“Thank you.” Hunt hung up. He’d have to arrange for her to regain sight of the targets.
He turned to Dr. Gillani. “Where is Yasmin?”
“She phoned while you were talking,” the woman replied. “She is in position.”
“Tell her to hold,” Hunt said. “This is going to take a little finessing. I’ll call you when it’s time.”
Hunt decided to go downstairs and wait for them, see if he could spot Muloni. He couldn’t start without her. The best place for her to observe would be from Battery Park, across the street. He didn’t think there would be a lot of tourists headed for the Statue of Liberty right now, but there were trees and kiosks she could lurk behind. She wouldn’t have to see Bishop’s face; a good agent would have noticed what he was wearing.
And Jessica Muloni was a good agent, he thought, which was one of the reasons she had been selected for this important task. Handpicked by Mr. Trask.
As Hunt waited for the penthouse elevator, he thought back to his own meeting with the industrial juggernaut two years before, when he underwent a psychiatric evaluation after expressing his disappointment with Muslims to a Muslim coworker. It was in response to an alert received by the NYFO that the NYPD was providing 24/7 police protection to the so-called Ground Zero mosque.
“They didn’t do that for the Jewish museum around the corner when someone painted swastikas on the wall,” Hunt had noted.
The coworker was offended. Hunt was forced to undergo sensitivity training. The two-week course turned up a general attitudinal problem toward Muslims. Not enough to require further attention, but enough to bear watching.
Trask was one of those who was watching. He requested that Hunt be part of a team that was evaluating new electromagnetic vests, designed to slow the velocity of incoming projectiles. Satisfied with Hunt’s worldview and his trustworthiness, Trask had taken him into his confidence. Put him in charge of what might prove to be the most important operation in American history since D-day.
Hunt still got chills down his spine when he thought of the honor he had been accorded. It was humbling. And nothing was going to derail it.
Within minutes he was standing in the sunshine outside the building. The streets were eerily empty, the loudest sounds coming from helicopters that were circling six and a half miles to the north.
Leaning against the brass handrail that ran down the center of the short flight of steps, his cell phone in his hand, he saw a woman walking across the street. She stopped to study a poster around the Pier A restoration project that showed Lower Manhattan early in the twentieth century. She looked back toward the building, then back toward the poster. She turned away. She moseyed as if enjoying the day. Never once did she look across the harbor, where most people looked, toward the Statue of Liberty.
That had to be Muloni.
A single cab made the right turn from Broadway, which was three blocks away. It moved along an empty street toward his building. It was moving slowly, as if looking for a number.
That had to be Bishop and his ex-CIA companion.
The cab pulled up to the curb. Hunt speed dialed upstairs. Dr. Gillani answered.
“It’s time,” Hunt said and hung up.
CHAPTER 22
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The UPS truck was parked on South Street, just below Catherine Slip. The driver was dead in the front, from a knife wound through the right eye and into his brain.
There was nowhere a young, attractive woman could not go.
She had taken the taxi to exit 2 of the FDR Drive. There Yasmin had discarded her flight attendant’s jacket and donned a red blazer she had in the wardrobe bag. There was a Realtor’s logo on the front. She had approached the coffee-breaking driver, cell phone in one hand, knife hidden up her sleeve, pretending to ask for directions. He didn’t even feel the hot thermos as it spilled over his lap.
Yasmin removed the man’s shirt and trousers and changed into them in the back. This time, it didn’t matter if the front was bloody. All that was important was that she blended in, briefly, with the top of the truck. She noticed the bracelet as she was changing, the one with the marble. She knew it, knew it so well, but she could not recall why. Nor did it matter. She had a job to do.
She lay down with her rifle in front of her, looked through the 4X telescopic sight at the Brooklyn Bridge. These weren’t like the last ones, rats smoked from a hole and picked off, pop, pop, pop, like she used to do in Cairo. These were bottles on a wall, heads moving across the walkway. A lot of heads, all leaving New York. Ironically, they were probably eager to get away from the city after that morning’s attack.
No, not bottles, she thought without knowing why. Invaders. At the moat.
Her phone pinged. She looked at the text message.
Go.
She slipped her finger over the trigger, picked a head at random, watched until it cleared the meshwork of wires that distinguished the sides of the stone edifice, then fired.
Walking home across the wooden planks of the bridge, June Furst never got used to the incessant wobble caused by the automobile traffic passing below. Or the bicycles shooting by in lanes that ran alongside the too-narrow pedestrian walkway. With most of the traffic moving in one direction-east, away from Manhattan-the bridge almost seemed lopsided. But that might have been just a visual response to the solid mass under and beside her and the relative emptiness to the south.
If the traffic was a constant hum and shudder, the people around her were always different. In two years, the twenty-five-year-old fashion designer couldn’t remember ever having seen the same person twice on her walks to and from work…
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.