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“No, it was a rotten job,” Jeremy says, rubbing his eyes. “You know earlier, when I said that we in the service make steel-like bonds with others, and can rely on them for favors? There’s a dark underbelly to that when you find someone’s hidden shame, hidden weaknesses, and drag it out into the open to get what you need.”
“You had something on the captain, then.”
“I did.”
“What was it?”
“None of your business, Amy,” he says. “It got us two twin-seater Typhoons to America. Leave it at that.” He takes a breath. “Come along—we’ve got to get kitted out if we want to get there before he uses his trains to disperse the weaponized anthrax.”
He turns and takes two steps, then realizes Amy isn’t following him. He looks at her and sees her head is tilted back, watching a TV broadcasting the BBC World Service.
The news footage shows a park with NYPD personnel gathered around a fountain. There are lumps of something on the pavement, and yellow sheets, and little plastic triangles marking bits of evidence to be collected and recorded.
The slow-moving crawl at the bottom of the screen says:
DEADLY ANTHRAX ATTACK THWARTED IN MANHATTAN WHEN WOULD-BE TERRORIST KILLS HERSELF WITH A SUICIDE BELT…
With near admiration in her voice, Amy says, “That tricky, slippery, son-of-a-bitch eel! First the suitcase nuke, and now this. He spent all this time working with that Frenchwoman, getting her prepared with weaponized anthrax, and at the very last moment sacrificing her to keep his real mission secret. He’s very good at setting up red herrings, isn’t he?”
Jeremy says, “And MI6 and the CIA will now think Rashad’s been stopped.”
“Yeah,” says Amy, her voice tired. “But we know better, don’t we? And we don’t have the time or connections to convince our higher-ups otherwise.”
Jeremy keeps staring at the scene in Manhattan. Two investigators in large yellow hazmat suits with astronaut-style helmets are waddling toward the lumps on the ground.
“We still don’t know what he’s going to do,” he says.
Amy starts for the door. “Sure we do,” she says. “He’s planning to kill thousands of my countrymen within the next twenty-four hours. The rest is just details. Come on—we don’t want to be late.”
Chapter84
FREDDIE FARRADY’Sfeet and shins ache something fierce, but his growing anger at Portia Grayson from MI5 is helping him ignore the pain.
They are sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Rector Street, just blocks away from where he saw the Frenchwoman get blown in half as the NYPD kept her at bay, but Portia refuses to acknowledge the evidence before her thin and disapproving face.
“Portia, don’t you see it?” Freddie demands. “A suicide bomber carrying enough weaponized anthrax to kill about ten thousand people…and Mike Patel is in the crowd, watching? You don’t think that needs to be investigated?”
They are sitting in a far corner of the coffee shop, on pink chairs. Freddie hates the color pink.
Portia takes a disapproving sip from her late-evening coffee. “There were scores of people near that deranged woman. Did you see Mike talk to her? Or approach her?”
“No, but earlier I saw Mike receive a phone call and make a phone call.”
“Do you know if she was contacted by Mike?”
Freddie wants to punch the tired but smug face in front of him. “Portia, there’s something going on with Mike, something big. Look, an hour after the bombing, I got into his apartment and—”
His MI5 supervisor puts her cardboard coffee cup down on the pink tabletop so hard that a little spurt of liquid spouts out from the plastic lid. “You broke into his apartment? Without my permission? Without the necessary documentation?”
“To hell with your permission, and to hell with your documentation,” Freddie says. “I found an American M4 automatic rifle with more than two hundred rounds of ammo and a bullet-resistant vest. Portia, he’s more than an HVAC tech. You know that.”
Portia picks up a brown napkin, gently wipes up the spill, and dabs the top of the coffee cup. “Freddie, you’re out,” she says, with ice and calm in her voice. “I’ll make the necessary arrangements to get a replacement. You’ve screwed up this job, terribly. Suppose you had been caught in that man’s flat?”
As if on cue, Freddie’s feet and lower legs throb in painful memory. After hearing Patel unlock the door, he had escaped the only way he could: Freddie thrust himself through one of the two open windows, hung down as far as he could by his fingertips, and then let go, hoping his years-old training in doing a drop-and-roll parachute landing would work.
His feet and legs throb again.
It did work, but it was sloppy. Freddie says, “If I had been caught in the man’s flat, then at least something would have happened. We would have brought in the NYPD, figure out what he is doing.”
