The Intercept jf-1

by Dick Wolf

  “Yes, sir,” said young St. Clair.

  “He is to remain in your line of sight at all times. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” St. Clair said again.

  “Good?” the lieutenant said to Fisk.

  “Good,” said Fisk.

  Before the lieutenant had even finished nodding, Fisk was through the checkpoint and running at a loping trot down Greenwich Street, trying to figure out which way to go.

  St. Clair sprinted after him, catching up with him before Vesey Street at the very perimeter of Ground Zero.

  Fisk heard the strains of the NYPD Pipe and Drum Band running scales, warming up. They were to play a medley of patriotic tunes during the live broadcast.

  Hearing them meant that he was close. And that the ceremony hadn’t started yet.

  Even the upbeat song sounded like a dirge. Fisk had always hated bagpipes. Bagpipes meant cop funerals to him.

  Gersten loved bagpipes. This memory struck him with the force of a cramp. She always teared up. Must have been that cop gene of hers.

  Across Vesey, the crowd thickened into a shoulder-to-shoulder mass that was difficult to see over. The entrance on the north side of the Ground Zero memorial was a hundred yards ahead. Fisk knew he had to stop The Six from going into the ceremony proper, because once the players were in place, then the central podium area would go into full lockdown — with Jenssen sealed in place, ready to blow them all to kingdom come.

  More than a hundred plainclothes NYPD officers, FBI men, and Secret Service agents meandered among the throng. Fisk darted into the crowd, quickly outpacing St. Clair, who yelled behind him, “Wait, wait!”

  Fisk ran toward the sound of the bagpipes. Tears burned his eyes. To his distant left, he saw a blue tunnel leading from a small staging area full of trailers.

  He heard yelling and noticed a few of the lawmen pointing him out. Others began running in his direction. He hoisted his shield high as he went so as not to be shot down.

  His anxiety was electric, apparently; it drew people his way. He was yelling, “Fisk! Intelligence Division!” because no one there knew him, and even if they did, they could barely see his face as he darted around strangers in his path.

  As he got closer, he saw that the tunnel was merely a series of tarps knit together, lashed to arched pipe scaffolding, the fabric rippling in the Hudson River breeze. Fisk looked left and made for the staging area.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” said a cop as Fisk blew another security barricade without stopping. He gave up showing his shield. Imitation tin was just a couple of dollars online.

  What Fisk had going for him was his years on the job: he looked “cop.” That, more than his shield, was what kept fellow officers from shooting at him on sight. He ran past a quartet of Porta-Potties and a hospitality tent manned by support staff. He darted around civilians wearing access passes on neck lanyards, searching wildly, then he saw a trailer with an open door.

  In the window of the trailer, propped up against the drawn shade, was a printed sign reading, THE SIX. Fisk raced to the door and burst inside.

  Food table, empty couches, a television.

  Empty.

  A person ran to the trailer door behind him. Fisk whirled around.

  It was a cop with his sidearm drawn. Patton.

  “Fisk?” he said.

  “Where are they?” said Fisk.

  “They’re… on their way in,” said Patton, pointing. “Where’s Gersten?”

  “Obama? Bush?”

  “Outside the core. They go in last.”

  Fisk grabbed Patton and spun him around, pushing him out of the trailer door. “Keep them out of here!” he said. “However you can. We have a man with a bomb!”

  In any other setting, such a claim would require further evaluation. But in this tinderbox of antiterror paranoia, such a warning was treated as verified until proven inaccurate.

  Fisk leaped off the top step of the trailer, waving gathering cops out of his way. The pipes and drums had started their medley, being carried throughout the staging area via speakers.

  He looked to the blue tarpaulin archway tunnel ahead. The crowd parted a bit, just enough for him to see and recognize the older man starting inside. Aldrich, the auto parts dealer, was entering the ten-foot-wide tunnel. Behind him went the journalist, Frank. Walking one at a time, like entrants at a wedding. Alphabetically. Which meant that…

  Fisk saw the next entrant, tall and blond, wearing a light blue suit. A coordinator wearing a headset nodded to Magnus Jenssen.

  With a long, determined stride, the Swedish terrorist started into the tunnel.

  Fisk glimpsed Jenssen’s left hand. The part of his cast visible beneath the sleeve of his suit — it was white. It was not blue.

  Fisk yelled, but his voice was drowned out by the music of the pipes. Jenssen was on his way to the stage.

  Chapter 72

  To Jenssen’s ears, the bagpipers’ bleating was like the furious drone of an overturned beehive. It sawed into his head. His left arm was little more than a weapon grafted onto his torso now — and one his body was rejecting.

  He was in the blue tunnel. Fabric rippled as each plodding step brought him closer to glory. Ten paces ahead, the journalist Frank swept his hand through his hair, grooming himself as he made his way toward the stage.

  Jenssen stumbled once from the dizzying pain. He was carried along by the will of God and the generous spirit of Osama, who through Jenssen was returning to the altar of victory as a marauding soldier of Allah, at the site of his greatest victory.

  … and then get resurrected and then get martyred…

  Ahead of him: daylight.

  Ahead of him: glory.

  The vague sounds of a commotion behind him barely breached the great commotion ongoing inside his own head. Was it about him? If so, they were too late.

  He was inside the heart of the beast. He had reached its soft, sentimental core.

  He pulled the trigger from his pocket with his good hand and rubbed it with his thumb like an amulet, a holy object.

  Chapter 73

  Fisk was yelling Jenssen’s name when law enforcement converged on him, stopping him before the entrance to the tunnel.

  That was as far as he could go. No one entered the chute who wasn’t cleared to be on the stage. He could have persuaded them eventually, but there wasn’t enough time. Fisk backed away from the hands that wanted to restrain him. “He’s in there!” yelled Fisk, past all sense now.

  Alain Nouvian, the cellist, was next to go in. He turned in alarm at what was happening, recognizing Fisk. He said to the nearest official, “That’s one of our police detectives.”

  The coordinator was lost in her headphones, the ceremony’s choreography the defining principle of her life at that moment. “Go,” she told him. “Now!”

  Nouvian, unsure, did as he was instructed, starting slowly into the tent, checking back over his shoulder.

  Joanne Sparks and Maggie Sullivan joined the fray near Fisk, echoing Nouvian’s words. “What’s happening?” said Maggie. “Where’s Detective Gersten?”

  The mention of her name gave Fisk a sudden burst of strength. He pulled away from the cops and raced around the two female heroes, in essence using them to set a pick, allowing Fisk to get free and go around the entrance to the side of the tunnel.

  He ran along it, trying to guess Jenssen’s position inside. He shielded his head with his arm and cut sideways into the tunnel, bracing for impact against the unseen metal rib cage.

  He struck a cross-pipe just a few inches away from a conjoined vertical post. The force of his impact ripped the blue tarp from the side bar, setting the entire tunnel wriggling like a giant blue worm.

  The pipe held firm, but exposed a weakness at a connecting joint above, dislodging the frame.

  Fisk fell sprawling into the tunnel, landing hard on the gravel path. He looked up fast and saw a body stumbling to the side. The dislodged pipe had struck Jenssen on the right side, nearly throwin
g him to the ground.

  Fisk righted himself. Jenssen did not. He looked up, wild-eyed, his cast hand held out from his side, his right hand open and empty.

  He was searching the gravel path around him frantically.

  Fisk slipped on the gravel with his first step toward the larger man.

  Five paces behind Jenssen, Nouvian stood in shock. He was looking down at something at his feet.

  A small white device lay in the gravel. He started to reach for it.

  It was the trigger.

  Fisk yelled at him, “Don’t touch it!”

  But Nouvian already had it in his hand. He straightened, examining the strange device — then saw Jenssen running at him.

  The Swede let out a howl, charging the cellist like a bull.

  Nouvian’s eyes saw Fisk beyond Jenssen, pointing, yelling, “No!” Then back to Jenssen coming at him.

  The cellist’s eyes cleared of all confusion. As Jenssen reached him, Nouvian tossed the trigger device away, toward Fisk.

  Jenssen crushed into Nouvian, driving him to the ground in an open-field tackle.

  Fisk caught the trigger with both hands, receiving it as gingerly as a newly laid egg. Jenssen turned from where he was crouching on top of Nouvian, seeing that the device was in Fisk’s hands now.

  He got up, then pitched hard to one side, holding his cast arm as he staggered.

  Fisk saw that the Swede was near delirious with pain and panic.

  Jenssen pitched himself toward Fisk, attempting another mad dash. But after a few uncertain, unbalanced steps, Jenssen stopped.

  Voices echoed in the rippling tunnel now. Police were rushing toward them from the staging area. People were massing outside the tarpaulin, pressing against the fabric walls.

  They were closing in. Failure was collapsing on Jenssen.

  He held out his broken wrist, looking at the explosive cast. Fisk saw blood dripping off the man’s fingertips to the ground.

  Gunfire now. Two rounds thumped the ground near them, tearing through the tarp.

  Somebody had given the sharpshooters orders to fire blindly into the tunnel in an attempt to stop the threat.

  Fisk remembered that TATP could be ignited three ways: electronic pulse, fuse, or impact.

  Jenssen knew that he could not reach the trigger in Fisk’s hand in time. Now he turned, looked for the source of the gunfire. He wanted suicide-by-cop like his comrade Bin-Hezam.

  Only — Jenssen wanted impact on his arm. He wanted detonation.

  Fisk saw a wild thought come into the terrorist’s blue eyes. The Swede, who had killed Gersten, stepped to the side of the tunnel. There, he reared his forearm over his head.

  Fisk started toward him but could not close the gap in time.

  Jenssen brought his cast down full-strength against one of the metal support bars.

  A massive crack… but no flash. No explosion.

  The pain from this desperate act crippled Jenssen. He fell to his knees as though struck, holding his cast out in front of him as though it were consuming his arm.

  For the moment he had lost all awareness of Fisk.

  Fisk lowered his shoulder, hurling himself at Jenssen. He struck him low against his ribs, laying him out. The terrorist stared up at the wind-rippled ceiling of the tunnel. He was trying to get his cast arm up. He was still trying to detonate.

  Fisk gripped Jenssen’s elbow, forcing the cast back into the terrorist’s throat. He had seen the bruises on Gersten’s neck. Fisk was choking him with his own weapon of mass destruction.

  The terrorist’s eyes bulged and his lips turned blue, his mouth open, breathless.

  Fisk used his free hand to reach into his pocket. Not for the trigger. He found his phone and held it before the terrorist’s dying eyes.

  He wanted him to see. Gersten’s picture. Krina’s dead body.

  Fisk wanted this to be the last thing Jenssen would ever see.

  Chapter 74

  Krina Gersten was posthumously promoted to Detective First Grade. She was buried six days later on a knoll overlooking the Verrazano Narrows at St. Peter’s Cemetery on Staten Island. Police officers from all across the city and the country attended the Saturday morning service, more than a thousand men and women in full-dress uniform.

  The NYPD Pipe and Drum Band played “Amazing Grace.” Fisk didn’t hate the bagpipes. Their song was beautiful. Their plaintive cry was his cry.

  The long blue line of mourners filed past the open grave and Gersten’s grieving mother. The Six — now five — attended, though Fisk tried to avoid any contact with them.

  They were obviously devastated, both by the death of a person they had come to know and by the duplicity of a person they had believed to be one of them.

  The flight attendant, Maggie Sullivan, was especially shaken. As was the cellist, Alain Nouvian. He was the only one who made a point of seeking out Fisk, perhaps guessing at his relationship with Gersten. Nouvian’s arm hung in a muslin sling, thanks to his scuffle with Jenssen. He had broken his hand, and his future with the New York Philharmonic was in doubt.

  His status as an American hero twice over was not.

  Later, Fisk shared a private moment with Gersten’s mother, following the long and emotionally exhausting tribute. Afterward he honestly could not recall a word either of them had said. The way Jenssen had felt when the pain in his improperly set arm overloaded the nerves throughout his entire body — that was how Fisk felt now. He too wished he could self-detonate.

  Fisk found Dubin standing with the commissioner after the service. Fisk had been out that entire week.

  “I don’t know if I can come back,” he told his boss.

  Dubin laid his white-gloved hand on Fisk’s uniform shoulder. “Take some more time. You’ll come back. We need you.”

  Fisk did not respond. He had stared into the icy blue eyes of a fanatic. He had crushed his windpipe. But nothing had ended, he knew that. Like a virus, the killing desire had merely jumped into a new host. The defeat of one soldier of jihad gave rise to ten more.

  Fisk’s biggest regret was not having killed Jenssen. He almost did. He would have, if not for the cops who converged on them, dragging Fisk away from Jenssen’s unconscious form. They had saved his life, but not his arm. Jenssen was in a military cell now. His arm had been amputated. Supposedly he had already given his interrogators information on the terror cell in Scandinavia, Nordic-looking jihadists existing beyond the limits of crude profiling techniques. The future of antiterrorism had begun its segue from ethnic and religious power struggles toward conflicts of pure ideology.

  Fisk didn’t care. The big picture didn’t interest him anymore. This was a war waged by damaged individuals, making victims of the innocent. Trying to be the catcher in the rye, as Fisk had, was insanity.

  Then again, despite the Sisyphean aspect of the job, somebody had to do it. Or at least try.

  * * *

  A few days later, Fisk found himself inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, staring at Monet’s sunflowers. He remembered how it all started, back in that hangar on the airfield at Ramstein Air Base: the digital images that hid the messages to and from bin Laden.

  Fisk wasn’t what you would call a museum-going person, but this was as good a place as any to try to figure out his life. Gersten’s life had ended forever, and it wouldn’t seem right to him if his didn’t veer off in some unknown direction now. That is what occurred to him as he thought about the digital rendering of this artist’s vision of an object in nature.

  No one knew about him and Gersten. That was a good thing. It allowed him to mourn her alone, and at his own pace. But that was also a bad thing. Everyone understood that he was distraught over the loss of a fellow cop. No one understood that he was also distraught over the loss of a love.

  When he stopped hearing the bagpipe music in his head, then he would know it was time to move on. Then he would know the next step.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to David Highfill and
Richard Abate, for their professionalism, enthusiasm, and guidance. To Cliff Gilbert and Bob Philpott, for their decades of advice and having my back. To Chuck Hogan, for his critical insights and creative generosity. To Peter Jankowski, who keeps the train running on time in my television life. But most of all to my children, Olivia, Serena, Elliot, Zoe, and Rex, and my wife, Noelle, who make my life truly blessed.

  About the Author

  DICK WOLF, a two-time Emmy award — winning writer, producer, and creator, is the architect of one of the longest-running scripted shows and most successful brands in the history of television — NBC’s Law & Order. Wolf has won numerous awards, including Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series (Law & Order) and Outstanding Made-for-Television Movie (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee); a Grammy; and an Edgar. This is his literary debut and the first in a series featuring NYPD detective Jeremy Fisk. He lives in Southern California.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Credits

  Cover design by Mary Schuck

  Cover photograph by Shutterstock

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