Give Us This Day

by Tom Avitabile

  As roiling heaves erupted from within her, Brooke abandoned trying to hold back her emotions and she broke out in deep sobs. So unprepared was she, that she had no hankie, no tissue. Why don’t I have a tissue? the outwardly stalwart director and former agent-in-charge of just a few seconds ago asked the woman inside her. It was the first time she’d needed one since her brother, Harley, died.

  Peter Remo, sitting next to her, handed over his hankie. She accepted it with a nod, and dabbed her eyes.

  She sensed she was attracting attention. She had to get out of there.

  She rose and headed to the side aisle. She walked over to the father and child. She smoothed the little girl’s hair. When the father looked up at Brooke with teary eyes, she extended her hand to him. He went to shake it but instead she placed Charlene’s broach in his and folded his fingers around it.

  When he opened his hand and saw the cracked and singed broach he had gotten her on their first Christmas together, he breathed in rapid breaths, attempting to stave off full-fledged wailing.

  Brooke put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a squeeze for strength and walked away.

  She made her way past the little gift shop and went out a side door. The NYPD patrolman on post on the other side of the door was there to stop people from entering, so he just nodded as she flashed her creds and hit the street.

  Thirty seconds later, George Stover exited the same door. “Did a woman come out of here?”

  “Yeah, she flashed federal tin.”

  “Which way did she go?”

  He pointed east. “That way, I think.”

  George was off down Forty-Ninth Street, with a still-noticeable limp.

  .G.

  Brooke had walked south a few hundred feet and hailed a cab on Fifth Avenue and told the driver to head to South Ferry.

  After a few minutes snaking through the midday traffic to get to the FDR South, the driver looked in the rearview mirror and said to the woman who was crying in the backseat. “You okay, lady?”

  Brooke nodded through her tears and closed her eyes.

  .G.

  “No, I don’t know. She disappeared and she is not answering her phone. I dunno. I guess it hit her pretty hard. I mean, how could it not? I don’t even know how I’m keeping it together,” George said into his cell phone from the corner of Fiftieth and Madison. Still scanning in all directions for a glimpse of the head of his unit.

  .G.

  In the backseat of the cab, Brooke kept seeing that little girl, Charlene’s daughter, who would never know her mommy. Then she thought of Charlene who would never see her daughter ride her first bike, the dress she’d wear to the prom, beam as she graduated, cry as she got married; Charlene would never hold her grandchildren. Brooke laid out on the backseat and cried into her folded arm.

  The driver was concerned. “Lady, please don’t throw up in the back of my cab, please.”

  .G.

  Being hopped up on heroin, the drug of choice for suicide bombers, Rashad saw the red lights as pomegranates dancing in his windshield. His cell leader, having heard the funeral was over on his phone, said to the young Saudi, “Go now, and soon Allah will greet you. Remember, release the button as you pass the middle of the church. Drive straight and fast. Let nothing get in your way. The suit will protect you all the way in, as will God.” He tapped the bundle of erratic teenage energy that was his human-guided bomb on the shoulder.

  “Allahu akbar . . .” the youth said, invoking the old Libyan national anthem as he shut the door on the huge Ryder truck.

  .G.

  “Event ended, attendees exiting at this time,” NYPD Patrolwoman Kylee Boyce’s portable radio crackled as she shielded her eyes from the sun glaring right down Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Fifth. She was one of six cops assigned to the intersection, which was as far south on Fifth as any vehicle could get until the ceremony at the church was over. In all, one hundred and eighty cops were stationed at roadblocks from Fifty-Fifth to Forty-Fifth from Madison Ave to Sixth, creating a thirty-square block frozen security zone. The measure was not announced. It was sprung on the drivers of New York thirty minutes before the service and now that the service had ended, for probably a half hour more. All she knew from her 104th precinct muster in Queens this morning was that it was a memorial service for the people who’d died in that building explosion and fire down on Park Avenue South. That, and her standing orders: nothing but a boss or brass gets through . . . nothing.

  Two consecutive car horns in rapid succession turned her head north, looking up Fifth. She saw some schmuck in a truck run a light at Fifty-Ninth. Then the truck plowed through Fifty-Eighth and sent two cars spinning out of the way.

  “Damn . . .” was all she said.

  From the corner of her eye she saw a big cement mixer truck, one with the polka dots, trying to cross her intersection here at Fifty-Fifth. She waved him on into the middle of the street, yelling, “Everybody get out of the way! Everybody get out of here.”

  The cement truck driver was startled when she jumped on the passenger running board and screamed, “Stop the truck. Stop the truck. Get out! Run!”

  Instinctively, the driver put the parking brake on before he bailed. Kylee un-holstered her Glock and aimed at the driver of the oncoming truck. Still standing on the running board, she was shaking and she said under her breath, “Shoot straight, girl.”

  .G.

  Rashad was screaming . . . His adrenaline surged with the drugs and had him balls-to-the-wall, all out. He was grinding the transmission because he had the truck in second gear. That way there would be more torque to move vehicles, people, and barriers out of the way. When he saw the big blue, red, green, and yellow polka dots he laughed. They too danced in his way. “Woooo,” he said as he realized without a hint of self-preserving fear that there was a cop pointing her gun at him from the side of the polka dots.

  .G.

  Kylee wasn’t aware of the fourteen shots she emptied into the front of the oncoming truck and its windshield.

  The Ryder truck smashed into the side of the huge cement hauler right at its heaviest point; the spinning drum full of stone and mix. The yellow truck’s back wheels rose up as the chassis rotated then came crashing down onto the street again. The engine was driven into the driver’s cab of the rental truck as it crushed up against the seventy-thousand-pound stationary object in its path.

  The mirror of the rental truck snapped off at impact and hit Kylee in her chest, right under where her hands were raised in front of her face as she prepared for the collision. It knocked her to the ground and forced the breath out of her. She slowly got up. Smoke and gritty dirt hung in the air. Other cops were now running to the wreck. She peered into the crushed, bloody cab. He was dead, all right. But . . .

  “Get the bomb squad, NOW!” Kylee yelled. Other cops finally got to her.

  “What is it?” one of them said.

  With her arm reaching into the crushed cab, she turned only her head. “I got my hand on a plunger that got pressed by the accident. I ain’t letting go. Get the bomb squad here.” She then breathed in and out in fast shallow breaths as she was finally aware of the pain in her chest—her ribs were broken.

  .G.

  Four blocks away, Paul shook his head. “Should have used a radio detonator.” Then he walked away.

  Later he was with Dequa. “It would have been the coup de grâce but Hamzah’s man failed.”

  “Yes, it would have been a blessing to rid ourselves of the entire unit, as you failed to do . . .”

  Paul felt the sting of criticism but knew better than to respond.

  “I understand the hostages were freed. Another request you failed to accomplish.”

  “The army was there when I arrived. There was nothing I could do against a platoon of soldiers with nothing more than a knife.”

  “The guards you e
mployed, if they are alive, will they be a problem?”

  “All they know is I was a representative of the New York mob and we wanted the family under control because Prescott owed big gambling debts. It was all cash and I only met with them in the countryside.”

  “Very well. By the way, Prescott was released.”

  “What?”

  “I am told it was Chechen rebels. Our friend in Russia was convinced of it.”

  “Chechen? Of what possible . . .”

  “It is not our concern any longer. Our focus is now the mission. The north team is ready. The south team nears their ready point. It won’t be long. Maybe the misfortune that has befallen us today will be of no consequence in the end if the police are slow to trace the truck and the contents, praise be to God,” Dequa said, using the English word for Allah, as he walked off.

  “The truck . . . the truck!” he said out loud then ran to catch up to Dequa. “I think I have a solution!”

  Dequa was near the point where he wanted to put a bullet in Paul’s head. His failures were beginning to add up. But Paul was his number-one muscle and as an American could penetrate and operate with greater impunity than any of his men. So he sighed and said, “Yes?”

  “The north team, they have finished the fabrication and have left the house for the time being, haven’t they?”

  .G.

  “Somebody wanna tell me how the hell this happened? How did a jihadi in full battle armor get a truck loaded with ammonia bombs into the city, much less Fifth Avenue?” Bridge was fuming.

  “It’s the fact that he was targeting the rest of your team that’s troubling,” the police commissioner said.

  “It’s still Director Burrell’s team. I am just standing in . . .” Bridgestone said as he realized that was a dumb thing to say. He was, in fact, in charge now. George, the highest-ranking member of Brooke’s team, didn’t have the tactical and strategic experience to take over the show.

  “Director Burrell has been missing for six hours now. She may be dead. Like it or not, you are it, my friend,” the commissioner said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Bridge threw down his pen.

  George came in at that moment. “She still isn’t picking up her cell.”

  “Can’t we track it?” the commissioner said. Holding out his phone.

  “We tried but Director Burrell turned off anything that would give away her location. All we know is Lower Manhattan by the cell tower’s track.”

  “I saw her leave the pew, but I just figured she needed a moment; I’ve lost men in battle, but she lost ’em in Midtown Manhattan,” Bridge said.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “George, in theater you don’t have time to grieve. Here in the city, the worst thing to have is the time to ponder the loss; question if you did everything you could to keep your people safe. That really plays with your head after the bullets stop flying.”

  “So she could just be in self-imposed isolation . . .”

  “Not answering her phone when she sees it’s us,” the commissioner said.

  “Maybe try another phone, one whose number she won’t recognize,” the commissioner said as he handed George his phone. “Here, it’s a Long Island number she doesn’t know.”

  “Or maybe she needs to see a number she knows?”

  .G.

  The president was refereeing a wrestling match in the situation room of the White House. His top advisors were going at it. The issue started out as a contingency plan for succession if Brooke’s absence was due to assassination. The cell, presumably SOM37, had tried twice, and the fear was that they might have gotten lucky the third time. The Director of Homeland Security, Davis, was engaged in an argument with the temporary Secretary of the Treasury, Tolland.

  “What the hell were we thinking, putting a women in charge of this?” DHS said.

  “Warren Cass personally selected her. She has handled this from the beginning,” Tolland said.

  “Yes and we have nineteen dead, scores injured, and have been so ineffective against the terrorists that they nearly succeeded in blowing up the signature Catholic Church in America. I’d say she isn’t batting a thousand here.”

  “She’s still the best we have situationally . . .”

  “If she’s still alive!”

  “We don’t know that she isn’t,” Tolland said, his voice starting to rise.

  “Then she is AWOL?” DHS said.

  “No . . . I mean, I don’t know,” Tolland said.

  “Face it, she’s either dead or cowering somewhere.”

  The president had had enough. “Alright. Hold it. First, neither of you are cleared to know what I know about Brooke. She isn’t anywhere cowering. She’s the best we have, man or woman, and I have personally witnessed her valor and commitment to this country many times over. However, if she has met with an untimely death, then your only task is to appoint a replacement so that her team, which has the lead on this, continues without interruption. In her last . . . latest communication with me she indicated that the attack was imminent. We can’t afford to disrupt the chain of command by putting the wrong person on top.”

  “Sir, not a person. Make the FBI lead agency on this. Burrell already had them in the mix. They have the oversight capability to take over and get results,” DHS said.

  “There is another option, sir.” Bill Hiccock spoke up for the first time.

  The president turned to him. “Go on . . .”

  “Bridgestone is there and he’s stepped in till Brooke returns.”

  The president raised his eyebrows. He mulled it over and made his policy decision. “Bridgestone it is.”

  Tolland was neutral, but Davis allowed his disappointment to show on his face. Not that it mattered. The boss had decided.

  “Bill, you know the man. Call him, tell him he’s got the ball.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

  The president went to get up and everyone in the room stood. “Oh and Bill, only while Brooke is MIA!”

  “Got it, sir.” Bill trotted out of the room to make his call.

  “We’ll at least it’s a man . . .” DHS muttered under his breath.

  The president heard him, stopped dead in his tracks, turned and said, “Fer Christ’s sake, Davis, stop being a fucking misogynist . . . It’s the twenty-first century, man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  .G.

  Brooke sat on the seawall at the tip of Lower Manhattan, looking out across the water. The Statue of Liberty stood as silent sentinel over the harbor. Various ships, boats, and ferries crisscrossed the harbor as she sat. Her phone vibrated. She glanced down at the 631, Long Island area code, but didn’t move an inch to get it.

  Her mind was a debating society. The two parts of who she was were warring and going at it. The Warrior in Brooke was screaming to stop this nonsense and get back to work. The Woman in Brooke argued that she had failed to live up to her number-one rule: “Everybody gets to go home . . .”

  “No, I ain’t saying nothing like that, Ramón. All I is saying is that you didn’t have to lie to me . . .”

  “But I didn’t . . . You going to believe Darnell or me?”

  Brooke looked over to the young couple arguing as they passed her bench and their words faded. Right now she would settle for arguing with Mush. Just to hear his voice. She needed him. He would see her point. No, he’d side with me, the Warrior Brooke in her brain countered.

  She pulled her feet up under her, onto the bench, and wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knee. Her phone buzzed again. This time she didn’t look. It eventually stopped as she focused on a spot in the middle of the bay. The undulating water hypnotizing her, she imagined it was the Arctic or the Pacific, wherever Mush was right now. How she needed him; how much she needed to be held in his arms and for him to tell her t
hat everything was gonna be all right. She unconsciously tightened her arms tighter to her body as if he indeed had his arms around her. It made her sigh. The phone buzzed again. This time she looked and was shocked. The caller ID read out as USS NEBRASKA.

  “Hello . . . Hello . . .”

  “Brooke?”

  “Mush . . . Oh my God! How did you . . . How can you . . . ?

  “Brooke, are you okay?”

  “Yes . . . no. I’m good but not . . . I mean, it’s been a hard forty-eight hours, Mush. Oh, how I miss you . . .”

  “I miss you too, babe. Look, you got a lot of people very worried about you.”

  Her head was clearing . . . “Wait a minute, Mush, how can you be calling me right now?”

  “Somebody named Bridgestone tapped a favor with CINCPACFLEET and then the president approved the order. So I got an Emergency Action Message to surface and call my wife. What’s going on, Brooke?”

  “Oh Mush . . .” was as far as she got before she started crying.

  A half hour later she was standing by the railing at the seawall, her eye makeup a mess, as she said into the phone, “I am looking at the water right now. Thinking of you.”

  “Brooke, I’ll be home soon. I am going to make this my last tour. I’ve earned the points to call my own shots. You won’t need to do this anymore. I’m sorry my absence led you to this.”

  “Mush, this was just a routine white collar crime, until it turned into a national security threat. Otherwise, I’d be home right now, coaching soccer and watching submarine movies.”

  “I love you so much, Brooke.”

  “I love you too, Bret,” Brooke said, using his first name, which was how she always addressed anything serious to him.

  “I gotta go, babe,” he said.

  “I know. Can’t wait to see you.”

  “Me neither.”

  The call ended. Brooke looked out at the water. It was then she realized she hadn’t told him about the foolishness with the president and the supposed affair. Now she felt bad. She didn’t ever want Mush to hear it from someone else. She wanted to tell him first so she could let him know that hurting him was the last thing in the world she would ever want. As she turned to walk to the street and get a cab, she saw Ramón and his girl sitting on the steps kissing. That’s better, she thought as she picked up her pace towards State Street.