“Jimmy Farina,” Gannon said, smiling widely. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“Hey, Mickey. Kidding me? What the hell? Is that really you?” the cop said.
“Hey, hon,” Gannon said to Ruby. “You know who this is? It’s Jimmy Farina, an old boss from my days on the West Side.”
Ruby stood wide-eyed and managed a smile.
“What the hell, Mick? You back now?” Farina said.
“Yeah, Sarge. I’m back. Not a moment too soon, it looks like. What the hell’s going on here? You need any help? This a fire drill?”
“Yeah, I’ll say. It’s a shots-fired drill. Only it’s not a drill. There just was a shooting at the college around the corner. Somebody with a damn machine gun, they said. I heard it myself there at the desk or I wouldn’t even have believed it. Believe this shit? Probably some Columbine deal with these nutjob blue-hair college kids. It’s just all-out pandemonium these days. ESU is on the way.”
“Crazy, man. Wow. Maybe you should retire, too, huh? Before it’s too late. Hey, is my boy Danny up there?” Gannon said, sliding past him.
“Yeah, Stick’s up there minding the store,” Farina said, looking at Ruby approvingly as Gannon pulled her with him.
“Doing well for yourself, huh, Mickey?” Farina said, giving him an A-OK sign with his fingers. “When you get back?”
“While ago,” Gannon lied, hoping his voice didn’t sound bizarre. “Been back for a bit.”
“We should go out for a Guinness,” Farina said.
“If you’re buying. I’m a pensioner now, remember?” Gannon said, grinning like a fool.
“Mike? Is that you?” Stick said from his office doorway as Gannon finally got up the stairs and came through the detective room door. “What in the stone-cold hell are you doing here?”
Gannon brought Ruby past the empty cubicles into the office and sat her down on Stick’s couch.
“And this is?” Stick said.
“Close the door, Stick,” Gannon said, looking down at the floor, his mind racing.
“What?”
“Close the damn door, Stick,” Gannon said, looking at him.
“What is it?” Stick said as he closed the door. “Which one of you smells like a mattress fire? What the hell, Mick? What’s going on?”
“We’ve got a bit of a situation,” Gannon said.
55
“He’s dead, boss,” Ruiz said over the comm link.
“Daly is dead?” Reyland said, standing before the wall screen.
“Yes. And all of his New York squad guys, too. I just got off the bird in Central Park. I’m at the scene.”
“Yeah, okay. We see you on the UAV,” Reyland said as he scanned the live feed they had over Lexington Avenue.
“Actually, they’re working on Janowski,” Ruiz continued. “But it’s no use. Three-quarters of his skull is gone. This guy blew everybody away. All pop tops, too. He must have had help, right? These men were no weekend warriors, Reyland. I was in Fallujah with Daly. He was one of the best I ever saw. What the hell is this? Did you see it?”
“No. That doesn’t matter. Ignore Janowski. You need to find them.”
“We have a problem,” Arietta called out.
“What?” Reyland said.
“We just got the feed from the 19th Precinct security camera. The guy in the Carhartt went in there five minutes ago. He’s in there right now with Everett.”
“Whoa, whoa. What? The police precinct?” Reyland said.
“Yes. They’re in the 19th Precinct right now,” Arietta said. “On one of the upper floors. I’m not sure which one. Only the ground floor has cameras.”
“What!” Emerson said. “The precinct? We’re done! This guy who grabbed her must be a cop or something. That’s it. We’re cooked, Reyland. This is... This whole operation is... We’re done!”
“Get a hold of yourself, Emerson,” Reyland said as he pressed the comm link to Ruiz. “Our targets are around the corner in the 19th Precinct. We need you and your men to go in, Ruiz.”
“Go in where?” Ruiz called back.
“The 19th Precinct.”
“Go in? They’re cops!” Ruiz said. “How can I go in?”
“I don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter. Eliminate those targets. That’s a direct order. You need to go in there and do it.”
“But they’re cops. My freaking dad was a cop,” Ruiz said.
“You want to go to jail, Tommy?”
“You can’t cover this,” Ruiz said.
“I can cover anything. You think this is the first time I’ve done this? When the well is on fire, you have to use dynamite, Tommy. Now go in.”
“How will you cover it?”
“That’s my lookout. The entire building is empty. You have to go in right now.”
“I can’t believe this. You’re actually crazy.”
“Crazy like a fox, Ruiz. Go in. We’re all in here, buddy. You, me and every last damn one of us. We’re halfway through, and the other side is paradise. Or you might as well shoot yourself. The graveyard or paradise, Tommy. Which one?”
“Double, then. Double our fee. For me and all my men.”
“Done. You’re a millionaire now. Congrats. Now go in.”
“Fine. Give me a second to think,” Ruiz said.
“We’re out of those, Ruiz. Get in there and kill them.”
56
Stick sat at his desk and Ruby sat on the couch, but Gannon kept pacing.
It was blazingly bright and steamy hot in the old government building office, and as he paced, Gannon began to sweat. He wiped at his brow, wondering if he should take his coat off. But he didn’t take it off. He didn’t know what the hell to do.
As he paced, the police radio in the corner behind Stick’s desk gave out a manic triple beep.
“Crowd control issue at location,” cried a fired-up cop at the scene.
“Clear the air,” said the female Hispanic dispatcher. “Sector units on the way.”
There was a radio break and another cop said, “Where are those buses? We got likelies, four of ’em.”
Gannon could still smell the cordite on his hands as he bit at a fingernail.
“En route, en route,” said the dispatcher. “Less than a block. To clarify, are the shooting victims police? Over.”
There was a beep followed by a screech of feedback.
“We’re waiting on that, Central,” said the cop.
Boy, are we ever, Gannon thought, wiping at his sweating face with his hand.
“They’re feds,” Stick said grimly as he got off his cell phone. “My guy on scene just pulled their IDs.”
Gannon finally sat down on Stick’s couch beside Ruby. He bent over and cupped his hands over his face for a moment then sat back, folding his arms.
“FBI?” Gannon said.
“Two were Department of Energy. One was DEA and one was ATF,” Stick said with a hushed tone of awe.
Just as he said this, Gannon glanced over at Ruby on the couch as she started to double over with a greenish look on her face.
He lunged and grabbed Stick’s wastepaper basket and whisked it under her just as she began to retch. He knelt down beside her, deftly keeping her hair out of the stream of it.
Can you blame her? Gannon thought, shaking his head.
He was feeling pretty damn sick about the situation himself.
“What the hell, Mick? Feds? Four feds? Four dead feds?” Stick said, folding his arms nervously.
“No,” Gannon said, turning toward him. “Aren’t you listening? They’re not feds. Or they’re dirty feds. Hell, screw it. I don’t give a shit who they work for. These folks, whoever they are, just blew a reporter’s fricking head off, an innocent American citizen’s head off, back at that hotel.
“They sho
t the room to pieces, man. It was a miracle we got out. Then they drew down on me on the street not five minutes ago, Stick. No ‘freeze.’ No ‘you’re under arrest.’ Just up comes an Escalade and out pops an assassin with a machine gun. I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s a lot of machine guns for one evening!”
Stick stared at him.
“You need to pick up on the theme here!” Gannon said. “These guys are trying to kill us.”
“Four dead feds,” Stick said quietly, shaking his head.
Gannon looked at him, looked through him, pacing now, trying to think.
How in the hell did they find us so fast? he wondered.
It was impossible. Pure dumb luck. Or had they tracked them on the subway somehow? That must have been it.
They can do that now? he thought. Surveillance and artificial intelligence is that good now? To track someone in real time through Manhattan?
Think about that later, Gannon thought. Now matters. What does it mean for us now?
He stopped pacing, his hands coming together as he closed his eyes.
It meant they knew they were in here.
He thought about Wheldon. The reporter’s brains staining the bad carpet.
He turned and looked at the pebbled-glass office door.
They would come in, he knew.
It didn’t matter that it was a precinct. All normal rules had been cast aside. The gates of hell had been unhinged over this.
They would actually come in.
A fire team was what? Four? There would be two of them. Eight!
He let out a breath.
Eight professionals. Eight elites with a whirlybird. Four would come from the top, four from the bottom. And they’d be in between, stuck in the middle to play the shit part in the shit sandwich.
He thought about the back way out, windows, but they could already be on them.
Then he hit on it. Pacing toward the door, he saw it across the bull pen, leaning up in a corner.
Plan C, he thought.
“Okay, listen up. I know what to do,” Gannon said, throwing open the door.
57
“Hey, Sarge, these are the other members of my team,” Ruiz said to a pudgy NYPD sergeant named Farina as Shepard and the rest of his men showed up in their tactical fatigues and backpacks.
From the corner of his eye, Ruiz watched Farina give Shepard a thumbs-up. He had already shown the cop his fed credentials that said he was a member of the US Marshals Service. He had given him the vague impression that the dead men in the truck were his colleagues and that the shooting might have been related to some fugitives they were in pursuit of.
Ruiz glanced out on the Lexington Avenue sidewalk behind them. There were four NYPD patrol cars and a fire truck around the shot-up SUV like a wagon train.
And more coming, Ruiz thought with a groan as he saw two more radio cars show up.
“You have a description of your perps yet so we can put out a BOLO?” Farina said.
“I’m still waiting to hear back from my boss,” Ruiz lied. “Until then, I was wondering if we could set up a staging area inside the precinct house. Like right now, if that’s possible.”
“You got it. Of course. Follow me,” the doughy cop said, guiding them through the lights and cops and lookie-loos already four deep on the sidewalk.
“Is there a back door to the precinct? The damn press is going to be all over this,” Ruiz complained as they turned the corner onto 67th.
“No, but there’s a garage just to the left of the front door with a rolling door. You can use it to get in and out without being seen. Will that work?” Farina said.
“Sounds perfect. Show me,” Ruiz said, quickly picturing the garage from the blueprints of the precinct that Reyland had already sent him.
They walked east down 67th to the sound of the screaming ambulances. Farina led them down a little alley beside the precinct. He opened a call box and pressed a code. Ruiz kept his head down at the overhead camera. The garage door began to roll open silently.
Inside was a dim and tiny exhaust-reeking garage with three personal cars in it and a row of NYPD moped scooters. To the left of the scooters was a pile of garbage bags and an old gun locker with a peeling American flag sticker on it.
“So do I have this right?” Ruiz said, pointing at a door on the right as they walked in. “Through that door is the patrol supervisor’s office and beyond that’s the muster room? And the back stairs are in the hall beyond that, right?”
“Yeah, you’re right. How’d you know?” Farina said.
Ruiz smiled as he raised his right arm up behind Farina as if he was about to give him a pat on the back.
Instead, he pressed his SIG Sauer P226’s long squared-off suppressor to the base of Farina’s skull and blew the back of his head off.
58
“How are we looking up top?” Ruiz called into the radio as two of his men dragged the cop’s body out of sight between the parked cars.
“They’re rappelling in as we speak,” Reyland said.
“Okay, inserting now,” Ruiz said as the four of them went in through the door behind the silenced H&K MP5 submachine guns they’d removed from their bags.
The dimly lit hallway inside was painted cement block. The four men moved down it in a silent flow, leapfrogging each other smoothly and quickly, keeping both ends of the hall covered at all times.
Ruiz hand signaled at a closed beige metal door on the left-hand side of the corridor and two of his men stopped and crouched along the side of it. Ruiz came forward, crouching low with Shepard behind him walking upright, his MP5 up over Ruiz’s head covering their twelve o’clock.
Ruiz checked the door’s knob. It was unlocked. He opened it.
Inside was an office space, chairs and desks and cubicles. Catty-cornered from the cubicles was another open doorway that he knew led into the muster room, and beyond that was the back stairs up to the second floor.
As Ruiz leaned in behind his SIG to check the corners, a uniformed female Hispanic cop walked in from the muster room doorway with a can of Diet Pepsi to her lips.
Ruiz didn’t think she had even had a chance to notice him before Shepard shredded the can and her face with a tight controlled burst.
Ruiz breezed forward over the dead cop’s feet, careful of the pool of soda and blood. He poked his head through the muster room doorway. There was a podium, a TV in the corner. A flyer tacked to a bulletin board beside the TV advertised an upcoming blood drive. He scanned the empty tables.
“Clear,” he said.
They pressed forward through the empty muster room and pulled open a door in its corner into a back concrete stairwell. There was a low whistle from above and they filed upward and linked up with the top-down team already waiting on the next landing.
“In, in, in,” Ruiz said, pulling open the detective room’s side door.
Inside was a surprisingly beautiful, high-ceilinged room. Paneled in old dark oak, it seemed formal, like a library. It was filled with cubicles, all empty now. Along the back wall was a row of old-fashioned pebbled-glass–doored offices.
Ruiz hand signaled at the one farthest left.
It was the only one with a light on inside of it.
The commandos hurried in a silent column, going low past the desks. Two men flanked the lit office door as Ruiz and his backup man came forward again.
Ruiz put a couple of pounds of pressure on the short reset trigger of the SIG and turned the knob and pushed open the door.
“Oh, shit,” he said, immediately letting off the trigger as he saw the bricks and rubble and dust on the carpet.
In the left-hand wall of the office, there was a hole. It was three feet high and three feet wide, and from it poured in cold air and the sound of loud sirens.
Before the hole on the dusty carpet we
re a couple of sledgehammers. Ruiz lifted one. NYPD Anti-Crime was written on the yellow handle in Sharpie.
Ruiz crouched and clicked on the flashlight on the bottom of his SIG’s barrel and turkey peeked his head and shoulders out of the hole. He looked left and right. The hole led out onto a one person–wide breezeway that separated the precinct from its neighboring building to the west. The thin alley at its bottom was blocked off on the 67th Street side, but the other end of it led north into what looked like a backyard for the adjoining building.
“Bad news, boss,” Ruiz said into the radio after he crawled back inside.
Shepard helped him easily up to his feet.
“They freaking mouse-holed us,” he said.
“What?” Reyland said.
“They busted a hole in the outside wall of the building on the second floor. They went out of the building into an alley to the west. It looks like it might lead out onto Lexington.”
“What are you waiting for? After them, Ruiz. We can still get these bastards,” Reyland said.
“They’ve got eight, ten minutes on us,” Ruiz said, looking at his watch. “It ain’t gonna happen, Reyland. We lost this round. They’re gone.”
PART THREE
It’s Deader in the Bahamas
59
Around five in the morning, after their second truck stop somewhere in northern Virginia, it started snowing heavily.
Wired tight on panic and bad gas station coffee, Gannon, at the wheel, cracked the window and clicked the seat up straighter.
The very last thing they needed at this time, he thought, blinking in the cold bracing air, was to spin out or to hit something or to get stuck.
They’d left New York at a little after midnight over the Goethals Bridge in a Subaru Baja crossover pickup truck they borrowed from Stick’s cousin out in Staten Island. They stayed on 278 until it ended in Elizabeth then drove backstreets through there and Plainfield until they got onto 78 West.
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