Andrew Britton - The Operative

“She was in the room of a flight attendant, probably picked her out in the lobby and followed her,” Kealey told Bishop. “Killed a maid to gain entrance, then took the flight attendant’s clothes to get out.”

“So we’re looking for a-”

“No,” Kealey said. “She’d stay in the uniform only for as long as it took to get away from the hotel. And then only for a short subway or probably cab ride. She knows the cops will be looking for a flight attendant.”

“Right.”

“What’s more significant is that our killer had an accomplice on the ground,” Kealey asserted.

“How do you know?”

“She broke the window in the hotel room instead of taking time to unscrew the lock,” Kealey told him. “That meant she didn’t have a lot of time. A dime, a nail file would have done the trick. Someone saw that our train had arrived, eyeballed us, told her we were coming, and she started firing as soon as we came up for air.”

“So she was already in the hotel.”

“Yes.”

“How did they know we would come out this side?” Bishop asked. “We could have gotten out on Eighth Avenue.”

“Not likely,” Kealey said. “They knew either that we were booked in that hotel or that we were going to catch a cab headed downtown.”

“Shit.”

“Exactly. This was for us, to tell us they know we’re here.”

“But they couldn’t kill us,” Bishop added. “They couldn’t afford to have another dead agent.”

“That, plus making it seem random is going to have a major chilling effect on transportation,” Kealey pointed out.

“To what end?” Bishop asked. “I mean, I understand the theory of it. Terror.”

“This wasn’t terror,” Kealey said.

“That’s my point,” Bishop said. “Assuming this action is related to Baltimore, and accepting that they were sending us some kind of message, why pile one atop the other? What’s their endgame?”

“That, obviously, is what we need to find out,” Kealey said. He didn’t add, “Quickly.” They both knew that.

“Those poor innocents,” Bishop thought aloud as they reached Broadway.

Kealey also hurt for the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time victims. But he couldn’t think about them now.

Who knows we are here? Kealey thought. Everyone in the president’s office and the people who made the travel plans. Whoever sent Bishop data on his missing cargo. The NYFO personnel they were supposed to meet and, most likely, everyone in their office.

It was a nightmare of possibilities with too-little evidence. What was more, the perpetrators knew where they were, most likely were watching them now, but they had no idea where those eyes might be.

“I’m guessing we shouldn’t go back to the hotel,” Bishop said.

“So they know exactly where to find us while we sleep? No,” Kealey agreed. Standing on a street corner, he felt like a tourist in Italy learning that a couple of strikes had just been called. What do you do? Where do you go? He looked at Bishop. “You got anything you really need in there?”

Bishop regarded him for a moment. He opened the cabin bag from the top, removed the iPad. “No.”

“Good,” Kealey said. “Let’s leave these here as a message for whoever’s still watching us. They’re going to have to work for their pay.”

They stacked the luggage against a cornerstone at Broadway and Thirty Third then walked south on Broadway to catch a cab at Thirty-Second Street, that had made it though the jam-up feeding into Thirty-Third Street. They headed downtown, the driver chattering into his cell phone in what sounded to Kealey like standard Hindi. As Kealey glanced back to see if anyone else had grabbed a taxi and was following-they weren’t-there was something strangely reassuring about that.

The city was just attacked, the nation was just attacked again, but life goes on.

Kealey could not remember when life had been that simple for him, when choices had been so clear, when the pressure had not been so absolute and crushing. He wasn’t lamenting that; he had chosen this life. But there were times like these when there was a clock ticking in his head, when he really did wish he could convince someone like Allison Dearborn to bag her life, too, and just find a jungle somewhere, build a tree house near a lake, and worry about nothing more remote or abstract than snaring a rabbit for the next meal…

Jessica Muloni could not believe what she had seen.

After an excruciatingly slow drive into the city, her driver had finally arrived at the hotel. She expected for-hire cabbies to take the costly scenic route, but this one worked for Trask. Her driver, Shrevnitz, also obeyed the speed limit and stopped at yellow lights.

He doesn’t want to be stopped by cops, she decided. Not with an armed passenger.

She’d remained at Hotel Pennsylvania, awaiting instructions. She’d ordered room service breakfast. She’d checked e-mails. Word had finally come shortly after 9:00 a.m., a text message on the Minotaur phone.

Suspect believed to be in vicinity. Face recognition software at Penn may have picked her up at 7th Avenue.

Muloni had hurried downstairs to Seventh Avenue. The station had only recently been equipped with FRS, which had been deployed for several years in London. Cameras scanned the faces of everyone walking through the terminal. Nothing was recorded, so the ACLU couldn’t squawk about privacy being invaded; but if the computers got a match with their criminal database, the transit police were quickly notified.

As she was waiting to cross the street, the attack began. She saw gunfire knock people down, but before she could turn to ascertain where the shooting was coming from, she saw Reed Bishop. He and another man were crouched in front of Madison Square Garden. They seemed immune to the assault. It was a horrifying thing to behold; it was as though they were shielded, behind a force field, as people died around them. Their omission as targets was that striking.

How could Bishop be a part of this? she wondered in shocked silence. Yet how else could Veil have gotten away in Canada? And he’s here within a day of the death of his daughter. That was monstrous.

The gunfire was over within a few moments, coming in two quick salvos. Muloni weighed running back into the hotel to chase Veil and waiting to see what Bishop did.

She decided to wait. If Veil and Bishop were in league, staying with the FBI agent would take her to the assassin. She wondered if Trask had suspected him; maybe that was why he didn’t want her to contact him. If that were the case, it would have been nice if he’d shared the information.

Muloni watched from behind a streetlight as Bishop flipped the other man a gun. The armed man came toward the hotel. Possibly to cover her retreat. Bishop went across Thirty-Third Street with two pieces of luggage. Muloni watched him as he waited. Mobs milled around her, fleeing toward Penn Station, into the hotel, out to Broadway. She did not see Veil-nor did she expect to-but after a few minutes she did see the other man. He rejoined Bishop, and they moved toward Broadway. She followed. They got into a cab.

Obviously, Trask was not the target as she had thought back in Atlanta. The City of New York was the target, she realized.

Muloni was blocked in by a mob with no chance of tracking the sniper. She had pulled the number off the cab but hadn’t been able to follow it. They were smart, her colleague and his partner. There was a queue of traffic stretching across Broadway, stranded there because they were blocked from going west. There was only a narrow passage for downtown traffic. Bishop and his partner had gotten a ride on the other side.

She punched a number into the Minotaur phone the driver had given her. It was the Bureau’s main number. She asked to be connected to Domestic Tracking and Identification. She provided her ID number. The intel associate would know from the call who and where she was. That couldn’t be helped. She asked the agent to get into the NY Taxi and Limousine Commission database, find out where that cab had gone. New security regulations required New York cab drivers to enter their destinations for GPS tracking. The American Civil Liberties Union had opposed the law but the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission put the safety of their workers above privacy concerns and endorsed the measure.