James Patterson - I, Michael Bennett

I thought maybe my picture was in the paper concerning the Perrine trial, or maybe there was a huge piece of Irish bacon stuck in my teeth, when I suddenly realized what it was.

Commuting into New York City from the hinterlands of the tristate area is a strange business. Regular passengers on the rush-hour trains see each other every morning or every evening for years and years. Friendships form; floating card games; affairs.

All the fuss was about me being a new face, I realized. Their furtive, spooked glances were a result of the fact that I’d upset their regular morning routine.

You want spooked? I thought. How about cleaning out your young teen’s bullet wound? I felt like asking them as I found a window seat and stretched out before closing my eyes.

Though Beacon was sixty miles north of New York City, we arrived at Grand Central Terminal only about an hour and twenty minutes later. I shuffled out with the throng, walking up one dirty underground tunnel until I found another one for the downtown subway.

Instead of heading straight to the courthouse, the plan was to go over the case with Tara McLellan first. She had sent me a text message, asking me to meet her at an inconspicuous office building on lower Broadway that the federal prosecutor’s office was now renting due to the trial’s unprecedented need for security.

Running early and dying for light and oxygen, I decided to get off the number 6 train at Canal Street and walk the rest of the way. I walked west to Broadway, and then made a left, going south, down into the Canyon of Heroes.

New York can truly drive you nuts, but every once in a while, you glance around and realize you live in one of the most beautiful man-made places that has ever existed. Washington, D.C., evokes the long line of American presidents, but for me, it’s the Canyon of Heroes, with its history of old-fashioned showers of ticker tape, that always reminds me of our country’s most shining human triumphs-driving in the golden railroad spike, Edison’s lightbulb, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, Armstrong’s not-so-small step on the moon.

As I walked, smiling up at the high, massive walls of the majestic buildings, a much more vivid and personal memory suddenly occurred to me. It was the first time I actually came to lower Manhattan with my father, to see the 1977 world champion Yankees in their ticker-tape parade.

Glowing with Yankees pride-and warmed by three or four pints of Guinness from a nearby Blarney Stone pub, packed wall-to-wall with customers-he hoisted me to his shoulders. With me riding on his broad back, we went up and down Broadway, where he pointed out all the landmarks-Trinity Church, where George Washington attended services following his inauguration at Federal Hall, across from the New York Stock Exchange; John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Building.

“Look around, Michael. Take it all in,” he said, a happy tear in his eye as we finally watched the tape glittering down over Reggie Jackson and Ron Guidry and George Steinbrenner, who were passing by in convertibles.

“Never forget we’re the good guys, Michael,” he said. “We win. They lose. End of story.”

I teared up a little as I thought about that. I thought about my life, the state of the country, the state of the world. I was the man now, and it was my turn to be the good guy, wasn’t it? A good father, a good cop, a good man. I’d like to think I was trying to fight the good fight, but I was starting to wonder more and more if the good guys weren’t becoming an endangered species these days-if we weren’t quickly getting outnumbered, outmaneuvered, outgunned.

No wonder the people on the train were spooked, I thought, shivering in the cool morning air as I walked. I, too, was spooked. Being spooked, I guess, was the only sane response to watching the world come apart at the seams.

Nine miles to the southwest of the dazzling glass-and-steel skyline of lower Manhattan lie the Maher Terminals in Elizabeth, New Jersey, North America’s largest container-ship facility.

It was coming on 8:30 a.m. when the dockside crane along the southern wharf sounded its horn, and the train-like column of trucks idling beside it finally began to move into position.

At the head of the line, a boyish, silver-haired trucker by the name of Norman O’Neill quickly stubbed out his tenth Marlboro of the morning before pulling his rumbling Volvo VN 630 semi beneath the massive steel legs of the towering unloading crane. He felt like lighting up a fresh one as he listened to the overhead cable’s shrill whine. Since all the paper and manifests had been stamped hours before, it was looking good, though he wasn’t out of the woods yet, he knew. He’d breathe again after he got the box and got the heck out of there.

O’Neill glanced to his right at the rusty hull of the small container vessel, called a feeder, that the crane was starting to unpack. Named the Estivado, it was a Costa Rican ship with a French crew that flew a Panamanian flag. Having picked up containers from her before, O’Neill knew there was nothing on the Estivado’s cargo manifest, such as machine tools, that would set off any Homeland Security threat-matrix alarms. In fact, most of the nine hundred LEGO-like red metal boxes aboard the ship contained navel oranges and tangelos out of Toluca, Mexico.

Most, O’Neill thought, as the weight of the lowered container settled onto the trailer attached to the truck with a slight thump and a creak.

But not all.

He shifted the five-hundred-horsepower Volvo into gear and pulled away from the crane and around a red brick warehouse to the end of another line of idling trucks. He nervously drummed the top of the Marlboro box sitting in his cup holder as he sat waiting.

This last part was the gut check. The line he was in was for the Homeland Security vehicle imaging scanner, where the in-sides of all containers had to be inspected by an X-ray machine before they were allowed to leave. Remembering his very specific instructions, O’Neill waited until it was right before his turn and then immediately sent a wordless text message to a number he’d already preprogrammed into his phone.

He assumed the text was a signal to someone working in the security office, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t really want to know. He just held his breath as he slowly rolled between the goalpost-like metal X-ray poles that bookended the security lane.

There was a traffic light with a gate arm on the other side, where you had to wait after you went through the scanner. O’Neill stared at the red light, his heart ticking like a clock attached to a bomb. He was wondering how much prison time they would give him for smuggling several metric tons of coke, and what his clueless wife and daughters would think, and how did one actually hang oneself in a prison cell, when the green light suddenly flashed and the arm tilted up.

O’Neill Zippoed himself a victory cigarette as he clutched and shifted and pulled out.

An hour later, still following specific instructions, O’Neill pulled into an I-95 rest stop just south of the New York State line and unhitched the trailer. A minute after he pulled away, a spanking new cherry-red Peterbilt 388 swung in front of the cargo container, and three hard-looking Hispanic men in jeans and denim work shirts hopped out. The largest of them checked the container’s seal and locks carefully before nodding to the other two to hook it up.

The final destination of the shipment was a warehouse on the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Inside, just beyond its open steel overhead door, a white Mercedes S600 sedan with tinted windows was parked beside a large silver Ford van. After the warehouse door was safely back down, an effeminate Hispanic man in seersucker shorts and a butter-colored tennis sweater exited the van and checked the seal and locks on the container. When the foppish man nodded, the driver of the truck, who had been waiting with a pair of bolt cutters, clipped the container’s heavy padlocks and swung the doors back.