by Ben Coes
Through the sirens, Tacoma heard footsteps. He saw a man walking slowly down the middle of the street, weaving in between abandoned vehicles. He held a submachine gun. He was short, with long black curly hair, a beard and mustache, and olive-colored skin. Tacoma held still in the shadows and waited for him to pass by.
Hezbollah.
Tacoma wiped his mouth and raised the rifle, feeling a warm sensation, the anticipation as he tracked the killer walking confidently down the street. There was disdain in the gunman’s confident swagger, as if he’d already won, already humiliated America. He walked like a victor.
Tacoma watched as the gunman continued to skulk down between the cars. He slid the fire selector to manual. As the gunman reached the next cross street, Tacoma inched from the alcove, acquired him, then yanked back on the trigger. The bullet bucked out of the gun—making a sheer metallic thwack—and thumped into the back of the gunman’s head, misting a cloud of brains, skull, and blood into the air behind him. The killer dropped with an animal yelp and that was all. He spiraled in a twisted morass to the street.
Tacoma kept moving down Lexington, along the sidewalk, in the shadows of the east side of the avenue’s skyscrapers. Soon, he was in a fast-paced run, galloping down Lexington in a hard sprint.
Tacoma caught the movement, to his right: a flash of steel. A gunman emerged at the corner.
The gunman marked Tacoma and fired.
Tacoma dived down to the sidewalk just as bullets ricocheted in the granite of the building behind him. He swept the MP7 and fired. A suppressed bullet caught the side of the gunman’s head. He fell to the street as Tacoma started running again.
90
9:44 A.M.
FLOOR 18
UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING
FIRST AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Dellenbaugh crabbed across the destroyed floor to the shattered window at the front of the tower. He sat back against a desk that was still there. He held the handgun he’d taken from the dead Secret Service agent. He felt overwhelming pain. He looked down; the bandage wrapped around his stomach was already soaked. He looked at the front of his pants and there was a large patch of wet red, blood that had already seeped from the wound and was now drenching him.
Dellenbaugh knew what it meant. Something was still embedded inside his body. He leaned back and could feel an odd, sharp, deep sensation of horrible pain. When he leaned forward he felt it less, but it was there.
Just above his head was a bent steel structural rod. He was seated at an angle of advantage and would see anyone enter. He knew they were coming. He would shoot them from where he was. Yet, the overwhelming sense of pain and torpor ripped at him from the inside, like a knife stabbing at his spine.
At the same time, he felt a sense of calm coming on. He knew it was shock from the pain. He couldn’t allow it to take him over, to envelop him in its painless cloud. If he went into shock, he would shut down.
Dellenbaugh reached his hand to the bandage and pushed the wet bottom of it up. He stuck his index finger into the wound, where the glass had penetrated, feeling amid a gelatinous surface as another part of him registered the entry of the foreign objects, the fingers from his own hand. Each fragment of an inch created pain he’d never imagined could exist. Tears of sheer pain, and the fight against it, streaked from Dellenbaugh’s eyes as his index and middle fingers found the source of the agony. It was a thick piece of glass, the size of a quarter. As shock reared its head again, and burning, razor pain hit him, he pulled the shard of glass from his stomach and put it on the ground, his fingers soaked in crimson, just as movement came from across the suite.
He looked at the small object, and, like removing a splinter, on some level felt relief—a lessening of the pain.
Dellenbaugh raised the gun just as a man entered the suite. He aimed the gun, though his arm was wobbly. When the gun fell from his hand all he could do was watch as the killer approached.
91
9:45 A.M.
UNITED STATES FEDERAL RESERVE
1135 SIXTH AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Rokan was in the governors’ room, staring at the four identical lecterns in a row. Each one stood waist high. On top of thin stainless steel poles sat four digital screens.
Rokan started at the first lectern. He opened a ziplock bag. He removed the wet, slimy eyeball. It was coated in blood and several stringy veins dangled down from it. He placed it on the screen with the front of the eye staring down into the screen. Next, he took out the thumb from the bag and put the print against the screen.
Suddenly, the iodine sheet field displayed a name in black letters across the electric energy field.
S E C U R E 9 5: 094612 F E N N E R D
Rokan worked quickly. He repeated what he’d done and soon had the eyes and fingers on each screen, cataloguing his progress by virtue of the appearance of the names of the governors.
S E C U R E 4 4: 094636 W I N I K O F F K
S E C U R E 1 9: 094702 L A W R E N C E P
There were now three bands of writing across the sheet field. He placed the fourth set of objects on the last screen. After he adjusted the eyeball several times, the sheet field lit up with a fourth name:
S E C U R E 6 2: 094752 J A K L I T S C H A
A computerized male voice spoke from somewhere:
“Access one minute.”
Then the field of energy abruptly disappeared. He had one minute to get inside.
Rokan put each eyeball and finger back into a separate bag, starting with the last one. He would need them to get out.
“Forty-five seconds,” came a spine-chilling voice.
He bagged up the first three sets of eyeballs and thumbs.
“Thirty seconds.”
He had plenty of time, though he fumbled a bit. As he stepped to the last screen, he felt his foot on top of something and felt an unnatural burst, as if he’d stepped on a balloon and it popped. His eyes shot to the last screen and saw only a thumb. Rokan didn’t need to look down to know what had happened. The eye had somehow rolled off the screen. Rokan had just stepped on it. Lifting his shoe, he saw only a pile of messy veins, blood, and white sludge. He’d just inadvertently ruined one of the eyeballs he needed to ultimately get out of the room.
“Fifteen seconds.”
Rokan stared at the destroyed mash of eyeball, not bothering to try to pick it up. As much as he had already accepted the fact he would die today, the realization was sudden and brutal. Once inside, he could never leave.
If there was another way in, he would be found, alive or dead. From here on in, it was a suicide mission. He had so wanted to grow old and someday do nothing but read and garden.…
“Ten seconds, nine, eight…”
Rokan stepped past the lecterns and ran as the seconds counted down.
“Five, four, three…”
Rokan walked past the lecterns and down the thin corridor. He entered the room he’d only imagined as, behind him, he heard the voltage of the wall reignite and slash back across the entrance to the room.
92
9:46 A.M.
LOBBY
UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING
FIRST AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Dewey entered the lobby in silence. He slammed in a fresh mag as he surveyed the scene.
The lobby of the tower was cavernous, several stories high, and it was scattered with bodies.
Alarms—mounted at various points inside the lobby—screeched high-decibel warning sounds, and lights flashed bright red and white.
The dead were the people who’d been inside when the terrorists first entered: diplomats, security people, staff members, journalists, and others. There were at least a dozen sprawled in blood on the ground … a killing field. There were also SWAT and other law enforcement dead on the ground.
He crouched, out of sight.
There was shouting and more
gunfire as SWAT from the FBI and NYPD engaged the Iranians from First Avenue.
Dewey had killed several men. Still, he wondered, how many were there? How the hell were they still fighting?
From the back of the lobby, he studied the front of the tower. Along First Avenue, he could see a pair of yellow school buses. This was how Hezbollah had penetrated the facility, arriving on school buses, packing soldiers in, then, upon arrival, using the fact that security would let their guard down for a few moments, expecting a school bus filled with children.
He saw several ambulances, with red lights flashing, and too many police cars to count—and yet, they all seemed pinned down by whatever Iranians had taken control of the entrance to the UN. Now, he was behind them. He stayed behind a pillar, out of the way of incoming fire.
He heard a beep in his ear. It was Calibrisi.
“You have a friendly to your left,” said Calibrisi. “Don’t shoot him. His name is Mike Murphy. He’s the president’s political guy. Give him a gun if you can use him, otherwise it’s cut off, we’ll get him later.”
Dewey tapped off.
93
9:50 A.M.
UNITED STATES FEDERAL RESERVE
1135 SIXTH AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Rokan stepped into the central governors’ room. His eyes saw the wall he’d read about in Winikoff’s journal, which they’d hacked into. Her words, however, didn’t do it justice. It was astonishing.
It is a cylindrical tower of data, bright letters and numbers in yellow, red, green, and white, moving up the center column of data, which is sheer. It is three feet in diameter. It runs from below and then disappears above. It is not connected to the internet but rather is run through a series of high-density cable networks that span the globe, all controlled by the United States. We do not control the cables and infrastructure. Rather, we control what moves along them. It is the real-time interrelationship between the Federal Reserve and other entities, including banks, foreign countries, and even the U.S. government itself. We are the gatekeepers, though we do not pass judgment, we simply move the money. The colors indicate time to the event, that is, the movement of the money. Red means within one minute, green two, and so on. In this room, in that column of light, we four alone manage approximately five trillion dollars. It is a mesmerizing sight and I found myself, for the first month or two, staring at it. It looks like a bouquet of lights, constantly moving, but eventually I learned to see past that and do my job.
Rokan’s mouth went ajar as he stared at the column. He removed his jacket and tie as he sat down behind a wide curvilinear keyboard, his eyes at all times on the center of the room.
He knew he had several hours of work in front of him. To get here was one thing—but the greater challenge was still ahead. He needed to learn how to enter the chessboard—and then destroy it.
94
9:53 A.M.
OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
On King’s office walls, bright LCD screens showed four separate feeds. One played Fox News, another BBC, then NBC, and ABC—all networks featuring wall-to-wall coverage of the attack on Manhattan.
Today’s date had the inauspicious luck, for the Iranian attackers, of being October 11th. All four networks ran tickers across the bottom of the screen. They were calling it “10/11.”
The volume was turned down. The screens were filled with live views of Manhattan from helicopters, an island shrouded in smoke. All of the networks intercut the view from above with street-level video—much of it sourced from social media—of dead bodies and people being shot.
Video also showed the harrowing moments just as two American Sikorsky helicopters were shot down over the East River. Still other video, taken from news helicopters and from buildings nearby, showed the damage and continuing chaos around the four separate tunnels.
The mood in King’s office was tense. Everyone was waiting for Bill Polk, the deputy CIA director, to arrive via video conference. He asked Calibrisi to assemble the interagency leadership now attempting to manage the different aspects of the attack and America’s response.
One particular scene had gone viral across the globe. An ABC reporter was attempting to try to do his feed from near the Lincoln Tunnel on the West Side. The video was interrupted by the reporter’s chest being hit by a slug, kicked out in a graphic picture of gory violence, then the video went dark, followed, presumably, by the killing of the cameraman. All networks across the globe were replaying the awful footage.
Meanwhile, King continued to pace back and forth behind his desk.
He could see the screens from the distance, but he paced nevertheless, separated from the group. He was in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the South Lawn.
In King’s office were King; CIA chief, Hector Calibrisi; Secretary of State Bailey Miller; Secretary of Defense Dale Arnold; Treasury Secretary Michelle Goncalves; Josh Brubaker, the White House national security advisor; Mark Hastings, chief justice of the Supreme Court; and John Schmidt, the White House communications director. A White House Communications Office engineer sat on a chair near the door to King’s office, managing the video feeds.
King looked at her and nodded.
Two of the news screens went dark. Then they cut internal feeds from CENCOM. Richard Baum, chairman of the Federal Reserve, came on the screen from a private airplane flying to Washington, D.C., from San Francisco. He was in a khaki shirt, arms crossed, seated in a white captain’s chair on the jet. Another screen flashed bright and showed Bill Polk, head of the National Clandestine Service, standing inside a mission theater at Langley.
King stepped around the desk and looked at Polk, on the screen.
“Well, Bill?” said King.
Polk, a bald man with round tortoiseshell eyeglasses and dressed in a coat and tie, nodded at King.
“The following information cannot be discussed outside of the individuals in this meeting,” said Polk. “I need you to all understand that we are now operating on American soil. We have three assets inside Manhattan. I’m not going to answer questions about what they’re doing. Three non-official covers. All three men have in-theater command control and are exonerated in any actions they may take. Based on what we’re seeing, we could be in a circumstance in which our agents are the last line of defense.”
“Who is it, Bill?” said King.
“Dewey Andreas, Aaron Singerman, and Rob Tacoma,” said Polk. “All three were in the vicinity of Manhattan and have been brought in and are operational.”
“Can we take a step back,” said Bailey Miller, the secretary of state. “What are we talking about here?”
“We have a three-tier attack going on,” said Polk calmly. “Streets, president, Fed. We’re behind, unprepared, and potentially in a situation where the president ends up dead and the nation’s wealth has been erased.” Polk paused. “Cut off Manhattan, kill the president, wipe out the Fed. That’s the operation. They’re creating an island.”
One of the screens flashed into four photographs, four head shots of individuals with their names:
DAVID FENNER | ADAM JAKLITSCH
PHILLIP LAWRENCE | KARA WINIKOFF
“There are the four governors of the United States Federal Reserve,” Polk continued. “Kara Winikoff, Adam Jaklitsch, Phil Lawrence, David Fenner. These four individuals manage the Fed’s money, and thus America’s money; about five trillion dollars. Alone, each individual is powerless. Together, they’re the most powerful people on earth after the president. Each died this morning in cold blood; each was missing a thumb and an eyeball.” Polk paused. “The attack on J. P. Dellenbaugh was a red herring. This is about destroying America. Wiping out the Fed, wiping out anything not in cash or gold.”
There was a long silence.
“There have to be redundancies in the Fed data,” said Brubaker. “Backups. Richard?”
When apprised of the situation, Baum, the
chairman of the Fed, for whom the four governors technically worked, put his hand to the bridge of his nose, holding back emotion.
“Richard, we need to understand the significance of what they’re after,” said King, pointing at Baum.
“Anything not cash or gold will be worth its intrinsic value, and the data will be worthless,” said Baum, staring back at King. “We’re talking about five trillion dollars. If they liquidate the Federal Reserve, the actions of the active shooters will look like child’s play. Even assassinating Dellenbaugh won’t matter. There will be no access to capital. Banks will triage and deny people their money. There will be no way to pay for anything, money will become a weapon.”
“There have to be redundancies that record the transactions,” said King. “Backup systems?”
“This is the backup system,” said Baum. “Understand—if they wipe out the data at the Federal Reserve, that money is simply gone. You’ll have riots in every city in America and that’s just the beginning. My guess is other world capitals and cities will also descend into chaos. We are the prime provider of liquidity to half the countries in the world. America will be vulnerable to military attack, and you might not even have a president.”
“To repeat, the system is the redundancy,” said Goncalves, the Treasury secretary. “The activity in that room is the central bank. It’s the backbone not only for the U.S. but it also undergirds banking systems, balance sheets, and foreign governments. We are the backup system.”
“How can someone just go in there and wipe out trillions of dollars?” said Brubaker.
“The security is designed to prevent it,” said Baum. “Nobody could’ve envisioned the kind of actions taken this morning. The crimes, the planning, and the brutality. But yes, theoretically it’s possible to do it. It’s happening.”
There was a long pause.
“Well, that’s just fucking great,” said King, shaking his head. “What the hell are we going to do about it?”