“Who was the agent in on the transfer?”
“Someone from Rendition Group One,” Bishop said. “I tried to contact her. No response. When I called her boss this morning, he told me she was in New York on special assignment. He was not at liberty to reveal its nature. Frankly, I don’t think he knew.”
“You suspect she’s looking for the missing cargo?” Kealey said.
“I hope so.” He didn’t have to add, “Either that, or she’s in on the escape.” “I’ve got a call in to the powers-that-be but they haven’t returned it.”
Kealey considered this. “There’s something a little off,” he said.
“The timing?”
“Yeah.”
Bishop nodded. “Why was she involved before I was informed?”
“Right. I can see that it wasn’t an IA issue, but as a matter of course, they would have wanted a debrief of everyone who was on-site.”
“Ordinarily,” Bishop agreed.
He didn’t have to finish.
“Yet they called you for this,” Kealey said.
“They did. When you think you’ve got a mole or a renegade, who do you go to?”
“Right.” He didn’t have to say it. You go to someone their actions impacted. Someone who values the takedown more than their own security. Like Kealey, someone who was hair trigger.
Kealey felt more comfortable with Bishop after that. He wasn’t being critical. What the G-man had said before about Kealey also applied to himself.
“Do they suspect your RG colleague of being involved with what happened in Quebec?” Kealey asked.
“They don’t not suspect her,” Bishop said. “That’s one of the things I’m going to have to find out.”
Kealey leaned back into the seat to think about what Bishop had said. He fell asleep instead. The next thing he knew, they were arriving at Penn Station.
CHAPTER 21
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
New York’s Penn Station was a bunker that used to be a palace. When the original station was ripped down and replaced with the new Penn Station and Madison Square Garden-under the theory that commuters would be more inclined to go to events if they were held right above trains to Long Island and New Jersey-the city lost a glorious and majestic landmark. That architectural disaster, in 1963, was one of the triggers for the creation of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The current station was a pair of below-ground hives without character or interest. Since the attacks of 2001, there had been a permanent presence of military reservists there, in addition to the police. Kealey respected their mission, while at the same time seeing hole after hole in the security. It was no different in Washington or at virtually any other train station in the country. Bags went unexamined, were not even spot-checked; tickets to board were glanced at cursorily by conductors as people moved down escalators to the tracks; dozens of shops received deliveries, probably daily, which might not contain bagels or I HEART NEW YORK T-shirts or magazines. This, in addition to the fact that tracks were accessible from the outside before trains passed under the Hudson and East Rivers. Kealey guessed that the backgrounds of porters and employees were only superficially examined.
Of course, as the NYPD and Homeland Security knew, applying manpower to what law enforcement called those “open doors” would be a large commitment of resources with low-yield results. The lone bombers, the homegrown terrorists, would invariably find a way to slip through. The cops and soldiers were eyes on-site for aberrant behavior, and that was the best that could be done. Kealey knew what law enforcement also knew: that the al-Qaidas of the world, the real terrorists, were looking to strike in ways that the West hadn’t considered or had not yet faced. That was the unfortunate nature of this war: the only way to catch them was on the intel side, with HUMNIT and ELINT, the people who infiltrated enemy groups or watched their movements from places of concealment, the digital eavesdroppers who listened for cell phone calls and watched computer posts.
It was for all those reasons that Kealey was not entirely surprised by what happened as they left the station.
He and Bishop were booked in rooms across Seventh Avenue, at Hotel Pennsylvania. Scaffolding had been erected along the Thirty-Third Street side of the building, where workers were doing the initial prep work before dismantling the hotel, which was to be replaced by the city’s third largest building.
The sidewalk was jammed with commuters and tourists, some waiting for taxis at the stand to the left, others going to work in the city’s once-thriving garment district. The first muted crack came after a woman had been spun 180 degrees just a few steps in front of Kealey. He had been unaware of her back, her yellow jacket, until she spun with a raw red hole in her forehead and dropped to the sidewalk, on top of her shoulder bag.
A second crack followed a cabbie’s head exploding inside his vehicle as he pulled from the curb. The car, with its screaming occupants, turned into Seventh Avenue and collided with a hollow crunch against several other vehicles.
From the first shot Kealey was on high alert, his instincts registering the attack before his mind had processed it. He pulled Bishop down flat, crouched for a moment, then ran to a trash can several steps ahead. He pulled down a young man in a business suit who was standing beside it; pieces of the man’s heart blew out his back as Kealey acted.
This is for us, he thought angrily. The cab was to block traffic, but the deaths were to show that the victims could just as easily have been Kealey or Bishop. The gunman was a helluva marksman.
Even though Kealey realized where the sniper was situated, there was nothing he could do about it. Even if he could get to his bag-he’d left it beside Bishop-his handgun didn’t have this kind of range. The shots were from very high up.
Cops were gathering, and as soon as the first two went down, the rest withdrew to the safety of the station to await armored reinforcement.
Kealey knew the gunman would leave before choppers could arrive. He had to get to the hotel. The killer might be expecting that but did not desire it; otherwise, the shots would have been aimed to Kealey’s rear, a signal he should head forward.
Sirens broke through the terrified shrieks and sobs and the honking horns that were all around him. Traffic was trying to maneuver around the disabled taxi, to pull to the curb or down one of the side streets. The police and emergency units were converging from all directions. His ear attuned to them, Kealey heard police radios rasping behind him.
The gunfire had stopped. People were beginning to rise as a terrible calm spread across the scene. They were in pockets behind the concrete walls of Madison Square Garden or behind the newspaper stand or the line of cabs. They were alone, rushing to get back into the station or into the arena.
And then a flurry of awful gunfire cut through them. It came from the same place, from a bolt-action weapon, judging from the delay, a slashing death that took down bodies alternately to the left and right of Kealey.
The gunman was swinging from side to side, sighting and taking down targets in a heartbeat. It was formidable.
Then everything was silent again. Kealey knew the killer was done. He hadn’t had time to get his gun from his bag, but Bishop was ahead of him: he had assumed the former agent was carrying one and had retrieved it. He flipped it over.
Kealey acknowledged this with a hasty salute as he tucked the Glock in his belt. He pulled out his shirt to conceal the weapon so he wouldn’t be shot by police. Then he ran through the now-halted traffic, Bishop close behind.
Yasmin climbed through the window she had broken to reach the scaffolding. She tossed aside the blanket she’d pulled from the bed to conceal herself, sidestepped the occupant-a young flight attendant whose spinal cord she had cut from behind-and stuffed her XM2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifle into a vinyl wardrobe bag. She had already donned the woman’s blouse and skirt while waiting for her audience to arrive from Washington. Cutting the woman’s neck in the back had prevented her from bleeding out on the garments. A deeper cut to get through the sinew and vertebrae, but as soon as the cord was cut, the woman fell, quite lifeless.