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  I stood there searching her face, her expression, her eyes for something—anything—that might explain any of this.

  But even after another minute, I didn’t see a damn thing.

  Chapter 53

  Apprehensive, angry, and still very much stunned numb, I peeled myself away from the incredible Queens crime scene at a little past one in the afternoon. I looked out at the rubble and the pockmarked, bullet-scarred brick walls as I put the unmarked into drive.

  “Welcome to Beirut, Queens,” I said to myself as I peeled out around a just-arriving news van.

  I decided to head home.

  First I showered, then I threw my clothes into the wash, since they were making the apartment smell like a firing range. As the machine filled with water, I poured myself a stiff measure of Wild Turkey and cracked open a bottle of Bud and sat on the couch in the blessedly silent apartment.

  Probably not what four out of five doctors would recommend at quarter to two in the afternoon, but it actually did the trick. My hands stopped shaking, and I was momentarily able to get the image of the dead Nigerian woman’s brains out of my mind.

  I was well into my next round of Irish therapy when the phone rang. It was Chief Fabretti. I sipped bourbon and listened idly as he chewed my ass about the raid. I wasn’t completely sober, but somewhere in there I caught the implication that he thought I might have been responsible for all the deaths.

  I decided to hang up on him and shut off my phone.

  “There. Much better,” I said as I poured another drink.

  I was busy making dinner when Seamus came in around two thirty. Corned beef was on the menu tonight. Being an Irishman from New York, I of course did it the Jewish way, deep-sixing the cabbage and replacing it with rye bread—heavy on the caraway seeds—and mustard to make huge Carnegie Deli–style sandwiches.

  I wasn’t really in the mood for eating, but it was Chrissy’s favorite dinner. After what I’d seen today, I wanted to make my baby happy for some strange reason.

  “Corned beef? Is it Saint Paddy’s Day again?” Seamus said when he peeked into the pot.

  “’Tis,” I answered as I poured a measure of Wild Turkey into a tumbler for him. “And lucky you: you’re just in time for the parade.”

  He took a sip and smiled and rolled his eyes. He looked good. Still kicking, which was good, because I loved the old man.

  “Ye can stop with the eagle-eye treatment, ya know.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I see you watching me like I’m going to fall over and die. That little incident was a one-off. I’m fine.”

  “I wasn’t worried about you, Father, so much as the glass you’re holding,” I said as I patted him on his white-haired head. “That Waterford crystal is a family heirloom.”

  “Little early for the bar to be open, eh?” Seamus said. “Was it that thing in Queens?”

  Boy, was the old codger still on the ball.

  He hugged me then. Wrapped me in his frail arms like I was five years old again, though I was twice his size. As he did it, I could see the woman lying there in her meat-case coffin. I tried not to cry about it, but I failed.

  “God bless you, Mike. It wasn’t your fault,” Seamus said.

  “God bless us all,” I whispered through my falling tears.

  Chapter 54

  At four minutes past 3:00 a.m., the image appeared on the tablet’s touch screen with the light press of a finger.

  It was a live video feed, a grainy picture of a dimly lit downtown alley. With a flick of the touch-screen controls, the camera moved forward, zooming in on the dark face of one of the alley’s shabby apartment buildings. Then, with another flick, the image teetered suddenly as apartment building windows began to scroll vertically, as if the camera were attached to a crane and someone were raising the boom.

  The screen showed a window with a yellowed lace curtain, then, on the floor above it, a window covered by some old broken blinds. The next floor’s window was shadeless and showed a bedroom in which a lean Asian woman was in the process of unbuttoning her blouse in a lit bathroom doorway.

  The camera went up to the next dark window for a moment before it reversed itself to the disrobing woman.

  “Mr. Beckett, please,” Mr. Joyce whispered harshly. “We have a schedule, you know. If you can’t resist distractions, then promptly hand over the controls.”

  “Fine,” said Mr. Beckett, smiling sheepishly as the camera-equipped drone returned to its ascent.

  They were wearing EMT uniforms now and were standing in the back of an idling ambulance parked in a little alley off Worth Street in the heart of downtown Manhattan. They needed to be in the area overnight, and, after some research, they realized that no vehicle was less suspicious or more ubiquitous than an ambulance waiting for a call.

  Mr. Joyce nervously wrung his hands as Mr. Beckett piloted the large quadcopter drone over two blocks of buildings and lights. Down at the far end of the alley, across Worth, was some kind of underground dance club. It must have been ’70s night or something, because there was a constant muffled thrum of disco music.

  He massaged his temples as the drone approached the imposing, almost industrial-looking square office building that was their target. All they would need was some fool spilling out of the club to take a piss and see the drone.

  He knew their attack plan was unprecedented and therefore almost impossible for the enemy to guard against. He’d thought of it himself after much deliberation—had gamed it twenty times, looking for every possible glitch. He knew in his well-informed gut that it would work. But still. Any damn thing could happen in this city. There was knowing it, and then there was actually doing it.

  With the drone finally alongside the target, Mr. Beckett swung it right until it was around three feet away from the building’s northeast corner, the best route for avoiding detection from the windows. It continued to ascend. Five more floors scrolled past, then ten, and then a few more, and they were finally there. They were finally up on the roof!

  “There it is,” said Mr. Joyce, pointing at the top left corner of the screen.

  “All over it,” said Mr. Beckett as he piloted the drone over to the teal-colored metal box that housed the air-conditioning unit.

  He pressed a button, and the image on the screen shifted to the camera at the bottom of the drone, beside the power screwdriver they’d installed.

  Mr. Joyce held his breath as Mr. Beckett took the drone down slowly toward the edge of the grate covering the AC unit’s fans. He maneuvered it carefully, hovering over the first of the Phillips-head screws holding the grate in place. Closer and closer, and then…yes! He was there. The tip of the drone’s magnetic screwdriver was snug in the groove of the first screw.

  “The Eagle has landed,” Mr. Beckett said happily as he hit another button.

  Forty minutes of meticulous maneuvering later, seven of the eight screws were off, and Mr. Beckett engaged the drone’s small grabber, hooked it on the grate, and began shifting the grate little by little. Five minutes after tugging it millimeters at a time, he disengaged the grabber and hovered the drone up to take a look.

  Mr. Joyce smiled through the streaks of sweat dripping off his face.

  About a third of the AC unit’s intake opening had been exposed.

  They were in. The door was open. They now had access to the entire iconic building through the HVAC ducts. Every floor and every room!

  Mr. Joyce looked away from the screen at the other four large quadcopter drones on the floor of the fake ambulance. Attached to each one of them were the four corners of a dark plastic tarp. Inside the bulging tarp were hundreds and hundreds of cubelike mobile minibots.

  Each one of the bots had been filled to capacity with several ounces of the precious plastic explosives, along with a radio-controlled detonator. Once the bots were poured into the AC ducts, they would distribute and maneuver the eighty pounds of explosives to appropriate areas of the building’s most vuln
erable struts and trusses.

  Then, tomorrow morning, just as the enemy sat down at their cubicles with their no-whip nonfat cappuccinos, the two men were going to press a button and blow it up. They were going to blow up the building with everyone in it in the most spectacular way possible.

  Mr. Joyce opened the rear doors of the ambulance, then powered up the four big drones using another tablet. He and Mr. Beckett took a step back as the swarm of drones began spinning their quietly whirring blades. It took another thirty seconds, then slowly, with incredible coordination and precision, they began lifting the payload out of the back of the ambulance and upward into the air.

  His sweat cooling in the rotor wash, Mr. Joyce giggled as he realized that he actually recognized one of the disco songs that was playing from the other end of the alley.

  “I love the nightlife, I got to boogie,” he sang, bopping his head.

  Then he and Mr. Beckett were both laughing as the drones ascended through the dark alley toward the night sky.

  Chapter 55

  Up and at ’em at 7:00 a.m., I saw from my e-mail that another massive VIP emergency meeting had been called, this time at One Police Plaza.

  Though I had snagged an invite, I hadn’t been asked to speak at the meeting for some strange reason. Actually, I knew the reason all too well. My boss, Miriam, had called at dawn and told me that I’d been taken off as lead in the case and would now be taking orders from and reporting to Lieutenant Bryce Miller.

  I arrived early enough to score a precious visitor parking spot at One Police Plaza, which was no small feat, considering how many people worked in the neighborhood’s courthouses and government buildings. On the crowded eighth floor of the brown brick monolith, I spotted Chief Fabretti in the hallway. Instead of giving me his usual hail-fellow-well-met routine, he blew past me with his iPhone glued to his ear and an evil look glued to his face, like I was empty air.

  I actually didn’t really care or really even blame him. The situation and the stress level everyone was under had reached the impossible zone. I knew we all wanted the same thing—for the killing to stop and for this horror to be over.

  I had a little time before the meeting, so I hit the break room, where I managed to score the last three survivors in a box of cinnamon Munchkins. There was no more coffee, so I had to settle for green tea that I made semitolerable once I poured in a lot of half-and-half and sugar.

  I took my grub over to a corner window overlooking the Foley Square courthouses to the northwest and gave Emily a call.

  “Hey, Agent. There you are,” I said when she answered. “I tried to call you earlier, but you must have been in the shower or something. I’m down here at One PP at the latest big emergency meeting. Are you heading over or what?”

  “Not this time,” Emily said. “Like dogs and people without shirts, feds aren’t allowed, apparently. The press is asking questions about what they’re calling ‘shortsighted and brutal’ tactics at the Queens raid yesterday, and now everybody involved is working overtime to throw anyone they can grab under the bus. So much for our happy task force. Looks like the feds and the department are so pissed at one another this morning they’re no longer talking.”

  I laughed grimly.

  “Great. Dissension and infighting are just what we need while the city is being dismantled brick by brick. So what are you doing?”

  “I’m at our VIP emergency meeting, of course. Just a couple of blocks from you at Twenty-Six Fed.”

  “So close and yet so far,” I said, looking at the federal building two blocks away, above the courthouses. “Hey, after our respective ass-covering sessions, how about Chinese for lunch? Wo Hop. My treat.”

  “Wo Hop?” Emily said. “How could I turn that down?”

  Chapter 56

  So…how’s your morning going?

  Gary Friedman smiled as he dropped his mop in the corner of the stairwell landing. He sat down, light-headed, as he looked at the text that had just come in on his phone from Gina.

  He couldn’t stop smiling. Or reading the text.

  “Thank you, Lord,” he said, kissing his Galaxy.

  He really wasn’t one for screwing off and getting lost in his phone like a lot of the other guys on the maintenance crew. Especially after his rat bastard of a boss, Freddie, busted him playing Angry Birds two weeks back and chewed him out in front of everybody. Just because they worked in a law enforcement building, Freddie thought he was in law enforcement, the stupid jackwad.

  But after last night, after the best night of his life, Gary didn’t care, he thought as he reread Gina’s text. Things were changing in the life of Gary Irving Friedman—for the better, finally.

  Like a lot of his classmates at Brandeis, he’d moved to Brooklyn from Boston straight after graduation. With his cinematography degree and his award-winning short-film under his belt, he’d thought it’d be just a matter of hooking up with other young artists in the borough’s vibrant arts scene, then it would be Hollywood, here I come.

  But he soon woke up and smelled the fair trade coffee, because practically everybody he knew in Williamsburg had a cinematography degree and a short-film award or was in a band or had a writing MFA. What none of them had were connections. Or jobs in their respective winner-take-all fields.

  Six months in, when his summer job money ran out and the janitor job came up through a friend of a friend, he was dumbfounded. A fucking janitor? It was a government job, with job security and benefits and all that, and it actually paid pretty well, but his father was an eye doctor, for the love of Pete, and he was going to be scrubbing urinals?!

  But in the end, he took it. Swallowed his pride. Because it was either start mopping or go home to Dr. Friedman’s musty beige basement in Brockton. He’d decided to stick it out and mop it up.

  And the whole time he’d been trying to meet girls, but it had been one depressing strikeout after another. Until last night. There he was, wallowing in the misery of his Xbox as usual, when the doorbell rang and the black-haired Katy Perry look-alike from downstairs was standing there, drunk. She’d broken her key in her door, and could he help her? Why, yes, as a matter of fact he could! Five minutes later, he was knight-in-shining-armoring it down the fire escape into her apartment window.

  In thanks, she poured him a Grey Goose, and they started talking, and the rest of the night was a blur of vodka shots and telling her his life story and showing her his short and her going gaga over it and then they were making out on her bed. They didn’t go all the way but damn close. Damn, damn close.

  And now she was texting him!

  Gary stared at the screen again, still not completely convinced it wasn’t a mirage. There was probably some advice about what to do next, play hard to get or something, but he didn’t give a shit. She was hot and she liked him. Told him he was talented and funny, and it was like his Brooklyn dream was finally coming true and—

  That’s when Gary heard it. It was a weird sound. It seemed to be coming from above him, on the ceiling of the stairwell. It was a little whirring sound followed by a couple of metallic clicks.

  He looked up as he heard it again. It seemed like it was coming from inside the rectangular AC duct above him. Then there were more of the sounds. A lot more. “What the hell?” Gary said, standing. It sounded like someone had dumped a box of Chiclets into the aluminum duct, only weirder.

  “Freddie?” Gary said, keying his radio.

  “What now?” said his perpetually surly bastard of a boss, who was outside hosing the sidewalk.

  “I don’t know. There’s something weird up here. I’m on the sixth floor in stairwell C.”

  “Weird how?”

  “I don’t know, but you should come up.”

  “This better be good,” Freddie replied.

  Chapter 57

  The ambulance was on Park Row beside a coffee cart when the sun came up. They’d had to move twice during the night to avoid suspicion. It didn’t matter where they were as long as th
ey were within the two thousand feet of the bots’ radio receiver.

  “Hey, what the hell is that?” said Mr. Beckett around a crumbling apple turnover as he suddenly saw something on the screen.

  The tablet screen was divided into a grid of hundreds of little boxes now, a view from the camera on each individual bot. Mr. Beckett didn’t know how Mr. Joyce was keeping track of them all. It looked like a lot of gobbledygook to him, but then again, he wasn’t a mathematical genius with an IQ of 170, like Mr. Joyce.

  “Which? Where? What?” said Mr. Joyce, who was as frazzled as Mr. Beckett had ever seen him. The guy had been a ball of sweat and nerves all night as he clicked at the keyboard, moving all the bots around. It was a miracle he didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.

  “It’s a face, I think. In this one. Can you make it larger?” Mr. Beckett said.

  Mr. Joyce hit a button and, lo and behold, a confused-looking Hispanic guy wearing a maintenance uniform appeared on the screen, as if he’d just snapped a puzzled selfie.

  “Maintenance!” Mr. Beckett cried. “They must have heard the bots in the duct. Shit! Detonate now! It’s our only chance!”

  “No,” Mr. Joyce said, clicking the man off the screen and going back to his typing.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I need more time,” he said calmly. “It’s not ready yet.”

  “Time just ran out,” Mr. Beckett cried as he shook Mr. Joyce’s shoulder. “We’re discovered. We need to go with what we got now!”

  “No,” said Mr. Joyce more firmly. He flipped a page in the pile of the building’s schematics on the workbench beside the tablet and began typing even faster.

  “I need ten minutes,” he said. “We’re that close. My calculations do not lie. We can still get it done. Think about it. They don’t know what the bots even are. It will take time for them to call the bomb squad and piece it together and sound the alarm. By then I’ll be ready. I promise.”