Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“The bastards were right here watching us yesterday, weren’t they?” Emily said in shock. “Watching us scramble. The panic. All those poor souls having to be evacuated from the hospitals. They just stood here happily watching the results of what they’d done.”

“And by leaving the bodies right here, I guess they want us to know it,” I said.

“I’m really starting to not like these fellas, Mike,” Emily said as she kicked a broken kayak handle into the water. “I mean, not even a little bit.”

Several hectic hours later that day, at ten to one, Emily and I waited in a narrow, crowded hallway before a set of double doors on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza.

On the other side of the doors, we could hear a voice droning on as we hastily went over the final details of the report we were about to give to the police commissioner and acting mayor and various and sundry other officials.

The door of the thunderdome opened after a minute, and Chief Fabretti was there.

“Mike, you ready?” he said.

The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment.

In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.

But before I could answer the chief’s question, Emily and I were inside, front and center.

There were about twenty or thirty people up on the amphitheater-style seats surrounding us, a lot of tense-looking NYPD and FBI brass, and the acting mayor. Also some suits from the White House, we’d been told.

If I needed any further indication of what was at stake, I saw it on the whiteboard that the last speaker had been using. Two words had been written with a Sharpie in large black letters.

EVACUATION PLAN

“Who the hell is this again?” said the acting mayor over the rim of her eyeglasses.

The tall, long-necked, white-haired woman’s name was Priscilla Atkinson, and I almost felt like asking the Park Avenue — raised grande dame the same question, as her only experience before being named deputy mayor was running public events for the Central Park Conservancy.

Instead I began.

“Hi. I’m Detective Bennett. This is Special Agent Parker, and we’d like to bring everybody up to date on what we have so far.”

An aide whispered in the acting mayor’s ear.

“One question,” Atkinson said, interrupting me. “What’s going on, Detective Bennett? Who’s doing this to us, and why the hell haven’t you found them yet?”

Instead of pointing out that she’d just asked, in fact, three questions, I continued.

“I’m here to answer everybody’s questions, Ms. Mayor, okay? I’ve been informed that everybody has already been briefed about the EMP device we discovered. What you may not be aware of is that last night, we were able to obtain video footage of men — two men — placing the object on the East Side building’s roof.”

“Are they the same two men seen on the video at the train bombing?” said the commissioner from the row beneath the mayor.

“No, they’re not, Mr. Commissioner,” said Emily. “They were different men.”

“Have you ID’d them? Who the hell are they?” demanded the mayor.

“We’ve located them, ma’am,” I said, “and we’ve actually just ID’d them as two recent NYU grads.”

“Why’d they do it?”

“We don’t know. We found them this morning in a Dumpster at a construction site on Roosevelt Island, both shot multiple times in the head.”

That got the murmuring going.

“The men ran a marketing firm. They’re local kids with no terrorist ties,” Emily said before the mayor could jump in with another stupid obvious question. “We think they were hired by the people behind this.”

“So we’re still in the dark?” said Ms. Atkinson.

“Not entirely,” I said. “We scoured their Internet and phone records and discovered that both were paid large sums of money over the Internet through what seems to be the same PayPal account. With the help of federal authorities, we are in the process of tracking down the owner of the account.”

“Get to it, Bennett,” the commissioner said after a beat. “Keep us apprised.”

I nodded at him and at Lieutenant Bryce Miller sitting below the commissioner like the good little doggie he was.

Guess I’m still on the case after all, Brycey, I mentally texted him.

As Fabretti showed us the door, I saw one of the White House suits start BlackBerrying like crazy; I hoped they were putting some pressure on PayPal to cough up a name. The mayor nodded at us before she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Seeing the obvious great concern and worry in her suddenly old-seeming face, I felt bad for her. She was just as strained and concerned and tired as the rest of us. And that was saying a lot.

That night at around 9:30, approximately fifty-five miles due north of New York City, Emily turned off her phone as I pulled my unmarked off a backcountry road into a remote campground at Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, on the border between Putnam and Dutchess Counties.

Unfortunately, we weren’t at the state park for a midnight weenie roast. There were at least a dozen New York state trooper vehicles already in the large parking lot, along with the same number of unmarked FBI Crown Victorias. Beyond a trooper command bus were two matte-black BearCat troop trucks, and at the end of the lot, in a muddy clearing, sat a bulky olive-drab Black Hawk helicopter with military markings.

We were finally on the hunt now. At around five that afternoon, PayPal had revealed the name of the person who had sent funds to both the mayor’s shooter and the dead EMP guys, and it was a doozy.

The name on the PayPal transfer was Jamil al Gharsi. Al Gharsi was a Yemeni-born Muslim cleric who was already on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist, suspected of running a militant and potentially violent Islamic group on a grubby cattle farm five miles due east of Fahnestock State Park.

Al Gharsi’s two dozen — strong group had a website that billed them as a kind of Muslim Cub Scouts, though they were anything but. The FBI had been following them closely since their inception six months ago, and they had been observed training with weapons.

The group also had ties to al Qaeda in Yemen, which boggled my mind. Why hadn’t they been shut down already? No one knew, or at least no one would say. If al Gharsi’s group turned out to be responsible for the bombings and for the assassination in New York, I was truly going to kick somebody’s ass. If Homeland Security had let yet another Islamic terrorist attack occur, I was going to be the first to propose its disbanding.

Emily and I passed a bunch of troopers wearing their Smokey the Bear hats and climbed onto the crowded bus, where the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had already started its briefing.

A flat screen behind the driver’s seat showed a series of photographs from reconnaissance that had already been done.

The pictures featured a cluster of buildings in the center of a large hilly field near the bottom of a ridge. There was an old farmhouse — a low concrete building that almost looked like a school — and a large dilapidated barn that was listing so far to the left it looked as if some magic spell had frozen it in the midst of collapse.

“This is al Gharsi,” the HRT leader, Terry Musa, said as he handed out a printout showing a mean-looking bald guy with a beard that would make any of the Boston Red Sox’s starting lineup green with envy.