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FREDDIE FARRADYis a detective with Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, on assignment in Manhattan. He would never admit this to his mates back home, but he’s grown to love American street vendors and their hot dogs. He’s on Church Street near the World Trade Center memorials, about ten meters from the entrance to the Cortlandt Street subway station.
He’s eating another hot dog while waiting for his target to show up. He has on blue jeans, black sneakers, and a plain tan jacket. Topping it off is a New York Yankees baseball cap that’s one size too large for his head, allowing him to lower the visor to obscure his face. New York isn’t quite up to London standards when it comes to CCTV, but Freddie still wants to minimize the chances of his recorded image being used anytime soon.
He checks his watch. The target is always on schedule, arriving here at the station from his job at One World Trade Center, give or take ten minutes.
Somewhere underneath him in the station is his temporary boss and the other half of his surveillance team, Portia Grayson of MI5. And for all intents and purposes, that’s it. Running a two-person surveillance is a bloody strange job—a surveillance like this usually takes six or seven folks—but being with Special Branch means taking on all sorts of strange jobs.
There.
Walking through the early commuters heading home, the target approaches the station.
He is Mike Patel, formerly of Manchester, now a worker with a company doing business at the new One World Trade Center.
The target walks quickly and confidently into the station. Freddie polishes off his hot dog, crumples up the napkin, and drops it into an overflowing waste bin as he races across the street.
He doesn’t spare a glance behind him, where the ghost of Tower Two lives in his mind, where his older cousin, Malcolm, worked in American finance—and burned to death back on that dark day.
The station is filthy—no surprise there—but Freddie ignores his surroundings as he follows the target through the turnstiles. Patel goes through and Freddie does the same, two turnstiles down from him, making sure his cap is tugged low.
Patel slowly weaves in and out of the crowd, pausing for a moment behind a steel girder, then stops on the platform and stands still. Freddie pretends to throw something into another overflowing waste bin—really, how hard can it be to empty these bins on a regular basis?—and glances up at the digital readout telling him and a few scores of people that the incoming W line train is only two minutes away.
Freddie waits.
He hears the familiar crackle of a police radioand turns. Coming up the platform are two heavily armed men of the NYPD, wearing helmets, body armor, and cut-down AR-15s slung over their chests. Freddie quickly turns away; he wants to see if Patel has noticed the police—and, if so, is he doing anything.
No, not a thing.
Patel is just staring down at the tracks, waiting, with seemingly not a worry in the world.
Freddie wishes he knew what that was like. Not a worry in the world because among his worries is the fact that not only is he here in Manhattan without an NYPD liaison being aware of his presence, he’s also carrying a small Glock 26 9mm pistol strapped to his ankle—quite illegally, of course.
The train’s headlight appears at the end of the tunnel. With awhooshand a rattling roar, the train pulls into the station and slows to a stop. Patel gets on with the rest of the pushing commuters, and Freddie joins the fray.
Three stops and twenty-one minutes later, Freddie is back out in the open air on 31st Street near Astoria Boulevard, a working-class area of Queens that has the rattling monstrosity of an elevated highway nearby, with lots of immigrants and poor folks, which means Patel fits right in.
En route to this destination—same as the time before, and the time before that, and so forth and so on—Freddie exchanged his Yankees black-and-white cap for an orange-and-blue Mets cap. He also turned his jacket inside out; it’s now a dark blue.
The weather feels better here in this part of Queens, with two- and three-story buildings and the sidewalks bustling with people, and he pauses, reverses course, and continues his tail until Patel goes up the steps of his brick building at the corner of 30th Street and Newtown Avenue. Again, no surprise.
He leans against a utility pole, yawns like he’s just gotten off a twelve-hour shift, and waits just a bit more to see if anyone else goes in. Nope—same as before.
There are small stores up and down this crowded stretch of Queens, from shoe shops to bodegas, and a few blocks away is a mosque. Not once has Patel been seen going into the mosque.
Freddie turns and nearly bumps into the MI5 woman, Portia Grayson, who’s frowning down at him. Portia is much taller than Freddie and probably weighs about the same. Freddie’s farmer granddad would say the woman with the short black hair and skinny face looks like a funny string bean, wearing American gray workout slacks and a dark blue sweatshirt with a faded Epcot seal on the front.
But Portia is not in a funny mood.
“Get walking,” she says. Freddie scratches his chin and starts walking, and five minutes later they’re at a little luncheonette, taking adjoining booths.
The talk is low and in spurts, so others coming and going can’t tell that they know each other.
“You shouldn’t hang around like that,” says Portia in her disapproving voice. “You’ll get spotted.”
“Then get us more bodies out here, so we can do a proper job,” he says.
“We have what we have,” she says. “Stop complaining. Anything out of the ordinary to report?”
“No,” Freddie says. “Came off shift, caught the tube, walked to his grotty little apartment. That’s it.”
