“Who cares, so long as it’s profitable?”
Caitlin shook her brother’s shoulders. “Don’t talk like that. There’s more important things than money.”
Liam threw his head back and laughed. “Not here in America, sis. In America money is everything.”
“Hush your mouth.”
“No way,” Liam replied. “I’m sick of wearin’ charity shop Nikes and listenin’ to the radio instead of playin’ CDs. I want a Nintendo. I want my own PC. And I’m tired of livin’ in some dump of an apartment above an old pub. Aren’t you?”
“I’m tellin’ you, man. You ain’t seen anything this fine. These bitches ain’t whores and they ain’t hookers. They’re high-class, know what I’m sayin’? Carne dulce.”
The white SUV bumped onto the ramp, climbing the bridge that spanned the East River from Queens to Manhattan. Dante Arete rolled down the window to disperse the fog in his head from too many beers, too much cocaine. For the last three hours, he’d been partying with his lieutenant at strip clubs on the Queens side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Now the stout drug dealer with the shaved head and tattoo of bloody thorns around his neck was driving him to a whorehouse that one of his Manhattan clients frequented.
“Word,” the lieutenant told Dante, “these sluts… they’ll make you feel like a fuckin’ king.”
The noise level increased as the van entered the mile-long lower level, which was enclosed in a steel support structure. Dark water flowed far below the span. Ahead, the lights of Manhattan twinkled in the warm spring night. Dante closed the window, sank deeper into his seat.
“A king, huh. Bring it on, ’cause that’s what I am tonight.”
More than a king, Dante felt downright immortal after surviving the last twenty-four hours. A CTU bust and a plane crash — neither had ended him. Now that it was over, Dante was gonna party till dawn.
“Royalty ain’t cheap. These girls, they live on Sutton Place.”
“Don’t worry about money, cholo. Tonight, you talkin’ to the ruler.”
Dante reached over the back of his chair, pulled the silver attaché case from a bin under the backseat. He laid the case across his lap, patted it.
“In here, I’m tellin’ you, I’ve got me a king’s ransom.”
The gang-banger nodded and licked his lips as Dante unsnapped the locks. Then he lifted the lid. Beneath the stacks of money that Griff had flashed him in Tatiana’s parking lot, the one-pound block of C4 detonated.
There were two triggers on the attaché case. In the event one failed, the other would still set off the plastic explosives. Griff had activated both before handing over the closed case. The blast sent the SUV’s sunroof upward, to dash itself against the roof overhead. The windows and doors flew off the white SUV, sending debris and glass blowing outward in a wide and deadly arc.
Sitting directly beneath the superheated blast, Dante Arete was instantly vaporized. The twitching body of his bald lieutenant — burned beyond recognition and still ablaze — was tossed out of the van and over the concrete wall that separated the traffic lanes.
A truck heading to Queens in the opposite direction pulverized what was left of the burning man.
The SUV, billowing orange fire and black smoke, rolled a few feet forward before it was ripped apart by a secondary explosion that spread wreckage and burning gasoline flowing across two lanes of the enclosed roadway.
6. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 A.M. AND 3 A.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
Jamey Farrell divided her attention between the latest Domestic Security Alert on her main screen — now more than two hours old — and a data window on the upper right-hand side of the HDTV monitor, where Dante Arete’s movements on the East Coast were tracked by a GPS program that detected the signal from the microchip embedded under the gangbanger’s skin.
Evaluating the daily Security Alert was an important part of Jamey’s job. The highly classified watch list was compiled by Richard Walsh’s staff in Washington, D.C., and issued electronically every evening at midnight, Eastern Daylight Time. The DSA cited every event occurring inside the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii within the next twenty-four-hour cycle that might pose a security threat, or attract the attention of terrorists. Every division of the CIA — including CTU — and all field agents posted in foreign capitals or the embassies of the world also received the DSA “hot list.”
There were numerous events cited in the current Domestic Security Alert. In the next twenty-four hours a United States Navy Carrier Group would be docking in San Diego; the President of the United States would fly Air Force One on a courtesy call to a Colorado Springs congressman’s district for a fund-raiser; and the Pennsylvania National Guard would conduct maneuvers in the hills of Central Pennsylvania.
Also listed on the DSA was a scheduled movement of spent nuclear fuel rods from the reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania; a charter flight from the Centers for Disease Control transporting dangerous biological specimens to New York City; and the First Lady’s motorcade visit to a kindergarten in Falls Church, Virginia, to push the President’s education agenda.
Jamey was about to catalog each item as “requiring no further action/CTULA” when she saw the red warning blip blinking inside the GPS data window. Dante Arete’s signal had vanished.
“Oh, damn.”
Jamey thought the problem might be a malfunction, or perhaps the battery in Arete’s subdermal tracker failed much sooner than expected. But when she tried to send a signal to the device, she received no reply — though she should have gotten a single blip in response from the chip’s fail-safe system, even if the device lost all power. The only way the tracker would completely fail to respond was if it was destroyed— which was only possible if Dante Arete’s body had been utterly annihilated.
Heart racing, Jamey reversed the tracking mode camera and retraced the path of the GPS blip back to the second it vanished. The signal ceased transmitting thirty-five seconds before she’d looked up — more than a minute ago when accounting for the East Coast/West Coast signal delay. It took another minute for Jamey to switch from terrain mode, and to overlay the map grid of New York City on the GPS path. As the images were forming on her main screen, it first appeared to Jamey that Dante Arete’s signal vanished over the East River. Finally, the three-dimensional image of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge appeared. The blip had vanished in the middle of the span.
Jamey activated a subsystem that could immediately interface with emergency services departments in dozens of major American metropolitan areas. She keyed in the EMS code for New York City, and ten seconds later a massive log of 911 calls appeared on her monitor.
Before Jamey could even begin to scan the contents a new call appeared on top of the 911 roster — one that alerted the New York Police Department and Fire Department about an accident in the middle of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. According to the frantic 911 call, a white, late-model SUV was engulfed in flames — or possibly an explosion. A subsequent caller reported multiple fatalities.
Jamey stared at the screen in disbelief. The phone beeped and she hit the intercom. “Yes?”
“It’s Nina.”
“God, Nina I just lost—”
Nina interrupted her. “Listen, Jamey, we don’t have much time. I have Jack on the line. He’s just dumped new intelligence in our lap, including the possible identity of the men with the missile launcher. Now Jack needs an update on Dante Arete’s position.”