Shock Warning

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“Captain Byrne? I’m Hope Gardner.”

Frankie looked at the woman standing in front of his desk. She’d been brought from Stewart directly to the CTU in a car with its rear windows tinted both inside and out and a partition between her and the driver. The location of the Counter-Terrorism Unit was still a secret, and Byrne wanted to keep it that way.

“Very pleased to meet you. I gather we shared some experiences on Forty-second Street during the… late unpleasantness. Your husband is a mighty fine man, Mrs. Gardner.”

“He’s not my husband… yet,” she said, and that explained it all.

“Then I wish you both nothing but the best, when the time is right. All I can say is, your fiancé is a lucky man.”

Hope looked down. “Thank you, Captain Byrne.”

“So let’s both make him proud. Here’s the deal. I understand that the man who flew the police helicopter for me over the East River—‘Martin Ferguson,’ I think he called himself — is on assignment somewhere classified, and very dangerous. I further understand — nobody told me this, but I’m not as dumb as I look — that he’s with the man who saved my life—”

“—and ours. He got us to the hospital after… after the building collapsed…”

“Well, whoever he is, he is one hell of a guy and I hope some day I can shake his hand…. So the bottom line is, right now, you are to be the secure line of communication between Mr. ‘Ferguson’ and my department. Which tells me something I am very unhappy to hear.”

“What is that, Captain?”

“It tells me that Washington doesn’t trust my department. It tells me that my department is leaking to somebody. It tells me that I have a mole in my department who is sharing information — not with the enemy, as far as I can tell, but with the FBI.”

“And is that a bad thing? I thought that the whole point of learning from 9/11 was that there shouldn’t be walls between… between, you know, all those agencies.”

“This is one wall that needs to stay in place, for a lot of reasons,” replied Byrne. He paused a moment to collect himself, trying to decide exactly how much to tell the attractive woman sitting across the desk from him. He decided to tell her everything; a world of deception was not something the country could afford at this moment.

“Mrs. Gardner—”

“Hope.”

“Hope, we have very strong reason to believe that there is a nuclear device hidden somewhere in the Mount Sinai Medical Center uptown.” He watched her carefully for a reaction. Nothing. Good. “In fact, information has just come to light that means were are certain of it. This bomb, based on the telephoned warnings we’ve received, is set to go off within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and my detectives, members of the NYPD bomb squad, and personnel from the Atomic Energy Commission are all on the site. I will do my damnedest not to put you in any danger, but I want to be very clear with you that it can’t be ruled out.”

“You mean the bomb could go off. What would happen then?”

“Depending on the yield — and mind you, we’re not certain the technology really exists to fashion such a device; for all we know, it may just be a dirty bomb, although a very dangerous one — it could destroy the Upper East Side and render much of the island of Manhattan uninhabitable for a hundred years. There would be a tremendous loss of life.”

“I understand.”

“And worse — yes, there is a ‘worse’—it would completely panic the country. After 9/11 we still had some spunk although, if you want my opinion, we reacted in exactly the wrong way. Instead of cowering, and rushing to assure the Muslim world we meant it no harm, and putting a bunch of Muslim-looking bylines in the New York Times, we should have taken the fight right overseas — not to Afghanistan, who gives a shit about Afghanistan, but right to Saudi Arabia, where we should have deposed the royal family and taken the Saudi oil fields into protective custody, to preserve the supply of energy for all the world. Wait, I’m not finished.

“Instead of treating our own people like potential terrorists every time they get on an airplane, we should have shut down immigration from the Middle East, expelled all the ‘students’ from that region until they could be vetted, and cut off all travel and technology to the Islamic countries — thrown a cordon sanitaire around them until they learned to act like civilized human beings. And then allowed them to kill each other until they had sorted themselves out and were ready to play nice with the rest of the world again. If ever. That way, your kids could get on a plane and not be pawed by the TSA gorillas, OPEC would have been broken, and we — especially we here in New York — could resume our lives without fear.”

Hope looked at him in amazement. She’d never heard anybody talk like this.

“Now you see why I’ll never be elected president,” said Byrne, rising. “Do you think you can handle a trip uptown, have a look around?”

“Of course, Captain.”

“Great. Now, how are you going to communicate with Mr. ‘Ferguson’?”

“Danny. His name is Danny. Danny Impellatieri. With this.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out something that looked like a stripped-down smartphone and showed it to Byrne. “They told me it was a prototype, a direct line to him, totally secure.”

“And I’m sure they’re right. Now put that thing away and don’t let anybody see you using it. There are a couple of people at the hospital you need to meet.”

They got into one of the secure blacked-out cars in the basement. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but it’s for your own protection.”

“I’ve seen New York already, Captain,” said Hope.

The ride uptown was uneventful. They went in through the hospital’s VIP entrance on Madison.

But it didn’t matter. She was right there, as Byrne halffeared.

“Hello, Captain Byrne,” said Principessa. Byrne looked around. She was alone — no team, no cameras, no sound guys. “Don’t worry, I won’t bite.” She gave Hope the onceover. “Who’s your date?”

“Knock it off, Ms. Stanley,” said Byrne.

“It’s the same guy, isn’t it? Archibald Grant and this ghost you’re chasing. The guy who saved me… and the guy who saved you, too… Am I right?”

She really was much smarter than she looked.

“I’m afraid I’m busy just now, Ms. Stanley.”

“Principessa.”

“Whatever. Call my office and we’ll talk later.”

She blocked the way. She was a big, healthy girl who had long since learned how to use that body of hers as a weapon. She got close to him, dropped her voice. “What’s going on, Frankie? And who’s the dame?”

“What, do you think you’re in a road-company version of His Girl Friday? Gimme a break and let me do my job, lady.”

“I’m just trying to do mine. We ought to be on the same team, Captain. The Archibald Grant team.”

“Who’s Archibald Grant?” asked Hope, innocently. Byrne cringed. Principessa Stanley was like a shark, and she always headed toward the blood in the water.

“He’s a fake,” she said. “A character, a joker, who poses as a bigdome while saving the world in his spare time. He’s Batman and Superman combined and, you know… when you get him out from underneath that makeup and that fat suit, he’s probably hell on the ladies. Except that I gather he has a girlfriend, so I guess we’re both out of luck.”

There had been a woman in the car. A real babe. That’s what Sam Raclette had told her after he recovered from the car crash in New Orleans. She had paid Raclette to follow Grant after the RAND lecture in the Crescent City. Exactly what had happened to him when he was tailing a car with a man and a woman in it he wasn’t exactly sure, except that all of a sudden his car flipped over under the Pontchartrain Expressway and that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up in Charity Hospital.

“Come on, Captain. You know who he is, don’t you? You can tell me. I need something to take back to my boss, Jake Sinclair.”

Byrne took Hope by the arm and started walking. “Jake Sinclair is the last man on earth I’d want to help. So why don’t you run back to him like a good little girl and tell him mean old Francis Byrne won’t give you a thing.”

Byrne stopped and turned around. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked. He knew she was a good newswoman, so something must have brought her here. He said a silent prayer that it didn’t have anything to do with his case, but in his heart, it knew it did.

“I got a tip,” she said coyly. She took a step or two backward. Make him come to her, now that she had his attention.

He bit. “What kind of a tip?”

“That some big shot was coming up from Washington on a national-security case. I figured I’d show up and say hello.”

Byrne let go of Hope and walked back to Principessa. He dropped his voice. “I ought to rip that fucking wig right off your head. You know something, tell me.”

“Oooh, trying to scare the little girl,” mocked Principessa. The chick had balls, he had to give her that. She’d taken just about the worst that Raymond Crankheit threw at her and had survived. She wasn’t about to be intimidated by him.

Whether she was or was not, however, was immediately rendered moot as a taxi pulled up in the underground driveway. Byrne knew instantly who it was. The last person on earth he wanted to see.

A man got out of the car. Principessa sashshayed over to him — that really was the only word to describe her motion — and greeted him with a kiss as he got out. “Look who’s here,” she said, indicating Byrne and Hope Gardner.

He let out a short, barking laugh. “Old home week. Hello, Frankie,” said Tom Byrne, deputy director of the FBI.