if you really wanted to take it that far, they could be mistaken for the same man.”

“Why is he in Baltimore?” Luke said.

“No one knows.”

“Has anyone spoken to him?”

“Negative. He was unconscious when they brought him in. He’s in surgery at this moment, getting the bullets removed. He’s under general anesthesia.”

“Is he going to live?”

“They expect him to survive surgery. Beyond that is anyone’s guess.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

He could feel her smile on the other end of the phone. “I just thought you might want to know.”

“Who are my chopper pilots?” Luke said.

“Rachel and Jacob,” Trudy said. “I ordered them special for you.”

“Friendlies,” Luke said.

“That’s right.”

The call ended. Luke glanced out at the water. A black Bell helicopter was coming in. That was their ride. His bug-out bag was at his feet. He opened it and pawed around for his Dexedrine pills. He found them and held the bottle up for Ed’s inspection.

“Dexies,” Ed said. “I used to live on them in Afghanistan. Take ’em long enough and they’ll kill you, ya know.”

Luke nodded.

“I know.”

He opened the bottle and carefully poured two capsules into his palm. One half of each capsule was reddish-brown, the other half clear.

“It looks like we have one more shot at this, if we want it. You up for bending a few more rules this morning?”

Ed took a capsule from between Luke’s fingers. He popped it in his mouth and swallowed. He glanced at his watch.

“I think I can make some time.”

Chapter 20

He drifted, listening to the sounds.

Music was playing, some kind of quiet classical music with violins and piano. The people gathered around him were talking in mechanical voices.

“Scissors. Scalpel. Suction. I said suction! Can’t you clear that out some more?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Then: “He was lucky. An inch to the left and it would have nicked his aorta. He’d have been dead in a couple of minutes.”

Eldrick wasn’t interested in the doctors, and he wasn’t interested in the body on the table. They were all below him now, and he caught a glimpse of the thing the doctors were working so hard to save. It reminded him of a dead dog by the side of the road. It didn’t seem like something worth saving.

He turned and through the doorway he saw his grandmother in the next room, standing at the stove and stirring a pot. Something smelled really good.

“LT, get your butt in here.”

He ran in there. It was afternoon, the sun was shining outside the windows of their apartment, and he wanted to go down to the park and play some ball. But the smell of dinner was enough to make him shake with anticipation. It was a happy time, before everything had gone so wrong.

“You finish your homework, honey?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

He smiled.

She turned to him, and her face was serious. “You’ve done a bad thing, haven’t you?”

He wasn’t a child after all. He was a grown man, and she was the little old lady she became before breast cancer took her away.

He nodded. “I did a bad thing.”

“Can you make it right?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know if anything will ever be right again.”

“Here come a couple of them,” Luke said.

He and Ed stood in a hospital corridor, about twenty yards from a door marked PHARMACY. A few moments before, Luke had tried to open it. It was locked. Up the hall, two men in blue scrubs and white lab jackets walked toward them. They were chatting and laughing about something.

There were surveillance cameras every at every corner. It didn’t matter. Luke planned to act fast. He was already in trouble. What was a little more?

“Excuse me, guys,” Luke said. “Are you men doctors?”

“Yes we are,” one said, a fit middle-aged guy in wire frame glasses. “What’s the trouble?”

Luke stepped close to the man. His gun was out. He pressed it to the man’s stomach, down low, away from the video cameras. He put a friendly hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t say a word, either of you.”

Ed stepped in close behind the second man. Luke could see a gun in Ed’s hand. He pressed the muzzle hard into the small of the second doctor’s back.

“We’re not going to hurt you, if you do exactly what I say.”

The first doctor, so confident a moment before, was trembling. “I…” he said. He couldn’t speak.

“It’s okay,” Luke said. “Don’t talk. I need you to open the door to the pharmacy over there. That’s all I need you to do. Open the door and come inside with me for a few minutes.”

The second doctor was calmer. He was balding, with thick glasses, more heavyset than the first. “That’s fine. If you need drugs, that’s fine. We’ll get you what you need. But there are security cameras everywhere. You’re not going to get very far.”

Luke smiled. “We’re not going very far.”

The men turned as a group and went to the door. The second doctor swiped his key card against the reader and the light turned green. Luke opened the door. Inside the room were numerous locked cabinets.

“What do you need?” the doctor said.

“Ritalin,” Luke said. “Two injections.”

“Ritalin?” the man said.

“Yes. Quickly now, I don’t have a lot of time.”

The doctor paused. “Sir, you won’t get high from Ritalin. If you have an attention deficit, you can easily get it with a prescription. You don’t have to go to all this trouble. There are programs that will help you pay. And anyway, Ritalin isn’t the preferred—”

Luke shook his head. “We’re not in school anymore, Doc. Let’s just assume I know what I’m doing, and you don’t know what I’m doing. Okay?”

The doctor shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He opened a cabinet, showed Luke the bottle, and prepared the injections. While he worked, Ed placed four plastic zip ties on the counter. He opened a drawer and found a couple of small hand towels and some surgical tape. He put the items next to the zip ties.

The doctor finished preparing the injections, and passed the syringes across the counter.

“Very good,” Luke said. “Thank you. Now I need you to do one more thing before we leave.”

“All right,” the doctor said.

“Take off your clothes,” Luke said. “Both of you.”

Luke and Ed, dressed in surgical gowns and gloves, walked through the crowd of police officers standing outside the door to Eldrick Thomas’s room. They paused and put their surgical masks on before they went in.

A yellow and black triangular sign was affixed to the door. DANGER: RISK OF RADIATION.

Beneath that was another sign. It was a series of instructions.

A cop touched Luke on the arm. “When can we expect him to wake up?”

Luke gave him the serious doctor face. “You mean if he wakes up. We’re doing the best we can. You guys just need to wait a little longer.”

They went inside. Thomas lay flat on a hospital bed, asleep. Random spots on his face and neck were flushed a deep, dark red. His wrists and ankles were fastened to the metal rails of the bed with plastic flex cuffs. Various machines monitored his vital signs. Two cops in surgical masks and gloves stood in one corner, as far from Thomas as the room would allow.

“Guys, can you please give us a few minutes with the patient?” Ed said.

“We’re not supposed to leave the room,” one cop said.

Ed said the magic words, the ones that would start a bureaucratic shoving match if the patient weren’t radioactive. “I’m sorry, but your presence conflicts with the provision of medical care.” Then he smiled. “Anyway, the guy is tied to the bed. He’s not going anywhere. Just give us a minute, okay?”

The cops went out, probably happy to get away.

Luke walked straight to Thomas’s side. He took the cap off the syringe, turned Thomas’s left arm, found the thick vein at the crook of his elbow, and gave him the injection.

“Ritalin, huh?” Ed said.

Luke shrugged. “It brings people right out of general anesthesia. Not exactly FDA approved, but it works like a charm.”

He stepped back. “Shouldn’t be long.”

A minute passed, then two minutes. Halfway through the third minute, Luke thought he saw a slight flutter in the eyelids.

“Eldrick,” he said. “Wake up.”

Eldrick’s eyes slowly opened. He blinked. He looked very tired. He looked like he was a hundred years old.

“My chest hurts,” he said, his voice rising just above a whisper. He glanced slowly around without moving his head. “Where am I?”

Luke shook his head. “It doesn’t matter where you are. You were in New York last night. You stole radioactive materials from Center Medical Center. You were working with Ken Bryant and Ibrahim Abdulraman. They were both murdered. So were two security guards.”

Memory flooded into the man’s face. He barely moved a muscle. He seemed so weak that he could die any minute. But his eyes were hard. “Cops?” he said.

Luke nodded. “We need to know where and when the bomb goes off.”

Eldrick Thomas looked at Ed. He made a gesture with his head toward Luke. “Hey, bro. Get this white devil pig out of here.”

He closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. “After that, I’ll tell you whatever I know.”

Luke waited in the hall, fifty yards down from the wall of cops. It wasn’t long before Ed came out. He walked quickly.

“Come on, man. Let’s go.”

Luke walked fast, keeping up with Ed’s pace. “What’s up?”

“I think he had a heart attack,” Ed said. “Maybe the Ritalin was too much for him. I don’t know. I hit the alarm before I left.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah. He did.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know if I can believe it.”

Luke stopped. Ed stopped, too.

“We need to keep walking,” Ed said.

Luke shook his head. “What’s the target?”

Above their heads, the hospital intercom came on. A woman’s voice, calm, mechanical, almost robotic. Code Blue, Code Blue. Third Floor, Room 318. Third Floor, Room 318. Code Blue… Frantic doctors and staff ran past them in the halls, bumping shoulders.

“It’s timed for the start of Ramadan in Iran. 8:24 p.m., which is 10:54 a.m. here.” He looked at his watch. “Just over one hour from now.”

“Where?” Luke demanded.

Ed stared back grimly. For the first time, Luke saw despair on Ed’s face.

“The White House.”

Chapter 21

The pilots were bad-asses.

The chopper flew low and fast. The landscape buzzed by below them, almost close enough to touch. Luke barely noticed. He shouted into the telephone. He kept losing the call. The hand-off process from one cell tower to the next was iffy at over a hundred miles per hour.

“We need to evacuate the White House,” he said. “Trudy! Do you hear me?”

Her voice cut through the static. “Luke, there’s a warrant for your arrest. You and Ed. It just came through.”

“Why? Because of the doctors? We didn’t hurt them.”

There was a burst of static. The call dropped.

“Trudy? Trudy! Shit!”

He looked at Ed.

“He told me they were in the Dun-Rite Laundry van,” Ed said. “The signs were magnetic decals. They took them off in Baltimore, and changed the license plates. There may be surveillance cameras near where Thomas was found. They might pick up the trail on the van’s location that way.”

Luke’s phone rang. He picked it up.

“Trudy.”

“Luke, before you say another thing, let me speak. Eldrick Thomas is dead. He had a massive heart attack. You and Ed are on video surveillance. It’s clear in the video that you gave Thomas a shot of some kind.”

“Ritalin, to wake him up,” Luke said.

“Ed leaned in close just before Thomas died.”

“Trudy, Thomas was giving Ed the information. Do you understand? Eldrick Thomas is not the issue right now. The attack is planned for the White House. All the evidence points to a drone attack. They were in the Dun-Rite Laundry van. They changed the markings. We need to find the van and we need to get everyone out of the White House. Now.”

Another burst of static came in.

“They’re not going to… Luke? Luke?”

“I’m here.”

“They’re watching Grand Central and the Hoboken PATH station. They closed the Midtown Tunnel. I spoke with Ron Begley. They don’t believe it’s the White House. They think you killed Eldrick Thomas. The arrest warrant is for murder.”

“What? Why would I murder Eldrick Thomas?”

The phone cut out again.

Luke looked at Ed. “We’ll get the pilots to radio it in.”

Ed shook his head. “No good. Nobody’s going to believe us. And if we tell the pilots to radio it in, everybody’s going to know where we are. No. We have to go in ourselves. And we have to go in stealth.”

Luke went up to the cockpit and poked his head inside.

He knew these two — Rachel and Jacob. They were old friends of his, and they’d flown together for years. Both of them were former U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Luke and Ed were used to flying with people like this. The 160th SOAR were the Delta Force of helicopter pilots.

Rachel was as tough as they came. You don’t join an elite group of Army special operations pilots as a woman. You brawl your way in. Which was perfect for Rachel — her off-work hobby was cage fighting. Meanwhile, Jacob was as steady as a rock. His calm under fire was legendary, almost surreal. His hobby was mountaintop meditation retreats. The two of them might know Luke was suspended. They might even know there was a warrant for his arrest. But they also knew Luke was Delta, and they weren’t the types to ask too many questions.

“How close can you get us to the White House?” Luke said.

“You got a lunch date?” Rachel said.

Luke shrugged. “Come on.”

“South Capitol Street heliport,” Jacob said. “It’s a DC Metro Police pad, closed to all other traffic, but I know them. I can squeeze us in there. They’re about three miles from the White House.”

“I need an SRT car waiting for us,” Luke said. “No driver, just the car. Okay?”

“Got it,” Rachel said. She glanced back at him.

“I’ll tell you all about it later,” he said.

Luke went back to the hold. Ed stood by the open cargo door.

Luke shouted at him. “We got a helipad three miles from the White House, and we’ll have a car there that we drive.”

Ed nodded. “That sounds right.”

The phone rang again. Luke looked at the caller ID. He didn’t want to talk about arrest warrants anymore, or about who believed what. This time, when he answered, he barely spoke to her.

“Trudy, put Mark Swann on the phone.”

Chapter 22

“We’re never going to make it.”

Luke drove the company SUV toward the White House through mid-morning traffic. It was stop and go. They were running out of time.

The phone was plastered to his ear. It rang and rang. Finally, it picked up. For the third or fourth time in a row, he got her voicemail. She had told him that she and Gunner planned on going to the movies.

Her voice was vibrant and bright. He pictured her: beautiful, smiling, optimistic, and energetic. “Hi, this is Becca. I can’t answer your call right now. Please leave a message after the tone, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

“Becca!” he said. He took a breath. He didn’t want to alarm her. “I need you to do something for me. I don’t have time to explain. When you get this message, drive straight to the country house. Don’t go home. Don’t stop to pick up anything. Just get on the highway and go. If you need anything, you can always get it over there. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.” He paused. “I love you both so much. Do this for me. Don’t hesitate. Just go now, as soon as you hear this.”

He hung up. Next to him, Ed sat ramrod straight. A thick vein stuck out on Ed’s forehead. He was sweating.

“We gotta get around this traffic somehow,” Luke said.

Ed reached into the glove compartment and pulled out an LED siren light. He mounted it on the dashboard, turned it on, and then hit the siren switch. Outside the car, the shriek of the siren was impossibly loud.

WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH.

“Go!” Ed said.

Luke pulled into oncoming traffic and laid on the horn. He tapped the accelerator, raced to the next light, then veered back into his own lane. He stomped on it now and the car took off like a missile.

“Go, man! Go!” Ed screamed.

Up ahead, cars at the next light pulled off to the right like a herd of animals. Luke blew through the intersection, going seventy miles per hour.

The phone rang.

“Swann?”

The voice had a subtle twang. “Luke, it’s Don Morris.”

“Don, I have to keep this line clear.”

“Son, what are you doing? They told me you killed a man in a hospital in Baltimore.”

Luke shook his head. “I didn’t kill anyone. They’re going to attack the White House. That’s what this has been all along.”

“That’s not true, Luke. In the past ten minutes, they arrested two Arab kids, one at Grand Central and one in Hoboken. They were both carrying pressure cooker bombs in knapsacks. NSA is tracking down their identities and affiliations right now.”

“Pressure cookers aren’t dirty bombs!” Luke said. He heard the shrillness in his own voice. He sounded like a crazy person. He had barely slept in twenty-four hours. He knew that. His perceptions might be off. But this far off? Could it be? He glanced at the speedometer. They were going eighty-five miles an hour on city streets.

“The pressure cookers were cat’s paws,” Don said. “The bombs weren’t even operational. The bad guys sent the kids in to see what the response would be. Now they know the targets are compromised.”

Luke tried to slow his voice down, so that he and Don could have a rational conversation. He wanted to make Don understand what Luke thought was painfully clear. “Don, we talked to Eldrick Thomas. He was one of the thieves. We didn’t kill him. He died of radiation poisoning. He told us the target is the White House.”

“Luke, I know who he was. The intel we have is that besides everything else, Eldrick Thomas was a professional conman. He was playing you, that’s all. That’s what conmen do. They play people right up to the end. He tells you it’s the White House. Security gets beefed up, and people think he’s cooperating. If he lives, maybe he gets a better plea deal. The man was in and out of prison his entire life. But he knows the target is the White House. Do you think the people behind this would trust a low-level hoodlum with that kind of information?”

Luke didn’t say a word.

“You can still call this off,” Don said. “Come back to headquarters. I’ll meet you there. If you say you didn’t kill him, I believe you. I’ll do whatever I can to protect you. We’ll get a psychiatrist in. He’ll say you had a PTSD episode. A psychotic break. Your combat record will support that. You might have to do a few days in-patient stay, but you will get out of this.”

Luke couldn’t believe the things he was hearing.

“I have to keep this line clear,” he said.

“You’re all the way out there now, Luke. If you go much further, you’re going to be by yourself.”

A call was coming through.

“Don, I have to run.”

“Luke! Don’t you dare hang up this phone.”

Ahead was the gate to the White House. Ed turned off the bubble light and the siren. Luke slowed the SUV. He held his phone out so he could see the screen. The person trying to call through was Swann.

Luke toggled the call in. “Swann. Did you get us the Secret Service clearance?”

Swann was hesitant. “I think so.”

“You think so?”

“You both have murder warrants, Luke. Give me a break. Yeah, it looks like you have Yankee White clearance, Category One. You’re cleared to work directly with the President and Vice President. But it’s fake. In thirty seconds, the Secret Service database could cross-reference the crime database and kick you out again. Someone could double-check it and find that the clearance was approved in the past five minutes. I can’t guarantee anything. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty at best. How soon will you be there?”

“We’re there now. We’re pulling into the driveway.”

“Well, all right then. I guess we’re about to see how good I am.”

Luke hung up. He toggled back to Don.

“Don?”

The line was dead.

The guardhouse was up ahead. It was protected by concrete barriers. There was both a STOP sign and a DO NOT ENTER sign. Four men in suits loitered by the entrance. NOTICE, another sign read. RESTRICTED AREA. 100 % ID CHECK.

Luke turned to Ed. Ed’s face was slick and shiny with sweat.

“Ready?” Luke said.

“Ready for anything.”

Luke felt a trickle of sweat inside his shirt. They were about to bluff their way into the White House. They would get as far as they could on fake security clearances, then bull through the rest of the way. They were going to try to override the entire Secret Service security apparatus and evacuate the President on their own orders, two men from a different agency, and who had been suspended from duty hours ago. And all of this was on the say-so of a dead career criminal who may or may not have been lying.

For a brief moment, Luke could almost see Don’s point. From the outside, this must seem like a crazy idea.

A guard appeared at Luke’s left elbow. Luke had driven up to the gatehouse on autopilot. Numb, he handed the man his identification along with Ed’s. The man went away, but came back a minute later.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “These are both rejected. You don’t have clearance.”

“Maybe it’s a sign,” Ed said.

“Run them again, please,” Luke said.

Ahead of them, the gate opened. The security guard reappeared.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Must be a glitch in the system.”

Luke drove slowly through the White House gate.

Swann was good. He was very, very good.

They entered the West Wing, passed through an identification check, then moved quickly down a hall lined with Greek-style columns. Their footsteps echoed on the marble floor. They turned right, and the entrance to the Oval Office was just ahead.

Two Secret Service men stood outside the door.

“Hi, fellas,” one of them said. “That’s far enough.”

Luke raised his badge. “FBI. We have Yankee White security clearance. We need to talk to President Hayes.”

“The President is in a meeting.”

“He’ll want to hear what we have to say.”

The guy shook his head. “We weren’t told anything about this. You’ll have to wait while we check it out.”

Ed didn’t hesitate. He punched the first man in the throat, then spun and caught the second man across the jaw with an elbow. The first man went to the floor clutching at his throat. Ed crouched, slammed his head against the stone floor, then was back up again. The second man was reaching for his gun when Ed punched him in the face. The man was unconscious before he hit the floor.

Luke and Ed burst through the door to the Oval Office.

Across the room from them, the President was there, and so was the Vice President. They were poring over what looked like a giant map draped on the President’s desk. Behind them, three tall windows looked out on the Rose Garden. A man was taking photographs. A young man with thinning hair stood nearby. Half a dozen other people were in the room.

When Luke and Ed came in, the President stood up straight. He was very tall.

Four Secret Service agents drew their guns.

“Freeze! On the ground!”

In the middle of the room, the cream-colored carpet had a round Seal of the President. Luke stepped into it. He raised his hands.

“FBI,” he said. “I have an important message for the President.”

He was tackled from behind. In a second, his cheek was against the carpet. His arms were twisted painfully behind him. A man’s foot was on his face. A few feet away, Ed was in the same position.

“FBI!” Luke screamed. “Federal agents!”

They had his badge and ID. They took his gun from its holster. He felt them pull up his pants legs and take away his extra gun and his knife.

“What is going on here?” the President said.

Three men held Luke down. A heavy arm was against his neck. It hurt to move. It was hard to speak. “Sir. I’m Agent Stone with the FBI Special Response Team. This is Agent Newsam. You are in danger. We have reliable intelligence suggesting there is a plot to attack the White House with a dirty bomb. That attack is scheduled to coincide with the start of Ramadan in Tehran, less than fifteen minutes from now.”

President Hayes moved closer. He towered over Luke.

“It isn’t true,” a female voice said.

Luke craned his neck enough to see Susan Hopkins, the Vice President. She was very pretty, like a veteran television announcer. She wore a gray pin-striped suit and her blonde hair in a short bob. “We just received a report that the threat was contained to New York City, and has been neutralized.”

“There isn’t enough time to tell you everything,” Luke said. “We have to evacuate the entire building, and we’re almost out of time. If we’re wrong, that’s very embarrassing. The White House had a bomb scare and was evacuated for no reason. But if you’re wrong… I don’t want to think about that.”

Everyone looked at the President. He was a man accustomed to making difficult decisions. He paused for all of seven seconds.

“Get everyone out,” he said. “Initiate evacuation protocols for all staff. Ten minutes from now, I don’t want a single person inside this building.”

Chapter 23

They rode an elevator deep into the bowels of the earth. Ten people were on board: the President, the Vice President, the President’s young chief of staff, Ed and Luke, and five Secret Service agents. One of the agents carried a black leather satchel, secured to his wrist with a metal clasp. Somewhere above them, an alarm was going off.

“How sure of this are you?” the President said.

Luke’s face was rug burned. The back and side of his neck was sore. He could feel a welt rising on his jaw. His mouth was bleeding.

“I’m not sure of anything, sir.”

“If you’re wrong, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

“Sir, I think you may not appreciate the full extent of that trouble.”

The elevator doors opened. They exited into to a cavernous lighted chamber, disappearing into the distance. Two black limousines were lined up just outside the elevator. Luke found himself in the second car, with Ed, the Vice President, and two Secret Service agents.

Ed’s face was a mess. His right eye was swollen half shut. The lid was cut and bleeding.

The car sped through the tunnel, yellow lights zooming overhead.

“I, for one, hope that you’re wrong,” Susan Hopkins said.

“So do I,” Luke said. “More than anything.”

At the far end of the tunnel, they took another elevator to the surface. They came out at a helipad. A big gray Sikorsky was on the pad, its rotors already turning. They climbed aboard and the helicopter took off.

As they rose, Luke saw that they were rising from a wooded area about half a mile from the White House. They hovered at a distance. The President stared at the building. Luke did, too.

“If something were going to happen, it would be happening right around now,” the President said. “Isn’t that right?”

Luke glanced at his watch. “It’s 10:53.”

“A dirty bomb tends to be small,” Ed said. “We might not see anything from this distance.”

“It may be a drone attack,” Luke said. “If so, we might—”

Suddenly, his words were cut off as the Oval Office exploded.

A flash of red and yellow light appeared behind the tall windows. The glass shattered. The walls seemed to bulge, then blew outward onto the lawn.

Another, larger explosion destroyed the West Wing.

As they watched, the roof caved in.

A series of explosions walked down the Colonnade toward the main Residence in the center. Everyone watched the flames consume one of the enduring symbols of the United States. A huge explosion, the largest one yet, ripped through the Residence. A huge chunk of masonry flew upwards, spinning end over end. Luke watched its arc as it disintegrated in the air.

Suddenly the helicopter shuddered. It dropped sickeningly before the pilots caught it, and it started its ascent again.

“It’s a shockwave,” Luke said. “We’re okay.”

The helicopter turned and headed west. They all flew in silence, exchanging dazed looks. Luke looked at Ed’s damaged face. He looked like a boxer who had just lost a fight. There was nothing left to say.

Behind them, the White House burned.