by Jack Mars
Three? Reid thought. There was the compound, and now the parking deck—what was the third? His hands tightened around the gun.
“You hear me, Agent?” Fitzpatrick grunted as he rose slowly to his feet. “You’re gonna have to kill me, ‘cause if not, I’m gonna kill you.”
“Stand down, Fitzpatrick,” Reid warned.
“Or what?” Fitzpatrick smirked. “You gonna shoot me? You had so much love for those terrorists back in Iraq. Didn’t want us shootin’ unarmed men. Well, here I am. You got me dead to rights. Go ahead. Shoot.”
Reid’s finger twitched against the trigger. He wanted to; in fact, he knew he should. The mercenary was not going to give him another chance. But if he did, he wouldn’t just be killing a man with no weapons in his hands. The other two mercs would fire on him in an instant.
“Come on, Agent,” Fitzpatrick goaded. “Splatter my brains all over the cement.” Fitzpatrick leaned forward slowly until his forehead was pressed right up against the barrel of the AR-15. “What are you waiting for?!” he shouted.
Reid, focusing on the gun and Fitzpatrick’s face, barely saw the movement as the mercenary’s hand slipped to his belt and pulled free a wood-stocked Sig Sauer pistol.
Reid’s finger tightened on the trigger, ready to fire if necessary and hoping against hope that Strickland and Maria could get a shot off in time—
Fitzpatrick’s body jerked to the side as a red sedan plowed into him. For a moment he seemed weightless, hovering over the hood of the car as his legs flew out from beneath him. Then the sedan’s brakes screeched and Fitzpatrick was flung forward, careening through the air for about twelve feet before skidding limply on the cement floor of the deck.
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
Several things happened all at once, without time for Reid to process any one of them. The brakes on the red sedan shrieked as it came to a halt in front of them. Fitzpatrick’s body slid across the concrete. Reid dropped himself to the floor, landing painfully on his forearms but out of the line of fire. Two shots went off over his head—both pistol shots. The two Division mercenaries yelped and fell beside him.
He scrambled to his feet again as Maria and Strickland quickly knelt to relieve the downed mercs of their rifles. One man groaned and held his shoulder; the other gripped his thigh, hissing breaths through his clenched teeth.
The door of the red sedan swung open and a familiar woman emerged—a woman with short dark hair, swept across her forehead, and equally dark eyes. She glanced dispassionately at Fitzpatrick, who twitched as he struggled for gasping breaths.
“Talia,” Reid said in disbelief. She had actually come, and even more unbelievable, had somehow managed to find them.
“Are we that easy to find?” Maria griped, thinking the same.
“We should move,” Talia said simply. “Someone will have heard those shots; police will come. Grab your things. Leave these men behind—”
From elsewhere in the parking deck came a short burst of automatic gunfire, followed by two pistol shots in quick succession, one-two. Then silence.
Talia raised an eyebrow. “Are there others?”
“Not anymore,” Reid guessed.
Watson came trotting out of the darkness and into the dim lighting of their level. “We have to go,” he said. Then he frowned at Mendel. “Who’s this?”
“Later,” Reid said in response. “Maria, get the trunk. Everyone grab a bag of gear.” He reached in and hauled out a black canvas bag for himself. Maria, Watson, and Talia did the same—but Strickland did not. Instead he knelt beside the two downed mercenaries and set about zip-tying their hands and relieving them of their radios and side arms.
“Todd, what are you doing? Leave them.”
Strickland shook his head. “I can’t come. I’m being tracked. I’d lead them right to us.”
Reid had nearly forgotten about the implant. “We’ll split up. If they find you, you can lead them away…”
The young agent shook his head. “Can’t risk it. If I stay here, they’ll think we’re all still with the Division. It should buy you some time.”
“And what if the cops come?” Maria demanded.
Strickland pulled his Glock from its holster and passed it off to Agent Mendel. “Then four mercenaries attacked a single unarmed CIA agent,” he said with a smirk.
Reid scoffed. “They’ll still arrest you.”
He nodded. “Probably. But it’s worth it if we put a stop to this. Now get out of here, would you?”
“Thanks, Todd.” Maria nodded to him and hurried down the deck, followed by Watson and Mendel.
Reid bent and picked up the satellite phone that Fitzpatrick had dropped when Talia ran him over. He glanced over at Fitzpatrick, who was twitching on the pavement, struggling to breathe, let alone move. “Hey. Do what you can to keep him from dying.”
Strickland frowned. “Really?”
Reid nodded. “Believe me, it’s not compassion talking. If we make it through this, there are a few questions I’d like to ask him.” Fitzpatrick might have been stubborn, boisterous, and arrogant, but he obviously knew some things about what was going on—chief among them, who was paying him and the Division to keep the agents at bay.
“Good luck, Kent.”
“You too, Todd.” Reid jogged down the deck after the others. “Agent Watson,” he said as he caught up to them, “this is Agent Talia Mendel, Mossad.”
“Mossad, huh?” said Watson, sounding impressed. “How’d you get yourself mixed up in this?”
“She has a thing for Kent,” Maria muttered.
“That is true,” Talia said candidly. Despite their situation, Reid felt his face flush. “But also, the Brotherhood is my assignment. Where they are, I will be.”
They reached the street level as the sun was just beginning to rise. Traffic had increased since they had entered the city and more people were out; the city that never sleeps was coming alive.
“We’ll head to Madison Square Park and split off from there,” Reid told them as he quickened his pace. He could hear sirens wailing in the distance, though he couldn’t be sure it was for the incident in the parking garage or not; it was not an uncommon sound in the city.
“You want to tell us how you found us?” Maria demanded of Mendel.
“My satellite phone,” Reid intervened. “That was you calling, wasn’t it?”
Talia nodded. “I called your cell phone upon arrival. Your daughter gave me the number to the satellite phone, and I tracked it by GPS. When that man answered it, I assumed you were in some sort of difficulty.”
“Thanks for that, by the way,” Reid said breathlessly. “Wait, Maya willingly gave you the number to my sat phone?”
Talia smiled. “Your daughter is quite keen, Agent Zero. I told her who I was; she said that if it was true, I would know the password that disabled the submarine drone in Israel.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “She is very keen.” He was immensely proud of how resourceful his daughter was; he hated to admit it, but she would make a hell of an agent if she remained determined to follow that path. They definitely weren’t little girls anymore; Maya had outwitted a Division member and Sara had knocked him unconscious. He couldn’t help but smile a little recounting the scene in the kitchen, Maya being so concerned for his safety rather than the other way around.
This seems a bit backwards, he had told her. It all seemed backwards; them acting against agency orders, trying to stop an attack while everyone else seemed to believe that the threat of the Brotherhood had passed—
Reid stopped suddenly and sucked in a breath. “Son of a bitch,” he murmured as a chill of terror ran down his spine. “It’s backwards.”
“Zero?” Watson said questioningly.
“What is it?” Maria asked as she paused on the sidewalk beside him.
“It’s backwards!” he practically shouted. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. The password to the submarine drone, ‘qafan,’ is transliterated English. But it’s
backwards; Arabic is written right to left. It’s not ‘qafan.’ It’s nafaq, which would translate to—”
“Tunnel,” Maria murmured. “Nafaq means ‘tunnel.’”
Reid was rooted to the spot, frozen, as Cartwright’s words from earlier ran through his head. Frankly, it would be suicide for anyone to try something.
The FBI, NYPD, Secret Service, emergency personnel of every type—they would all be at the parade and concentrated at the UN building. Vigilant, aware… and in completely the wrong place.
The parade was a red herring. A distraction. Back in the parking deck, Fitzpatrick had said he was supposed to hold them for the next couple of hours, well before the parade even began. If the attack came sooner, he reasoned, the Secret Service wouldn’t let the president within a hundred miles of New York—but Pierson wasn’t a target, and neither was the United Nations.
And if Reid’s team activated the RF jammers, they would, as Watson had pointed out, be crippling the communications system of anyone that could respond when the attack came.
They would be unwittingly helping the attack claim even more lives.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
“It’s not about the parade at all,” Reid told his team quickly. “The attack is going to be on a tunnel.” His hands were shaking; their plan was completely disrupted and utterly wrong.
“But which one?” Talia asked. “How do we know where they’re targeting?”
“We don’t,” Reid said quickly. “We need to alert the authorities and shut them all down. It could be any of the major tunnels leading in or out of the island—Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown, Brooklyn-Battery…”
Watson blinked at him. “You want us to ask them to shut down and evac every major underwater route into the city? They’ll think we’re insane. We’re already off agency radar on this.”
“Then we call it in as a bomb threat,” Reid said urgently. “Give them no other choice than to listen—”
“Are you insane?” Watson scoffed. “That’s grounds for incarceration, Zero—”
“What choice do we have?” Reid said heatedly. “Don’t you realize what’s at stake here?”
“Wait!” Maria shouted at them both. “Shut up a second. Listen, in Baghdad, the Brotherhood planted their bomb under the guise of a contractor crew, right? So maybe there’s a way to narrow this down.”
Reid understood immediately and already had his sat phone out, punching in a number he had memorized. “Bixby, it’s Zero,” he said before the engineer could greet him. “Listen to me. We have reason to believe the target is one of the primary tunnels leading into the city. I need to check right now and tell me if any of them are undergoing construction.”
“On it,” Bixby said through the phone. Reid heard a clattering of keys in the background. “Looks like the Holland Tunnel is currently undergoing some construction on the north tube. It’s down to one lane about a quarter-mile in and spanning another half mile. It’s causing some major delays, total gridlock at the moment with all these people coming into town for the parade.”
“Holland Tunnel,” Reid said quickly to Maria. “Alert the authorities—NYPD, MTA, FBI, whoever you can. Get it shut down and evacuated.” He turned to Watson. “Call Cartwright. Don’t talk to anyone else. Tell him what we think is going on, have him activate anyone the CIA has got in the area.” To Mendel he said, “Call 911 and tell them to send any emergency personnel available to the Holland Tunnel.”
“Zero?” Bixby said through the phone. “What can I do to help?”
“Hedge our bets,” he told the engineer. The Holland Tunnel was a primary thoroughfare into New York, connecting the city to New Jersey, and was their best guess—but until there was evidence, it was still just that, a guess. “Get in touch with authorities on the opposite ends of the other three main tunnels leaving New York and do whatever you’ve got to do to shut them off to anyone coming in.”
“No easy task,” Bixby said, “but I’ll do what I can.” The line clicked as he hung up.
Reid’s heart was pounding a mile a minute with the prospect of a bomb being detonated in one of the underwater tunnels. Not only would there be immediate casualties, but if it was strong enough to collapse and flood the tubes, thousands would die.
Calm down, he scolded himself. Think straight.
“We need to get there,” he murmured aloud. If the authorities discovered a bomb, the RF jammers could stop any signal from detonating it. But the four of them were on the opposite side of the island from the Holland Tunnel. “We need a car.”
He stepped right out into the street, holding up both hands as oncoming traffic swerved around him amid sharp horn blasts. A yellow taxi screeched to a halt less than a foot from him, the irate driver shouting and gesticulating with his hands behind the windshield. Reid threw the door open.
“Sir,” he said, “I need your vehicle.”
“The hell are you talkin’ about?” The cabbie, a Jewish man in his fifties wearing a derby cap, scowled up at him. “Get out of here!”
Reid leaned over and, in one swift motion, unclipped the driver’s seatbelt with one hand as he dragged him out of the seat with the other, unceremoniously dropping the man to the pavement. “Sorry,” Reid muttered as he slid behind the wheel.
“Hey!” the driver shouted. “That’s my cab! Somebody stop that guy! Asshole!”
Agent Mendel stepped up and, with a quick flash of a Glock, sent the cabbie fleeing for his life. She slid into the passenger seat with the black bag of equipment in her lap. Watson and Maria piled in quickly behind them, and Reid slammed the gas before their door was even shut.
“911 is sending emergency services,” Talia told him.
“MTA is shutting down the tunnel,” said Maria, “and the NYPD is sending every available unit. But evac is going to take some time. That tunnel is a mile and a half long.”
“No answer from Cartwright,” Watson announced. “But I’ll keep trying.”
Reid swerved in and out of traffic, cursing in frustration at his lack of speed. Screw it, he thought. “Hold on to something.” He jerked the wheel and mounted the curb, slamming on the horn in bursts to alert pedestrians out of his way. Any cops in the area would undoubtedly give chase in no time, but that was the least of his concerns at the moment. And hopefully, we’re the least of theirs, he thought. If the MTA and NYPD were taking the threat seriously, a stolen taxi was of little consequence.
“Everyone make sure you’ve got an RF jammer,” he told them between blasts from the horn. Mendel unzipped the black nylon bag and pulled out a handheld black box, about the size of a nineteen-eighties cell phone, with two rubber-coated antennae protruding from the top at odd angles.
“Got it,” Watson confirmed as well.
“Jammers?” said Talia questioningly. “That is your plan?”
Reid hardly had the time or the patience to go through another explanation. “Look, I can’t be sure, but this thing could be going off sooner than we anticipated, and we need to be ready for that if they can’t evacuate in time.” He turned specifically to her and added, “So yes, jammers. That’s my plan.”
“You understand that for this to work, we would have to be positioned in range of the bomb, yes?”
“Yes,” Reid said tightly. No one else had made vocal that concern, though they must have certainly all been thinking it.
Mendel nodded once. “Okay.”
“Who’s got the Parasite?” he asked.
“Got it,” Maria said behind him.
“What the hell is a Parasite?” asked Watson.
“It’s a small UAV that can override the controls of another,” Reid told him. He gritted his teeth as he ran a red light, swerving around the perpendicular traffic. “If the Brotherhood is in a range close enough to detonate while still being outside the tunnel, it might come in handy to help locate them.”
“And you know how to use it?”
“Um…” Bixby had given both him and Maria a crash course in the rem
ote guidance system—but neither of them had actually tested it. “Yes,” he said simply. He didn’t bother explaining that they also had seismic detectors that would let them know the moment any bombs detonated in a particular radius, and shotgun motion sensors to pick up any aerial drone activity; the jammers were the key component. The rest of the equipment they had been outfitted with was more or less useless in the moment.
Reid’s satellite phone rang, displaying Bixby’s number on the screen. He kept one hand firmly on the wheel as he flipped it over his shoulder to Maria. “Get that for me, would you?”
“Johansson,” Maria answered. “Uh-huh… Jesus…” Then she shouted, “Kent, stop!”
“What?”
“Stop the car!”
Reid grunted as he slammed the brakes. The taxi skidded to a halt in the middle of 26th Street. Angry New Yorkers shouted and waved rude gestures in their direction. “What? What is it?”
Maria put the phone on speaker. “Bixby, repeat what you just told me.”
“The transit authority has just announced the closure of the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels,” Bixby said quickly. “But there’s something else; a truck just flipped on the eastbound tube of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, Manhattan side. Traffic is already congested heading into the city; now both lanes are stopped heading into Queens, too.”
Reid gaped at Talia beside him. An overturned truck? All four lanes congested? That couldn’t just be coincidence.
“I’m listening in on the police airwaves,” Bixby continued quickly, “and they’re saying there were two men in the truck, both dead on impact—and both of Middle Eastern descent. Neither was carrying ID.”
“And this just happened?” Watson asked.
“Just now. Two minutes ago,” Bixby confirmed.
Reid had heard enough. He slammed the gas again and spun the wheel, pulling a U-turn in the middle of the street, blaring the horn as cars swerved around him. “It’s the Midtown Tunnel. That’s the target.” He jerked the wheel again and the taxi fishtailed onto Park Avenue.