Through special arrangement with the Cayman Island’s Government, FinCEN agents were through the ten-foot crystal clear doors at 9:01 a.m. local time. The manager of the art house hurried to greet the ten men and two Cayman officials as they entered. He spoke to the local men first. “What is the meaning of this?”
“These men are here as part of an international investigation. I’ll let them explain,” he said as he nodded to the American.
.G.
The BBC news van had just set up when the reporter rolled her hand in a gesture that the studio was switching live to them immediately.
The cameraman called out, “In three . . . two,” then he silently threw one finger at her, which was her cue.
“At one minute past two this afternoon, British authorities entered and suspended all business activities here at the world headquarters of Shipsen-Deloitte. We are told by a top Scotland Yard source that similar raids are being held at this exact moment at offices from Prague to the Cayman Islands. All we know so far is that the cessation of business stems from an investigation by the US and Interpol into money laundering schemes to finance terror groups. We have footage of just a few minutes ago when the afternoon calm of this quiet little section of Savile Row, in Westminster, was visited upon by scores of police vehicles . . .” She stood looking at the camera until the cameraman said “Clear.” Then she looked down at a monitor on the sidewalk and watched the video that was being broadcast as she pressed an earbud into her ear so she could better talk to the director back at the studio. “I’ll do the wrap up then we’ll wait and see if I can get a quote or bite when they come out.”
.G.
Bridge and Harris emerged from the State Trooper car that had met them at the dirt-runway airport for the quick drive with sirens all the way to the quarry. Trooper Selma Gains, information officer for Troop E, met them as they got out. “Gains, State. I assume you want to contain this?”
“Definitely, until we know what we are dealing with here.”
“Got more and more press finding their way up here every hour. What do I tell them?”
“Is ‘no comment’ still fashionable?” Bridge said.
“Short lived. Then they start looking for leaks and speculating.”
“Look, Gains, if this is what we think it is, the bad guys can’t know we are even here. If you can’t black it out, then use a cold case cover story.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Jocko Pizzarelli,” Harris said.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said.
“Mob lieutenant who went missing five years ago. I was on the case but it went cold. I’m thinking they dumped Jocko up here,” Harris said with a knowing look to Gains.
“Works for me,” Bridge said.
“Works for me too. Joint operation then, NYPD NYS?” Gains said.
“Again, if we can’t black it out, then yes,” Bridge said as he and Harris walked off.
.G,
Work had proceeded to the point where they had the whole carcass of the trailer unearthed and had a spiral path of sorts leading down the fifty or so feet that Bridge estimated it was. As they approached, Harris saw the flattened wheel with the narrow tire.
There was a forensic explosives expert from Rochester PD at the bottom. The first thing Bridge noticed was that the roof of the trailer and the sides were relatively intact. The bottom, the chassis, was blown deeper into the dirt.
.G.
Meanwhile, Selma Gain’s mother, having raised no foolish children, would have been proud of what her daughter came up with for the non-denial denial. Right before she met the press that was being kept on the other side of the notch behind police tape, she took out her cell phone and wandered close to Officer Gabriel Rice. He was a townie and worked for the sheriff. She also knew he was a sieve. Real gossip hound as she had found out the few times their paths crossed out here in Midwestern New York State.
“Got it, Jocko Pizzarelli. New York mob. Went missing five years ago. Send us the dentals . . . I will. They think they’re close to the body but they’re still digging. Yes, I will . . .”
She closed the phone and purposely didn’t look at Rice as she walked off towards where the reporters were corralled. They all quieted down when she arrived at the tapeline. “I have a quick statement and I will not take questions. You boys covering this live, consider this your one-minute warning. Then she saw a female reporter from channel nine and nodded to her in deference to the “boys” line.
A minute later she introduced herself, her rank, and spelled both her first and last names for proper attribution and delivered a very short statement.
“We have no comment at this time.” Then she walked away after an eruption of questions.
Five minutes later, she smiled as she saw a group of reporters around Rice as he was sucking up all the fame of being an unnamed source. The legend of Jocko Pizzerelli lives.
.G.
Bridge asked them to rig the back loader with a chain and they flipped over the intact top of the trailer; then they saw it. Welded to the top was what looked like a metal umbrella. Bridge examined it and made it out to be one-inch thick steel plating five foot or so around. The peen marks on the scorched metal showed the forming of the concave shape.
“That would make a hell of a racket to form,” Bridge said to Harris.
“It must weigh half a ton,” Harris said.
Bridge turned to the forensic expert. “Have you done a test?”
“Yes, this is Semtex, definitely RDX and PETN scoring and pitting along the dish here.”
“Any guess as to how much would make a crater this deep?”
“Oh, I’d say five hundred to eight hundred pounds, easy.”
“Plus a thousand pounds of steel plate. We’re there at the maximum load on the trailer: eighteen hundred!”
.G.
Brooke had an ATF&E bomb tech in her office in thirty minutes. “Harris and Bridge are due back in twenty minutes. Peter, Kronos, listen to what Nick here from ATF&E thinks of the dish the boys found.”
“Well, as I was explaining to Director Burrell, from the pictures it looks like the shape is actually parabolic. Like a satellite dish.”
“And it was welded to the top of the trailer?” Peter said.
“That’s what they said.”
“So then you think the parabolic shape is a force director?” Brooke said.
“Brooke, a what?” Remo said.
“It’s like a magnifying glass, focusing the full power of the explosion to the center of the dish.” The bomb tech arced his hands in the rough shape of dome.
“And since it was pointing down this explains why they found it fifty feet down?” Kronos said.
“Exactly!”
“And our best guess is that there were three of these things,” Brooke said.
“Scratch one. That must have been their test bomb,” Remo said.
“Okay, so they want this thing to shoot downward. What does that tell us?” Brooke said.
“Subway. Drive it down Broadway and if you time it right you’ll kill thousands at Times Square.”
“The downward force rules out using it inside a car tunnel. Although I would order an immediate ban on all such rental trailers on bridges and tunnels to err on the side of caution,” the bomb tech said.
Brooke took it all in. Peter Remo noticed her expression. “What is it, Brooke? You don’t look convinced.”
“I think this is bigger than the subway. London proved you could get the same result with backpacks.”
“With all respect, that wasn’t thousands,” Kronos said.
“They’ve already hit us for thousands . . . And I know they have tried bigger things. And this current cell seems more . . . desperate . . . more organized than any of those.”
“So you are thinking bigger than 9/11?”<
br />
“I hope to God I am wrong, but remember this started out with put and calls in advance of a terror plot. There are no stocks for the subway. And if there are only two bombs, they are localized. That wouldn’t dent the stock market enough to make a hedge play worthwhile.”
“So, then the bombs might be initiators?” Kronos said.
“How so?” Brooke asked.
“They may start a more devastating catastrophe.”
“I’m seeing your point, Kronos, but that still leaves the question of why they shaped the charge downward.”
“Gas mains?”
“Again, devastating but still localized. I think they are going for bigger. Kronos, Peter, call in anyone you have to. Ask Bill Hiccock to run it by his people and his network. We are not seeing the same opportunity that they are.”
Remo shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“What?” Brooke said.
“Parabolic focused explosions? These are terrorists. That seems like real egg-head nasty shit.”
“Parabolics?” Kronos said. “Parabolic curves are tenth grade high school crap, Peter . . . and remember algebra was invented in their part of the world.”
.G.
Dequa was at the whiteboard filled with formulas and diagrams. “The synchronous relays will not be a problem in that they are triggered by deviation from the grid frequency. In our scenario, it all reduces together, simultaneously across the entire infrastructure. Therefore we are never outside the deviant range.”
“I don’t know, .0167 cps is a very tight margin,” Yusuf said.
“But here the system helps us defeat it.”
“Yes. Yes, you may be right . . . Still, I’d like to run a few more simulations to make sure we are factoring in rotator torque under load conditions.”
“That is a valid point. Run the simulations. We might have to adjust the delta factor here,” Dequa said.
Paul was standing behind them and had listened to everything but still didn’t have a clue as to what the hell they were talking about. Although he got that Dequa hadn’t figured on something that could screw up the whole thing. When they finished, they erased the board.
Dequa was brushing the marker dust off his hands when he turned to Paul. “Paul, the north team has had a very successful test. They are ready and will be in position at the appointed hour. Your job will be to ensure perimeter security of the central station. We need at least five minutes, maybe ten if the rotator torque is indeed a factor,” Dequa said, nodding to the erased board.
“The first response will be plant security. That won’t be a challenge because they won’t be expecting anything on the scale I have prepared. For the next wave of responders, I am going to need at least all ten of my first team in position in order to give you your ten minutes. It would take that long for them to assess the situation and decide on a strategy. By then, if you guys got it right, the city will already be a living hell,” Paul said.
.G.
As soon as Bridge returned, he and Brooke sequestered themselves in her office as she downloaded what the brain boys had come up with and their speculation as to the probable timings and nature of the attack.
“Brooke, the more I hear, the more convinced I am that we need a rapid way to respond to whatever and wherever they are going to strike.”
“Your RDF idea?”
“I was toying with the idea of multiple assets strategically placed and ready to go at a moment’s notice. And now, with what Remo and Kronos are saying, I think it’s time for me to draw it up and send my rapid deployment force up the chain of command.”
“In this case, it won’t be a long trip; I am the last link to the top of the chain, Bridge. But do you really think you can get all the equipment and personnel we need turned around in twelve hours? Assuming we have that long?”
“Well, we’ve got at least a division of men and two hundred fixed wing and rotary aircraft that are normally stationed within a three-hundred-mile radius of the city. And thanks to your chat with the president, he put all forces on PTDO elevated alert, so all it would take is an order from the commander in chief and they’d go from the Prepare to Deploy Order to REDCON1 to immediate deploy. Once we are at Ready Condition One and we get that deployment order, we’ll be cocked and ready to kick butt.”
“How long from the DEPORD before we are capable?”
“Well, for example, the pods on the Apache attack helos would have to be loaded with Hellfire missiles and other ordnance packages. Figure three hours. Flight time to New York City from, let’s say Fort Drum—three hundred plus miles upstate, where these birds nest—is about two hours at cruising speed. Supplemental parts, equipment trucks and support personnel can convoy down the Thruway in five hours thirty-five minutes to Times Square. So I’d say total time from alert to locked and loaded . . . nine hours.”
“Sounds miraculous.”
“Our boys train that hard to pull off miracles every day.”
“You sold me. What are you going to call this plan?”
“I was thinking, Archangel.”
“I like it. Someone to watch over me, us, the city . . .”
“Something like that.”
“Start writing. I got a meeting with Barnes. I’ll get him on board.”
.G.
“A high school science teacher?” Harold Barnes, director of FinCEN, said for the second time to Brooke as she briefed them on where they were.
“When you stop to think about it, sir, this whole operation is being run by a high school soccer coach, you know.”
Barnes squinched his face, then remembered that’s what Brooke had been doing when they recruited her. “What have we got from Prescott?”
“Kitman.”
“Barry Kitman?”
“He was pulling Morgan Prescott’s strings on the financial side.”
“So how did the Russians wind up with him?”
“Not so much the Russians but the oligarchs. There are only two options. The oligarch was working for Kitman or the other way around.”
“And we don’t know which one of them is behind the terror attack?”
“Or if they are at all. Could be they just caught wind of it and are trying to cash in,” Brooke said.
“It would make sense. If America is weakened then the oligarch’s share of the world’s economy increases tenfold instantly.”
“That’s a pretty big profit motive for just lending logistical support. Also they side with the very group who otherwise might attack them next.”
“Smart play all around in their book,” Barnes said.
“And if Kitman is behind it then he just scores big hedging on the knowledge of the attack,” Brooke said.
“So then that brings us to the only possible third financial player . . .”
“You mean the terrorists themselves?”
“Why not? For all we know ISIS is deep in the stock market through third parties and foreign investments. Look at what they’re doing with just the oil money they take from the captured wells. What’s Prescott say?”
“Swears it was all put and calls for Kitman while they held his family. He wasn’t in it for any piece of the profit,” Brooke said as she waved her hands in a flat gesture.
“You believe him?”
“Yeah, I do. George didn’t find anything in three months at Prescott Capital Management. We thought he was hiding it, but it wasn’t even in PCM; it was across town at Kitman.”
“So it was funded by artwork?”
“Yes. The pieces are coming in now. Working with Interpol and SWIFT, we just raided Shipsen-Deloitte’s offices in five countries.”
“So SOM37 sold junk art for millions and was funded by ISIS right under our noses as a simple art sale.”
“Yes, thousands of overvalued works yielding hundreds of millions of
dollars. The sales were made through the cells needing the money to certain Middle East benefactors that are probably fronts for ISIS.”
“Anything from the captors down in Grenada?”
“Unfortunately, all local hires who believe they were working for the mob.”
“Russian mob? Prescott was held at Borishenko’s compound.”
“I’ve got the bureau’s organized crime division on it, but they only ever spoke to the one man who paid them. And I have a feeling, an instinct actually, that it’s one of our prime suspects in all this: we are calling him Paul. He may have contracted with the locals.”
“So who’s Paul?”
“We don’t know, but he may be connected to a few deaths that happened on the periphery of all this. We have established a bloody trail of victims who were either complicit or used unknowingly. Most of the bodies that sprang up in Prague and Sweden, and a few we suspect that will never surface down in the Caymans, were in position to take worthless pieces of art and establish them as major works with a reflectively high price tag. Or cover the transfer of those funds. Then Paul eliminated them.”
“Wait a minute, the priest, the one that tried to kill you?”
“The imposter priest. Yes, that was him and he also may be responsible for the rocket attack on our satellite office.”
“To finish the job . . .”
“Not a comforting thought but definitely in the stack,” Brooke paused.
Barnes instinctively paused as well and held back his next question for a few seconds. “How are you holding up under all this?”
“Fine, sir.”
“I was in law enforcement for twenty-seven years before I went to the Treasury. I have a masters in criminology and a minor in psychology, but everything I need to know to sense that you are not fine. I learned from my three daughters.”
He could see her stoic mask break apart as she looked at him.
She softened. “I let them down. I couldn’t protect my team. I should have anticipated their play. Should have moved to more secure offices.” She pounded her desk with her fist with each of the next four syllables. “Nine-teen-peo-ple would be alive and twenty-three others wouldn’t be maimed and wounded. I got too focused, got too into tactical and not enough into strategic.”
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