The bridge’s roadway was chunked and gapped as it drew near the southern tower. Cars were piled atop one another on either side. Charred bodies lay just outside open doors and protruded from shattered windshields. There were survivors up there too, some trapped inside their ruined cars, others wandering nervously while they waited for rescue. There’d been reports that a few of them had plunged to their deaths during the night. Whether they’d jumped or fell, no one was sure, but the result was the same either way. Two hundred and seventy feet is a long way to fall-four full seconds from bridge to bay. When they hit the water, they were moving so fast that they might as well have landed on a city street.
The tower itself was blackened but stood true, although a few of the steel support ropes that ran parallel to the tower dangled freely, frayed at the ends and curled like broken guitar strings. Smoke still drifted on occasion from below as leftover accelerant caught fire, only to be quickly doused. The undamaged northern tower seemed impossibly small from where Hendricks stood, which made sense, given that it was almost two miles distant.
The bay was littered with government boats: police, Coast Guard, fire-and-rescue. Most were small, ugly, and utilitarian-scuffed hulls and faded paint, pilothouses crowded with antennas and equipment-but a few were quite large. Several hundred yards to the west of the bridge was a fog bank as pale and solid as the cliffs of Dover, and a Coast Guard cutter hovered like a ghost ship at its edge. A massive crane barge with a ruined pickup truck in its grasp sat to the bridge’s immediate right, the twisted wreck swinging like a pendulum as the crane pivoted to deposit it on a flattop barge beside it.
As Hendricks approached the top of the on-ramp, he forced himself to give the Homeland Security agent guarding it a friendly nod. It felt awkward, insincere, and in that instant, Hendricks was painfully aware that this plan hinged on a disguise made out of duct tape.
The man eyed him a long moment. Shifted his weight and adjusted his hand on his gunstock. Hendricks tensed. He was too far away to engage hand to hand but not nearly far enough for the man to miss him if he opened fire.
Then the man said, “Fucking awful, isn’t it?”
“You ain’t kidding,” Hendricks replied. “It makes me hope there’s such a thing as hell-death’s too easy for anybody who could do a thing like this.”
“I hear you,” the man said, and then a quadcopter camera drone zipping toward the bridge from the command tent drew his gaze. Hendricks slipped past him without another word, into the teeming nerve center of the rescue effort.
From Hendricks’s perspective, the place was an operational nightmare. There were cop cars, fire trucks, and military vehicles everywhere. At least half of them were occupied, their doors open, radios crackling. People seemed to dart around at random. SFPD and Park Police uniforms abounded, but FBI and ATF agents were sprinkled here and there as well, their nylon raid jackets fluttering in the breeze. Men and women in military fatigues trotted back and forth between the command tent to the south of the tollbooths and the sawhorses that marked the point at which the roadway was deemed structurally unsound. Homeland Security agents in riot gear stood guard at all the access points.
It looked to Hendricks like it had been a while since a survivor was extracted from the wreckage. Ambulances lined the FasTrak lane that bypassed the tollbooths, their drivers antsy and wide-eyed. Two Life Flight helicopters sat in the bridge pavilion’s parking lot, their crews milling just outside. Some paced. Others smoked. All of them looked tired, strung out, on edge.
Hendricks took in most of this through the screen of his smartphone. He walked with it in front of him, scowling and occasionally tapping at it with his thumbs as if he were texting. Smartphones made for excellent camouflage. People were less likely to question your presence if you seemed like you belonged, and these days, belonging meant wandering obliviously around with your eyes glued to your phone’s screen.
But the phone was no mere prop for Hendricks; it was also a useful piece of tech. He kept the camera app open as he walked, and, pretending that he was looking for a decent signal or trying to see the screen in full sunlight, he alternated between live shots of whatever was in front of him and glimpses over his shoulder, via the forward-facing camera, to see if he was being followed.
The cell on wheels was set apart a ways from all the chaos, which made approaching it tricky. It was a good fifty yards south of the command tent, to which it was connected by a cord the width of Hendricks’s wrist, and twenty yards from the nearest cluster of vehicles. No one was guarding it, which was good, but no one passed near it either, which would make any attempt to do so painfully obvious.
He snapped a pic. Sent it off to Cameron via text. “You still with me?” he asked.
“Sure am,” she replied in his Bluetooth earpiece. Hendricks could hear the clink of dishes and quiet conversation all around her. A coffee shop, she’d said. Then she’d hit him with some mumbo-jumbo about how she planned to use its unencrypted Wi-Fi network to gain access to the other computers on it, which would decrease the processing time for all the data they were about to steal. He’d barely understood a word.
“Good. I sent you something. Any updates on our bomb scare?”
“CNN and local news are on the scene. The bomb squad’s cordoned off the area. They’re waiting for a robot to arrive as we speak so they can safely detonate it.”
Her tone was sharp. Brittle. “You sound annoyed,” he said.
“More like disgusted. Two more witnesses came forward claiming they saw, and I quote, ‘an Arab-looking guy’ drop the bag and flee the scene. One of ’em swore up and down this nonexistent perp was wearing some kind of explosive vest.”
“People are scared. Nervous. Bracing for the next attack. They see what they expect to see. That’s why eyewitnesses are so untrustworthy. You’d be surprised how easy it is to plant the seeds of false memory. They probably don’t even realize they’re lying.”
“Somehow,” she said, “that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Did the pic come through yet?”
“Yeah. Pulling it up now.”
“Is that what I’m looking for?”
“Yup. That’s our Bessie, all right.”
Hendricks smiled despite himself. “You really want to make that happen, don’t you?” She’d called the damn thing Bessie the whole drive north while they were hashing out their plan.
“What else are you supposed to name a COW?” she asked. “Have you reached it yet?”
“I’m headed toward it now,” he said, head down, snaking through the crowd. “What next?”
“There should be some kind of control panel.”
Up close, the cell on wheels looked to be part cargo trailer, part TV-news van, and part moon lander. It was a wheeled box of road-grimy white maybe four feet high with a ladder at one end and a trailer hitch at the other. From its center, a telescoping antenna pointed twenty feet into the air, and a triangular brace extended from each of its four corners, like landing gear, to hold it steady.
“The whole thing’s panels,” he said.
“The one we want would be waist height or higher. We’re looking for electronics, not anything mechanical, and no designer in her right mind would put an access terminal at ground height.”
Hendricks raised his phone into the air toward the tower as if he had just lost the signal and started to circle it slowly, taking pics and texting them to her. In the distance, an equipment tech in his midtwenties eyed Hendricks with confusion and then began walking toward him.