That was when he saw the shadow of the water tower before him, and an irregular shape on top of it. Such an unusual contour was what snipers referred to as “tree cancer,” an abnormal growth on an otherwise ordinary object. Bishop crouched, looked up, peered through the telescopic sight at the tower itself. He recognized the assassin instantly. His heart beating thick and fast, he put her in the crosshairs.
“Yasmin! Put down the weapon!”
He watched her shoulder. There would be a slight flexing if she intended to shoot. He started to squeeze the trigger…
The woman looked back. He relaxed his grip on the trigger, but slightly.
“Yasmin, raise your right hand now, or I will shoot!”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Agent Reed Bishop. We met at the Quebec airport,” he told her. “Come down now. You can’t get away!”
She hesitated. “The airport?”
“I was there with another agent,” he said. “We went to a room, talked about your daughter.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong. I have no…”
Yasmin didn’t bother to finish. She looked away, resighted the rocket launcher, hunkered into the rocket launcher.
Damn you, Bishop thought. Her head, in profile, filled the circular scope. He dropped the site very slightly; a head shot could still cause a reflex action in her finger. He remembered that much from basic weapons training. He aimed at her shoulder and squeezed the trigger. There was a pop, a recoil, the gun site exploding in red before it kicked up toward the soft blue sky.
Bishop lowered the rifle just in time to see her jerk toward the tower. He laid the weapon down, took out his handgun, and ran to the base of the water tower. He could hear her groaning, see her feet kicking at nothing, like those of a wounded animal, as they hung over the edge. He couldn’t see her hands or the rocket launcher. He hurried up the ladder, gun at the ready. When he reached the top, he saw her lying on her side, the rocket launcher at an angle beneath her. She was trying to reach the trigger, but her right arm was hanging on by sinewy strings, the flesh ripped and the shoulder shattered, the side of her face coated with blood. The blood on her face was not from her shoulder: the bullet had glanced hard from her temple upon exiting. It was still there, nestled in a raw hole in her skull.
Bishop tasted bile, swallowed hard as he walked over and carefully moved the tube from under her. He did not want to touch anything. He laid it gently beside her and knelt, called for an ambulance. He was told there would be a wait of forty minutes or more. He didn’t think that would matter.
He kept the phone out. “I’m sorry, Yasmin,” he said.
She looked up at him with uncomprehending eyes. “Where…”
He didn’t answer. He saw her good hand pawing at her broken arm. At a bracelet with a marble. She hadn’t had that in Quebec. He slipped it from her wrist. Then he searched her for a cell phone. There wasn’t any.
Yasmin shut her eyes. “Kamilah,” she sighed. “God. Oh, my God. I want… to… go… home.”
Bishop didn’t know what to say. He took her good hand. He understood what they had been doing in the lab. He held the fingers that had caused so many deaths. After a moment her eyes rolled back slightly and the fingers relaxed. He laid her hand on her side.
Bishop looked out at the sparkling waters of the Hudson as he called Kealey.
“Reed, where are you?”
“On the roof at One West,” Bishop told him. “I got Yasmin and her nuke.”
“Nice work. Real nice.” There was a slight pause. “I see you. By the water tower.”
“Right.” Bishop looked up, saw the silver 23 hovering over the World Financial Center a few blocks north.
“I think the Xana project was about brainwashing,” Bishop said. “After I shot her, Yasmin had no idea where she was or what she was doing.”
“Wipe killers’ minds, you’ve got plausible deniability,” Kealey said. “Any idea what her target was?”
“Given where she was aiming, I’d guess the bathtub of the World Trade Center site, west wall,” he said looking north toward the site. “If she’d popped that, Manhattan would’ve been cooked. The subways, Penn Station, Grand Central… There would have been endless miles for the river to empty into.”
“Jesus.”
“Exactly. The nuke is armed, but I’ve got the bomb squad-”
“Leave it,” Kealey said.
“What?”
“For just a minute, I mean. We need to get its GPS signature so we can find the other one.”
“Roger that.”
There was muted talk on the other end of the phone. Bishop looked down at the woman he’d killed. She was paling quickly as blood and life left her. He had never shot anyone. It had been easy to pull the trigger; the rest, he imagined-whatever degree of sadness, regret, revulsion-would come later, if at all. The big pain was that despite having hunted one participant down and prevented unimaginable slaughter, he didn’t feel a damn bit better about the loss of his daughter. He glanced at the bracelet. Did that have something to do with Kamilah, or was it something else? Maybe Veil’s mind was impacted by the gunshot wound, or maybe it was something else. But Bishop got the feeling that this woman truly had no idea what had just happened to her.
Like so many of your victims over the years, he thought, if they were even permitted to have a final thought.
Kealey got back on. “We got it, Reed. Listen, can you see the marina from there?”
“Negative. World Financial tower’s in the way.”
“Okay. I’m going to send you a photo of a launch at the marina. Tell me if that’s the one you saw.”
The sun was high and hot to his left, over the harbor. Bishop shielded the phone from the glare and waited for the e-mail. The sun felt good. Life felt good. Damn these people… damn them. Tears streamed along his cheeks as he thought of Laura and the days and sunlight she would never know. The graduations, books, dates, children
… Damn them all for eternity.
The phone pinged, and Bishop opened the attachment.
“That looks like the one,” Bishop told Kealey. “So he’s on foot? With a nuclear-tipped rocket launcher?”
“I doubt it,” Kealey replied.
“Right, of course,” Bishop said. Being spotted wasn’t the issue. Hunt was expecting Veil’s bomb to go off. He would have wanted to be as far away as possible.
“I’m sure he’s skipped town, and there’s one other thing I’m sure of,” Kealey said. “That SOB will have been expecting to hear a blast by now. We need to intercept Plan B.”
The speeding runabout passed below the George Washington Bridge as it left New York City.
Hunt looked at his watch. He exhaled loudly. “Was it your work or did they screw up our plan?” he asked Dr. Gillani.
“I do not believe the fault was mine,” she insisted.
“No, of course not,” Hunt rasped.
“She’s right,” Dr. Samson said as he steered the runabout north. “The programming worked straight down the line. There’s no reason to think it broke now. We spent the most time on this part of it. She was solid.”
Hunt shook his head. The years of work and planning, from Pakistan to here, and it ended up on his shoulders, after all. His one consolation was that if they took Yasmin prisoner, she would remember nothing. If they killed her, the effect would be the same: another Muslim had participated in a wave of Muslim attacks against the United States. That also meant the lab would not be destroyed. Even if they got in there- And they wouldn’t have much time to do that, he thought-even if they checked all the records, everything would point back to another Muslim, Dr. Gillani. A call to her from Scroggins’s phone would tie them together; the men would take the blame for the nukes. Trask would see to that. The drivers would disappear into a cell at any number of secret government prisons for weeks.
By then it would be too late.
As for himself, he would say that he was undercover, trying to sniff out this Muslim brainwasher. Dr. Samson was the voice of her process, knew how it worked. He was all they’d need. In one hour, she would be the last victim of this necessary evil.