Alert

by James Patterson

  “Well, hurry up already, would you please?” Mr. Beckett said, going to the aluminum blinds on the ambulance window that faced the target.

  Chapter 58

  I immediately spotted the commissioner and the acting mayor, Priscilla Atkinson, in attendance when I entered the huge, crowded conference room. As I glanced up to the nosebleed section of the amphitheater seating, I was happy to see Brooklyn Kale and Arturo and Doyle and climbed up and sat down next to them.

  Down on the floor in the center of the room, I could see my new fair-haired leader, Lieutenant Bryce Miller, going over his notes. I was almost glad I’d been taken off as case lead. It was high time to allow another Christian to be fed to the lions.

  Someone dimmed the lighting, and a satellite image of the Queens warehouse from yesterday’s raid appeared. Bryce had just stepped to the podium and was still adjusting the microphone when the conference room doors burst open and two uniformed cops rushed in.

  One of them made a beeline for the commissioner and whispered in his ear. I sat up straight when the puzzled, annoyed look on the commissioner’s face became one of intense concern.

  “Ms. Mayor, everyone, excuse me,” the commissioner said, standing as the lights came back on.

  Brooklyn and Arturo and Doyle and I all looked at each other with the same wide-eyed expression.

  “Good grief. What the hell now?” Brooklyn said.

  “Something has come up,” the commissioner said. “I’ll explain in a minute, but right now I’m going to need everyone to please stand and calmly head for the stairwells and proceed outside.”

  He cleared his throat as everyone started freaking out.

  “Quiet, now, everybody, okay? Head for the exit immediately. We have a problem. A red terrorist alert has been issued. We need to evacuate the building.”

  Chapter 59

  “I told you, you stupid bastard,” Mr. Beckett said from the window, where he looked at the building through binoculars. “They’re coming out now! They’re evacuating! Blow it now!”

  “One more minute,” said Mr. Joyce.

  “No! Now!” Mr. Beckett cried. He watched as a truck pulled up in front of the building and a guy leaped out with a black Lab in tow.

  “It’s the bomb squad! Do it now!”

  “One second,” said Mr. Joyce, clicking away at the keyboard like a jazz piano soloist. “Just a couple more adjustments.”

  Mr. Beckett tore a schematic in half and kicked the cooler.

  “You’ve adjusted it enough! It’s now or never!”

  Mr. Joyce ignored him, eyes on the screen, clicking buttons like mad.

  Mr. Beckett looked through the binocs again, then started banging his head against the ambulance’s metal wall.

  “Blow it,” he whimpered. “Blow it.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Mr. Joyce said. “It’s all about the placement, otherwise it’ll do cosmetic damage at best.”

  “I don’t give a shit! Blow the damn thing now!”

  “Fine,” said Mr. Joyce. “You win. Just so you know, it’s not ready.”

  “Blow it!”

  “First say that it’s your call,” said Mr. Joyce. “I don’t want you blaming this on me later.”

  “It’s my call! It’s my call!” Mr. Beckett cried.

  Mr. Joyce set off the detonators on the eighty pounds of plastic explosives with a soft press of his thumb.

  Chapter 60

  We were in the stairwell, nervous, feeling as powerless as schoolchildren in a teacher-led fire drill. It wasn’t the weird sound we suddenly heard that was that concerning. It was the hard shudder that a moment later came up through the ground and wrenched through the stairs and walls into the marrow of our bones.

  Everyone stopped dead on the stairs with a collective gasp as the concrete drunkenly swayed back and forth under our feet. I looked up immediately at the ceiling, along with everyone else, suddenly feeling the hard beating of my heart as I wondered if it was about to drop down on top of us.

  “Oh, my God, Mike! Look!” said Brooklyn, elbowing me in the neck as she pointed up at the stairwell window.

  I looked.

  Behind the courthouses, up on Broadway, about two long blocks away, I saw 26 Federal Plaza, the huge, monolithic FBI headquarters building. Something was wrong. Smoke was rising in the air above it. The smoke seemed to be coming from many of its seemingly blown-open windows.

  Emily!

  I watched helplessly as more of its windows blew out simultaneously, almost in a left-to-right diagonal line, flashing with a blinding white light.

  I looked silently at what happened next.

  The top floors of 26 Fed seemed to tremble and waft back and forth. There was a thunderclap crack of concrete and a horrid creak and groan of shearing steel. Then the top stories of the building freed themselves from their blown moorings and slowly slid away into empty air.

  “Dear holy God,” I said. The building around us rocked again as most of 26 Fed’s million-pound avalanche of glass and stone crashed down onto the streets below.

  When I peeled my eyes away from the mushrooming dust cloud out the window, I could hear somebody crying. It was the mayor, two steps above me. She was bawling her eyes out.

  “They’re dead,” she kept saying as she crumpled to the floor. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

  Every cop there turned and looked at each other as the dust plume rose into the sky. Doyle and Arturo and Brooklyn and Chief Fabretti. The shock was fine. What wasn’t so fine was the fear. The pale and shivering crazed looks of fear.

  “Déjà vu all over again,” said Doyle, licking his lips. He had his gun in his hand. I gently helped him put it away.

  “This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy,” said Arturo hysterically.

  I put my arm on Arturo’s shoulder. I opened my mouth, but I was speechless. He was in shock, the same as me. He was also right.

  Then I was running down the stairs two by two, speed-dialing Emily as I began to pray that she miraculously might still be alive.

  Chapter 61

  I hit the street and ran as fast as I could up narrow Saint Andrew’s Plaza toward the destruction.

  I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sky above the buildings. A misty cloud of gray dust was above it. It kept billowing wider and wider. Within the expanding gray cloud was a confetti-like, glittering mass of debris that I realized after a moment was paper.

  I kept trying to call Emily as I ran, but her phone kept kicking into voice mail.

  Maybe she’s just on the phone, I thought with desperate hope. Or her phone needs charging. Or the cell sites are down.

  As I neared Foley Square, the Irish prayer to Saint Michael, the patron saint of cops, which Seamus had made me memorize when I graduated from the academy, suddenly popped into my head.

  Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in this hour of conflict. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and…something, something…thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.

  “And please let Emily be okay, God,” I whispered. “Let me have this one. You have to let me have just this one, please. Amen.”

  Fire-truck horns blatted and blasted in the distance as I finally sprinted past the row of Corinthian columns fronting the Thurgood Marshall courthouse into Foley Square. I was going at a pretty good clip, but when I glanced up and got my first good look at 26 Fed, I immediately slowed, then abruptly stopped in my tracks and just stood there in the street staring up, completely overwhelmed by what I was seeing.

  Twenty-Six Federal Plaza’s normally perfectly sleek rectilinear forty-one-story glass-and-stone slab now looked like a giant cereal box that had been chewed up by a rabid pit bull. I grimaced at the grid of exposed offices in the horrifically wrecked upper half of the skyscraper. Everything was completely pulverized. Every ruined nook and cranny was filled with smoking wreckage.

  An
even harder pulse of dread shuddered through me as I suddenly noticed that what remained of the structure was still visibly swaying back and forth. I gripped down hard on my cell phone, wondering if I was about to watch the rest of it go, about to see it start pancaking down like the Twin Towers on 9/11.

  When it didn’t happen immediately, I started racking my brain, trying to remember the one or two times I had been in the FBI building. I tried to think what floor Emily’s office or morning meeting room might have been on, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember. All I could do was stand there feeling numb as I stared up at the torn-apart office tower.

  I wasn’t the only one. All over Foley Square, I saw people standing silently out on the steps of the courthouses and on the sidewalks in front of the government buildings. The ones who weren’t filming with their smartphones were like me—just standing there frozen, a regiment of jaw-dropped statues staring up.

  Somehow, after a minute or two, I shook myself out of my stupor and continued haltingly up Lafayette Street. When I got to the next corner, at Worth Street, I looked to the left—west, toward Broadway.

  When I saw the devastation up close for the first time, I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it.

  How could anyone?

  It looked like the entire top half of 26 Federal Plaza had fallen into Worth Street, filling it up like dirt in a trench. Through the concrete dust, I could make out a dark, immense, almost three-story mound of debris that completely blocked the street and both sidewalks.

  At its top, a half dozen steel girders stuck up crookedly like a stand of burned, branchless trees. Around the girders, huge folded sections of the office building’s distinctive facade were slumped over on themselves like unspooled bolts of cloth. In the warm breeze that hit my sweating face, I smelled the acrid, industrial stink of burned metal and plastic.

  A falling, flapping sheet of paper suddenly hit me in the temple like a tap, and I began shuffling forward at the terrible mound through the haze.

  Chapter 62

  There was a soft flapping sound as a steady rain of printer-paper sheets fell down around me. The dust above must have been doing something to the light, because everything was tinted with a strange, unreal bluish tinge.

  I walked up the wide sidewalk around a haphazard maze of splintered desks, smashed office chairs, and cracked computer screens. I blinked down at an intact framed bachelor’s degree from Tulane University propped up against the gutter as if someone had placed it there.

  As I continued my approach, a tall, skinny black bike messenger with a scratched face silently staggered past in the street, covered in a pale-gray coating of dust.

  Then I came closer and saw something really amazing.

  People were already up on the mound of debris, a dozen or so people. There were a few uniformed cops, but mostly they were civilians—office workers, a guy in a white doctor’s coat, a loose line of people silently passing down debris and rubble.

  I climbed up over some chunks of concrete, immediately joining them. As the dry, stale taste of concrete and drywall dust filled my nostrils and mouth, I accepted a huge hunk of concrete from a short, Italian-looking guy in a ruined pin-striped suit above me. As I turned to heave it, I saw that a burly uniformed security guard had arrived behind me, waiting to accept it.

  “What happened?” the guard said to me as I passed him the concrete.

  I squinted at him. He was a really distinctive-looking guy. He had longish brown hair under his navy ball cap and bright, light-blue eyes. He must have played football in college or something, because he was jacked.

  “Someone said it was a plane,” he said as I continued to stare at him stupidly. “Was it a plane?”

  After he handed the concrete to the next person down the line, I shook my head and carefully passed him the two-yard length of fractured rebar I’d just been handed.

  “It was explosives,” I finally said. “I saw it. They blew it. Someone took it down with high explosives or something. Demo’d it, like. I didn’t see a plane.”

  That’s when my cell phone went off in my pocket. I crouched down in the wreckage, frenziedly wiping the dust-covered screen to see who was calling.

  I closed my eyes with relief as my heart somersaulted in my chest.

  All was not lost. There was still hope. A tiny drop.

  “Emily?!” I yelled as I put the phone to my ear.

  “Mike! Are you okay?” she said. “We got hit. I just made it out of the building. Someone said you guys were hit as well. Are you okay?”

  Thank you, God. You came through. Thank you. And Saint Michael. You guys came through. I owe you.

  I clenched back my tears of relief. Then I couldn’t anymore.

  “Yes,” I said, wiping dust and tears off my face. “I’m fine. Perfect now. Where are you?”

  “On the west side of Broadway near Worth.”

  “Okay, stay where you are. I’m coming to you.”

  When I stood and turned around again to ask the muscular security guard to take my place in line, I stopped and just stood there blinking.

  Because all of a sudden the guy, whoever he had been, whatever he had been, was gone.

  Chapter 63

  The next three days were some of the most tumultuous in New York City’s history.

  Twenty-two people had died in the blast. Eleven special agents (one of them the direct assistant to the head of the New York office), three civilian clerks, and eight maintenance and security people. More than a hundred were still in the hospital, many with internal injuries from being crushed under heavy debris when the building collapsed. Many people were missing fingers, arms, eyes, feet. The fact that half of Manhattan’s hospitals were still out of commission after the EMP blast in Yorkville did not help the situation at all.

  The initial investigation into the bombing showed that it had been as ingenious as it had been devastating. Incredibly, robots had been used. Investigators had found three unexploded robots in the pile. They looked like miniature children’s blocks, but inside they had intricate flywheels and radio receivers and electronics that allowed them to be moved around remotely, like a swarm of insects. In addition to the electronics, the bots had been laden with explosives and had been inserted probably through the AC unit on the roof into the air ducts.

  Experts were speculating that whoever had radio-controlled the bots into position must have been an engineer or a demolitions expert, because each unit had been precisely placed alongside the building’s support struts for maximum destruction.

  As in the aftermath of 9/11, the governor of New York had issued a citywide state of emergency, and the National Guard was called in. Soldiers armed with rifles stood at multiple checkpoints throughout the city, with countersniper teams on various rooftops. There were even rumors that there was a CIA surveillance drone high in the air above New York City 24-7. It was truly unreal.

  But instead of committing the mentally unhealthy act of dwelling on things, Emily and I and my Ombudsman Outreach squaddies busied ourselves by doubling down, trying to shake out everything we could on the investigation. It was all dead ends so far, but something would break. It had to. Or at least we couldn’t stop believing that it would.

  “If they’re terrorists, Mike, then why won’t they contact us, claim credit?” said Noah Robertson, starting up our Friday morning team meeting at the Intelligence Division building in Brooklyn.

  We were all camped around my desk—Emily and Arturo in commandeered office chairs, which were in high demand since about a hundred cops had been reassigned to the case. Doyle and Brooklyn and Noah were actually sitting on the floor against the partition wall among the stacks of paper and coffee cups and pizza boxes that were strewn around the once-fancy office space.

  Everyone was in jeans and hoodies and T-shirts—even Emily, who was usually in her FBI-mandated fancy office clothes. Nonstop sixteen-hour days tend to make everyone a little less formal.

  “Because that would be the conventio
nal thing,” Emily said, picking one of the little bots they’d found in the rubble off my desk.

  “These guys don’t do conventional,” she said, tossing the bot into the air and catching it.

  “They figure it’s even more terrifying to not claim credit, to continue to stay in the shadows being a faceless menace,” I said.

  “I think they might be right,” said Arturo around the straw of his blue Coolatta.

  “But they are terrorists, right? I mean, they have to be, considering how well financed they are,” Brooklyn said. “Only a team of computer experts could have come up with that robot swarm bomb, or whatever the hell you want to call it.”

  “Or built those EMP devices,” said Doyle, yawning. “Hell, we’ve all heard the rumors. It’s most likely being sponsored by a foreign government.”

  “No,” I said as I stared up at the ceiling.

  “Earth to Mike,” Doyle said after a beat of silence.

  “It’s not a government or even a team of terrorists. It’s too…elegant,” I said, snatching the bot Emily was tossing out of the air.

  “For all its destruction, this is handcrafted,” I said. “It’s one or two people. This is being done to precision. The attacks. The head fakes. And if you want something done this right, you have to do it yourself.”

  Chapter 64

  “One or two people are systematically leveling New York City?” said Arturo as he made an annoying squeaking sound with his drink straw. “How? It’s impossible.”

  “In 2000, there was a famous article in Wired magazine,” I said. “Some computer genius sat down and mapped out how all these new computer-assisted breakthroughs in technology will pan out. The potential pitfalls of things like artificial intelligence and nanotech and robotics and biotech.”