She was in the stairwell and on the nineteenth floor before the first police officers reached the room. She was in the lobby and then on the street before the block had been surrounded. She did not see the men whose attention she had been sent to attract. She did not know who they were, only that the spotter in the station had called her cell phone and told her to start.
Yasmin walked over to Broadway to catch a cab headed downtown. She kept the garment bag with her for the ride downtown, instead of putting it in the trunk. She wanted the gun handy, just in case.
The gun and the marble set in a bracelet on her left wrist.
The hotel lobby was jammed with people who had come in from the street. They stood awaiting some kind of instruction, from anyone. Mobs were like that: big, burly, and impotent until someone struck a match.
Kealey knew it was probably safe, but he wasn’t going to be the one to tell them so. Not because he thought they were safer here—they might not be; the gunman could have herded them here to set off a bomb—but because Bishop had a job to do.
“Stay here and look for your cargo,” Kealey said. Bishop had caught up to him as Kealey started weaving through the packed room.
“How certain are you that she’s the one?”
“Call it a strong hunch,” he said. It was a little more than that: the way the line of fire had skipped them during the sweeping barrage was a hallmark of her precision work. “I doubt she’ll come out this way, but we need to be sure.”
Bishop agreed as Kealey literally shoved his way through.
He asked a bellhop for directions and took the stairs. He felt that would be his best chance of running into her, or at least of finding anything she’d discarded. He drew his Glock and held it close to his ribs as he ascended.
Breathless, his legs aching, he reached the twentieth floor and entered the hallway. He had approximated within a floor in either direction that that was where the shots had come from. He was right. Apparently alerted by guests who saw blood seeping from a utility closet, hotel personnel had just discovered the housekeeper’s body.
Kealey stopped and looked around.
“I need the key to that door,” he said to one of the young executives. He was pointing to a door at the end of this section of hallway.
“Is that your—”
“It’s where the sniper was,” Kealey said. “Let me have the key.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for—”
Kealey showed his Glock. “Give me the goddamn key.”
The man obliged. Kealey ran over. He felt the wall to the side of the door. It seemed solid enough. He leaned against it as he swiped the plastic key. The lock clicked. There was no gunfire. Relatively certain she would not be inside, Kealey nudged open the door with his foot. It swung in to reveal the dead flight attendant lying in her underwear on the blood-soaked carpet and the broken window.
“Oh Christ!” someone shouted from behind him.
Kealey shut the door. He didn’t have long before the police arrived, and he didn’t want to answer questions. Still breathing heavily, he looked around the body without disturbing it. Killed from behind, bled out from there. He walked over to the window. It was an old-fashioned type, wood framed, but a lock had been added at the top, so it opened only a crack. Rather than unscrew the little metal piece, she had smashed the window. He looked around. Saw shards on a discarded pillowcase.
With her fist inside that. He looked out. Large pieces of glass were lying on the scaffolding. She had kicked those out, no doubt.
He took the pillowcase, turned it inside out, crumpled it in a ball, and left the room. The police sirens were screaming from directly below. He tucked the room key in his pocket so he wouldn’t leave prints behind, put the gun back in his belt, and went to the stairs. He ran up to the twenty-first floor and took the elevator down. He did not encounter any police until he reached the lobby. They were directing people to leave by the side doors. The front of the building was a cordoned-off crime scene.
Kealey found Bishop standing on the north side of Thirty-Third Street, watching for him. He had both of their travel bags. Traffic had been stopped on the side street, and Kealey crossed. He cocked his head toward Broadway, and they hooked up as they continued east. The street was a wall of stalled traffic and people either flowing west or staring east. Heads had emerged from windows to look at the carnage. Kealey glanced back. The police were already out on the scaffolding.
“She was in the room of a flight attendant, probably picked her out in the lobby and followed her,” Kealey told Bishop. “Killed a maid to gain entrance, then took the flight attendant’s clothes to get out.”
“So we’re looking for a—”
“No,” Kealey said. “She’d stay in the uniform only for as long as it took to get away from the hotel. And then only for a short subway or probably cab ride. She knows the cops will be looking for a flight attendant.”
“Right.”
“What’s more significant is that our killer had an accomplice on the ground,” Kealey asserted.
“How do you know?”
“She broke the window in the hotel room instead of taking time to unscrew the lock,” Kealey told him. “That meant she didn’t have a lot of time. A dime, a nail file would have done the trick. Someone saw that our train had arrived, eyeballed us, told her we were coming, and she started firing as soon as we came up for air.”
“So she was already in the hotel.”
“Yes.”
“How did they know we would come out this side?” Bishop asked. “We could have gotten out on Eighth Avenue.”
“Not likely,” Kealey said. “They knew either that we were booked in that hotel or that we were going to catch a cab headed downtown.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly. This was for us, to tell us they know we’re here.”
“But they couldn’t kill us,” Bishop added. “They couldn’t afford to have another dead agent.”
“That, plus making it seem random is going to have a major chilling effect on transportation,” Kealey pointed out.
“To what end?” Bishop asked. “I mean, I understand the theory of it. Terror.”
“This wasn’t terror,” Kealey said.
“That’s my point,” Bishop said. “Assuming this action is related to Baltimore, and accepting that they were sending us some kind of message, why pile one atop the other? What’s their endgame?”
“That, obviously, is what we need to find out,” Kealey said. He didn’t add, “Quickly.” They both knew that.
“Those poor innocents,” Bishop thought aloud as they reached Broadway.
Kealey also hurt for the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time victims. But he couldn’t think about them now.
Who knows we are here? Kealey thought. Everyone in the president’s office and the people who made the travel plans. Whoever sent Bishop data on his missing cargo. The NYFO personnel they were supposed to meet and, most likely, everyone in their office.
It was a nightmare of possibilities with too-little evidence. What was more, the perpetrators knew where they were, most likely were watching them now, but they had no idea where those eyes might be.
“I’m guessing we shouldn’t go back to the hotel,” Bishop said.
“So they know exactly where to find us while we sleep? No,” Kealey agreed. Standing on a street corner, he felt like a tourist in Italy learning that a couple of strikes had just been called. What do you do? Where do you go? He looked at Bishop. “You got anything you really need in there?”
Bishop regarded him for a moment. He opened the cabin bag from the top, removed the iPad. “No.”
“Good,” Kealey said. “Let’s leave these here as a message for whoever’s still watching us. They’re going to have to work for their pay.”
They stacked the luggage against a cornerstone at Broadway and Thirty Third then walked south on Broadway to catch a cab at Thirty-Second Street, that had made it though the jam-up feeding into Thirty-Third S
treet. They headed downtown, the driver chattering into his cell phone in what sounded to Kealey like standard Hindi. As Kealey glanced back to see if anyone else had grabbed a taxi and was following—they weren’t—there was something strangely reassuring about that.
The city was just attacked, the nation was just attacked again, but life goes on.
Kealey could not remember when life had been that simple for him, when choices had been so clear, when the pressure had not been so absolute and crushing. He wasn’t lamenting that; he had chosen this life. But there were times like these when there was a clock ticking in his head, when he really did wish he could convince someone like Allison Dearborn to bag her life, too, and just find a jungle somewhere, build a tree house near a lake, and worry about nothing more remote or abstract than snaring a rabbit for the next meal... .
Jessica Muloni could not believe what she had seen.
After an excruciatingly slow drive into the city, her driver had finally arrived at the hotel. She expected for-hire cabbies to take the costly scenic route, but this one worked for Trask. Her driver, Shrevnitz, also obeyed the speed limit and stopped at yellow lights.
He doesn’t want to be stopped by cops, she decided. Not with an armed passenger.
She’d remained at Hotel Pennsylvania, awaiting instructions. She’d ordered room service breakfast. She’d checked e-mails. Word had finally come shortly after 9:00 a.m., a text message on the Minotaur phone.
Suspect believed to be in vicinity. Face recognition software at Penn may have picked her up at 7th Avenue.
Muloni had hurried downstairs to Seventh Avenue. The station had only recently been equipped with FRS, which had been deployed for several years in London. Cameras scanned the faces of everyone walking through the terminal. Nothing was recorded, so the ACLU couldn’t squawk about privacy being invaded; but if the computers got a match with their criminal database, the transit police were quickly notified.
As she was waiting to cross the street, the attack began. She saw gunfire knock people down, but before she could turn to ascertain where the shooting was coming from, she saw Reed Bishop. He and another man were crouched in front of Madison Square Garden. They seemed immune to the assault. It was a horrifying thing to behold; it was as though they were shielded, behind a force field, as people died around them. Their omission as targets was that striking.
How could Bishop be a part of this? she wondered in shocked silence. Yet how else could Veil have gotten away in Canada? And he’s here within a day of the death of his daughter. That was monstrous.
The gunfire was over within a few moments, coming in two quick salvos. Muloni weighed running back into the hotel to chase Veil and waiting to see what Bishop did.
She decided to wait. If Veil and Bishop were in league, staying with the FBI agent would take her to the assassin. She wondered if Trask had suspected him; maybe that was why he didn’t want her to contact him. If that were the case, it would have been nice if he’d shared the information.
Muloni watched from behind a streetlight as Bishop flipped the other man a gun. The armed man came toward the hotel. Possibly to cover her retreat. Bishop went across Thirty-Third Street with two pieces of luggage. Muloni watched him as he waited. Mobs milled around her, fleeing toward Penn Station, into the hotel, out to Broadway. She did not see Veil—nor did she expect to—but after a few minutes she did see the other man. He rejoined Bishop, and they moved toward Broadway. She followed. They got into a cab.
Obviously, Trask was not the target as she had thought back in Atlanta. The City of New York was the target, she realized.
Muloni was blocked in by a mob with no chance of tracking the sniper. She had pulled the number off the cab but hadn’t been able to follow it. They were smart, her colleague and his partner. There was a queue of traffic stretching across Broadway, stranded there because they were blocked from going west. There was only a narrow passage for downtown traffic. Bishop and his partner had gotten a ride on the other side.
She punched a number into the Minotaur phone the driver had given her. It was the Bureau’s main number. She asked to be connected to Domestic Tracking and Identification. She provided her ID number. The intel associate would know from the call who and where she was. That couldn’t be helped. She asked the agent to get into the NY Taxi and Limousine Commission database, find out where that cab had gone. New security regulations required New York cab drivers to enter their destinations for GPS tracking. The American Civil Liberties Union had opposed the law but the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission put the safety of their workers above privacy concerns and endorsed the measure.
“They’re headed to One West Street,” the agent said. “That’s at the corner of West Street and Battery Place.”
“Thank you,” she said and hung up.
Muloni had been walking south along Broadway as she placed the call, getting herself below the traffic jam. But traffic was backed up in all directions. She knew she would never get into Penn Station, so she walked four blocks to Twenty-Eighth Street then back west to Seventh Avenue to catch the One train downtown. She had a feeling that people would be leaving the city after an event like this, not coming into it. The One terminated at the bottom of Manhattan. Few people would be going there. They’d be going to Penn Station, or else uptown to Grand Central to catch a train to Connecticut, or to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to head for New Jersey.
Muloni was right. Within five minutes she was on her way downtown in a near-empty subway car.
Watching Fox News and pacing anxiously in the lab, Hunt glared at the phone when it beeped. It was Shrevnitz.
“Go!” Hunt said, almost angrily. He did not like waiting under ordinary circumstances. And these circumstances were not ordinary.
“She saw them,” reported the driver, who was also the team’s eyes on at Penn Station. “Everyone is in motion.”
“Details.”
“The men are in a cab headed down Broadway. Muloni is in the subway, the One downtown.”
“The subway?” Hunt said.
“That’s right,” Shrevnitz replied. “Traffic up here is hell.”
Jessica Muloni obviously knew where Bishop and Kealey were going. That had been the plan, of course. Shrevnitz had timed everything so she would be in the area when the gunfire began. She would look over, of course, and couldn’t miss them. Recognizing Bishop, knowing there was a mole, knowing how absurd it was for a grieving father even to be there, she would have done what she was trained to do: suspect him. Follow him without making contact. She must have taken the subway to circumvent the traffic. That meant she’d be getting off at either the Rector Street or the South Ferry stop. She might even beat the other two down here.
“Thank you.” Hunt hung up. He’d have to arrange for her to regain sight of the targets.
He turned to Dr. Gillani. “Where is Yasmin?”
“She phoned while you were talking,” the woman replied. “She is in position.”
“Tell her to hold,” Hunt said. “This is going to take a little finessing. I’ll call you when it’s time.”
Hunt decided to go downstairs and wait for them, see if he could spot Muloni. He couldn’t start without her. The best place for her to observe would be from Battery Park, across the street. He didn’t think there would be a lot of tourists headed for the Statue of Liberty right now, but there were trees and kiosks she could lurk behind. She wouldn’t have to see Bishop’s face; a good agent would have noticed what he was wearing.
And Jessica Muloni was a good agent, he thought, which was one of the reasons she had been selected for this important task. Handpicked by Mr. Trask.
As Hunt waited for the penthouse elevator, he thought back to his own meeting with the industrial juggernaut two years before, when he underwent a psychiatric evaluation after expressing his disappointment with Muslims to a Muslim coworker. It was in response to an alert received by the NYFO that the NYPD was providing 24/7 police protection to the so-called Gro
und Zero mosque.
“They didn’t do that for the Jewish museum around the corner when someone painted swastikas on the wall,” Hunt had noted.
The coworker was offended. Hunt was forced to undergo sensitivity training. The two-week course turned up a general attitudinal problem toward Muslims. Not enough to require further attention, but enough to bear watching.
Trask was one of those who was watching. He requested that Hunt be part of a team that was evaluating new electromagnetic vests, designed to slow the velocity of incoming projectiles. Satisfied with Hunt’s worldview and his trustworthiness, Trask had taken him into his confidence. Put him in charge of what might prove to be the most important operation in American history since D-day.
Hunt still got chills down his spine when he thought of the honor he had been accorded. It was humbling. And nothing was going to derail it.
Within minutes he was standing in the sunshine outside the building. The streets were eerily empty, the loudest sounds coming from helicopters that were circling six and a half miles to the north.
Leaning against the brass handrail that ran down the center of the short flight of steps, his cell phone in his hand, he saw a woman walking across the street. She stopped to study a poster around the Pier A restoration project that showed Lower Manhattan early in the twentieth century. She looked back toward the building, then back toward the poster. She turned away. She moseyed as if enjoying the day. Never once did she look across the harbor, where most people looked, toward the Statue of Liberty.
That had to be Muloni.
A single cab made the right turn from Broadway, which was three blocks away. It moved along an empty street toward his building. It was moving slowly, as if looking for a number.
That had to be Bishop and his ex-CIA companion.
The cab pulled up to the curb. Hunt speed dialed upstairs. Dr. Gillani answered.
“It’s time,” Hunt said and hung up.
The Operative Page 24