He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, like he’d gone into some kind of idiot trance. “Allah! Allah!”
“Like you were merciful with the women and children at Sayad and Baykhan?”
“Please!”
And that was when the door burst in, and Mclean and Jones stood silhouetted, training their guns on me. “Freeze, Walker! Get on your face!”
I sighed. “Jesus, Mclean! Where were you when they were handing out brains? Did you get the files I sent you?”
“Get on your face!”
“No. Just listen to me, will you? This man is involved in a plot to bomb the UN conference in about nine hours…”
“I don’t want to hear it! For the last time! Get on your face!”
I raised my hands. “I am unarmed, Mclean. Even you can’t be stupid enough to shoot an unarmed man. Do you know who this guy is?”
He glanced at Abbassi, who started burbling, “I am Abdul Abbassi! I am attached to the Embassy! I have diplomatic immunity! I am an aide to Prince Mohamed bin Awad! You are required by law to release me!”
“Do not release him, Mclean! This man is a dangerous terrorist! Do not release him!”
Mclean jerked his head at Jones, who holstered his .38, moved to Abbassi, and inspected the cuffs. He glanced at Mclean. “They’re standard cuffs.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his standard keys. I said, “Jones! For crying out loud! This man is a killer!”
Mclean shouted, “Shut up, Walker! I’ve about had it with you!”
Abbassi was standing, rubbing his wrists. Jones was kneeling at his feet, unlocking the cuffs on his ankles. I said, “Mclean, for crying out loud…”
Abbassi bent down, muttering, “Allow me to help…”
I pointed and shouted, “Jones!”
But it was too late. Abbassi had his gun in his hand. He turned, smiling, and fired at Mclean. I saw the red hole in his chest and the plume of red gore explode from his back. Then, in a single, fluid movement Abbassi had hammered down with the butt of the gun on Jones’ head, and as the FBI man sagged and sprawled on the floor, Abbassi emptied two rounds into his heart. I was reaching for my Smith & Wesson behind my back, but he was already aiming at me, pulling the trigger. I dropped to the floor, heard two explosions and the glass shatter above me. Then he was grabbing his clothes, running down the corridor. I scrambled to my feet. Jones was dead, but Mclean was gasping.
I grabbed my cell and called 911. When they answered I said, “Shut up! Two FBI agents down, critical, Bryant Avenue, the Bronx!” Then I hung up.
Mclean was staring at me, trying to talk. I said, “I warned you. I sent you the damned files.” Then I reached in his jacket and pulled out his badge. I showed it to him. “I’m going to borrow this. I may need it.”
I went after Abbassi. I ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time. In reception, Joe looked worried and I went over to him and grabbed him by the scruff of his filthy neck. “You have two Feds upstairs, Joe, that you should not have let in. That guy who ran out in his shorts just now? He shot them. You are going to have a lot of trouble now, pal. But that is nothing compared to what you’ll have if you mention me. Look at me. Listen to me. I will come back and I will feed you your own dick. You understand me?”
He nodded and I left, wondering how they’d found me. I climbed in my car, knowing there was probably an APB out on it. I took off north, up Bryant to Spofford Avenue and turned west as far as Tiffany Street. There I turned left again into the industrial units. They were dim and lonely. It was late and the whores had all gone home, leaving the sad, yellow light of the street lamps to wait for the gray dawn alone.
I knew I didn’t have long. Pretty soon the whole of Hunts Point would be crawling with cops and Feds. I needed to move fast. I turned right onto Randall Avenue, right again into some dark alley, then sharp left and over Truxton into 156th. There I stopped outside an industrial unit with a parking lot full of trucks. It was sealed off with a steel fence and a padlock. I checked my watch. It was fifteen minutes after three. I had less than nine hours.
I climbed out and with my Swiss Army knife, I removed my plates. I vaulted the fence, wondering if I had triggered an alarm. I ignored the possibility and set to work removing the plates from a truck at the back of the lot, where it wouldn’t be noticed by cops with flashlights. It took me less than five minutes. Then I clambered back over and fitted the plates to the Zombie.
As I pulled away, headed north, I could hear the sirens descending on Bryant Avenue. And somewhere above, there was a chopper circling. I kept going, taking random turns for no particular reason, going back on myself, around in circles, but always moving north and always west, until I finally came to the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, pretty sure I wasn’t being tailed. There I crossed over into Washington Heights and finally, I started to head south, toward Midtown.
At three-forty AM I finally came to West 42nd and turned east in the direction of the United Nations Headquarters. At that time the traffic had a restless, prowling, predatory look. What had F. Scott Fitzgerald called it? The long, dark night of the soul, where it is always three o’clock in the morning. But I was closing in on four o’clock, with eight hours to go. I left my car on the corner of 1st Avenue, lit a cigarette, and took a walk up as far as the Sutton Bar, which I knew was open all night.
As I walked, the horizon beyond the East River was already touched with the first gray light of pre-dawn. My footsteps were loud on the sidewalk and, far off, an accelerating car and a woman’s shouts made a strange, lonely counterpoint.
I pushed through the door of the small bar into the desultory laughter and conversation of those people left at the tail end of the night. They sat, a couple of small groups at small tables, leaning in to each other, wanting to take one more laugh, one more drink, maybe one more promise of love before they went back to an empty bed, or at least a bed that felt empty.
I sat at the bar and ordered a Bushmills straight up from a barman who looked bored and tired. I tried not to think about Marni, about what she was doing right then, what she would be doing in the last moments if I failed.
If I failed.
If I failed at what? I didn’t even know what I was doing there. I didn’t know what my plan was, or even what its precise objective was. The number of questions that needed to be answered was overwhelming. Was it a bomb? If it was, where was it? Was it in the General Assembly Hall? Was it in the parking garage? Was it in the wasteland nearby? Was it biochemical? And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
I knew that if I considered all the questions at the same time, my mind would seize up. I needed to select one single question and work from there. And the one that was staring at me, the one that was shining bright, was, if the bomb that Abbassi and his team were supposed to plant was a fake, if that was misdirection, then what was the other hand doing? Where was the other device going to be placed?
I tried to visualize the scene. Abbassi had assured them they could get through security carrying their pieces of the bomb. I could hear the recording in my mind. “…Don’t worry about that, Ali, that is not your concern. Trust me, that has been taken care of. I have the components here for you. You will each carry a separate part. Ali, you will carry the C4. Hassan, you will carry the detonator, Aatifa, you will carry the agent. You will arrive separately on Friday, at eleven o’clock, eleven fifteen, and eleven thirty. You will not be detected at security. Forget about that. Forget about that! You go down to the basement at exactly eleven thirty-five…”
But he had lied to them. They would be seized at security. And hard as I tried, I could not see how that would allow for the placing of a different bomb. Unless the bomb was already there.
I took a pull on my whiskey and savored it slowly. It still didn’t make any sense. If this was misdirection, it meant that while everybody’s attention was on Aatifa and his team, the real bomb had to be slipped in some other way; not through the main gate. Through the parking garage then? But that didn’t work eithe
r, because the seizure of the three at the gate would not affect security in the garage.
Not only that, but the discovery of the bomb would in all probability trigger an immediate shutdown of the conference. Especially after the protest that broke out at the Hennessy debate. And that would rob them of their target.
All I could think of was that parts of the bomb had somehow been smuggled in already and were being assembled. With about seven thousand people working at the complex, it would not be so hard to find a handful of sympathizers to do that job. Perhaps the misdirection planned for today was to smuggle in the detonator, or some other essential part.
Or perhaps I was thinking about it all wrong. Perhaps whatever they had planned had been scrapped because I’d killed the team. Either way, I had to get in there and try to find the device if there was one. Or, if that failed, alert security to the possibility of a bomb.
And that raised another question. How the hell was I going to get in? I fished out Mclean’s badge. At a pinch, if you didn’t look too close, I could pass for him. I smiled. He lacked my rugged good looks, but what the hell!
If I failed, I wouldn’t have any looks at all.
Sixteen
My plan was: make it up as you go along.
I walked down First Avenue as dawn turned the air a grainy shade of gray, as the lights that had burned through the night died, one by one, and the seagulls cried out in despair over the mournful bray of barges and boats that plowed through the fragile light of the new day. It was thirty minutes after five AM, seven and a half hours to go, and I was making it up as I went along.
That was my plan.
I figured that from five or six in the morning, people involved one way or another in technical support would be turning up. Janitors, electricians, gas maintenance, plumbers, cleaners, you name it. They’d be turning up before the daily rush, and a lot of them would be using vans, and they’d be leaving those vans in the parking garage.
At five forty-five, as the sun warped molten over Brooklyn, I was at the top of the ramp that led to the basements beneath the UN building. Out of 42nd Street, I saw a van pull onto the avenue. It had a logo on the side that read, ‘The Tech Guys’, and it moved into the near lane and slowed with its indicator on as it approached the ramp. I pulled out Mclean’s badge, held it up for the driver to see, and signaled him to stop. He did and I stepped around to the passenger side and opened the door. I climbed in, waved the badge at him again, and said, “Special Agent Harrison Mclean. I’m not here. Carry on.”
He stared at me and his expression was skeptical. “Uh, can I see your badge again?”
I looked at him with dead eyes and pulled the revolver. “Sure. Here it is. This is a Smith & Wesson 500, loaded with seven hundred grain flat-nose hard cast. It will punch right through four layers of concrete. Will that do?”
“OK, pal. Take it easy. I don’t want any trouble.”
“You won’t get any. Just do what you normally do every morning when you get here, and nobody will get hurt.”
“OK, mister.”
I jerked my head toward the garage. “They going to check your papers?”
“Yeah.”
“Will he want my papers, too?”
He shook his head. “No, sometimes I bring an assistant.”
“If this goes bad, I’ll shoot you, you realize that?”
“Look, man. I don’t know if he will or not. He never has before.”
“OK, get going.”
We moved down the ramp and into the dark maw of the first basement. We stopped at a barrier and a guard in uniform came out of his office. My driver showed him his papers and the guard waved him on. We wound down through two basements into the dark bowels of the building and finally came to a halt in a bay near the elevators. There he stopped and stared at me. I could see he was scared. The smart thing would have been to throw him in the back and tie him up.
But what if I failed?
“What’s your name?”
“Danny.”
“You married, Danny?”
He thought about it, weighing up the consequences of a guy like me having that kind of knowledge. I saw his left hand drop out of view and he shook his head.
“Nah. Not my scene.”
I smiled. “How come you’re wearing a wedding ring?”
He shook his head. “Ah, we broke up. I wear it out of habit.”
I sighed. “Kids?”
He went pale and swallowed hard. “No!”
“OK, Danny, here’s my problem. I’m the good guy. I’m going to tell you something, and you are going to think I’m crazy, but I’m not. Somewhere in this building there is a bomb. It’s a dirty bomb. You know what that is?”
He nodded. “It has some kind of biochemical agent…”
I nodded. “Yeah, something like that. It will go off at shortly after noon. I have told the Feds but, like you, they think I’m crazy. So I have to find that bomb. Now, here is my problem. What do I do with you? If I tie you up and put you in the back of the van, and fail to find the bomb...”
I let the words hang. He stared at me with dawning horror on his face. “You want me to help you find the bomb?”
I laughed. “No, what I want you to do is go back to your wife, collect your kids, and make sure you are in Pennsylvania by twelve o’clock.”
He gaped at me. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously. But how do I know you will not go straight to security and tell them there is some nut job in the basement who is probably going to place a bomb?”
He thought about it. “Well, I guess, if you were a real nut job and your story wasn’t true, you probably…” He faltered and trailed off. “You’d probably kill me.”
I nodded. “Yeah, Danny. I probably would.” I opened the door and climbed out. “Get out of here. Get your loved ones and go. If twelve o’clock comes and there is nothing on the news, you’ll know I found it.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then seemed to snap out of it, reached in his pocket, and pulled out a technician’s badge and an electronic key. He handed them to me. “These will get you in most places. Obviously there are some highly restricted areas, but the chances of a bomb being in there…” He shrugged. “The PIN that goes with the key is 1776, year of independence. You better take my toolbox, too.”
I took them. “Thanks.”
I watched his tail lights disappear up the ramp and wondered if I had done the right thing, or if I was growing soft in my thirties.
Now that I was in, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Like I said, I was making it up as I went along. I had no idea how many levels the parking garage had. With almost seven thousand employees, it could be any number. But my gut told me, if they were going for something spectacular, the bomb was more likely to be somewhere between the first basement, where conference rooms four through thirteen were, and the fourth floor. Conference room four was large and had a gallery on the first floor. The General Assembly Hall was on the second floor, but it had galleries on the third and fourth. And it made sense, if they wanted to kill Marni and Gibbons in some spectacular way, then the bomb had to be in that area.
I figured there would be metal detectors at the access points to the main building, so I put the revolver into the toolbox and left it beside a trash can, then made my way to the elevators and rode up to the first basement. I came out opposite the bookstore. It was closed. At that time of the morning, everything was closed, the coffee shop, the gift shop, the kiosk, and the bank. I turned right and walked to the johns. I inspected the ladies’ first and then the men’s. Every cubicle. But there was nothing.
After that, I checked the briefing room and started to work my way methodically through each of the conference rooms. Danny’s key gave me access to all of them. I checked under every seat, on every stage, every dais, I scoured every inch of them, but there was nothing. A device capable of doing the kind of damage that Awad and Abbassi seemed intent on doing is not small. It is not easy to conceal. But I cou
ld not find anything at all that was even suggestive of that kind of device.
The next four floors gave me the same result, and by nine o’clock I was exhausted and out of ideas. I made my way to the vast main lobby and stared at the great, plate-glass doors, watching security open up and start to admit the steady flow of visitors from across the globe. They straggled in, passing through the big airport-style security scanners. It was nine-thirty, two and a half hours to go, and I was out of ideas, numb, and my brain was too tired to think.
I had two and a half hours, and I had nothing.
I watched a group admitted with their tour guide or, as they liked to be called, ambassador to the people. Most of the group were young, in their late teens and early twenties. Some of them looked Latin or Mediterranean, others looked Scandinavian or German. They all had the young person’s uniform of jeans, anorak, and stupid, half-sized rucksack, with a bottle of water in their hands. They were all smiling, some where laughing. They were the confident heirs to the new, global world, designed by Gene Roddenberry, where everything conformed to the three ‘Hs’: it was wholesome, hygienic, and humanitarian.
I rubbed my face. My brain ached. I searched it for a solution. There wasn’t one. A second tour was coming in, led by an attractive, well-dressed woman. There was a family, a father, a mother and three kids. Behind them was an old woman, maybe in her eighties—maybe old enough to remember the end of the war and the building of the UN HQ. She was in a wheelchair being pushed by a young man. In less than three hours, all of these people would die if I didn’t do something.
I had one last card to play. It was desperate, but it was all I had left. I wanted to discuss it with Marni, so I made my way to the public telephones and called my apartment. It rang for a long while, then went to my answering service. She might have gone out for breakfast, or she might be sleeping late. I called her cell. It was switched off or unavailable. I thought for a long moment, then tried again, both numbers, with the same result.
OMEGA SERIES BOX SET: Books 1-4 Page 69
