“Let’s forget about that, Frankie.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“What would Pop have thought about all this? You know. I mean 9/11 and the way the city’s changed and now…” Tom looked up at the sky, “… this fucking thing.”
Frankie shook his head. “I don’t think Pop would have been surprised by much.”
“Just that dirtbag who snuck up behind him and his partner and killed them. What was the name of his partner back in sixty-eight…?”
“Rodriguez. Alfonso Rodriguez. New York was already changing back then, but what did we know? We were still just kids.”
Tom took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and offered one to his brother. Frankie started to shake his head, then accepted. What did it matter now? “Does it still bother you that we never got him? The bad guy, I mean.”
“What chance did we have? He was probably some junkie, got picked up a few days later on some bullshit B and E beef and got shivved in prison and we never heard about it.”
“Mom took it hard.”
“Let’s not talk about Mom.”
“How is she?”
“Still alive. Rufus still checks in on her every day. She’s old now, Tommy. Real old.” There was nothing more to say on that subject. “The kid who did this…”
“Who planted the bomb, you mean?” said Tom.
“Yeah. He was a born tunnel rat. In another life, he could have been a sandhog, done something useful. Got himself killed but good under the Central Park Reservoir. Buried your girlfriend up to her neck behind the Met. So I keep thinking… underground. That’s where he felt comfortable. That’s where he felt safe.”
Byrne turned to look back at the building. They were looking at the oldest part, the Metzger Pavilion, which had been built back in 1904, long after the hospital had changed its name from the Jews’ Hospital in the City of New York and moved uptown from Chelsea. But Brunner’s original building had long since been augmented by other wings and had even leaped Madison Avenue to connect up with the Icahn Medical Institute. Connected by…
“A tunnel,” said Frankie, tossing the cigarette away. “That’s it — the tunnel under Madison.” He was moving now, almost running. Tom jumped up and followed him. “It’s in the fucking tunnel, Tommy. That’s where he took it. That’s where he set it up. We thought he’d put it among the other radioactive devices, but he didn’t care about that — the whole damn place shows up radioactive in overflights and nobody was going to be poking around down here with sensors. The bomb didn’t need a power source because now we know what the power source is.” He stopped and looked up to the sky. The sight of the BVM looming over the Upper East Side was so remarkable that he didn’t even have time to think about it. Later, perhaps; later.
The plans for the tunnel were already waiting for them when they hit the reception desk, running. A receptionist ripped them out of the printer and handed them both copies as they charged toward the Madison Avenue side of the complex.
“Here,” said Tom, pointing as he ran. “There’s a couple of service bays, an electrical closet… a water main…”
“That’s it. That’s how he knew about the Central Park Reservoir, how to get into it. I wondered about that. Here was some fucking bumpkin from flyover land and he knows his way around the bowels of New York like a born sandhog. Well, this is where he started his exploration.”
They were in the tunnel now, running, two crazy Irish brothers, trying to save the whole damn city.
They found the entrance to the old main. The Reservoir had been the lifeline of Manhattan for decades, its water running down below the park and Fifth Avenue, all the way to Forty-second Street, where the Public Library now stood, but which in the nineteenth century had also been a reservoir, a great watershed enclosed by something that looked like it had time-traveled from the Egypt of the pharaohs.
That was New York for you. Even the dead past kept on affecting the living, the city that never slept and the city that never died.
“Not on my watch,” said Frankie Byrne as they burst through the door.
“Son of a bitch,” said Tom.
There it was. Just sitting there, unmolested, undiscovered. The nasty bastard had brought it here, in something that looked like a large duffel bag, unnoticed by anybody. Just another anonymous kid in a deliveryman’s outfit, going about his business.
“Careful,” said Tom to his brother as Frankie picked the accursed thing up. Frankie could not remember the last time his brother had looked out for him.
“Little help here,” he said.
“Right.” Tom was on the phone to the bomb squad two seconds later.
“Where are you going to take it?” ask Frankie. He had slung it over his shoulder and together they were making their way up into the lobby of the Icahn building. The squad would be coming down Madison any second now.
He was puffing hard as they made the street. Was it his imagination or was the rate of descent speeding up? How much time did they have? Would it be enough? It would have to be.
And there, right on Madison Avenue, Captain Francis Byrne fell to his knees, blessed himself, and said a prayer to the Virgin — the real Virgin, not this apparition — to spare his city, spare his people, the good and the bad, the saints and the sinners, all the people of New York. That was his sworn duty as a police officer to protect them, but now he was asking a higher power. It didn’t even matter whether there even was such a higher power, whether the Lady was as much a fantasy as any other religion’s icons.
None of that mattered now. Because, at a moment like this, all he had was his faith, and it was his faith that was going to have to get him through.
The bomb truck was there. The bomb went inside it.
And then it was gone.
“Captain Byrne!”
Byrne unfolded his hands and looked across the street to see Principessa and a camera crew filming him. Ignoring the traffic, she dashed across Madison. “That was great,” she said. “The perfect image. ‘The Praying Detective.’ In two hours, you’ll be famous.”
Byrne took her by the arm. “Listen, Ms. Stanley, I don’t want to be famous. I don’t even want to be rich. I just want to be Captain Francis Byrne, the kid from Queens who does his job.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Kill it. You want the same shot, shoot your boyfriend over there. Nobody who knows him will ever believe it, but go ahead. He’s already famous. He’s the great Tom Byrne of the FBI and you know what publicity hounds those clowns are.”
“But—”
“But nothing. You want me to help you find this Archibald Grant, you’ll do it. If not, no dice.”
Principessa thought for a moment, but only a moment. “Deal,” she said.
“You really got a jones for this Grant guy, don’t you?” said Byrne. “Why?”
She had her answers all set and ready. “Because he’s a fraud and the public has a right to know about it. Because he’s arrogant, cold, aloof, and superior. Because he put me in my place in an off-the-record RAND lecture and made me look ridiculous.”
Byrne got it. “In other words,” he said, “you’re crazy about him.”
She hadn’t expected that. She pulled back a little. “Promise you won’t tell your brother?” she said.
“Believe me, sweetheart, he already knows. And you know what — he doesn’t care.”
“A real bastard, huh?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I know the whole of it. But I don’t care.”
“That’s what they all say — at first.”
He started to walk away. Whatever happened now, it was out of his hands. Either the government would stop the laser or it wouldn’t. Either the bomb squad would defuse a nuclear bomb or it wouldn’t. Either the sun would come out tomorrow, or it wouldn’t.
She was following him down Madison now. “Will you call me?”
“No.”
“Why not? Don’t you like me?”
What a chance this would be. Payback time for Mary Claire and everything else. “No.”
She had caught up to him now, as they were crossing Ninety-eighth Street. “Why not? Don’t you find me attractive?”
“I’d have to be blind not to. And I’m not blind.”
“Then why not?”
“I try not to share with my brother.”
She stopped. So he had to. “Strictly business, then?”
Byrne stepped back so he could get a good eyeful of her. He’d seen her on television many times, especially now that she’d become a big star. Just about every guy he knew desired her. She was single and so was he. The department generally frowned on cops boinking the media, but he knew Matt would turn a blind eye to it. That was their deal, locked into it for life: a blind eye to everything except what absolutely, positively, could not be ignored or swept under the rug.
They’d been sweeping stuff under the rug ever since Matt put two .38 slugs in Enrique Marcon’s head and then gave him four more in the body just for good measure. Just to make sure he was dead. Just to make him feel the pain that Rosa Montez had felt when Marcon ice-picked her to death. It had been frontier justice in Park Slope, and it had been real justice.
“Strictly business,” said Frankie. They shook hands.
Then Principessa leaned over and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.
In the sky, the image of the Virgin had stopped descending and was now fading rapidly. In a few moments, she would be gone forever.
And then Principessa’s news van pulled up and she was gone and Francis Byrne was left to find his own way back downtown.
Story of his life.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Outside Qom
“There they are.” In the desert, near the launchpads.
The Viper could be used as a sniper rifle, and while Devlin didn’t have a sniper scope on this one, what he did have was powerful enough to let him draw a clear bead on the three figures in the distance.
He could put a bullet through Skorzeny’s head right now, and none the wiser.
At first Maryam wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Shahabs or the hostages. Three people standing alone in the desert. Even from this distance, she recognized Amanda’s tall form, Mlle. Derrida, short and chic, and Skorzeny. She shuddered inwardly, and hoped it didn’t show.
“I should kill them all now, save us time and trouble,” Devlin said.
“Don’t you trust your friend?” She wasn’t sure which name he was going by for this operation and could not ask.
“Don Barker. That’s his name. Don Barker.”
“Just like yours is Frank Ross.”
“It is to you — little Miss No Last Name.”
“Do you think we’ll ever trust each other?”
Devlin resighted. Pumpkin time: one, two, three… “Probably not.”
“Does it matter?”
“Probably not.” And then he heard it. Thwack thwack thwack… It was like the beating of wings.
Danny.
“I used to think that sound was angels,” she said.
“It is,” he said, up and sprinting now. “Black Angels.”
The sound was bringing out the soldiers, but that didn’t matter. Danny was here, right on schedule. The poison in the system of the Iranian nuclear program was working. The lasers were being retargeted. In a few minutes, if his aim held true and his nerve was steady and his luck held, they would all be on the chopper, heading for the rendezvous point at Desert One while the Super Hornets came in and bombed every single one of the Iranian nuclear-enrichment facilities. The Iranian air force would be no match for them, and with chaos breaking out all over the country as the miracle failed to appear, their pilots would be distracted. The mullahs would be the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, helpless against the rage of their people.
At last, the West was using the East’s most potent weapon against it — superstition.
Payback time.
The time of the Black Angels and the guardian angels. He had his and she had hers. For the first time, they were in together, going into action the way Branch 4 teammates should, going into battle with another of their own.
And they were all going home. Life would triumph over death. The end times, with all their apocalyptic carnage, would have to wait for another day, another year, another millennium, another eon. Back to the eternally receding future with you, O Legend. There was no need for ghosts here. Not among the living.
He started firing. The Viper was a fine piece of equipment and the soldiers fell one after another, toy soldiers dying for a cause they didn’t understand and couldn’t understand. Pop pop pop pop pop… he was firing on semiautomatic, setting them up and knocking them down. There was no use in putting it on full assault-rifle auto and wasting ammunition. In his experience, when you got to the full-auto part of the program you were already in big trouble, and big trouble was a place he did his damnedest to stay away from. Full-auto was Last Stand time. Full-auto was a marksman’s pathway to hell.
He was not ready for hell yet.
He kept firing and the men kept dropping. Two of the three figures in the desert had dropped to the ground, the women sheltering each other, Skorzeny trying to make a run for it.
Shoot him… shoot him now.
He took aim.
Thwack thwack thwack…
And then he saw — the first missile was starting to launch.
“Come on!” he shouted to Maryam.
The big Black Hawk was directly overhead now. Would Danny lower the ropes or would he try to land?
No time to ask. No time to worry. Danny would do what he had to do. And now he had to do what he had to do.
He charged, firing as he ran.
In the distance, he could see a phalanx of Jeeps, tearing out of the mountainside and streaming across the salt desert.
Twin M240 machine guns spat hot death. Nobody could shoot and fly like Danny. Two of the Jeeps flipped and burst into flames.
“Rockets, damn it, rockets!” he shouted.
On the launchpad, the first of the Israel-bound Shahabs was shuddering on the launch pad. No time… no time…
And Hellfire roared.
AGM-114s. The specially equipped Black Hawk had two of them. It needed both.
The missile was starting to lift off.
Covering fire was raking the Black Hawk, but Danny wasn’t going anywhere. He kept the bird steady, trying to get the second Hellfire into position for a kill shot on the Shahab. Kill it on the ground, strangle it in its cradle, before the demon bird could take flight and visit destruction a thousand miles away.
“Come on!”
One of the Jeeps had a .50-caliber gun and it was firing as it raced toward the launchpad. Danny couldn’t fight back — his attention was on the missile. He was going to stop the missile or die trying.
No need — the virus was already killing it. But he didn’t know that.
Devlin had to stop the Jeeps.
He was closer now, with a good bead on the Jeep. His first shot was a kill shot, right through the head of the gunner. The .50-caliber spun wildly, firing with a dead man’s hand on the trigger.
Devlin’s second shot took the man’s hand off, and the firing stopped.
His third shot penetrated the engine block and the fourth shot penetrated the driver’s skull. The Jeep careened, spun and flipped over.
Just as—
— the Shahab began to lift off and—
— the Black Hawk fired its second Hellfire.
Wobbling, the Shahab lifted into the air… and then started to gyrate wildly, spinning out of control. It was no longer going straight up but toppling… heading into the desert.
A burst of gunfire to his right. Maryam had the Kalashnikov and was peppering the other Jeeps, taking out the front tires of one and sending it head over heels.
Amanda was down, motionless, and Mlle. Derrida was screaming for the noise to stop as he pas
sed the women. Skorzeny was up ahead, running into the missile field.
He followed him. This time, he would not get away. There was no bolt-hole for the bastard. At long last Emanuel Skorzeny was his.
Devlin closed the gap easily. Maryam and Danny could cover him.
Closer… closer…
And then the other missiles died.
Inside each lethal weapon, the guidance systems melted down, obeying the instructions of the poisoned NSA computer. His instructions. Delivered by none other than Emanuel Skorzeny.
Checkmate.
He tackled him on the fly.
He had his hands around his throat.
He was choking him to death.
“Die, you bastard,” he hissed. “Die. Die for everything you’ve done to me. Die for everything you’ve done to humanity. I don’t care what you die for, but die.”
Skorzeny was gurgling, turning purple. There was no sport in choking to death an old man, but he didn’t care. His blood was up, he was doing the thing he had been trained to do all his life, all his life since his mother had died in his arms in Rome, since his father caught the terrorists’ bullets to save him, since his parents had died because of this man, this Skorzeny, this beast, this animal, this monster.
“Stop!” cried Skorzeny. “You can’t kill me. I can’t die like this!”
“Why not?” In the distance, beyond his bloodlust, he could hear Maryam still firing. Something was wrong. Danny should have her by now. The fight should be over.
“Because it is not for you to kill me. You have not earned that right.”
“Try me.”
Something distracted him for just an instant, but an instant was all it ever took when you were parsing the line between life and death.
Somehow Skorzeny managed to squirm from his grasp. It was amazing what feats of strength a man was capable of, even an old man, when his life was on the line. That was the thing that always gave the lie to the nihilists and the atheists — that, when the chips were down and death was at the other end of the wire, every living creature struggled, nothing wanted to go gently into that doubleplusungood night, all fought for life, all pleaded, all begged.
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