The Last Templar

Chapter 4

A t the edge of the museum's steps, Sean Reilly stood carefully outside the yellow and black crime scene tape. He ran a hand over his short brown hair as he looked down at the outline where the headless body had lain. He let his eyes drift down lower, following the trail of blood splatters to where a basketball-sized mark noted the position of the head.

Nick Aparo walked over and peered around his partner's shoulder. Round-faced, balding, and ten years older than Reilly's thirty-eight, he was average height, average build, average looking. You could forget what he looked like while you were still talking to him, a useful quality for an agent and one he had exploited very successfully during the years Reilly had known him. Like Reilly, he wore a loose-fitting, dark-blue Windbreaker over his charcoal suit with big white letters, FBI, printed on the back. Right now, his mouth was twisted in distaste.

"I don't think the coroner's gonna have too much trouble figuring that one out," he observed.

Reilly nodded. He couldn't take his eyes off the markings of where the head had lain, the pool of blood leading down from it now dark. Why was it, he wondered, that being shot or stabbed to death didn't seem quite as bad as having your head chopped off? It occurred to him that official execution by beheading was standard procedure in some parts of the world. Parts of the world that had spawned many of the terrorists whose intentions had the country gripped by heightened alert levels; terrorists whose trails consumed all of his days and more than a few of his nights.

He turned to Aparo. "What's the word on the mayor's wife?" He knew she had been dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the park, along with the horses.

"She's just shaken," Aparo answered. "She's got more bruises to her ego than to her butt."

"Good thing there's an election coming. It'd be a shame to see a good bruising go to waste." Reilly looked around, his mind still coming to terms with the shock of what had taken place right where he was standing. "Still nothing from the roadblocks?"

Roadblocks had been set up at a ten-block radius and at all bridges and tunnels leading into and out of Manhattan.

"Nope. These guys knew what they were doing. They weren't waiting around for a cab."

Reilly nodded. Professionals. Well organized.

Great.

As if amateurs couldn't do as much damage these days. All it took was a couple of flying lessons or a truckload of fertilizer, along with a suicidal, psychotic disposition—none of which were exacdy in short supply.

He surveyed the ravaged scene in silence. As he did, he felt an up-welling of utter frustration and anger. The randomness of these deadly acts of madness, and their infuriating propensity to catch everyone off guard, never ceased to amaze him. Still, something about this particular crime scene seemed odd—even distracting. He realized he felt a strange detachment, standing there. It was all somehow too outlandish to take in, after the grim and potentially disastrous scenarios he and his colleagues had been trying to second-guess for the last few years. He felt as if he were stuck outside the big tent, distracted away from the main event by some freakish sideshow. And yet in a disturbing way, and much to his annoyance, he felt somewhat grateful for it.

As special agent in charge heading up the field office's Domestic Terrorism Unit, he had suspected the raid would end up in his corner from the moment he'd gotten the call. Not that he minded the mind-boggling job of coordinating the work of dozens of agents and police officers, as well as the analysts, lab technicians, psychologists, photographers, and countless others. It was what he always wanted to do.

He had always felt he could make a difference.

No, make that known. And would.

***

The feeling had crystallized during his years at Notre Dame's law school. Reilly felt that a lot of things were wrong in this world—his father's death, when he was only ten, was painful proof of that

—and he wanted to help make it a better place, at least for other people, if not for himself. The feeling became inescapable the day when, working on a paper involving a case of race crime, he attended a white supremacist rally in Terre Haute. The event had affected Reilly deeply. He felt he had been witnessing evil, and he felt a pressing need to understand it more if he was going to help fight it.

His first plan didn't work out quite as well as he'd hoped. In a youthful burst of idealism, he had decided to become a navy pilot. The idea of helping rid the world of evil from the cockpit of a silver Tomcat sounded perfect. Fortunately, he turned out to be just the kind of recruit the navy was looking for. Unfortunately, they had something else in mind. They had more than enough Top Gun wannabes; what they needed were lawyers. The recruiters did their best to get him to join the Judge Advocate General Corps, and Reilly flirted with the idea for a while, but ultimately decided against it and went back to focus on passing the Indiana bar exam.

It was a chance meeting in a secondhand bookstore that diverted his path again, this time for good.

That was where he met a retired FBI agent who was only too happy to talk to him about the Bureau and encourage him to apply, which he did as soon as he passed the bar. His mother wasn't too thrilled with the idea of his spending seven years in college to end up as what she called "a glorified cop," but Reilly knew it was right for him.

He was barely a year into his rookie stint in the Chicago office, logging some street duty on robbery and drug-trafficking squads, when on the twenty-sixth of February 1993 everything changed. That was the day a bomb exploded in a parking lot underneath the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring over a thousand. The conspirators had actually planned to topple one of the towers onto the other while simultaneously releasing a cloud of cyanide gas. Only financial limitations had prevented them from achieving their objective; they simply ran out of money. They didn't have enough gas canisters for the bomb that, apart from being too meager to fulfill its nefarious purpose, was also placed alongside the wrong column, one that wasn't of critical structural importance.

The attack, although a failure, was nevertheless a serious wake-up call. It demonstrated that a small group of unsophisticated, low-level terrorists with very little funding or resources could cause a huge amount of damage. Intelligence agencies scrambled to re-allocate their resources to meet this new threat.

And so less than a year after joining the Bureau, Reilly found himself working out of the Bureau's New York City field office. The office had long had the reputation of being the worst place to work because of the high cost of living, the traffic problems, and the need to live quite a way out of the city if one wanted anything more spacious than a broom closet. But given that the city had always generated more action than anywhere else in the country, it was the dream posting of most new, and naive, special agents. Reilly was such an agent when he'd been assigned to the city.

He wasn't new, or naive, anymore.

As he looked around, Reilly knew the chaos surrounding him was going to monopolize his life for the foreseeable future. He made a mental note to call Father Bragg in the morning and let him know he wouldn't be able to make softball practice. He felt bad about that; he hated to disappoint the kids.

If there was one thing he tried not to allow his work to trespass, it was those Sundays in the park.

He'd probably be in the park this Sunday, only it would be for other, less congenial reasons.

"You want to have a look inside?" Aparo asked.

"Yeah." Reilly shrugged, casting one last sweeping look at the surreal scene around him.