The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  CHAPTER 22

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  The UPS truck was parked on South Street, just below Catherine Slip. The driver was dead in the front, from a knife wound through the right eye and into his brain.

  There was nowhere a young, attractive woman could not go.

  She had taken the taxi to exit 2 of the FDR Drive. There Yasmin had discarded her flight attendant’s jacket and donned a red blazer she had in the wardrobe bag. There was a Realtor’s logo on the front. She had approached the coffee-breaking driver, cell phone in one hand, knife hidden up her sleeve, pretending to ask for directions. He didn’t even feel the hot thermos as it spilled over his lap.

  Yasmin removed the man’s shirt and trousers and changed into them in the back. This time, it didn’t matter if the front was bloody. All that was important was that she blended in, briefly, with the top of the truck. She noticed the bracelet as she was changing, the one with the marble. She knew it, knew it so well, but she could not recall why. Nor did it matter. She had a job to do.

  She lay down with her rifle in front of her, looked through the 4X telescopic sight at the Brooklyn Bridge. These weren’t like the last ones, rats smoked from a hole and picked off, pop, pop, pop, like she used to do in Cairo. These were bottles on a wall, heads moving across the walkway. A lot of heads, all leaving New York. Ironically, they were probably eager to get away from the city after that morning’s attack.

  No, not bottles, she thought without knowing why. Invaders. At the moat.

  Her phone pinged. She looked at the text message.

  Go.

  She slipped her finger over the trigger, picked a head at random, watched until it cleared the meshwork of wires that distinguished the sides of the stone edifice, then fired.

  Walking home across the wooden planks of the bridge, June Furst never got used to the incessant wobble caused by the automobile traffic passing below. Or the bicycles shooting by in lanes that ran alongside the too-narrow pedestrian walkway. With most of the traffic moving in one direction—east, away from Manhattan—the bridge almost seemed lopsided. But that might have been just a visual response to the solid mass under and beside her and the relative emptiness to the south.

  If the traffic was a constant hum and shudder, the people around her were always different. In two years, the twenty-five-year-old fashion designer couldn’t remember ever having seen the same person twice on her walks to and from work... .

  At first she thought someone, a workman, had dropped a can of red paint from above. Then she saw the man in front of her cartwheel to the same side the crimson splash had gone. It wasn’t exactly a cartwheel; his body turned, but his arms were like noodles, spindly and whipping as he moved.

  The screams from behind her told June that it was not paint and not an acrobatic stunt. A muted crack reached her ears a moment later.

  “Someone’s shooting!” a man screamed.

  June dropped to her knees as she turned, looking for whoever had shouted while at the same time seeking to get behind the fat cables that ran up the span in a gentle slope. It took only an instant, and it was an instant that saved her life. The person to her right lost the left side of his head. It came away in fragments, riding another wave of red, as the older woman did a half-corkscrew turn before dropping. A bride who had been posing with her husband for wedding photos was slashed across the throat as her mouth, tongue, and neck spat blood sideways across his tuxedo and forward down her own white gown. She grabbed at her throat like it was the recently tossed bouquet.

  Then people began dropping everywhere, each under a ruddy plume, their blood continuing to pump as they lay still or twitching.

  June flopped on her chest, pressed herself as low as she could while sidling over to the cables, to protection. She slid across something wet. Her face was turned to the south, and she heard the screams, watched the death, with a kind of disconnected horror, as if this were a movie. She could do that, feeling she was no longer at risk. Even when the bodies stopped being knocked down, when the distant pops faded like the last echo of holiday fireworks, she lay on the unvarnished wooden floor of the bridge, trembling from more than just the traffic, promising her dead mother that she would go home to Montana and work at the family bridal gown shop and never leave, as she had once been warned.

  She had no idea how long it was before people started moving again, most of them running, some of them crawling, toward the Brooklyn side of the bridge. When she saw them move, she got up.

  An elderly Hasidic Jew, hurrying by, turned toward her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, showing concern.

  “I’m sorry?”

  He pointed to her blouse, which was covered with blood.

  “Oh, no,” she said, smiling stupidly, as if she were declining sidewalk literature. “It’s not mine.”

  He gave her a funny look and moved on.

  As did she.

  Slowly, tentatively, before fainting.

  Alexander Hunt’s cell phone chirped as Bishop and his partner walked toward the building. He checked the message, though he knew what it must be.

  From: Notify NYC swnalert@sendwordnow.com

  To: Alexander Hunt

  Sent: Mon, May 20, 2013, 9:59 a.m.

  Subject: Notify NYC - Notification

  Notification issued 5/20/13. Gunshots fired at Brooklyn

  Bridge from Manhattan. All traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, is being diverted from FDR to Pearl.

  For show, Hunt pretended to study the message intently, then shook his head and swore. He “happened” to look up as the men swung by him.

  “Are you Reed Bishop?” Hunt asked, turning to catch the men as they moved up the stairs.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Agent Hunt,” he said, turning back to snag the cab as it pulled away. It screeched to a stop. “You’d better come with me.”

  “Where?” Bishop asked.

  “There’s been another sniper attack, at the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Hunt jogged to the curb, the men running behind. They climbed in the back of the cab, Bishop in the center. Hunt gave the cabbie their destination, and he made a U turn on Battery Place and headed north on Greenwich Street.

  “See if you can get us to the foot of the bridge,” Hunt told the driver as they sped north.

  “Why? Is something going on?” the driver asked.

  Hunt slapped his ID against the plastic partition. “Nothing you need to worry about,” he said and sat back.

  The driver sped up, either enjoying a moment of importance or immunity from a speeding ticket.

  Introductions were made, after which Hunt said to Bishop, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. What the hell is happening here?”

  Hunt showed them the e-mail. “I’m guessing it has to do with the individual you met in Quebec. You heard about that?”

  Bishop nodded.

  “Is she on the bridge?” Kealey asked.

  “I don’t know any more than this,” Hunt said, still holding up the phone. There was a drumming noise overhead, passing west to east. “Choppers heading to the scene.” He cranked down the window, looked up before they vanished behind the waterfront towers. “Disbursal pattern, fanning out. A search.”

  “Hey, am I gonna be in some kind of danger over there?” the cabbie asked.

  “Not anymore,” Kealey said as a second wave of police and coast guard choppers flew behind them, following the harbor to the East River. “Safest place on the planet.”

  The ride was quick until they reached Park Row. Then it stopped moving, with the bottleneck from the closed bridge spilling in all directions.

  “We’ll get out here,” Hunt said, tossing the driver a twenty-dollar bill and getting out across from St Paul’s Chapel.

  Bishop thanked the driver and told him to stay safe.

  “Thanks,” the cabbie said. “You too.”

  The men rushed toward the bridge, Hunt’s credentials getting them t
hrough the police barricade. Hunt slowed as he saw someone else from his field office. Kealey and Bishop did likewise.

  Kealey looked around. In the air, on the ground, and now in the water, it looked as though all of New York law enforcement was arriving. He even noticed the WhisprWave, the NYPD Harbor Unit’s sleek, new, seventy-two-foot, high-tech antiterror vessel.

  “What do you think about all this?” Kealey asked. Even though there was little chance of being overheard with the police shouting and ambulance sirens shrieking toward them, he spoke softly.

  “Sniping people on the bridge? That’s at the top of her skill set,” Bishop said.

  “Pull back from the bridge, from the hotel,” Kealey suggested. “What does it look like to you?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The larger picture,” Kealey said, “because to me it doesn’t add up. The minute we get to New York, there’s an attack that dances all around us. We arrive to interview Hunt, and he gets pulled away by a second attack. It’s all too damn neat.”

  “It’s unusual, but why bother?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Kealey said. “Tell me what you know, going back to Quebec.”

  “About Veil?”

  “Yeah. Was that her code name or yours?”

  “Ours. It was meant to be ironic, something a Middle Eastern lady, a shaykhah, would wear.”

  “She came from poverty? She wasn’t a pampered sociopath like bin Laden?”

  “As far as we can tell,” Bishop said.

  He and Kealey had stopped, while Hunt moved ahead, up the walkway on the Manhattan side of the bridge.

  “Go on,” Kealey said.

  “The Gulfstream had landed from Pakistan before we got there. We never really met the escorts. She arrived with a group of Mounties by car, we took custody with the Pakistanis, and an agent from Rendition Group One, Jessica Muloni, let her know that we knew she had a daughter, knew where she was, and expected her complete cooperation.”

  “Let her know how? Photos? Details?”

  “Her name and information about the midwife,” Bishop said. “Veil believed her.”

  “Where is the daughter?” Kealey asked.

  “Pakistan.”

  Kealey shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense, then. Veil had a ride home. Why go on a rampage here, especially when she knows that her daughter can be used as leverage to stop her?”

  “Do you think someone else has the girl?”

  “If we found out, someone else could have,” Kealey said. “They got to the Pakistani escort, hijacked the plane.”

  “You’re right, though—that doesn’t make sense. It’s a lot of effort to go through. Snipers are easy enough to buy.”

  “What about Jessica Muloni? Do you know her well?”

  “Rendition Group and internal affairs wouldn’t have many encounters. Tough to find common ground. But she seemed square.”

  Kealey looked at the pieces he knew. As in Baltimore, the shootings here were acts of terror. A city of some ten million citizens and a good chunk of the world’s commerce had been paralyzed in the space of less than an hour. Their presence could have been a coincidence. It made sense that a killer would target incoming and outgoing commuters. But he had to assume there was a connection.

  “What if someone helped to arrange it so that two upstanding agents were brought here just to be stonewalled?” Kealey said as he glanced at Hunt and his colleagues. “There are other boots on the ground, but the Oval Office can’t trust any of them, not with a potential traitor at the Bureau. He or she could pollute everything, even intel going to otherwise clean divisions, like the NYPD antiterror units.”

  Bishop considered this. “The president is more or less made to sit on his hands until ... what?”

  “Exactly. What? Another attack in another city? What does he do then? Dispatch another team? The pattern could go on for days.”

  “So simple,” Bishop said. “It’s like a computer virus—with people.”

  “We’ve got to take charge of this,” Kealey said. “What do you think about going back to the psyops project office where we were supposed to meet Hunt? Get up there, find out what he was working on, what May had been checking on?”

  “Sounds good,” Bishop said. He looked to where Hunt was talking with the other members of his field office. They were pointing up South Street, presumably in the direction from which the gunfire had come. Helicopters were circling that area as well. “Check in if you’ve got anything. I’ll do the same.”

  Kealey gave him a look. “How are you holding up, Reed?” He was concerned about Bishop personally, but also—and this was a hard fact of their line of work—he had to know that he could count on the man to stay focused.

  “Everything seems surreal,” Bishop told him. “Short answer, I can function as long as I don’t think about it.”

  He didn’t have to tell Bishop that what they were doing here was for all the Lauras of the nation. He could see in the man’s resolute expression that he grasped that.

  Kealey gave the agent a supportive clap on the shoulder as he turned and went back in the direction of Centre Street.

  Police were moving everywhere to try and clear the massive tangle that reached from the Brooklyn Bridge to Broadway and city hall. More people were standing still than moving; they didn’t know where to go. Many were shouting into cell phones, trying to hear above the sirens and choppers and the endless honking of horns. Other people were texting. Some were just sitting on benches or steps, alone or in pairs, talking, sobbing, or just resting with their head on their knees. A few were praying. People were asking the police if the subways were running, the PATH trains, the buses on Church Street. Some were trying to find out if the shootings at Penn Station had shut down the commuter lines. The officers, showing remarkable patience, did not know the answers as they tried to direct all foot traffic north. They just wanted to clear the area so vehicles could be moved. The FDR Drive and South Street were also at a standstill heading downtown. Bishop realized the best way to get back to Battery Park was to walk the mile or so. He knew he had to pick his way southwest and decided that once he left the on-ramp of the bridge, he’d turn down Park Row.

  Brooklyn-bound pedestrians were still making for the bridge, dodging police who were trying to preserve the multiple crime scenes and rubbernecking as they passed. They were the most orderly group, like metal filings being drawn by a magnet. They obviously felt it was safe enough to cross now that the shooting was over and the sniper had apparently fled. Bishop had to weave his way through the mob. In spite of everything that had happened, he found himself smiling when he remembered being with his wife and daughter at Disney World on a holiday about eight years ago. It was packed solid, as these streets were, and he was holding both of their hands as he spearheaded an exit from the park. His hands closed beside him, and he could almost feel their soft, loving, trusting grip.

  I miss you both, he thought.

  He shouldered his way through people, twisted his way through cars, even climbed over fenders that were nearly touching. And then he froze. Among the stopped cars was a cab. Getting out less than 20 feet from him was someone he knew. It seemed surreal seeing her here, but when their eyes met, there was no question who it was, because she recognized him, too.

  It was Jessica Muloni.

  CHAPTER 23

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  Trask Industries AMRAD Division—advanced munitions research and development—was located beneath a boxy white warehouse in the Atlanta Industrial Park. Sitting at the dead end of Atlanta Industrial Drive NW, the four-thousand-square-foot, two-story structure was completely rebuilt in 2011. It generally resembled the others in the park. What set it apart was that the grounds were entirely surrounded by a fence. The thin iron bars were ten feet high, were painted white, and resembled spears on top. One would have to touch them to discover that there were ten thousand volts of electricity running through every bar. That was the maximum allowed by i
nternational law, as likely to kill as to render unconscious. There were signs warning of the danger, though it was unlikely anyone would get close enough to read them. The surveillance cameras that lined the barricade every 10 feet—backed by a guard station on the roof, staffed 24/7—alerted a corps of security personnel to any individual who made the turn off Atlanta Industrial Way NW, which was the only way in. The day’s scheduled arrivals had already been logged by their license numbers. If the cameras and computers didn’t match a vehicle with its license number, security converged at the gate and a spike plate rotated points up from the road. The plate did not just deflate the tires; it pierced the rims and stopped even a speeding car bomb.

  After the attacks in Baltimore and New York, the chief of security at the facility received preliminary reports from the FBI on the type of weapons used. He and his team reviewed the estimated yield from the explosives at the convention center, studied photographs of the damage, and saw no reason to expand the existing protection of the facility. They were an unlikely target. Few people outside the industrial park knew Trask had a facility here, and no one beyond the staff knew it was the AMRAD Division. Still, the unlikely targets were the ones that were usually caught with their shorts around their ankles. So the team met, did its review, and was satisfied that nothing needed to be done.

  Even if all the systems failed, even if a hijacker crashed an Airbus into the facility, the cost would be in human life and property, but not ordnance. The aboveground structure was comprised entirely of executive offices. The real research facilities—the labs, the molding shops, the low-yield ordnance ranges, the storage facilities—were all located on four belowground levels, each of them protected on the top, bottom, and sides by steel-lined concrete 10 inches thick. The steel was ribbed with wires that created an electronic web: in the milliseconds after an explosion, a strong electromagnetic force would be generated to disburse the concussive wave, minimizing the impact in any one spot. If something exploded upstairs, it was unlikely to penetrate the ceiling of the first sublevel. If something exploded down here, it was unlikely anyone upstairs would hear it.