The Intercept

by Dick Wolf

  Removing this evil from the earth—Bush, the radical Christian leader of the American crusade against Islam, the unprincipled thug—was the greatest victory a martyr could claim. Taking Obama at the same time—were it to be God’s plan—was an added glory. The sitting president was a man who had heard Islam’s voice and turned from it. Curse both of them to hell.

  Jenssen again trembled in pain. He had reviewed their approach on the way in. They would follow a pathway through the tree garden, over which a pipe scaffolding covered with blue tarpaulin had been constructed. This was so that during their walk to the stage, the president, former president, and fellow dignitaries would be shielded from potential snipers in any of the thousands of windows overlooking the Ground Zero construction site.

  Jenssen reached into his jacket pocket, having transferred the trigger mechanism there. He fondled the small plastic rectangle, running his thumb over its simple switch.

  The components were virtually foolproof. The trigger was a simple inertial generator, sending a single pulse of electricity to the wire antennae of the twin igniters. Only one of the igniters had to work. There would be a gap of about a half second between the trigger and the flash: a blue blast from his arm, then a rush of flame consuming all oxygen in the air.

  In that split second, all would die.

  His thumb pressed against the trigger, toying with it. The fire in his arm was such that he could not wait to detonate and be free of pain. His vision of becoming the most glorious religious martyr in the history of the world was the only thing that allowed him to rise above the weakness of his flesh.

  The mayor’s office’s liaison entered. She was going over arrangements after the building dedication. Jenssen smiled grimly before tuning her out. There was nothing to arrange after the ceremony. Jenssen would take care of all that.

  Chapter 71

  Fisk was still in the car four blocks from Chambers Street when his phone rang.

  “Uh, hi. Detective Fisk?”

  Fisk’s heart sunk. “Bascomb. What do you got?”

  “We, uh . . . somebody, a guest, reported seeing a woman’s shoe out on the lower-level roof in back of the hotel.”

  A chill ran up Fisk’s spine. “You found a shoe?”

  “We went out and got the shoe . . . and we found a woman’s body.”

  Fisk blanked out. He was still driving but he wasn’t seeing anything and he could not speak. He had to remind himself to breathe.

  “I said . . . we found a woman’s body. On the roof. It looked like a suicide, until we saw her throat. Really badly bruised.”

  “Are you sure it’s . . . ?”

  “We found an empty gun nearby. A Beretta. Somebody said a service piece. I . . . I took a picture and just sent it to this number as a text. I hope that was okay. If you want to . . .”

  “Hold on,” said Fisk, nearly a whisper.

  He worked his phone to his messaging queue. He opened the one from Bascomb.

  It showed Krina Gersten lying against a bed of roof gravel. Her eyes were open, her upper neck purpled with deep contusions.

  Fisk stared at the image for a long time. Somehow when he looked up, he was still driving, and hadn’t crashed.

  He brought the phone back to his ear. “What are they doing for her?” he asked.

  “They’re . . . it’s a crime scene. I’m sorry to be—”

  Fisk waited. Someone or something had cut him off. Fisk was in shock. When Bascomb didn’t continue, Fisk looked at his phone display.

  Dropped the call. No bars. No reception.

  Because he was now inside the security cell blackout.

  The traffic came to a dead stop ahead. It was a virtual parking lot in the street. With nobody honking, it only added to the unreality of the situation as Fisk sat there staring straight ahead—stricken by heartbreak.

  Fisk put the car in park. He got out with his phone and walked on, abandoning the car where it was.

  Despair gave way to rage, and soon he was running. She was dead. Krina was dead. She had found out something. Her murder was connected to the fucking Islamic terrorist decoy asshole motherfuckers he had been chasing all weekend.

  That trail ended with The Six. Magnus Jenssen. A human bomb who was ready to detonate himself outside One World Trade Center.

  Fisk reached the lines of people waiting to be screened for entry. So many people wanted to be near the new building, despite the heat. They wanted to be a part of the healing.

  He had to find a way to the front. He started pushing his way through.

  “Sorry, sorry.” He said it in that New York way, where he didn’t really mean it, but was just letting others know that he had a good reason for being rude.

  He reached the front. A few grumbles but no real complaints yet. He faced dozens of police cadets wanding for weapons. Fisk picked out the youngest and approached him with his badge wallet held at shoulder level, right in the cadet’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” said the kid. “Nobody armed gets inside this morning. That’s right down from the commissioner. Even your shield won’t get you in with a piece.”

  “Your lieutenant. I need him. Now.” Fisk was breathing heavily, not from the exertion of running but from hyperventilating with emotion.

  Now people started to get on Fisk for holding up the line. “Hey, what is this?” “Who the hell is this guy?” “Commmmoonnnnnnnnn.”

  A patrol lieutenant in dress blues walked up, expecting trouble. Fisk read him in a glance. Old school, not terribly bright, honest. A cop’s cop. Showed up every day, made no waves, took all the tests and made lieutenant. The guy looked at Fisk’s credentials and repeated what the cadet said.

  “Not getting in with a piece,” he said. “Nobody enters with a weapon after seven A.M. No exceptions.”

  Fisk felt himself getting shrill, and pulled back, keeping in control. Asking these guys to let him pass with his firearm was asking them to put their careers in his hands, something that wasn’t going to happen.

  “I gotta get in there,” said Fisk. He showed the lieutenant his open hand. “Lou. Look at me. I’m reaching.”

  The lieutenant looked suspicious. “Okay. Slow.”

  Fisk went into his jacket and pulled out his Glock 19. He turned it butt-first, slid out the magazine, kicked out the round in the chamber. He handed it all to the lieutenant.

  “Good?” said Fisk.

  The lieutenant still wasn’t sure. “St. Clair,” he said. “Wand him.”

  St. Clair did. Fisk was clean for metal.

  “Okay?” said Fisk.

  The lieutenant took the wand from St. Clair. “You accompany Detective Fisk wherever he is going. When you get him there, you report back to me on the double. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said young St. Clair.

  “He is to remain in your line of sight at all times. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” St. Clair said again.

  “Good?” the lieutenant said to Fisk.

  “Good,” said Fisk.

  Before the lieutenant had even finished nodding, Fisk was through the checkpoint and running at a loping trot down Greenwich Street, trying to figure out which way to go.

  St. Clair sprinted after him, catching up with him before Vesey Street at the very perimeter of Ground Zero.

  Fisk heard the strains of the NYPD Pipe and Drum Band running scales, warming up. They were to play a medley of patriotic tunes during the live broadcast.

  Hearing them meant that he was close. And that the ceremony hadn’t started yet.

  Even the upbeat song sounded like a dirge. Fisk had always hated bagpipes. Bagpipes meant cop funerals to him.

  Gersten loved bagpipes. This memory struck him with the force of a cramp. She always teared up. Must have been that cop gene of hers.

  Across Vesey, the crowd thickened
into a shoulder-to-shoulder mass that was difficult to see over. The entrance on the north side of the Ground Zero memorial was a hundred yards ahead. Fisk knew he had to stop The Six from going into the ceremony proper, because once the players were in place, then the central podium area would go into full lockdown—with Jenssen sealed in place, ready to blow them all to kingdom come.

  More than a hundred plainclothes NYPD officers, FBI men, and Secret Service agents meandered among the throng. Fisk darted into the crowd, quickly outpacing St. Clair, who yelled behind him, “Wait, wait!”

  Fisk ran toward the sound of the bagpipes. Tears burned his eyes. To his distant left, he saw a blue tunnel leading from a small staging area full of trailers.

  He heard yelling and noticed a few of the lawmen pointing him out. Others began running in his direction. He hoisted his shield high as he went so as not to be shot down.

  His anxiety was electric, apparently; it drew people his way. He was yelling, “Fisk! Intelligence Division!” because no one there knew him, and even if they did, they could barely see his face as he darted around strangers in his path.

  As he got closer, he saw that the tunnel was merely a series of tarps knit together, lashed to arched pipe scaffolding, the fabric rippling in the Hudson River breeze. Fisk looked left and made for the staging area.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” said a cop as Fisk blew another security barricade without stopping. He gave up showing his shield. Imitation tin was just a couple of dollars online.

  What Fisk had going for him was his years on the job: he looked “cop.” That, more than his shield, was what kept fellow officers from shooting at him on sight. He ran past a quartet of Porta-Potties and a hospitality tent manned by support staff. He darted around civilians wearing access passes on neck lanyards, searching wildly, then he saw a trailer with an open door.

  In the window of the trailer, propped up against the drawn shade, was a printed sign reading, THE SIX. Fisk raced to the door and burst inside.

  Food table, empty couches, a television.

  Empty.

  A person ran to the trailer door behind him. Fisk whirled around.

  It was a cop with his sidearm drawn. Patton.

  “Fisk?” he said.

  “Where are they?” said Fisk.

  “They’re . . . on their way in,” said Patton, pointing. “Where’s Gersten?”

  “Obama? Bush?”

  “Outside the core. They go in last.”

  Fisk grabbed Patton and spun him around, pushing him out of the trailer door. “Keep them out of here!” he said. “However you can. We have a man with a bomb!”

  In any other setting, such a claim would require further evaluation. But in this tinderbox of antiterror paranoia, such a warning was treated as verified until proven inaccurate.

  Fisk leaped off the top step of the trailer, waving gathering cops out of his way. The pipes and drums had started their medley, being carried throughout the staging area via speakers.

  He looked to the blue tarpaulin archway tunnel ahead. The crowd parted a bit, just enough for him to see and recognize the older man starting inside. Aldrich, the auto parts dealer, was entering the ten-foot-wide tunnel. Behind him went the journalist, Frank. Walking one at a time, like entrants at a wedding. Alphabetically. Which meant that . . .

  Fisk saw the next entrant, tall and blond, wearing a light blue suit. A coordinator wearing a headset nodded to Magnus Jenssen.

  With a long, determined stride, the Swedish terrorist started into the tunnel.

  Fisk glimpsed Jenssen’s left hand. The part of his cast visible beneath the sleeve of his suit—it was white. It was not blue.

  Fisk yelled, but his voice was drowned out by the music of the pipes. Jenssen was on his way to the stage.

  Chapter 72

  To Jenssen’s ears, the bagpipers’ bleating was like the furious drone of an overturned beehive. It sawed into his head. His left arm was little more than a weapon grafted onto his torso now—and one his body was rejecting.

  He was in the blue tunnel. Fabric rippled as each plodding step brought him closer to glory. Ten paces ahead, the journalist Frank swept his hand through his hair, grooming himself as he made his way toward the stage.

  Jenssen stumbled once from the dizzying pain. He was carried along by the will of God and the generous spirit of Osama, who through Jenssen was returning to the altar of victory as a marauding soldier of Allah, at the site of his greatest victory.

  . . . and then get resurrected and then get martyred . . .

  Ahead of him: daylight.

  Ahead of him: glory.

  The vague sounds of a commotion behind him barely breached the great commotion ongoing inside his own head. Was it about him? If so, they were too late.

  He was inside the heart of the beast. He had reached its soft, sentimental core.

  He pulled the trigger from his pocket with his good hand and rubbed it with his thumb like an amulet, a holy object.

  Chapter 73

  Fisk was yelling Jenssen’s name when law enforcement converged on him, stopping him before the entrance to the tunnel.

  That was as far as he could go. No one entered the chute who wasn’t cleared to be on the stage. He could have persuaded them eventually, but there wasn’t enough time. Fisk backed away from the hands that wanted to restrain him. “He’s in there!” yelled Fisk, past all sense now.

  Alain Nouvian, the cellist, was next to go in. He turned in alarm at what was happening, recognizing Fisk. He said to the nearest official, “That’s one of our police detectives.”

  The coordinator was lost in her headphones, the ceremony’s choreography the defining principle of her life at that moment. “Go,” she told him. “Now!”

  Nouvian, unsure, did as he was instructed, starting slowly into the tent, checking back over his shoulder.

  Joanne Sparks and Maggie Sullivan joined the fray near Fisk, echoing Nouvian’s words. “What’s happening?” said Maggie. “Where’s Detective Gersten?”

  The mention of her name gave Fisk a sudden burst of strength. He pulled away from the cops and raced around the two female heroes, in essence using them to set a pick, allowing Fisk to get free and go around the entrance to the side of the tunnel.

  He ran along it, trying to guess Jenssen’s position inside. He shielded his head with his arm and cut sideways into the tunnel, bracing for impact against the unseen metal rib cage.

  He struck a cross-pipe just a few inches away from a conjoined vertical post. The force of his impact ripped the blue tarp from the side bar, setting the entire tunnel wriggling like a giant blue worm.

  The pipe held firm, but exposed a weakness at a connecting joint above, dislodging the frame.

  Fisk fell sprawling into the tunnel, landing hard on the gravel path. He looked up fast and saw a body stumbling to the side. The dislodged pipe had struck Jenssen on the right side, nearly throwing him to the ground.

  Fisk righted himself. Jenssen did not. He looked up, wild-eyed, his cast hand held out from his side, his right hand open and empty.

  He was searching the gravel path around him frantically.

  Fisk slipped on the gravel with his first step toward the larger man.

  Five paces behind Jenssen, Nouvian stood in shock. He was looking down at something at his feet.

  A small white device lay in the gravel. He started to reach for it.

  It was the trigger.

  Fisk yelled at him, “Don’t touch it!”

  But Nouvian already had it in his hand. He straightened, examining the strange device—then saw Jenssen running at him.

  The Swede let out a howl, charging the cellist like a bull.

  Nouvian’s eyes saw Fisk beyond Jenssen, pointing, yelling, “No!” Then back to Jenssen coming at him.

  The cellist’s eyes cleared of all confusion. As
Jenssen reached him, Nouvian tossed the trigger device away, toward Fisk.

  Jenssen crushed into Nouvian, driving him to the ground in an open-field tackle.

  Fisk caught the trigger with both hands, receiving it as gingerly as a newly laid egg. Jenssen turned from where he was crouching on top of Nouvian, seeing that the device was in Fisk’s hands now.

  He got up, then pitched hard to one side, holding his cast arm as he staggered.

  Fisk saw that the Swede was near delirious with pain and panic.

  Jenssen pitched himself toward Fisk, attempting another mad dash. But after a few uncertain, unbalanced steps, Jenssen stopped.

  Voices echoed in the rippling tunnel now. Police were rushing toward them from the staging area. People were massing outside the tarpaulin, pressing against the fabric walls.

  They were closing in. Failure was collapsing on Jenssen.

  He held out his broken wrist, looking at the explosive cast. Fisk saw blood dripping off the man’s fingertips to the ground.

  Gunfire now. Two rounds thumped the ground near them, tearing through the tarp.

  Somebody had given the sharpshooters orders to fire blindly into the tunnel in an attempt to stop the threat.

  Fisk remembered that TATP could be ignited three ways: electronic pulse, fuse, or impact.

  Jenssen knew that he could not reach the trigger in Fisk’s hand in time. Now he turned, looked for the source of the gunfire. He wanted suicide-by-cop like his comrade Bin-Hezam.

  Only—Jenssen wanted impact on his arm. He wanted detonation.

  Fisk saw a wild thought come into the terrorist’s blue eyes. The Swede, who had killed Gersten, stepped to the side of the tunnel. There, he reared his forearm over his head.