“What are we going to do, sir?” asked Johnson.
Tyler sat back down again, just as Manuel entered with the drinks. “We’re going to show them,” he said. “We’re going to show them that they’re half right. We’re going to show them that there is no god but Allah—but that there is no Allah. Not in this life, anyway.”
He handed the drinks around. “I want our enhanced version of the STUXNET unleashed on the facility of Qom— and everywhere else. I want those three Super Hornets locked and loaded—make sure they know the rubble needs to bounce, and in the most spectacular fashion they’ve got. A real fucking son et lumiére. I want the Iranians and any other holy warriors to understand: no more Mr. Nice Guy. From now on the Bush Doctrine is in effect: any country that harbors or abets these murderous bastards is going to get it, right in the chops. And I want Emanuel Skorzeny dead. Not brought to justice. Dead. Cheers.”
They drank. Tyler looked over at the bust of Lincoln hanging on one of the walls. “Now I know how you felt, you ruthless son of a bitch,” he said, and raised his glass to Abraham’s ghost.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
New York City
Alonzo Schmidt would be damned if he was going to let this stump him.
The radiation levels were well within the standard tolerances, but something was amiss. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there definitely was something wrong.
Think.
He’d been on duty the day of the attacks, and he’d seen firsthand some of the carnage as they brought the dead and wounded over from the Ninety-second Street Y. It was always the Jews who caught the brunt of things like this, always the Jews who got blamed for everything. Being black in America was hard enough, but being a Jew, he decided, was really tough.
Not that he minded being black in America. He was always being lectured by some baggy-pants, straight-haired Negro or other that the black man had suffered four hundred years of iniquity at the hands of the white man, but then he looked around the hospital and what did he see? A sea of color: white doctors, black doctors, Indian doctors, Arab doctors, Christian doctors, Jewish doctors, even some Muslim doctors. All getting along perfectly fine, all conforming to the discipline of the hospital, all dedicated to precisely one cause, which was saving lives.
He had a good job, a good life, a good wife, great kids. They had their own place in Queens, bought if not yet paid for. He had a nice car, which he left garaged most of the year until spring came and he could take the family out to Sag Harbor to visit relatives. And the hospital made it all possible—the hospital and his skill at his job.
Think. No, better—
Think back.
Chaos that day. Hard to believe that one lone gunman could have done all that damage. Why—
The phone rang. “Schmidt,” he said.
“It’s Detective Saleh, Mr. Schmidt,” came the phone. “Remember me?”
“Sure I do. In fact, I was just thinking about you. You know, there’s something at the back of my—”
“Listen, we don’t have much time. I’m in the car right now, on my way uptown. Can you clear your schedule?”
“Of course, Detective.”
“The M.E. got us an ID on the shooter at the Y. His name was Crankheit, C-R-A-N-K-H-E-I-T, like Walter only different, first name Raymond. Does that ring a bell?’
Alonzo thought for a moment. “Can’t say that it does.”
“He might have been using another name. Or maybe he never told anybody his name.”
“What are you getting at?”
“We think he might have been in the hospital prior to the incident. His head was blown off by whoever took him out, but our guys in the M.E.’s office are whizzes with computers and we think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what he might have looked like. I’m sending you the picture now. Hold on.”
Alonzo Schmidt took the smartphone away from his ear and watched. Sure enough, in a few seconds the machine let him know he had a photo. He punched it up.
“Nasty-looking little geek, ain’t he?” he said to Lannie.
“Mustn’t go by looks now,” said Lannie. “But he was even nastier than he looked—a real piece of shit.”
“I saw what he done to those ladies at the Y,” said Alonzo. “He messed them up pretty good. A whole lotta hate in that boy. Whole lotta hate in a lot of people.”
“Yeah, love seems in pretty short supply around the world these days. Hang on—we’re pulling up now. Meet me out front.”
Lannie was coming through the main doors when Alonzo got there. He held out his hand in greeting. Lannie shook it and kept moving. “Someplace private,” he said, “where we can talk.”
They ducked into a nearby office, empty. “Do you recognize him?”
“Yes,” said Alonzo simply.
Lannie turned on the recorder application in his smartphone. “Go.”
“I only saw him a couple of times, but I have a pretty good memory for faces, and this one kinda creeped me out. I mean, he seemed nice enough in a weird sort of way, but he wasn’t what you’d call friendly, which I thought was odd for a delivery guy.”
“Delivery guy?”
“Yeah, from the deli around the corner. People always getting hungry around here, sending out for stuff, and he brought me a corned-beef sandwich a couple of times.”
“When was this?”
“Right before the attack. Couple of days.”
“What makes you think you’d remember somebody as anonymous as a delivery guy?”
“Celina Selena pointed it out to me. That’s what we call her, Celina Selena, on account of her momma loved that singer who got killed. Don’t tell her I told you. She likes to keep her middle name private.”
“You mean, the technician in nuclear medicine?”
“That’s Celina.”
Five minutes later they were in one of the unused examining rooms in Nuclear Medicine. “Of course I remember, Detective,” Celina was saying. “People tell me I have the best ear for accents of anyone they’ve ever met.”
“Where am I from?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Atlantic Avenue, west of the Van Wyck. If I hear you talk some more, I might be able to get within a couple of blocks.”
Lannie was impressed but didn’t have time for parlor tricks right now. “I’ll take you up on that some other time,” he said. “Tell me about this guy. What was it about his accent?”
Celina looked at Alonzo. “Well, we were shooting the breeze and he said he was from Wahoo, Nebraska, but I know people from Wahoo, Nebraska—Dr. Lovenberg is from Wahoo, Nebraska.”
“Why do you keep saying that. ‘Wahoo, Nebraska’?”
“Because that’s how they say it. Wahoo, Nebraska, accent on the ‘hoo.’ And he didn’t. He just said Wahoo. So I said, you mean, Wahoo, Nebraska, and he just looked at me. That was when I knew he wasn’t from Wahoo.”
“Nebraska,” finished Lannie.
“Exactly. Plus he accented ‘Wa.’ ”
“Okay, now where did he go? Was he ever carrying anything? Did he walk over here or take a bike?”
“Neither,” said Alonzo. “He rode one of those threewheelers with a compartment up front to put stuff in. You’ve seen ’em.”
Lannie felt his heart racing. “Where’s the service entrance?”
They were there eight minutes later. Lannie was punching in text on his phone the whole way.
The room was downstairs, just as he feared.
“Are there any storage rooms around here? Places the service personnel use to store things?”
“It’s okay, Ralph,” said Schmidt to a big man in a security guard’s rig. “Everything cool. Right over here, Detective.”
Lannie tried the door. “It’s locked.”
“Not locked. The door’s busted, stuck or something, and we haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed. Not a lot of use for it anyway.”
“We have to break it down,” said Lannie, deadly serious. “Come on, help me.”
The fat man added his weight to the mix. The door groaned and buckled but did not give.
“Stand back,” said Lannie, drawing his weapon, the Sig P226, the model that was among the standard-issue nine-millimeters in the department. Even his chief, Frankie Byrne, had switched, although more out of necessity than choice. He fired a single round. “Okay, again,” he said, and the four of them put their combined weight behind it....
Open. There was the trike. “Fuck a duck,” said Lannie.
He raced to the trike and opened the compartment. Empty. It would have been a miracle were it not, and it seemed that for New York City miracles were just about in as short supply as love.
Lannie punched another message, then looked up. “How far could he have gotten with whatever he was carrying before somebody noticed him?”
“Depends on the time of day,” said Celina. “Late at night . . .”
Late at night, hospitals were just about the least secure places in the city. Just the comatose patients and a few overworked interns heading into the twentieth consecutive hour of work while most of the doctors slept soundly at home in the Oranges or Westchester or Ridgefield in Connecticut, and the help went home to the Bronx and Staten Island. If that kid had gotten entry to the hospital at night, he could have left his package anywhere.
“Thanks, Ralph, you’ve been very helpful,” said Lannie to the fat man, and began to walk away. He dropped his voice as he spoke to Celina and Alonzo. “You’re not to speak of this to anybody, you understand. This is police business. Alonzo, get me a radiation check on that trike ASAP. Celina, I need you to start asking around . . . quietly . . . among the staff if anybody remembers seeing your boyfriend Raymond one night before the attacks. And I need to see the head administrator, right now.”
“I’ll take to you Dr. Leopold’s office,” offered Celina.
“I knew something was wrong,” muttered Alonzo. “I felt it. I felt like something was hiding from me”
Celina and Lannie were heading for the elevator that would take them to the administration floor. “Do you think you can feel it one more time?” asked Lannie. “And find it? Our lives are going to depend on it.”
“You can count on me, Detective,” said Schmidt. “If there’s something hot in this place, I’ll get it.”
“Make it snappy,” said Lannie. Then, to Celina, “Let’s—”
She was taking an in-house page on her cell phone. The look on her face told Lannie something was terribly wrong. “Can you please repeat that?” she said, signaling frantically to Lannie to come close and listen. “I’m having a hard time hearing you. This is a hospital, you know. It’s noisy around here. Wait, let me put you on speakerphone.”
She hit the button. Together, they listened to the voice.
“Did you give him my message?”
Lannie signaled for her to play along, string out the conversation, keep him on the line as much as possible as he frantically sent a message back to Sid Sheinberg at CTU headquarters. In hospitals, cell phone service was tied in with Internet service; the relay stations worked off the wireless service. If he could just keep the guy talking long enough, they could get a read on his position.
“Give who the message?”
“Detective Aslan Saleh—” and then the words devolved into some kind of Middle Eastern gibberish again, words that Celina had no chance of ever understanding, no matter how many times she went to Brooklyn.
Lannie was still texting when his ear caught the change of language. A look of disbelief came over his face as he listened, and a sneer of derision appeared on his lips.
“He’s right there with you, isn’t he?” said the man, speaking in English again. “So this is my message to you, Detective Saleh, you dog son of a thousand whores. There is fatwa against you and your family for the crime of apostasy. There is fatwa against you and your family for the crime of insulting Islam. There is fatwa against you for the crime of collaborating with the infidel. May you make your peace with Allah and beg his most compassionate forgiveness. Taubeh kon! For the day of reckoning is at—”
Lannie grabbed the phone. “Listen to me, fella. You can take your goddamn fucking threats and shove them up your ass. This is my town, my country, my home and if you don’t like then go blow a camel. You ever show up here, you’re dead meat. You wanna see repentance? By the time I’m finished with you, you’re gonna confess to murdering Judge Crater. Capisce?”
But the bastard had rung off. No matter—he’d kept him on the phone long enough. Sid Sheinberg would track his ass down. The long arm of the NYPD would reach out and take his fucking head right off.
“Everything okay, Detective?” asked Celina.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Washington, D.C.
Millie Dhouri hated to interrupt the President when he was power napping but the FBI was on the line. “It’s Deputy Director Byrne, Mr. President,” she said. “On the phone. Says it’s a matter of national security.”
Jeb Tyler shook his head to clear the cobwebs. What was he, some middle manager? Didn’t anybody go through channels anymore? It was easy for the President to say that the door to the Oval Office was always open, but he wasn’t supposed to mean it.
Before he took the call he went into the small room just off the Oval Office that one of his predecessors had made famous and splashed some water on his face. He loved playing poker as much as the next good ol’ boy, but this was the highest-stakes game he ever hoped to play in. The situation was fluid and changing by the minute. Prophets and Virgins were appearing in the skies, the Iranians had just fired off three Shahabs to make sure everybody was paying attention, he’d just signed off on an op that, if it failed, would ensure that he ranked right up there with Jimmy Carter and the failed hostage rescue attempt in the annals of presidential futility, fecklessness, and infamy.
What was not to like?
“What is it?”
“There’s a bomb at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The NYPD won’t confirm that, but I can.”
“What kind of bomb?”
“Suitcase nuke, we think. The media’s been telling folks for years there’s no such thing, but you and I both know better, don’t we, Mr. President?”
Tyler could see why everybody loathed Tom Byrne. The man was rude, crude, and lewd, and probably screwed, blooed, and tattooed as well. Nevertheless he was damn good at his job precisely because of all those unsavory character traits.
“How do you know? Did your brother tell you? And if he didn’t, why wasn’t I informed?”
“You’ll have to ask Frankie that, Mr. President. He and I don’t get along so good, as you probably know. But I’ve got a little bird in the CTU, and he sings like a regular canary.”
Tyler felt his blood boiling. Goddamned clannish Irish and their goddamned NYPD blue line and their goddamned mick version of omertá.
“Thank you for informing me, Deputy Director Byrne,” said Tyler. “I’ll task it to the proper authorities.”
It was clear Byrne didn’t like getting blown off. “I think you should let the FBI handle it, sir.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of Homeland Security.”
If he’d been present, Byrne would have laughed in his face. The sneer came through loud and clear over the phone. “You have got to be kidding me, sir.”
“I’m the President of the United States,” Tyler reminded him.
“Yes, you are, sir. And the statutory authority is clear: This is an FBI matter, Mr. President. So please let us handle it. We have the men, the training, and the equipment. And I have my . . . special relationship . . . with the head of the CTU, as you know.”
Tyler ran through the calculations in his head. Results were all that counted now, and there was no time to waste. T
he thought of dragging that idiot Colangelo into the case and getting him up to speed made him ill. Whatever the bad blood between the Byrne brothers was, it didn’t matter at this moment. All that mattered was finding that bomb, defusing it, and getting it the hell out of Manhattan with the public none the wiser.
“If this goes tits up . . .” said Tyler.
“Then we’ve both got bigger problems than jurisdiction.”
“Where are you now?”
“In the Acela, on my way to Penn Station. Will be there in forty-five minutes.”
So the die was already cast. After this was over, if somehow he won reelection, he was going to clean house. Except for Seelye and maybe Shalika Johnson, there wouldn’t be anybody left standing from the old regime. Well, maybe with one or two exceptions, depending on how well they carried out their current missions. But Thomas A. Byrne, he felt quite sure, was destined for early retirement.
“Deputy Director Byrne?” said the President.
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Don’t fuck up.”
“Thank you, sir. And if you ever need a, you know, favor . . .”
Tyler kept him on the line. He didn’t have to worry about Byrne hanging up. You didn’t hang up on the President, he hung up on you.
“Sir?”
“I’m thinking.... Listen, Tom, what’s this I hear about you and a certain lady . . . ?”
Thank God for interagency gossip, and his appetite for it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Al Dhafra, United Arab Emirates
It was more than a little creepy to see the memorial models of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside the fire department. At least, thought Devlin, we had some friends in the Arab world. Especially here, in the Emirates and near the other Gulf states. They all had their problems with the United States, but they had an even bigger problem with their Shiite minorities, who were growing more restive by the day, whipped up and egged on by the Iranians and their proxies in the Levant. Thank Allah for the ancient principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, or we wouldn’t have any friends in the Middle East at all.
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