6:05 a.m.
Joint Counter-Terrorism Command Center – Midtown Manhattan
“Luke, the best thing to do is get your people together and go back to Washington,” the man in the suit said.
Luke stood inside the swirling chaos of the command center’s main room. It was already daytime, and weak light filtered in from windows two stories above the working floor. Time was passing too quickly, and the command center was a clusterfuck in progress.
Two hundred people filled the space. There were at least forty workstations, some of them with two or three people sitting at five computer screens. On the big board up front, there were twenty different television and computer screens. Screens showed digital maps of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, live video streams of the entrances to the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, mug shots of Arab terrorists known to be in the country.
Three of the screens currently showed Mayor DeAngelo, at six-foot-three dwarfing the aides that flanked him, standing at the microphone and telling the brave people of New York to stay home and hug their kids. He was reading from prepared remarks.
“In a worst-case scenario,” the mayor said, his voice coming from speakers located around the room, “the initial explosion would kill many people and create mass panic in the immediate area. Radiation exposure would cause widespread terror throughout the region and probably the country. Many people exposed in the initial attack would become sick, and some would die. The clean-up costs would be enormous, but they would be dwarfed by the psychological and economic costs. A dirty bomb attack on a major train station in New York City would cripple transportation along the Eastern seaboard for the foreseeable future.”
“Pleasant,” Luke said. “I wonder who writes his material.”
He scanned the room. Everyone was represented here, everyone jockeying for position. It was alphabet soup. NYPD, FBI, NSA, ATF, DEP, even CIA. Hell, the DEA was here. Luke wasn’t sure how stealing radioactive waste constituted a drug crime.
Ed Newsam had gone to track down the SRT staff among the crowd.
“Luke, did you hear me?”
Luke turned back to the matter at hand. He was standing with Ron Begley of Homeland Security. Ron was a balding man in his late 50s. He had a large round gut and pudgy little fingers. Luke knew his story. He was a desk jockey, a man who had come up through the government bureaucracy. On September 11, he was at Treasury running a team analyzing tax evasion and Ponzi schemes. He slid over to counter-terrorism when Homeland Security was created. He had never made an arrest, or fired a gun in anger, in his life.
“You said you want me to go home.”
“You’re stepping on toes here, Luke. Kurt Myerson called his boss at NYPD and told him you were at the hospital treating people like your personal servants. And that you commandeered a SWAT team. Really? A SWAT team? Listen, this is their turf. You’re supposed to follow their lead. That’s how the game is played.”
“Ron, the NYPD called us in. I assume that’s because they felt they needed us. People know how we work.”
“Cowboys,” Begley said. “You work like rodeo cowboys.”
“Don Morris got me out of bed to come up here. You can talk to Don…”
Begley shrugged. A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “Don’s been recalled. He caught a chopper out twenty minutes ago. I suggest you do the same.”
“What?”
“That’s right. He’s been kicked upstairs on this one. They called him back to do a situation briefing at the Pentagon. Real high-level stuff. I guess they couldn’t get an intern to do it, so they’re bringing in Don.”
Begley lowered his voice, though Luke could still easily hear him. “A word of advice. What does Don have, three more years before retirement? Don’s a dying breed. He’s a dinosaur, and so is SRT. You know it and I know it. All of these little secret agencies within an agency, they’re going by the wayside. We’re consolidating and centralizing, Luke. What we need now is data-driven analysis. That’s how we’re going to solve the crimes of the future. That’s how we’re going to catch these terrorists today. We don’t need macho super-spies and aging former commandos rappelling down the sides of buildings anymore. We just don’t. Playing hero ball is over. It’s actually a little ridiculous, if you think about it.”
“Great,” Luke said. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
“I thought you were teaching college,” Begley said. “History, political science, that kind of thing.”
Luke nodded. “I am.”
Begley put a meaty hand on Luke’s arm. “You should stick with that.”
Luke shook the hand off and plunged into the crowd, looking for his people.
“What do we got?” Luke said.
His team had set up camp in an outlying office. They had grabbed some empty desks and built their own little command station with laptops and satellite uplinks. Trudy and Ed Newsam were there, along with a few of the others. Swann was off in a corner by himself with three laptops.
“They called Don back,” Trudy said.
“I know. Have you talked to him?”
She nodded. “Twenty minutes ago. He was just about to take off. He said keep working this case until he personally calls it off. Politely ignore anyone else.”
“Sounds good. So where are we?”
Her face was serious. “We’re moving fast. We’ve narrowed it down to six high-priority vehicles. All of them passed within a block of the hospital last night, and have details that are funky or don’t match up.”
“Give me an example.”
“Okay. One is a food vendor truck registered to a former Russian paratrooper. We were able to follow him on surveillance cameras, and as near as we can tell, he’s been cruising around Manhattan all night, selling hot dogs and Pepsi to sex workers, pimps, and johns.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s parked on 11th Ave, south of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. He hasn’t moved in a while. We’re thinking he might be asleep.”
“Okay, sounds like he just became low priority. Pass him on to NYPD, just in case. They can roust him and toss his truck, find out what else he’s selling in there. Next.”
Trudy ran down her list. A minivan operated as an Uber car by a disgraced former nuclear physicist. A forty-ton tractor trailer with an insurance claim that it was demolished in an accident and scrapped. A delivery van for a commercial laundry service, with license plates registered to an unrelated flooring business in Long Island. An ambulance reported stolen three years ago.
“A stolen ambulance?” Luke said. “That sounds like something.”
Trudy shrugged. “Usually it’s the illegal organ trade. They harvest from newly deceased patients within minutes of death. They have to harvest the organs, pack them, and get them out of the hospital quickly. No one looks twice at an ambulance waiting around in a hospital parking lot.”
“But tonight, maybe they weren’t waiting for organs. Do we know where they are?”
She shook her head. “No. The only location we have is the Russian. This is still more of an art than a science. Surveillance cameras aren’t everywhere yet, especially once you get out of Manhattan. You see a truck pass a camera, then you might not see it again. Or you might pick it up on another camera ten blocks away, or five miles away. The tractor trailer crossed the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey before we lost it. The laundry van went over the 138th Street Bridge into the South Bronx and disappeared. Right now, we’re tracking them all down using other means. We’ve contacted the trucking company, Uber, the flooring company, and the laundry service. We should know something on those soon. And I’ve got eight people at headquarters sifting through hours of video feeds, looking for the ambulance.”
“Good. Keep me posted. What’s going on with the bank stuff?”
Trudy’s face was stone. “You should ask Swann about that.”
“Okay.” He took a step toward Swann’s little fiefdom in the corner.
“Luke?”
He stopped. “Yeah.”
Her eyes darted around the room. “Can we talk? In private?”
“You’re going to fire me because I won’t break the law for you?”
“Trudy, I’m not going to fire you. Why would you even think that?”
“It’s what you said, Luke.”
They were standing in a tiny utility room. There were two empty desks in here and one small window. The carpeting was new. The walls were white with nothing on them. There was a small video camera mounted in one corner, near the ceiling.
It looked like the room had never been used. The command center itself had been open for less than a year.
Trudy’s big eyes stared at him intently.
Luke sighed. “I was giving you an out. I thought you would understand that. If trouble comes down, you can blame it on me. All you did was what I told you to do. You were afraid you’d lose your job if you didn’t follow my orders.”
She took a step closer to him. In the confines of the room, he could smell her shampoo, and the understated cologne she often wore. The combination of scents did something to his knees. He felt them tremble the slightest amount.
“You can’t even give me a direct order, Luke. You don’t work at SRT anymore.”
“I’m on a leave of absence.”
She took another small step toward him. Her eyes were focused on him like twin lasers. There was intelligence in those eyes, and heat.
“And you left… why? Because of me?”
He shook his head. “No. I had my reasons. You weren’t one of them.”
“The Marshall brothers?”
He shrugged. “When you kill two men in one night, it’s a good time to take a pause. Maybe reassess what you’re doing.”
“Are you saying you never had any feelings for me?” she asked.
He looked at her, stunned by the question. He had always sensed Trudy flirting with him, and he had never taken the bait. There had been a few times, drunk at cocktail parties, after bad fights with his wife, when he had come close. But thoughts of his wife and son had always pulled him back from the brink of doing something stupid.
“Trudy, we work together,” he said firmly. “And I’m married.”
She came even closer.
“I’m not looking for a marriage, Luke,” she said softly, leaning in, inches away.
She pushed herself against him now. His arms were at his sides. He felt the heat from her, and that old uncontrollable urge when she was near, the excitement, the energy… the lust. She reached up to lay her hands on his chest, and as soon as her palms touched his shirt, he knew he had to act now or give in to her completely.
With one final act of supreme self-discipline, Luke stepped back and gently pushed her hands away.
“I’m sorry, Trudy,” he said, his voice raspy. “I care about you. I really do. But this is not a good idea.”
She frowned, but before she could say anything, a heavy fist banged against the wooden door.
“Luke? You in there?” It was Newsam’s voice. “You should come out and look at this. Swann’s got something.”
They stared at each other, Luke feeling guilty as hell as he thought of his wife, even though he hadn’t done anything. He peeled himself away before anything more could happen and couldn’t help wondering how this would affect their working together.
He also, worst of all, couldn’t help but admit, deep down, that he didn’t want to leave the room.
Swann sat a long table with his three video monitors arrayed in front of him. With his thinning hair and glasses, he reminded Luke of a NASA physicist at mission control. Luke stood behind him with Newsam and Trudy, the three of them hovering over Swann’s narrow shoulders.
“This one is Ken Bryant’s checking account,” Swann said, moving his cursor around on the center screen. Luke absorbed the details: deposits, withdrawals, total balance, a date range from April 28th to May 27th.
“How secure is this connection?” Luke said. He glanced around the room and out the door. The main room of the command center was just down the hall.
“This?” Swann said. He shrugged. “It’s independent of the command center. I’m connected to our own tower and our own satellites. It’s encrypted by our guys. I suppose CIA or NSA could have somebody trying to break it, but why bother? We’re all on the same team, right? I wouldn’t worry about that. Instead, I would focus on this bank account. Notice anything funny?”
“His balance is over $24,000,” Luke said.
“Right,” Swann said. “A janitor has a pretty sizeable chunk of money in his checking account. Interesting. Now let’s go back a month. March 28th to April 27th. The balance goes as high as $37,000, and he starts spending it down. There are transfers here from an unnamed account, $5,000, then $4,000, then, oh well, forget the whole IRS reporting problem… give me $20,000.”
“Okay,” Luke said.
“Go back another month. Late February to late March. His beginning balance is $1,129. By the end of the month, it’s over $9,000. Go back another month, late January to late February, and his balance never reached $2,000 the whole time. From there, if you go back three years, you see that his balance rarely went above $1,500. Here was a guy living month to month, who suddenly started getting large wire transfers in March.”
“Where are they coming from?”
Swann smiled and raised a finger. “Now for the fun part. They’re coming from a small offshore bank specializing in anonymous numbered accounts. It’s called Royal Heritage Bank, and it’s based on Grand Cayman.”
“Can you hack it?” Luke said. He glanced sidelong at Trudy’s disapproving look.
“I don’t have to,” Swann said. “Royal Heritage is owned by a CIA asset named Grigor Svetlana. He’s a Ukrainian who used to be in the Red Army. He got himself in deep with the Russians twenty years ago, after some old Soviet weaponry disappeared and then turned up on the black markets in West Africa. I’m not talking about guns. I’m talking about anti-aircraft, anti-tank, plus some low-altitude cruise missiles. The Russians were ready to hang him upside down. With nowhere to turn, he turned to us. I have a friend at Langley, and the accounts at Royal Heritage Bank, far from being anonymous, are in fact an open book to the American intelligence community. Of course, this isn’t something most Royal Heritage customers are aware of.”
“So you know who owned the account making the transfers.”
“I do.”
“Okay, Swann,” Luke said. “I understand. You’re very clever. Now get to the point.”
Swann gestured at the computer screens. “Bryant himself owned the account that was making the transfers. That’s the account on my left monitor there. You can see it has about $209,000 in it right now. He was transferring a little bit here and there from the numbered account to his local checking account, probably for his own personal use. And if we scroll back a few months, you can see that Bryant’s offshore account was created on March 3rd by a $250,000 transfer from another Royal Heritage account, the one on the right monitor here.”
Luke looked at the account on the right. There was more than forty-four million dollars in it.
“Someone got a bargain hiring Bryant,” he said.
“Exactly,” Swann said.
“Who is it?”
“It’s this man.” On the screen, a photo identification card appeared. It showed a middle-aged man with dark hair fading to white. “This is Ali Nassar. Fifty-seven years old. Iranian national. Born in Tehran to an influential and wealthy family. Studied at the London School of Economics, then Harvard Law School. Went home and got another law degree, this one from the University of Tehran. As a result, he can practice law in both the United States and Iran. He’s been involved in international trade negotiations for much of his career. He lives here in New York and is currently an Iranian diplomat to the United Nations. He has full diplomatic immunity.”
Luke stroked his chin. He could feel the short stubble growing there. He was starting to get tired. “Let me get this straight. Nassar paid Ken Bryant, presumably for access to the hospital, as well as information about security measures and how to circumvent them.”
“Presumably, yes.”
“So he’s likely running a terrorist cell here in New York, he’s an accessory to the theft of hazardous materials and at least four murders, and he can’t be prosecuted under American law?”
“It certainly appears that way.”
“Okay. You’re in the account already, right? Let’s see where else he’s been sending money.”
“It’ll take me a little while.”
“That’s fine. I have an errand to run in the meantime.”
Luke glanced at Ed Newsam. Newsam’s face was hard, his eyes flat and blank.
“Say, Ed? You feel like taking a ride with me? Maybe we should go pay Mr. Ali Nassar a visit.”
Newsam smiled, looking more like a scowl.
“Sounds like fun.”
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