Andrew Britton - The Assassin

The others snickered; clearly, they were waiting for him to react. Instead of protesting, Kealey walked a few steps closer, stopping about 5 feet away from the nearest youth. He looked them over quickly. He didn’t think they had anything larger than a knife between them, but he had to be sure.

The guy on the car looked to be the oldest and, therefore, the de facto leader, but the teenagers standing nearby were the greater threat. Turning to the one who had both hands free, Kealey said, “I’m going to show you something, and I don’t want you to panic, okay?”

They laughed again, but it was slightly forced, and he knew he had their attention. Dropping his gaze to their hands, he lifted the right side of his long-sleeve T-shirt, revealing the Beretta 92FS holstered on his right hip. He didn’t look up, but he could tell that seeing the gun had sobered them up. The youth on the car slid off and backed up immediately, muttering something in Spanish. Kealey assumed they thought he was a cop or something similar, since he wasn’t brandishing the weapon like a maniac.

Still watching their hands, he said, “I want you all to do something for me. Lift your shirts slowly. Come on, you too.”

They did as he asked. Just as he’d expected, they didn’t appear to be carrying. “Turn around,” he ordered. “Keep your shirts up.”

Still nothing. Relaxing slightly, Kealey said, “Okay, drop ’em and face me.” When they turned back around, he finally looked at their faces. He could see that the two younger men were nervous, but the leader appeared unfazed. Kealey knew he had guessed right from the start. These young men were far from hardened criminals, but they weren’t exactly Boy Scouts, either. In short, they were exactly what he was looking for.

He lowered his shirt back over the butt of the Beretta. Then he smiled and showed them his open hands.

“You guys feel like making some money?”

Terry Best, the assistant director in charge of the New York field office, was fifty-three years old, a large man with ruddy features, heavy jowls, and a fringe of coppery hair. When Naomi followed Matt Foster into the room, Best half-stood and shook her hand perfunctorily, then waved her into a seat. She looked around the office quickly, unimpressed with what she saw. For a man in charge of the largest FO in the country, Best didn’t seem to have a great deal of space to himself. Then again, she reflected, that might be intentional. It was rare, but sometimes men in Best’s position actually preferred to play down their authority. Normally, Naomi would have considered Jonathan Harper such a man and meant it as a compliment, but she still wasn’t feeling very charitable toward him, given the current situation.

The ADIC looked to Foster and said, “Thanks, Matt. That’ll be all for now. How are we doing on those carriers?”

“We just got the list back from customs, sir. Apparently, use of the Pre-Arrival Processing System became mandatory for land-based carriers back in 2002. In order to qualify, a U.S. carrier needs a Standard Carrier Alpha Code.”

Best gestured for the younger man to explain.

“It’s a two-to-four letter code that customs uses to identify individual carriers. We’re cross-checking all the carriers in the state against the information Langley sent us this morning.”

“Good. Keep me up to date,” Best said. Foster shot Naomi a little grin and left the room, closing the door behind him.

“As you can see,” Best continued, “we’re taking the information you people sent us very seriously. Even though you don’t seem to have any hard evidence that this… What do you call it?”

“A BLU-82, sir.” She was annoyed by his show of ignorance; she knew he’d spent half the morning on the phone with Harper, who would have sent pictures and specifications. “Also known as a daisy cutter.”

“Yes. Despite the fact that you can’t prove this ‘daisy cutter’ is even in the country.”

Naomi straightened in her seat. “Sir, the evidence may be sketchy, but it’s there.”

“By which you mean this storage facility in Canada, right?”

“That’s right, sir. The unit was leased by Thomas Ruhmann. He was in Al Qaqaa when the explosives went missing in 2003. He was killed two nights ago in Berlin, almost certainly by William Vanderveen. I’m sure you’re familiar with the name.”

Best nodded to show that he was. He picked up a ballpoint pen and began to twirl it clumsily in his fingers. “Is there any proof that BLU-82s were being stored at Al Qaqaa? That Ruhmann would even have access to one?”

“Actually, there is. This morning we managed to get in touch with a man named Paul Owen, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. He was involved with the unit responsible for investigating the theft. Colonel Owen told us that in addition to three hundred and eighty tons of convention explosives, four BLU-82s were taken from the facility at Al Qaqaa. That fact was never admitted by the U.S. government.”

“Four? I thought we were looking for one.”

“Two of the bombs were located at a warehouse outside Karbala a month after they were taken, and the third was picked up a month after that. It was discovered in the back of a dump truck at the Iranian border. The fourth was never recovered.”

Best leaned back in his seat, dropped the pen, and studied her plaintively. “So again the Iranians come into it. The information you’ve given us so far is shot full of holes, Ms. Kharmai, but Vanderveen’s part in this seems to be the biggest leap of all. I don’t appreciate your trying to confuse the issue by bringing his name into it.”

“Sir, we know that he was involved with Ruhmann, and we know he took part in the bombing of the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad.”

“But you can’t prove he was in Berlin, and you can’t prove he’s here in New York.”

Naomi lifted her hands in exasperation, then instantly regretted the gesture. This man was just a couple steps below the FBI director himself, and he wouldn’t appreciate a show of insubordination. “Sir… okay, I’ll give you that. But even if we assume that he doesn’t have a part in this, it doesn’t change the fact that this bomb is almost certainly here in the U.S., as evidenced by the documentation found in Ruhmann’s car and the statement given by the owner of the storage facility in Montreal. Given everything that’s happened in Iraq over the past few weeks, and the fact that half the Iraqi Parliament is scheduled to be at the UN this afternoon, I think we have ample cause for concern.”

“‘Half the Iraqi Parliament’ is quite an exaggeration,” Best pointed out. “But security couldn’t be tighter, and frankly, I don’t know what else we can do. Fifty of my agents are there, along with the entire Manhattan Traffic Task Force and a good part of the Manhattan South Patrol Borough. Everything east of Second Avenue is completely closed off to traffic, along with the through streets between Forty-first and Fifty-first. It’s easy to stop vehicles, though. The pedestrians are where it gets tricky.”

Naomi nodded. She’d caught part of the news that morning, and she knew that a massive antiwar demonstration was scheduled to take place at the corner of Fifty-first and First. The protesters had requested a permit to march past the UN complex. Predictably, the request was denied by city officials, but that hadn’t deterred the organizers of the event. By the time she and Kealey had left for Dulles, 20,000 people had already arrived at the police barricades on Fifty-first Street, the crowd stretching up to Fifty-fourth. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning. More than 100,000 people were expected to show up by the time the General Assembly convened, and Naomi knew that the NYPD would have its hands full with crowd control. Nearly every street surrounding the UN enclave would be completely packed by day’s end.