London Bridges Read online

  In the FBI training sessions at Quantico, they talk about their principles of interrogation as the RPMs: rationalization, projection, and minimization. I rationalized like crazy: “You’re a good person, Ahmed. Your beliefs are true ones. I wish I had your strong faith.” I projected blame: “It isn’t your fault. You’re just a young guy. The United States government can be evil at times. Sometimes I think we need to be punished myself.” I minimized consequences: “So far, you’ve committed no actual crimes here in America. Our weak laws and judicial system can protect you.” And I got down to business: “Tell me about the Englishman. We know that his name is Geoffrey Shafer. He’s called the Weasel. He was here yesterday. We have videotapes, photographs, audiotapes. We know he was here. Where is he now? He’s the one we really want.”

  I kept at it, repeating my pitch again and again. “What did the Englishman want you to do? He’s the guilty one, not you or your friends. We already know this. Just fill in a few blanks for us. You’ll be able to go home.”

  Then I repeated the same questions about the Wolf.

  Nothing worked with any of the terrorists, though, not even the young ones. They were tough; more disciplined and more experienced than they looked; smart and clearly very motivated.

  Why not? They believed in something. Maybe there’s something to be learned from that, too.

  Chapter 51

  THE NEXT TERRORIST I chose was older, ruddily good-looking, with a thick mustache and white, nearly perfect teeth. He spoke English and told me, with some pride, that he had studied at Berkeley and Oxford.

  “Biochemistry and electrical engineering. Does that surprise you?” His name was Ahmed el-Masry, and he was number eight on Homeland Security’s hit list.

  He was very willing to talk about Geoffrey Shafer.

  “Yes, the Englishman came here. You are right about this, of course. Video- and audiotapes don’t usually lie. He claimed to have something important he wanted to talk to us about.”

  “And did he?”

  El-Masry frowned deeply. “No, not really. We thought he might be one of your agents.”

  “So why did he come here?” I asked. “Why did you consent to see him?”

  El-Masry shrugged off my question. “Curiosity. He said that he had access to tactical nuclear explosive devices.”

  I winced, and my heart started to beat a whole lot faster. Nuclear devices in the metropolitan New York area? “Did he have the weapons?”

  “We agreed to talk with him. We believed he meant suitcase nuclear bombs. Suitcase nukes. Difficult to obtain, but not impossible. As you may know, the Soviet Union built them during the Cold War. No one knows how many, or what happened to them. The Russian Mafiya has tried to sell them in recent years, or so it’s rumored. I wouldn’t actually know. I came here to be a professor, you see. To look for employment.”

  A shudder passed through me. Unlike conventional warheads, suitcase nukes were designed to go off at ground level. They were about the size of a large valise and could easily be operated by an infantryman.

  They could also be concealed just about anywhere, even carried on foot around New York, Washington, London, Frankfurt.

  “So, did he have access to suitcase nukes?” I asked el-Masry.

  He shrugged. “We are just students and teachers. In truth, why should we care about nuclear weapons?”

  I thought that I understood what he was doing now—bargaining for himself and his people.

  “Why did one of your students kill herself diving from a window?” I asked.

  El-Masry’s eyes narrowed in pain. “She was afraid all the time she was in New York. She was an orphan, her parents killed in an unjust war by Americans.”

  I nodded slowly as if I understood and sympathized with what he was telling me. “All right, you haven’t committed any crimes here. We’ve been watching you for weeks. But did Colonel Shafer have access to nuclear weapons?” I asked again. “That’s the question I need answered. It’s important for you, and for your people. Are you following me?”

  “I believe so. Are you suggesting that we would be deported if we cooperate? Sent home? Since we’ve committed no actual crimes?” el-Masry asked. He was trying to pin down the deal.

  I came right back at him. “Some of you have committed serious crimes in the past. Murders. The others will be questioned, and then they will be sent home.”

  He nodded. “All right, then. I did not get the impression that Mr. Shafer had tactical nuclear weapons in his possession. You say that you’ve been watching us. Maybe he knew that also? Does that make sense to you? That you were set up? I don’t pretend to understand this myself. But these are thoughts that pass through my mind as I sit and talk to you.”

  Unfortunately, what he was telling me made sense. I was afraid that might be what had happened. A trap, a test. It was the Wolf’s pattern so far.

  “How did Shafer get out of here without our seeing him leave?” I asked.

  “The basement in the building connects to a building to the south. Colonel Shafer knew that. He seemed to know a lot about us.”

  It was nine in the morning by the time I left the building. I felt exhausted, as though I could lie down and sleep in an alleyway. The suspects would be transported soon, and the whole area was still shut down, even the Holland Tunnel because of our fear that it might be a primary target, that it might suddenly be blown up.

  Had everything been a test, a trap?

  Chapter 52

  THE DAY’S WEIRDNESS wasn’t over.

  A crowd had gathered outside the building, and as I pushed a way out toward my ride, someone called to me. “Dr. Cross!”

  Dr. Cross? Who was calling me?

  A kid in a tan and crimson windbreaker waved so that I’d see him.

  “Dr. Cross, over here! Dr. Alex Cross! I need to talk to you, man.”

  I walked over to the young man, who was probably in his late teens. I stopped and leaned in close to him. “How do you know my name?” I asked.

  He shook his head and backed up a step. “You were warned, man,” he said. “You were warned by the Wolf!”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth I was all over him, grabbing at his hair, his jacket. I took him down on the ground in a headlock. I fell on top of him with all my weight.

  Red-faced, his lean body torquing powerfully, he started screaming at me. “Hey! hey! I was paid to give you a message. Get the fuck off me. Guy gave me a hundred bucks. I’m just a messenger, man. English guy told me you were Dr. Alex Cross.”

  The youth, the messenger, looked into my eyes. “You don’t seem like no doctor to me.”

  Chapter 53

  THE WOLF WAS in New York. He couldn’t miss the big deadline, not for all the money in the world. This was going to be too good, too delicious not to savor.

  The negotiations were really heating up now. The U.S. president, the British prime minister, the German chancellor—of course, none of them wanted to make a deal, to be exposed for the incredible weaklings they were. One couldn’t deal with terrorists, could one? What kind of precedent would it set? They needed even more pressure, more stress, more convincing before they collapsed.

  Hell, he could do that. He would be only too happy to oblige, to torture these fools. The whole thing was so predictable—to him, anyway.

  He went for a long walk on the East Side of Manhattan. A constitutional. He was feeling at the top of his game. How could the governments of the world compete with him? He had every advantage. No politics, no media pundits, bureaucracies, laws or ethics to get in his way. Who could beat that?

  He returned to one of several apartments he owned around the world, this one a stunning penthouse overlooking the East River, and made a phone call. Lightly squeezing his black rubber ball, he spoke to a senior agent from the New York FBI office, one of their top people, a woman.

  The agent told him everything the Bureau knew so far and what they were doing to find him, which was basically nothing of consequence. The
y had a far better chance of suddenly finding bin Laden than of finding him.

  The Wolf yelled into the telephone receiver. “I’m supposed to pay you for this shit? For telling me what I already know? I should kill you instead.”

  But then the Russian laughed. “Just a nasty joke, my friend. You bring me good news. And I have news for you: there is going to be an incident in New York very soon. Stay away from the bridges. Bridges are very dangerous places. I know this from past experience.”

  Chapter 54

  BILL CAPISTRAN WAS the man with the plan, and also a very bad and dangerous attitude—serious anger-management problems, to put it mildly. But soon he’d also be the man with 250 large in his bank account in the Caymans. All he had to do was his particular job, and what he had to do wasn’t going to be that hard. I can do this, no problemo.

  Capistran was twenty-nine years old, slim and sinewy, originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. He had played lacrosse for a year at North Carolina State, then left for the Marines. After a three-year stint he’d been recruited to do merc work for a company out of Washington. Then two weeks ago he’d been approached by a guy he knew from D.C., Geoffrey Shafer, and he’d agreed to do the biggest job of his career. Two hundred fifty thousand’s worth.

  He was on the job now.

  At seven in the morning, he drove a black Ford van east across Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, then turned north at First Avenue. Finally, he parked near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, also called the Queensboro.

  He and two men in white painters’ overalls climbed out of the van, then gathered up equipment from the back. Not paint and drop cloths and aluminum ladders. Explosives. A combination of C4 and nitrate to be packed into the bridge’s lowest trusses at a strategic point near the Manhattan side of the East River.

  Capistran knew the Queensboro inside and out by now. He stared up at the sturdy, ninety-five-year-old bridge, and what he saw was an open, flexible structure, a cantilever-truss design, the only one of the four East River bridges that wasn’t a suspension bridge. Which meant that it required a special kind of bomb, one that he just happened to have in the back of the van.

  This is something else, Capistran couldn’t help thinking as he and his compadres hauled their gear toward the bridge. New York City. The East Side. All these fancy-assed big-business dicks, these blond princesses, walking around as though the world was theirs for the taking. Nerves aside, he was almost enjoying himself now, and he found himself whistling a song that struck him as pretty funny. “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” by Simon and Garfunkel—whom he considered to be typical New York City assholes, too. Both of them—Curly and the Midget.

  For the past couple of days, Capistran had been working into the wee hours with a couple of sympathetic engineering students at Stony Brook University out on Long Island. One whiz kid was from Iran, the other from Afghanistan. They got a kick and a half out of the irony, too: New York-trained college students helping to blow up New York. Land of the fucking free, right? They called their team the Manhattan Project. Another insider joke.

  At first they had considered an ANFO, a type of bomb that would blow a crater in a road for sure but was unlikely to topple a large bridge like the Queensboro. The college whizzes told Capistran he could see what an ANFO would accomplish just by setting off a firecracker on a city street. Or imagining it. The explosion would be characterized by “coward forces which always seek the path of least resistance.” In other words, the bomb would make a nasty little burn on the road, but the real destructive power would escape up and sideways into the air.

  Not good enough for today. Too benign. Not even close to what was needed.

  Then the clever-as-hell college students came upon a much better way to blow up the bridge. They instructed Capistran on how and where to attach several small charges at different points in the foundation. This was similar to the way demolition companies toppled old buildings, and it would work like a charm.

  Since he had absolutely no interest in being caught, Capistran had considered sending divers into the East River to set the charges on the supports. He had approached the bridge several times himself. And to his surprise, he found security to be virtually nonexistent.

  That’s exactly the way it was early that morning. He and his two associates walked out on the lower supports of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and nobody said boo to them.

  From a distance, the ornate silver-painted ironwork and finials had made the old bridge look rather delicate. Up close, the real power of the structure was revealed: the massive trusses; rivets as large as a man’s kneecaps.

  This sounded crazy, but it would work—his piece would work.

  Sometimes he wondered how he’d gotten so sour on everything, so bitter and full of rage. Hell, years ago in the Marines he’d been part of the rescue team that had extracted downed pilots like Scott O’Grady in Bosnia. Well, he wasn’t a war hero anymore. He was just another capitalist working in the system, right? And that was a lot truer statement than most people could let themselves believe.

  As he continued to walk out on the support structure, Capistran couldn’t help humming, then singing the words, “Groovy. Feeling very groovy.”

  Chapter 55

  THE STRANGEST, most puzzling thing happened next.

  The deadline passed—and nothing happened.

  There was no message from the Wolf, no immediate attacks. Nothing. Silence. It was eerie, but also incredibly scary.

  The Wolf was the only one who knew what was going on now—or maybe, the Wolf, the president, and a few other world leaders. Rumor had it that the president, vice president, and the cabinet had already been moved out of Washington.

  This thing wouldn’t stop, would it? The news stories certainly wouldn’t. The Post, the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the networks—they had all gotten hold of some version of the threats against major cities. No one knew which cities, or who was doing the threatening. But after years of yellow and orange alerts from Homeland Security, no one seemed to take the threats and rumors too seriously.

  The uncertainty, the war of nerves had to be part of the Wolf’s plan, too. I was in Washington for the Memorial Day weekend, and was asleep when I got a call to get over to the Hoover Building right away.

  I looked at the alarm clock, squinting to focus, saw that it was three in the morning. Now what? Have there been reprisals? If so, they weren’t telling me over the phone.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said, pushing myself out of bed, cursing under my breath. I showered under hot, then cold water for a minute or two, toweled off, threw on clothes, and got in the car and drove through Washington in a horrible daze. All I knew was that the Wolf was going to call in thirty minutes.

  Three-thirty in the morning, after a long weekend, with the expired deadline hanging over our head. He wasn’t just controlling, he was sadistic.

  When I arrived at the crisis room on five, there were at least a dozen others already there. We greeted one another like old friends at somebody’s wake. For the next couple of minutes, bleary-eyed agents kept filing into the conference room, nobody seeming completely awake. A ragged line formed at the coffee table as a couple of pots finally arrived. Everybody looked nervous and on edge.

  “No Danish?” said one of the other agents. “Where’s the love?” But nobody even smiled at his joke.

  Director Burns came in a few minutes past 3:30. He was wearing a dark suit and tie, formal for him, but especially at this time of the morning. I had the sense that he didn’t have any idea what was happening, either. The Wolf was in charge, not any of us.

  “And you thought I was a tough boss,” Director Burns cracked after a couple of minutes of silence in the room. Finally, there was a sprinkling of laughter. “Thank you for coming,” Burns added.

  The Wolf came on the line at 3:43. The filtered voice. The characteristic smugness and disdain.

  “You’re probably wondering why I scheduled a meeting in the middle of th
e night,” he began. “Because I can. How do you like that? Because I can.

  “In case you haven’t been able to tell, I don’t like you people very much. Not at all, actually. I have my reasons, good ones. I hate everything America stands for. So maybe this is partly about revenge? Maybe you’ve wronged me somewhere, sometime in the past? Maybe you wronged my family. That’s a part of the puzzle. Revenge is a sweet bonus for me.

  “But let me get to the present. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I instructed you not to conduct any more investigations into my whereabouts.

  “So what do you do? You bust six poor bastards in downtown Manhattan because you suspect they’re working with me. Why, one poor girl was so distraught that she went out a third-floor window. I saw her fall! I suppose that your thinking—such as it is—was that if you took out my operatives there, then New York City would be safe.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I almost forgot. There’s also a little matter of a deadline you missed.

  “Did you think I had forgotten about that? Well, I didn’t forget about the deadline. Or the insult in your missing it. Now, watch what I can do.”

  Chapter 56

  AT 3:40 IN THE MORNING, following instructions, the Weasel took up a position on a bench in the riverfront park on Sutton Place and Fifty-seventh Street. There was a great deal that bothered him about this job, but the problems were balanced by two large positives: he was being paid a lot of money, and he was in the middle of the action again. Jesus, am I ever in the middle of the shit.

  He stared down on the East River’s dark, swift-moving currents. A red tugboat marked MCALLISTER BROTHERS was assisting a containership on its way. The city that never sleeps, right? Hell, the bars on First and Second Avenues were just getting down to their last call. A little earlier he’d passed an animal medical center that was still open for late-night pet emergencies. Pet emergencies? Jesus, what a city, what a messed-up country America had become.