Andrew Britton - The Operative

At first she thought someone, a workman, had dropped a can of red paint from above. Then she saw the man in front of her cartwheel to the same side the crimson splash had gone. It wasn’t exactly a cartwheel; his body turned, but his arms were like noodles, spindly and whipping as he moved.

The screams from behind her told June that it was not paint and not an acrobatic stunt. A muted crack reached her ears a moment later.

“Someone’s shooting!” a man screamed.

June dropped to her knees as she turned, looking for whoever had shouted while at the same time seeking to get behind the fat cables that ran up the span in a gentle slope. It took only an instant, and it was an instant that saved her life. The person to her right lost the left side of his head. It came away in fragments, riding another wave of red, as the older woman did a half-corkscrew turn before dropping. A bride who had been posing with her husband for wedding photos was slashed across the throat as her mouth, tongue, and neck spat blood sideways across his tuxedo and forward down her own white gown. She grabbed at her throat like it was the recently tossed bouquet.

Then people began dropping everywhere, each under a ruddy plume, their blood continuing to pump as they lay still or twitching.

June flopped on her chest, pressed herself as low as she could while sidling over to the cables, to protection. She slid across something wet. Her face was turned to the south, and she heard the screams, watched the death, with a kind of disconnected horror, as if this were a movie. She could do that, feeling she was no longer at risk. Even when the bodies stopped being knocked down, when the distant pops faded like the last echo of holiday fireworks, she lay on the unvarnished wooden floor of the bridge, trembling from more than just the traffic, promising her dead mother that she would go home to Montana and work at the family bridal gown shop and never leave, as she had once been warned.

She had no idea how long it was before people started moving again, most of them running, some of them crawling, toward the Brooklyn side of the bridge. When she saw them move, she got up.

An elderly Hasidic Jew, hurrying by, turned toward her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, showing concern.

“I’m sorry?”

He pointed to her blouse, which was covered with blood.

“Oh, no,” she said, smiling stupidly, as if she were declining sidewalk literature. “It’s not mine.”

He gave her a funny look and moved on.

As did she.

Slowly, tentatively, before fainting.

Alexander Hunt’s cell phone chirped as Bishop and his partner walked toward the building. He checked the message, though he knew what it must be.

From: Notify NYC swnalert@sendwordnow. com

To: Alexander Hunt

Sent: Mon, May 20, 2013, 9:59 a.m.

Subject: Notify NYC — Notification

Notification issued 5/20/13. Gunshots fired at Brooklyn

Bridge from Manhattan. All traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, is being diverted from FDR to Pearl.

For show, Hunt pretended to study the message intently, then shook his head and swore. He “happened” to look up as the men swung by him.

“Are you Reed Bishop?” Hunt asked, turning to catch the men as they moved up the stairs.

“Yes.”

“I’m Agent Hunt,” he said, turning back to snag the cab as it pulled away. It screeched to a stop. “You’d better come with me.”

“Where?” Bishop asked.

“There’s been another sniper attack, at the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Hunt jogged to the curb, the men running behind. They climbed in the back of the cab, Bishop in the center. Hunt gave the cabbie their destination, and he made a U turn on Battery Place and headed north on Greenwich Street.

“See if you can get us to the foot of the bridge,” Hunt told the driver as they sped north.

“Why? Is something going on?” the driver asked.

Hunt slapped his ID against the plastic partition. “Nothing you need to worry about,” he said and sat back.

The driver sped up, either enjoying a moment of importance or immunity from a speeding ticket.

Introductions were made, after which Hunt said to Bishop, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. What the hell is happening here?”

Hunt showed them the e-mail. “I’m guessing it has to do with the individual you met in Quebec. You heard about that?”

Bishop nodded.

“Is she on the bridge?” Kealey asked.

“I don’t know any more than this,” Hunt said, still holding up the phone. There was a drumming noise overhead, passing west to east. “Choppers heading to the scene.” He cranked down the window, looked up before they vanished behind the waterfront towers. “Disbursal pattern, fanning out. A search.”

“Hey, am I gonna be in some kind of danger over there?” the cabbie asked.

“Not anymore,” Kealey said as a second wave of police and coast guard choppers flew behind them, following the harbor to the East River. “Safest place on the planet.”

The ride was quick until they reached Park Row. Then it stopped moving, with the bottleneck from the closed bridge spilling in all directions.

“We’ll get out here,” Hunt said, tossing the driver a twenty-dollar bill and getting out across from St Paul’s Chapel.

Bishop thanked the driver and told him to stay safe.

“Thanks,” the cabbie said. “You too.”

The men rushed toward the bridge, Hunt’s credentials getting them through the police barricade. Hunt slowed as he saw someone else from his field office. Kealey and Bishop did likewise.

Kealey looked around. In the air, on the ground, and now in the water, it looked as though all of New York law enforcement was arriving. He even noticed the WhisprWave, the NYPD Harbor Unit’s sleek, new, seventy-two-foot, high-tech antiterror vessel.

“What do you think about all this?” Kealey asked. Even though there was little chance of being overheard with the police shouting and ambulance sirens shrieking toward them, he spoke softly.

“Sniping people on the bridge? That’s at the top of her skill set,” Bishop said.

“Pull back from the bridge, from the hotel,” Kealey suggested. “What does it look like to you?”

“I don’t follow.”

“The larger picture,” Kealey said, “because to me it doesn’t add up. The minute we get to New York, there’s an attack that dances all around us. We arrive to interview Hunt, and he gets pulled away by a second attack. It’s all too damn neat.”

“It’s unusual, but why bother?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Kealey said. “Tell me what you know, going back to Quebec.”

“About Veil?”

“Yeah. Was that her code name or yours?”

“Ours. It was meant to be ironic, something a Middle Eastern lady, a shaykhah, would wear.”

“She came from poverty? She wasn’t a pampered sociopath like bin Laden?”

“As far as we can tell,” Bishop said.

He and Kealey had stopped, while Hunt moved ahead, up the walkway on the Manhattan side of the bridge.

“Go on,” Kealey said.

“The Gulfstream had landed from Pakistan before we got there. We never really met the escorts. She arrived with a group of Mounties by car, we took custody with the Pakistanis, and an agent from Rendition Group One, Jessica Muloni, let her know that we knew she had a daughter, knew where she was, and expected her complete cooperation.”

“Let her know how? Photos? Details?”

“Her name and information about the midwife,” Bishop said. “Veil believed her.”

“Where is the daughter?” Kealey asked.

“Pakistan.”

Kealey shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense, then. Veil had a ride home. Why go on a rampage here, especially when she knows that her daughter can be used as leverage to stop her?”