A woman’s voice said, “May I come in?” It was Fannie.
“Are you alone?”
“Of course.” She threw in a girlish giggle to convince him.
He wasn’t taking any chances and opened the door a crack, ready to throw his weight into anyone other than Fannie. He might not have had a gun, but he was confident he could outfight one of these jihadists if he used the element of surprise.
But the surprise was on him when he opened the door and Fannie slipped into the room wearing a heavy bathrobe and slippers. She flopped onto his bed and gave him a dazzling smile.
Fannie said, “I thought you might be lonely.”
Severov was careful to lean back on the desk and not show his desire as he gazed upon the lovely young woman. Since he had heard her phone call with an American marine officer earlier in the evening, he realized how adept she was at manipulating men. He wasn’t sure he wanted any part of that. They could end up being on the opposite sides of the conflict at any moment. She even told him the alliance between her group and his country was temporary because, as she put it, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
It seemed that Fannie finally realized he was not about to jump onto the bed with her. She stood up and leaned against him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a long, passionate kiss.
It had been some time since he’d felt a woman like this in his arms. Who cared if she manipulated him? As long as he was aware of what was happening, he’d be safe. And so would his secrets.
Joseph Katazin was waiting in the only place he was certain Derek Walsh would eventually come to. He had eyes all over the city and people reporting back to him every twenty minutes, and so far the only place the former marine had been seen was near his office. Katazin’s associate said he thought some cops were chasing him, but Walsh got away. That all made sense to Joseph Katazin. He would probably do the same thing. He would get back to his office to see what intelligence he could gather, but then he would head here. What sane man wouldn’t?
Katazin had only brought one man with him: Serge, who still had a black eye and swollen face from the homeless guy punching him outside of Walsh’s apartment. He’d decided to use Serge so he could channel his anger as a motivator in case something went wrong.
He had to question Walsh to make sure he hadn’t learned anything, then dispose of him as quickly and quietly as possible. It would be to the operation’s benefit if Walsh’s body was never found. The police would just assume it was a suicide because that was the easiest thing to do. If he’d only been successful that first night and put a bullet in the banker’s temple, then left the gun at Walsh’s side, it would’ve looked like the man had killed himself over his guilt for stealing so much money and sending it to Switzerland. Instead Walsh had reported it as a robbery attempt.
Katazin was confident he could correct that mistake in the next few hours.
Derek Walsh had carefully made his way toward the Upper West Side, closer to Columbia University and his girlfriend Alena’s apartment. The farther he got from the financial district, the less disruption there was on the street. He had noticed that by the time he reached the theater district, life appeared pretty much normal except that the usual crowds of tourists weren’t there. He could understand that no one wanted to risk being out in a major city with all of the lone wolf terror attacks occurring, but it was a little spooky as he cut across Times Square and never had to change his course or pace. About a third of the touristy stores were closed, and many of the people walking across the square were glued to the giant screen broadcasting news.
There had been two attempted suicide bombings in the subway, one by an inept bomber whose remote didn’t work. The other was thwarted when someone noticed a suspicious-looking man wearing a long coat and told the cop on the platform. The cop did a masterful job of coming up behind the man and didn’t hesitate as he grabbed him and wrestled him to the dirty subway floor. Once the man was handcuffed, the cop discovered a nasty nail bomb wrapped around his midsection.
The mayor had declared that the city wouldn’t be intimidated and the subways would still run. It was brash but a gamble. Sooner or later one of the bombers would be successful.
As Walsh continued through Times Square there was not a cop in sight, so he stopped and read the ticker running under a silent newscast showing some sort of demonstration in Europe. As the screen flashed different images, his eyes kept drifting to the one-line feed under the footage. There had now been over fifty terror attacks across Europe and the United States. All the financial markets had stopped trading and were not planning on using computers once they started up again.
Then, as he was staring up at the screen, a photo of his driver’s license picture flashed. He was stunned for a moment as he looked up, seeing his face on the giant screen. Now they were getting serious about finding him. He nervously glanced around and realized no one was paying attention to anyone else. His photo quickly disappeared from the screen only to be replaced by film footage of the outside of Thomas Brothers Financial. It showed the increasingly rowdy protesters clashing with the police, who were doing everything they could to keep this from becoming a deadly incident.
Walsh decided not to risk the subway and instead caught an uptown bus to Alena’s neighborhood. Looking for a place to hang out until Alena got home, he came across a deli called Doaba off Columbus Avenue. There were no TVs, and the place wasn’t crowded, so he quietly ate a sandwich while he waited. Walsh used the Boost phone he had bought at Mike Rosenberg’s suggestion to call her cell phone and left a message. He didn’t bother to leave a message on her home phone. He knew she was rarely in the apartment before five o’clock, and he’d head there then.
Right now he was happy to be in a comfortable place figuring out what his next move would be.
Mike Rosenberg couldn’t remember moving so frantically within the offices of the CIA. There was no way he could get a call from his friend Derek Walsh while he was at work. He locked his cell phone in the car before he came through security, where he was searched thoroughly for anything that might transmit information outside the building. He had a lead as his focus right now, and that was finding out all he could about the bank account where the money from Thomas Brothers was transferred.
It was easy to speak to the analysts helping the FBI, and it didn’t take long to confirm that the account was opened in the bank that was blown up in an apparent terror attack in Bern, Switzerland. Immediately Rosenberg recognized this was quite a coincidence. He was sure someone else had figured it out as well, so he kept moving.
The account had been opened by a female using the name Francine Talmont who was listed as white and twenty-seven years of age. That didn’t tell him much. Some more digging determined that several FBI agents had been dispatched to interview anyone who might have worked at the bank and wasn’t there at the time of the explosion. Sixty-six people were dead and the few survivors appeared to be people working in offices on the top floor. Part of it had remained standing long enough for them to be evacuated.
Rosenberg didn’t like the way everything seemed to be going wrong at once. Money was transferred to terrorists, the financial markets were in an absolute freefall, rioting had broken out across Europe and the United States, and there were so many small terror attacks that not all of them were being reported. It felt like too much to happen at once without there being a larger goal.
He was relieved to see that the U.S. military had been put on alert, but that didn’t change his unease at the idea of a giant distraction, which he thought all of this was. Since Russia had annexed Crimea and threatened Ukraine, Rosenberg had been much more careful when he studied world maps, trying to figure out where the next hot point might be.