Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

Then a thought hit her. She sat up ramrod straight as the train pulled out of Trenton station. Maybe it was the other way around.

What if AQI, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was using Dima and her connections to the Syrians to hit the Waldorf and blame it on the Iranians?

Hell, it was possible. For part of the time she’d been in OCSA, when she wasn’t working Beirut, her official assignment was al-Qaeda. And then last year, when she’d been stationed in Baghdad, she’d spent a lot of her time studying AQI, especially the tiny bits and pieces of intel they had on Abu Nazir, the leader of AQI, and the one thing she’d come away with was that he was devious. He never did anything simple or straightforward. Ever. An attack on the Waldorf with Syrian-Iranian connections would be just the sort of thing he’d do and then leverage it in Baghdad.

There’s something else going on, she thought. She just couldn’t put her finger on it, watching Saul packing up his laptop as they went underground into Penn Station.

New York, New York

Koslowski and one of his men were waiting for them on the platform. Koslowski was a stocky six-footer with sandy hair, wearing jeans and a leather jacket. The man with him, Gillespie, was in a windbreaker and a Yankees baseball cap. Despite the casual clothes, they both had “cop” written all over them.

“Saul, good to see you again. You must be Mathison,” Koslowski said to Carrie, showing her his badge. “You know this woman Dima? We’re calling her by her cover name, Jihan. We’re concerned she might change her look. Put on a wig. Could you spot her in a crowd like this?” he asked, indicating the people filling the platform from the train. “All we’ve got is the DS-160 photo.”

“I could spot her in Yankee Stadium, Captain,” Carrie said.

“I guess we’ve got the right people then,” Koslowski said, grinning to his partner. “Glad you’re here.”

“Where are we going?” Saul asked as they walked into the main hall in Penn Station.

“We’ve set up on Forty-Eighth near the UN Plaza. We’ll coordinate from there. Our headquarters is out in Queens, too far from the bull’s-eye, the Waldorf.” He frowned. “We’ll have four Hercules teams, plus normal NYPD security details on the outside, with increasing security the closer we get to the bull’s-eye.”

“Lot of firepower. You’re taking this seriously. Good,” Saul said. “What about surveillance on the Jordanians?”

“Nothing, as we discussed. We don’t want to spook ’em. And we’re covering all four of the ones you sent us. But we have a warrant and we’ve bugged their land phones and the cell towers near their locations. We’ve got ears on every call.”

“Arabic-speaking?” Carrie asked. Unless the monitors listening in on the calls spoke Arabic, they wouldn’t be of much use.

“Yes,” he nodded.

“What about Dima-sorry, Jihan? When does she get in?” Carrie asked.

“Her plane just landed. She’s already through customs at JFK. Something interesting with her luggage,” Koslowski added.

“Oh?” Saul said.

“She brought in a cello. Big case,” he said.

“She doesn’t play an instrument,” Carrie said.

Koslowski nodded grimly. “That’s what we thought. This little lady,” he said, indicating Carrie to Saul, “definitely got our attention.”

“What else?” Saul asked.

“FBI’ll be coming. Special Agent Sanders. Also, we’ll have to coordinate with the Secret Service because of the Veep. We’re holding off notifying them for the moment,” Koslowski said.

“Good. We want you guys to take the lead, not the Bureau. And we don’t want Vice-President Chasen or the governor or anyone else canceling anything till the very last second,” Saul said.

Koslowski and Gillespie exchanged cop looks as they came out on Seventh Avenue. Traffic, people, a cool, crisp afternoon.

“Our thinking exactly. Get them inside the killing box, then shut it down. Of course, once the Feds show up and the pissing contest over jurisdiction starts. .” Koslowski shrugged. He led them to a police squad car parked illegally in front of Penn Station, being watched over by a uniformed policeman.

“I’ll deal with Agent Sanders. Director Estes, Counterterrorism Center back at Langley, is on it,” Saul said as they got into the squad car.

Gillespie got behind the wheel. They drove around the block to Eighth Avenue, then up to Forty-Second Street and across town.

The office was on the thirty-seventh floor of a steel and glass building overlooking the UN Plaza and the East River. The building housed a number of corporations and several foreign consulates. Gillespie told them there was a direct, highly secure link to their headquarters in Queens. There were some forty people in the office, some in plainclothes, most wearing blue NYPD Counter-Terrorism Bureau T-shirts working computers and banks of flat-screen TV monitors showing street views of Manhattan, including a five-block radius in every direction around the Waldorf Astoria, plus interior security camera views inside the hotel.

“How much street video surveillance have you got?” Saul asked after he and Carrie had set up their laptops at a big conference table.

“A lot of people don’t realize we’ve got virtually every inch of lower Manhattan from Battery Park to midtown covered with surveillance cameras. Obviously, we’re holding off on the suspects’ locations, though at some point we’ll try to kick that in,” Koslowski said.

“Is there anybody on Dim-Jihan?” Carrie asked him.

“We’ve got a plainclothes team driving an unmarked car. Last I heard,” he said, looking at Gillespie, “they’re on the Van Wyck. One thing,” he added. “We’ll need you on Jihan. Make sure we’ve got her covered.”

Carrie nodded. “But she can’t see me. Use cameras or something. The instant she sees me, she knows she’s blown. Also. .” She looked at them and at a heavy-set older man in a suit who joined them. By his age and suit, she assumed he was a senior person in the New York Counter-Terrorism Bureau. “I need your men to understand. We don’t want her killed. I can’t get intel from a corpse.”

The three men, Koslowski, Gillespie and the older man, frowned.

“You understand, our primary concern is the safety of our officers and the civilians-not to mention the Vice-President and the others,” the older man said.

“This is Deputy Commissioner Cassani. He’s our boss,” Koslowski said.

Saul jumped in. “We understand perfectly. It’s your call. But we also understand how it is when the adrenaline is pumping in a situation with a bunch of gung-ho guys. We want to make sure that if you have to take her and the others out, the decision is made at your level and not by some wannabe Rambo trying to save the world. There’s information in that woman’s head that will make this country safer if you can keep her alive for us to interrogate.”

“We’ll do our best,” Cassani said, nodding at the two policemen. “But safety first.”

A black female officer came over and whispered something to Koslowski.

“Okay,” he said. “She’s through the Midtown Tunnel. She’ll be at the Waldorf in minutes. Cello and all.” He pointed at one of the screens showing traffic emerging from the tunnel on Thirty-Seventh Street. There was a taxi with someone in it with a cello case. Carrie strained but she couldn’t see Dima. After a second, the taxi passed out of view.

“What’s the cello for?” Cassani asked.

“Best guess?” Saul asked, looking at Koslowski. “Keep assault rifles in the case till just before the party.”

Koslowski nodded. “Exactly. We’ve spoken with the hotel manager. We’ve arranged a room for her on the twenty-sixth floor. Needless to say, it’s completely bugged, with full interior and corridor surveillance.”