Alert

by James Patterson

  No, Rezende was low-level, I thought, going over the report. He had several assault arrests as a young man, some domestic violence incidents, a 2010 burglary charge that didn’t stick. He definitely didn’t have any industrial or military experience with explosives.

  What he did have, though, was a recent radical conversion to Islam. On his computer, they found records of time spent on jihadist websites. Time spent in chat rooms known to be frequented by people from al Qaeda and ISIS.

  I thought about the low-level American criminal turned to Islam who recently beheaded a woman in Oklahoma. Maybe that was where all the hate was coming from. Islamic jihad was certainly no stranger to inhuman acts of barbaric violence these days.

  That wasn’t all. What was even more curious was the fact that Rezende had an uncle on his father’s side who was one of the most violent of the revolutionaries during the Cape Verde independence movement.

  In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Cape Verde, along with the African continental nation of Portuguese Guinea, fought for independence from Portugal in a bloody jungle guerrilla war that many people called Portugal’s Vietnam. The Marxist rebels, led by Amilcar Cabral, had about a third of the troop strength that the Portuguese had, but the rebels were heavily supported by the Soviet Union with supplies and weaponry, including jet aircraft.

  We’d learned from the Cape Verde cops that Rezende’s late uncle, Paulo Rezende, who raised him, was a colonel in that rebel army and was actually trained to fly MiGs in Russia.

  The Russians again, I mumbled at the screen. It keeps coming back to the Russians.

  “Who am I kidding?” Emily said, suddenly sitting up across from me. “I can’t sleep, either, with these maniacs still running loose out there. Is there any coffee left, Mike?”

  Chapter 93

  “Let’s run through it again from the very beginning,” I said after the flight attendant, Patricia, had poured a coffee for Emily.

  “Okay,” Emily said, tucking her stockinged feet underneath her. “We land at Rezende’s village.”

  “We land at Rezende’s village,” I repeated with a nod. “What I don’t understand is, if he was planning to detonate the bombs by the deadline, why wasn’t he on Árvore Preta already?”

  “That’s an excellent point, Mike,” Emily said. “According to the deadline described in the video threat, he should have had all the batteries in place already—had everything ready to go.”

  “But he didn’t,” I said, drumming my fingers along the edge of my Toshiba laptop. “We definitely seem to have surprised him. His attempt to manually set off everything with the batteries proved that. All the meticulous planning and money and expertise required to wire up the mountain came down to some sloppy and desperate last-ditch ploy to insert the batteries? No way. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “So what happened? Rezende was definitely involved in the planting of the explosives,” Emily said, biting her lip. “Did he wake up late? There was some communication screwup? Why the hell was he surprised if the deadline was only two hours away?”

  “Maybe…,” I said, tapping my forehead as I stared down at my socks.

  “Maybe what?” Emily said after a moment.

  I snapped my fingers as I looked up.

  “Maybe the people who set the bombs up weren’t the ones who called for the ransom. Maybe we’re looking at two different groups.”

  “What do you mean? How? The guys on the phone actually sent a video of the bombs being set up.”

  “True, they sent a video, but did they make the video?” I said.

  “You’re losing me.”

  “I keep thinking about our initial read that the bombing campaign is the idea of one person—one very angry, very motivated, very meticulous person—who is solely out to terrify and to destroy the city. That still makes the most sense to me.”

  “Me, too,” Emily said with a nod. “The first thing the Unabomber told us out in Colorado was spot-on: ‘They’re going to destroy New York City—you know that, right?’”

  “Precisely,” I said. “The ransom-money play never corresponded to that. What if someone found out about the plot, found the video of the real people setting it up, and decided to try to make money off of it?”

  “A piggyback!” Emily said. “That’s entirely possible. Someone co-opting it.”

  “Somebody Russian or who runs around in Russian circles,” I said.

  “You’re right,” Emily said, putting her coffee down. “The mayor’s sniper had Russian ties, there were Russian explosives on the island, and now the direct Russian connection to Rezende through his uncle.”

  I glanced out at the cloudy night rushing past the large porthole window beside me again as I racked my brain. Then it hit me. Right between the eyes, forty thousand feet above the dark Atlantic.

  “Dmitri Yevdokimov!” I yelled, suddenly sitting up. “The Russian we had in custody. Not only can we place Yevdokimov at the drop where the video was picked up, he’s also a computer expert.”

  “That’s it,” said Emily excitedly. “Yevdokimov must have hacked the real Russian bomber, copied the video, and cooked up the ransom deal!”

  “Yevdokimov’s the link. We needed to find him yesterday,” I said as I almost knocked over my china coffee cup while fumbling out my phone to call New York. “He’s the only one who knows who the real bombers are.”

  Chapter 94

  The line of massive steel pylons forming the truck-bomb barrier were built directly into the asphalt across the width of Broad Street. They glinted dully in the morning sun as we pulled up in front of them eight hours later.

  Beyond them to the north, up the man-made slot canyon of Broad Street, you could see the reason for all the security—the iconic columned edifice of the New York Stock Exchange.

  We were down here in lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes territory not for a ticker-tape parade or to engage in insider trading but to head into the new FBI headquarters across the street from the exchange, at 23 Broad.

  The whole block around the exchange already had incredible security, so it was a no-brainer after the fall of 26 Federal Plaza for the FBI to rent out space at what had to be one of the safest blocks in the entire city, if not the planet. Still, as we waited for our turn at the checkpoint, I frowned at the oak-trunk-thick steel rods that formed a line across the street. There was something depressing and barbaric about them, something medieval.

  “You know you’re living in some interesting times,” I said to Emily, riding shotgun, “when they’ve actually brought back the drawbridge.”

  The pylons retracted into the street after we showed our creds to federal cops manning the checkpoint, and we drove up and parked in 23 Broad’s underground lot. We’d been able to catch some sleep and actually shower on the mayor’s incredible plane, so we weren’t looking too bad as we rode the fancy financial building’s mirrored elevator up to the thirty-first floor.

  I looked down at my suddenly vibrating phone to see that Fabretti was trying to call me. He’d texted me earlier to try to coordinate a media strategy, of all things. The raid on the island had been leaked to the press, apparently, and they wanted details.

  Leaked by whom? I wondered. I hadn’t texted him back, nor did I answer his call. He didn’t seem to understand that we were still very much in the middle of this. It wasn’t mission-accomplished time.

  Emily smiled at me in the elevator mirror as I looked up. We held eyes for a moment. Then two moments. Her eyes were nice to look at.

  “What?” I finally said.

  “Your kids,” she said.

  “Oh, them,” I said, smiling back.

  After we’d gotten off the plane, we’d been by my apartment to squeeze in a happy-reunion-slash-power-breakfast with my kids. Seamus had done God’s work by having piles of scrambled eggs and toast and Irish sausages hot and ready for us. As we devoured them, the gang had regaled us about their incredible failed Escape from New York odyssey in the van. I laughed the
hardest when they said they had to practically carry poor Martin, completely exhausted, into his dorm room back at Manhattan College.

  He was probably still sleeping, I thought. Or looking for a new job.

  “What about my little tykes?” I said to Emily as we ascended. “What did they do this time? Was it Eddie?”

  She shook her head and smiled. “They’re just terrific. All of them. So alive and funny and happy and good. They actually care about each other. No one even has kids anymore, and you have ten. Ten! That’s a lot of love. They’re so lucky.”

  “I’m the lucky one,” I said. “They practically take care of me now.”

  Off the elevator in the hall on thirty-one, there was an incredibly stunning airplane-like view of the city. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass on the east side, you could see the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, and down the corridor was a clear shot of the gleaming Freedom Tower and Lady Liberty out in the harbor.

  “This city doesn’t quit, does it?” Emily said, walking over and pressing her forehead to the glass like a little kid.

  “All the people and motion and money and work and art and history. Dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper after dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper everywhere you turn. I mean, look at it. It’s…a wonder.”

  “It sure is,” I said, looking down with her at the slants of light on the buildings and the ant-size people on Broadway. Out in the wide, sparkling bay, a bath-toy tugboat was drawing alongside Liberty Island, chugging earnestly toward Bayonne.

  “But you know what the bigger wonder is?” I said after a beat.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why all these losers keep lining up to destroy it.”

  Chapter 95

  I followed Emily around a corner, where she pressed some buttons on an electronic keypad beside an unmarked door. On the other side of it was a huge busy bull pen of desks and cubicles with phones ringing and FBI agents tapping at computers and running around.

  Without saying anything to anyone, Emily guided me through the office maze and around another corner to another unmarked door beside another keypad. She typed in another combo, and then we were in a cramped, too-bright windowless room where there were rows of servers on shelves and wires on racks and eight or nine people typing at computer terminals.

  Emily introduced me around to the agents of the FBI New York office cyber investigative squad. CIS supervisory agent Chuck Jordan was a young, intense, clean-cut guy who, in his sharp Tiffany-blue button-down dress shirt and gray slacks, looked more like a young finance guy than a cop.

  Jordan had called Emily as we were finishing breakfast. He said he might have found a possible lead on Yevdokimov’s whereabouts.

  “So you think you have something for us, Chuck?” said Emily.

  Instead of saying anything, Chuck handed us a photograph. It was a shot of a cluttered table with papers and books piled on it. There was a pair of glasses, a magenta Sharpie, and a crumpled napkin on an egg-crusted paper plate. Beyond the messy table was a room with bare, paint-chipped plaster walls and dirty hardwood floors. The space struck me as vaguely industrial.

  In the top left-hand corner of the photo, you could see a shadeless window. In the window was the stone edifice of an old office building on the other side of a narrow street.

  “This is the PC where the ransom demand originated from,” Chuck said. “This shot is from the PC’s webcam.”

  “Where is it?” I said.

  “That’s the rub,” Chuck said. “We don’t know. They sent the signal through Tor, the underground computer network. It bounces things around so you don’t know the actual physical location or owner of a particular computer. Basically, we can find the original computer. Unfortunately, we just don’t know whose it is or where it is. That’s why we turned on the PC’s camera to get a clue from the room.”

  “You turned on the camera on the bad guy’s computer? How?”

  “After the judge gave us a warrant, we sent in our Trojan horse,” Chuck said.

  “Trojan horses are the investigative malware we use,” Emily explained. “It looks like a regular program on the surface, but behind the scenes, it’s secretly able to contact the PC’s internal controller to allow backdoor access to the target PC.”

  “Like a virus or something?” I said.

  “Technically, no,” said Chuck. “Technically, a virus attempts to inject itself into other files. A Trojan is its own file.”

  “But how do you get in?” I said. “What about firewalls and stuff?”

  “Most people have one or two popular antivirus programs, so we usually send the Trojan through a pretend update to one of them,” Chuck said. “But in this case, the target didn’t seem to have an antivirus program on the list, so we used an exploit in their browser’s PDF parser.”

  “A what in the what?” I said.

  Emily rolled her eyes.

  “Does it matter, Mike? They went around it with some computer stuff. Bottom line, we can look at a bad guy’s files, even turn on his webcam and microphone, which is what they did here.”

  “And you searched their files?” I said to Chuck. “Did you find the ransom video?”

  “No, it’s not there. They must have removed it,” he said, squinting.

  “What about encryption? This guy is a hacker himself,” I said. “He has to use encryption, right?”

  “He had layers upon layers of it, but we looked at the PC’s recorded keystrokes and got the passwords to the encryption software he used.”

  “Got it,” I said, gazing at the picture again.

  I concentrated on the building beyond the window. It had setbacks and some fairly elaborate ornamentation in the stonework. Some stone wreaths and a lot of fleurs-de-lis. Where was this building? It definitely seemed familiar.

  “Hey, wait. Did you get any audio?” Emily said.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Chuck said with a mischievous smile as he clicked a terminal’s button.

  “We picked this up just three minutes ago,” he said. “This is a live feed. Listen carefully.”

  We did. There were sirens and traffic, and then we heard it. A soft, rhythmic buzzing sound.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what it sounds like, is it?”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” said Chuck, rubbing his hands together. “Someone is close to that computer, and they’re snoring. We heard a door open ten minutes ago, then somebody creaking down onto what has to be a bed or something.”

  “Yevdokimov! Has to be!” Emily said. “He’s there right now!”

  “Wherever the hell ‘there’ is,” I said as I gazed at the photo again. “This building in the window here. I feel like I know it. I just can’t place it.”

  “It’s definitely in Manhattan, definitely somewhere below Ninety-Sixth Street,” Chuck offered.

  “Old, dirty, once-grand office buildings. Where in the city do you have these old, dirty buildings? Basically all over the damn place,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “Tribeca, maybe?” Chuck said. “Or SoHo?”

  “Yes, kind of,” I said. “But in SoHo, the buildings are usually older and have elaborate fire escapes and all that painted cast-iron cladding. With all these setbacks, this building is prewar—classic-Superman era.”

  “It looks huge,” said Emily.

  “It also looks high up,” Chuck said. “Ten or twelve stories, maybe.”

  “Wait. I got it!” I said, violently shaking the photograph. “The fleurs-de-lis!”

  “The what?” said Chuck.

  “The fleurs-de-lis. The intricate stonework design here under the windows. And the setbacks. I used to work in Midtown South. I know where this is!”

  “You know the building?” Emily said.

  “No, but I know the neighborhood. It’s the garment district. The West Side below Times Square,” I said, ushering Emily to the door. “Tell your buddies downstairs to lower the drawbridge, because we need to get uptown and pop this Russian clown before he wakes up
and we lose him again.”

  Chapter 96

  Siren cranking, we raced up the West Side Highway all the way to midtown. I got off at 34th and gunned it five blocks to Macy’s. The light was red on Eighth Avenue, but there were no cars coming from the east or south, so I hooked a shrieking, fishtailing left around a shocked-looking DOT parking-ticket lady standing in the intersection.

  I’d turned off the siren by the time we arrived to a skidding stop six blocks north, at 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. If Yevdokimov was in the area and still sleeping, the one thing I didn’t want to do was wake him up.

  We parked by the southeast corner of the intersection, where the statues were. One was a bronze eight-foot structure called The Garment Worker that depicted a sad, old-looking, wrinkly guy in a yarmulke bent over a sewing machine, working on some fabric. Next to him was a gigantic button with a needle stuck through it. Between the two sculptures stood a dozen NYPD uniforms from the Midtown South task force, whom I’d called for help in finding Yevdokimov’s hideout.

  We rushed over to them, and I quickly took a radio from the task force sergeant, Rowe, before handing out photographs of both Yevdokimov and the building in his window.

  “Remember, guys. You need to look up,” I said. “This fleur-de-lis architectural design on the building we’re looking for is going to be on the tenth floor or so.”

  We sectored out the district and split up on foot into two-person teams. Emily and I walked south down the east side of Seventh Avenue. We passed a gimcrack tourist gift place and a seedy-looking barbershop with a sign that said it bought gold. Fifth Avenue this was not.

  As we walked, we looked east and west, up and down the side streets. Every one of them was extremely congested. Double-parked delivery trucks in the streets, loading and unloading. Guys on sidewalks pushing racks of plastic-wrapped clothes. It was coming on the lunch rush now, and clusters of workers were spilling out of the old buildings and jamming up the already crowded dirty sidewalks.