By midnight, the heads of all major security agencies were on a conference call with the President, answering questions about ongoing alerts. There were no specific threats being investigated at this time. The three terrorists in Miami were dead. Nothing alarming intercepted over the past few days on monitored phones or e-mails. No particularly important national events scheduled within the next seventy-two hours. They tried to figure out what “bombs, but not bombs” meant.
“Like I said, someone wants to rattle us. If they really had something, they wouldn’t give us a heads-up,” said the head of the CIA.
“The third coming of wrath? Churchill called the nuclear bomb the second. What’s the third?” That from the FBI.
“Pretty damn confident, bragging that they’re here already. Usually they claim credit after,” Kyle fretted.
“The Tol-e-Khomri reference bothers me the most,” the National Security Advisor said.
The decision was not to pay, of course, or announce a potential threat days before the national political convention, but relevant agencies would try to track all spending by the “charities” overseas, even though the guess was that money trails would be dead ends, a traceless series of transfers, cash disappearing into black holes.
The national terrorism threat level was raised to red that night, but Homeland Security announced it was a drill. Police around the country increased patrols around public facilities. Army Reserve copters flew over major harbors. Homeland Security added staff at airports. The cost drained hundreds of millions of dollars, as usual.
Another drill.
“We don’t bow to threats,” the National Security Advisor told Kyle boldly, after the meeting.
We just did, he thought, at home on Calvert Street, unable to sleep. The seventy-two-hour deadline had shrunk to sixty-six. He had not told his wife what happened. On TV, sound off to let her sleep, he watched a firefight between U.S. Rangers and ISIS troops. Then came a segment about veterans being mistreated in VA hospitals. Is it about this? Utley wondered, each time the announcer detailed another gripe.
At that moment Amtrak’s regularly scheduled Patriot Express pulled into Pennsylvania Station in New York City, and the fourth man who exited the quiet car no longer looked as he had at the New Post Pub. The blond wig was gone. The hair was short, thick, black, and curly. The limp was absent, the tattoo and freckles washed off. The man stood just on the tall side of average. The face, without beard or cheek plugs, seemed rounder, and the eyes, contact lenses out, were almost azure blue, with a slight bulge that made him look less intelligent. The look was deceptive.
Tom Fargo transferred to the New York City subway Two train, heading south, downtown. Even at this hour people were moving around the great city. College boys coming back from having sex with girlfriends. Pissed-off Yankees fans who had closed a Chelsea bar after the fiasco with the Red Sox tonight. A homeless man who snored and stank of urine. A Japanese tourist, too shy to ask directions. Any of them, Tom speculated, might be dead by next week, and the subway filled with panic-stricken people trying to flee the metropolis any way they could.
Tom Fargo looked around the car and hated these people with a vast, steady drumbeat that pulsed through his veins. You are of them but not one of them, Dr. Cardozo had said. He had fought them overseas, in dry wadis and wet melon fields. He’d assassinated an American diplomat in a Rio shopping mall. Now he was back home.
The subway rocked, and he smelled cologne and garlicky sweat, French fries and cleaned-away vomit. These people lived in filth. They were so fat that they actually paid others to help them become thin, the natural hungry state of millions elsewhere. Their armies slaughtered while they occupied themselves with subway advertisements to cure toenail fungus. These people were as oblivious as the old fool who had taught him what to do tonight.
When you make a threat, Hobart Haines had told him, long ago, you need to back it up with action. Hook them with easy cooperation. Then nail them to the wall.
Tom Fargo was not afraid. Running over what was to happen next, he recalled that before boarding Amtrak he’d made a phone call from outside Union Station, used an encrypted cell, punched in a twenty-digit number, and the signal had joined a hundred thousand other calls shot gunning into space at that moment, to bounce off a commercial satellite in a flood of talk that overwhelmed monitoring. Even if listeners broke the encryption, which was virtually impossible, he spoke in code. He and Dr. Cardozo traded comments about soccer. Hundreds of miles above earth, words lived, money moved, plans coalesced. Their coded words had meant:
“Think they’ll go for it?”
“Makes no difference. We do the same either way.”
“Your suggestions were smart, Tom. You suggested sending two separate groups to America. You said to make the demands first, not after. You know how to talk to them.”
“I had a good teacher.”
At Borough Hall, Tom Fargo exited the train and walked up top and into an area housing century-old municipal buildings. He headed toward Brooklyn Heights. The night was sultry, the air so saturated with moisture that a light mist coated cars, the hulking courthouse, a neon-smeared falafel shop window. The city smelled of baking tar, coal-oven pizza, hundred-year-old brick, diesel fuel. At 3:45 A.M. even the muggers were asleep. The neighborhood was a high-income area filled with young professionals. His rented co-op was in a converted potato chip factory, across from the Brooklyn Bridge, down the cobblestone street from the popular River Café.
Tom Fargo pushed through a polished glass revolving door to enter the sparkling lobby, where the night doorman sat behind a large post, eyeing a portable TV on which a White House spokesman was telling a news announcer, “The President has kept us safe for four years.”
“Good morning, sir,” the doorman said.
“Call me Tom.”
“Been clubbing again in Manhattan?”
Tom Fargo grinned and rubbed his thick hair as if happily woozy from drink. “The shop doesn’t open until noon. Might as well have some fun before that.”
The doorman sat beneath a framed black-and-white 1950s photo of Christmas shoppers on 5th Avenue: sleekly dressed executives, upscale tourists, wealthy leisure seekers. The shot caught the casual power and confidence at the heart of a great empire. People who knew they were safe. But Tom knew that within days the looks on those faces would change. It was too late to stop his first attack. He’d set it in motion before going to Washington. There was no way the Americans would capitulate to demands at this stage without proof.
The doorman was a forty-year-old Dominican, nine years in the union. He lowered his voice, as if to reveal a secret. He was a tall man with a tough face and sensitive disposition. He wrote poetry lyrics late at night, and listened to biographies of singing stars on DVDs.
“It happened again, sir.”
Tom Fargo stiffened.
“She came down to walk the dog. Her face, sir. It was black and blue. It’s not right.”
Tom Fargo relaxed, because this wasn’t about the FBI. But he was angry. The doorman was hoping Tom would call the cops on his next-door neighbor, a big, loudmouthed architect who chaired the building co-op board and relished his nickname, “Captain,” and lived with his girlfriend. The doorman wouldn’t make the call, fearing that if he did, he’d lose his job.