“We were just kicking that around ourselves,” Andrews said. “We just received an action memo from Brigadier General Arthur Gilbert at White Sands. A pair of prototype nukes that were en route to the installation never made it.”
“Projectiles?” Kealey asked.
“Damn. How did you know?”
“Just an ugly hunch,” he replied. “How are they fired?”
“Shoulder-mounted.”
“Shit.”
“They may be in New York,” Andrews said. “The drivers are in custody. They swear everything they had was off-loaded downtown.”
“Let me guess,” Kealey said. “One West Street?”
“Yeah. That was one of the addresses.”
Kealey had stopped on the corner of Fifth Avenue. The four miles from where he needed to be suddenly felt like a hundred. “Bishop is still downtown,” Kealey said. “I’m going to send him over. I’ll call you when I can.”
As he was clicking off, he heard Andrews say, “Thanks, and Godspeed.”
Reed Bishop felt like a corked bottle on the sea. He would shift and move, not always forward, as people shifted around him. And it was in one of those backward pitches, as a fire truck moved in front of him, that he lost Assistant Director Hunt.
The maneuver might have been intentional; Hunt was there and then gone. It was too clean. He had to be watching for the opportunity.
Bishop charged in that direction, shouldering through people when there wasn’t an opening. He fished out his badge, apologizing and flashing it at the same time; he didn’t want to have to stop and explain what he was doing to anyone, police or civilian. He was moving against the human wave on Frankfort Street, as people who had walked along the East River resumed making their way to and across the Brooklyn Bridge. He couldn’t imagine that all these people lived in the borough of Brooklyn; Bishop had the feeling that people just wanted to get out of Manhattan.
Or were being driven out? he wondered.
An air of relief seemed to pass over the crowd as people chattered about a gunman having been slain at the bus terminal. Bishop took out his phone, was about to call Kealey as he weaved his way past the Manhattan base of the bridge.
The phone beeped. It was Kealey.
“What happened?” Bishop said as he answered.
Kealey told him about the shooting. “I think we have a bigger problem,” he said then he proceeded to tell about the missing nukes. “Where’s Hunt?”
“Gone,” Bishop told him. “I lost him when traffic got between us.”
“Where are you now?”
“Nearly at the East River,” Bishop said. “I want to see if I can spot him.”
“Whether you see him or not, you need to get to the lab. There’s no way I can get down there now.”
“Yeah, I hear that,” Bishop said. He was nearly a half block from South Street. The broad avenue, which followed the river, looked like the top half of an hourglass with human sand pouring down. People were making the loop down Frankfort up to the entrance ramp to the bridge. Vehicular traffic was basically halted now, with horns voicing their displeasure. “Man, I don’t see how somebody in a hurry would go any way but the direction from which I was coming.”
“Could Hunt have ducked down a side street?”
“That would have put him in the mess by City Hall Park,” Bishop said. “I could have run into him the same way I did Agent Muloni.” Bishop pushed harder as he neared the bottleneck. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Hold on.” Bishop stopped being polite. He stiff-armed his way forward, shoving and driving his hip against anyone who was in his way. “FBI!” he repeated, with his badge raised. “Please step aside.”
There were isolated protests, but for the most part, people made faces and tried to accommodate him. He finally reached South Street, crossed it, went to the esplanade that followed the river. It was packed with humanity, but he wasn’t looking for Hunt. Not there. He looked north, then south along the river.
It was packed with maritime traffic. Most of the boats were ferries-water taxis and even private vessels-which were pulling up to the seawall. Most were doing this for free; some were charging people anywhere from twenty to one hundred dollars to cross to Brooklyn. Times were tougher and citizens were more polarized than they were in 2001, when all civilian vessels provided this service for free.
“My insurance company won’t let me do this,” one tug captain was saying as he asked for 120 dollars. “You gotta make it worth my while.”
He had some passengers already. The exploitation made Bishop sick.
There was other traffic moving up and down the river, mostly police and coast guard ships.
Except for one. It was speeding toward the harbor.
“What’s going on?” Kealey asked.
“The river,” Bishop said. “I’m guessing that’s how he’s getting back to One West.”
“Is there anything there you can commandeer?”
“I can try, but there’s no way I’m going to catch him.”
“He wouldn’t be going back to clean the place,” Kealey said. “He could do that with a phone call. He must be-” Kealey stopped.
“What?”
“The crates,” he said.
“What target?” Bishop asked. “The Statue of Liberty?”
“Doesn’t fit,” Kealey said. “He wouldn’t need the punching power of a nuke to cut her in two.”
“Speaking of ‘two,’ why would he need two?” Bishop said. Though he knew the answer even as he said it.
“Double jeopardy,” Kealey said. “He’s pulled the police all over Manhattan so they can’t organize to stop him. They’re too busy with goddamn crowd control.”
‘Look, I’m going to hoof it,” Bishop said. “I can cut across from the Staten Island Ferry terminal, get there faster than on the river. If he’s going to the West Side-”
“I’m on it,” Kealey said. “I’m going to need Brenneman’s muscle for that. Call me when you get to the building. Don’t pull in any cops unless you need to. There isn’t time to get a search warrant.”
“Agreed,” Bishop said.
Kealey was gone, and Bishop turned and headed downtown. He was tired, but he was focused now. However much his cramped legs protested, he couldn’t afford to rest.
Not if Baltimore was only a warm-up for something written on a much larger canvas with a much stronger pen.
CHAPTER 30
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“I need a helicopter, now. With firepower. I’d like Twenty-Three.” In government circles Kealey’s request-put on speaker-was what was known as a torpedo. It had the effect of sinking whatever was in front of it.
The president and his team had been sifting through the IDs of the Baltimore bombers and the FBI impostor, hoping to find a common link. There was nothing, save what their fingerprints told them: they were all Muslims here on visas, mostly students, from different world hot spots where hatred of the United States was high: Kosovo, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and the like. As with so many other things in these past two days, it seemed too pat to be real. They had been debating whether the attacks had been designed to be conclusion driven-individuals recruited to guarantee that blame attached itself in a particular way-when Kealey called.
“Sorry, what’s that?” the president asked. “The high-tech surveillance chopper?”
“Yes, sir,” Max Carlson said. “It went into service in two thousand eight. Named for the number of officers killed in the World Trade Center attacks.”
“What do you plan to do with any chopper?” Andrews asked.
“Bishop thinks Hunt may have escaped by sea, to get to One West and the nukes maybe there.”
“Bishop thinks that,” Cluzot said.
“He’s your man, Mr. Director,” Carlson pointed out.
“He’s internal affairs!” Cluzot said. “A desk jockey. What does he base that on, Mr. Kealey?”
“Suspicious activity, reasonable assessment.”
“SARA is not sufficient for the president to make this call,” Cluzot said.
“Where did he get a boat?” Andrews asked.
“He probably had it there, waiting,” Kealey said. “He knew there was going to be an attack on the bridge. He knew he’d be going over there with us. Hell, the timing of both attacks seems to have been built around us. That and the death of Agent Muloni.”