Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (15 page)

I double-clicked it from safe to full auto and flung the door open. Wet mud sucked at my knees as I rolled beside the car into a prone shooting position.

The men, who must have finally seen the car, stopped suddenly halfway down the hill.

My heart bashing a hole in my chest, I managed to sight on the first man as I yelled, “Police! Down! All of you! Now!”

They looked at each other, then started whispering as they stayed on their feet. One of them was taller than the other two, I saw. Was it al Gharsi? Damn it, what were they doing? Did they have guns? Suicide vests? I wondered.

They definitely weren’t listening. I decided I needed to change that.

The silence of the night shattered into a million pieces as I went ahead and squeezed off a long burst of about a dozen or so .223 rounds up the hill. Wood splinters and leaves flew as I raked lead all over the trees and forest floor in front of them.

“We give up! Please don’t shoot!” one of them said as all three of them dropped into the fetal position.

I stood with the gun to my shoulder and my finger still on the trigger as I heard the sweet sound of the first trooper car screaming up the gravel road.

“THIS IS TOTAL
bullshit! This is racism! I know my rights. How dare you shoot at me on my own property?” said the large and broad-shouldered al Gharsi as he glared hatefully at me in the back of his crumbling farmhouse a tense twenty minutes later.

“Hey, I’m not the daring one, Al,” I said, kicking a cardboard box of double-aught shotgun shells across his dirty, scuffed floor. “Running a jihadist camp in New York State sixty miles from Ground Zero? Talk about chutzpah.”

And talk about living off the grid, I thought, shaking my head at the surroundings. The house was barely habitable. There was no phone, and what little electricity there was, was provided by a small propane generator. I couldn’t decide which part of the decor was more charming—the little room off the kitchen, where a roughly butchered deer lay on a homemade plywood table, or the upstairs bedrooms, where Arabic graffiti covered the walls above sleeping bags.

Handcuffed behind his back, al Gharsi shifted uncomfortably on a ratty, faded orange couch, where he sat bookended by two standing FBI commandos. The only other furniture was a massive green metal gun locker in a far corner and twelve pale immaculate prayer mats set in a disturbingly precise four-by-three rectangle in the center of the room.

The locker had kicked out some good news for a change. Several of the semiautomatic AK-47s inside had been illegally converted to fully automatic. A felony federal weapons violation would be a good start at gaining some leverage to find out just what in the hell was going on.

“This is not a jihadist camp,” al Gharsi said through yellow gritted teeth. “We are woodsmen, hunters.”

“Woodsmen,” I said with a laugh. “I guess that Arabic on the walls up there says, ‘Give a hoot, don’t pollute.’ You’re not woodsmen, but I’ll concede that you are hunters. It’s
what
you’re hunting that’s the problem.”

I walked behind al Gharsi and took the photographs Emily was holding. The black-and-white blown-up stills showed the two men from the subway tunnel bombing.

“Who are they?” I said, flapping the photographs in front of al Gharsi’s face.

He shrugged as he studiously refused to look at them.

“Who are they?” I said again, patiently.

“Wait. I know them. Yes,” he said, nodding, as he finally glanced at the pictures. “The one on the left, his name is…let’s see…Fuck. That’s it. His name is Fuck, and the one on the right is…um…You, I believe. There they are together, Fuck and You, my dear old friends.”

“That’s pretty good, Al. Your delivery needs a little work, but it’s almost happily surprising to see that you have any sense of humor at all.”

That’s when I walked behind him again and took a document and another picture from Emily. I showed him the PayPal stuff along with a photo of him sending funds from the nearby library.

“Last Thursday at three o’clock, you sent money to these two different accounts. I want to know why.”

“What?” he said, peering at the photo.

“You sent money. Why?”

There was a glimmer of something in his face then. Recognition, definitely. Then a little confusion. Then his mask of impertinence was back. After a moment, he gave me a cold yellow smile.

“I want my lawyer,” he said.

I smiled back.

“Don’t worry, Al. A lawyer will be provided for you. That’s what makes our country so great, you see. Free lawyers, stuff like that. Maybe one day you might want to ask yourself why you want to wreck it so badly.”

He started laughing then.

“More amusement, Al?” I said. “I got you all wrong. You’re just a big teddy bear, aren’t you?”

“You’re here about the attacks,” he said. “The mayor, the bombing, the EMP.”

“Why, yes,” I said. “Have you heard anything about these things, by chance?”

“No,” al Gharsi said calmly. “But I must admit, I am quite a fan of whoever is so brilliantly attacking New York City and bringing this corrupt-to-the-core Great Satan to its knees.”

Al started chuckling again.

“You think I have something to do with it. Me! You come up here with your helicopters and men kicking in the door. But you are clueless. You are losing. You are flailing. You don’t even know which direction to duck. Allah willing, you are about to be defeated, I think.”

A minute later, I left the living room and followed Emily out of the house and onto the back porch.

In the farmyard’s sole electric light, thirty yards to the south, some shoeless middle-school-age kids, al Gharsi’s, probably, were kicking a basketball around as troopers interviewed blackclad, burka-wearing aunts and mothers. I wished suddenly that I were home with my own kids.

“What do you think?” I said to Emily.

“I think what you think,” Emily said. “I think we just dug ourselves another dry hole.”

SIXTY-FIVE MILES
due south, between the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, three glowing windows stood out sharply on the top floor of the Pratt Institute’s otherwise dark North Hall building.

On the other side of the translucent window shades was a large, white-walled lab space that was the showpiece of Pratt’s brand-new robotics facility. At its center, a young man and two young women sat at the largest of the stainless steel lab tables, side by side, working busily.

They had an assembly line going. Aaron started off with the brushless motor controller and flywheel and the flywheel’s braking mechanism. Gia, who had a light touch with the soldering iron, fit in the tiny electronics board and the radio receiver, while Shui popped in rolling-pin-like magnets and put additional magnets onto the face of the small, square white plastic panels.

The finished product was a white-and-silver cube about the size of a quarter. It looked innocuous enough, like a tiny futuristic children’s block.

But these definitely were not Junior’s LEGOs, Shui thought as she clicked on the mini robot’s test software on the iPad.

Immediately there was a whirring sound as the computer-initiated radio signal activated the bot’s interior flywheel. When the computer-dictated amount of RPMs were reached, the flywheel halted suddenly, catapulting the bot across the table. Another whir and flip, and the bot snapped into position onto the end of a line of six minibots that were already arranged in a straight row.

Then, with another click on the iPad, the magic really began as the tiny minibots started leapfrogging each other, moving steadily across the table just as a half-track would roll over a tank. Shui knew she was supposed to place the bots carefully into a foam-lined box at the end of the counter, but the boss wasn’t around, was he? One by one, she made the minibots whir and flip into the box.

“Ah, my aching wrists!” said Gia, a 4.0 junior, as she removed her magnifying goggles. “There has to be a labor law against this. How long have we been at it? Ten hours now? I feel like one of those kids in India forced to hand-roll cigarettes. I mean, I really think I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”

“Now, now. Time is money. We’re not getting paid by the hour but by the minibot, remember? Keep rowing the slave boat so Aaron the Baron here can score himself some nice front-row seats at Coachella,” Aaron said, snapping components together and flicking them toward Gia as though they were lunch-table footballs.

“No one is going to get paid a dime if these bots are damaged, damn it,” said Dr. Seth Keshet as he stormed in.

Fresh from running the world-renowned PhD program at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, tall, dark, and cocky Keshet was one of the top three people in the world in digital topology. But with his meticulously tailored casual suits and visible chest hair, he acted more like a scuzzy Eurotrash club lizard than a famous scientist.

“How many?” he wanted to know.

“A hundred and eleven,” said Aaron.

“I need another hundred.”

“Another hundred? We’ve been hitting it since three this afternoon. By when?”

“Six a.m.”

“Six? You’re effing kidding me. We’ve been going ten hours now.”

“Stop whining. We’re on a deadline,” the doctor said, checking his Patek Philippe. “That’s why I pay you the big bucks.”

Aaron pondered this for a moment with a thoroughly depressed look on his face. Then he finally stood.

“I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m done,” he said. “You keep your fifty a bot. I can’t take it anymore. I’m done. Total toast. I’m going to drop right here.”

“Exactly, Seth,” said Shui, with an uncharacteristic defiance in her voice. “We’re not bots, we’re humans. You seem to have lost sight of that.”

“Okay, okay,” the professor said, changing his tune instantly from demanding to charming. “Sorry for being such an ass. I’m under a lot of pressure. I’ll double your pay for tonight. A hundred a bot, but only if you finish.”

Aaron looked at him and blew out a breath.

“Fine,” he said. “But we’re going to need more pizza.”

“And Red Bull,” said Gia.

“As you wish, my children. Daddy will go get the refreshments,” said Keshet as he left the lab.

His iPhone jingled as he hit the school building’s concrete stairwell.

How are we looking? the client had texted.

We’re on target, Mr. Joyce. No worries. Everything will be ready by six as you said, Keshet texted back.

THE SUN BROKE
over the top of the trees on the High Line in Chelsea as a dingy white van with the words
HARRISON BROS PLUMBING
on its side pulled to a stop on West 27th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues.

As the van idled, a waiflike man-child in a designer business suit biked past over the side street’s half-lit, worn pavement. Then a whistling homeless man followed, towing a dirty white leather PING golf bag piled with jingling empties.

Once the men had passed, Mr. Beckett opened the rear door of the van and stepped out onto the street dressed like a plumber.

With the minibots secured, he was there to retrieve the last item on their shopping list. And it was, as the Americans said, quite a doozy.

The plumber’s getup was probably a little overkill, he thought. But his image had to be in the hands of the authorities by now, so every caution was most prudent, he knew, as he hit the buzzer of a familiar faded brick tenement building on the street’s north side.

Upstairs, Senturk, the bodyguard, was already standing in the open doorway at the end of the second-floor corridor. He wore gray slacks and nice Italian shoes and a white silk dress shirt that was just a little too tight for his soda machine of a torso.

Mr. Beckett felt a rare bead of sweat roll down his back as the green-eyed, muscular Turk wanded him with the metal detector. He knew the man had been in the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati back when the Turkish version of the CIA had been run by the brutal military. Since then, he had been a bodyguard for Middle Eastern billionaire businessmen and sultans and was a hard man of legendary reputation.

Senturk led him in through a door into the back. The rest of the building was a rotten, dusty dump, but back here, it had been transformed into a posh loft. It was the size of an indoor basketball court, with fabric wallpaper and million-dollar lighting and massive modern paintings on the walls.

Ahmed Dzurdzuk, the young man Mr. Beckett had come to see, was sitting behind an impressive, shining chrome desk that looked like it had been made out of a World War II airplane wing. Dzurdzuk didn’t bother looking up from whatever he was doing on his iMac as Mr. Beckett sat in the midcentury modern chair in front of the desk.

Mr. Beckett sighed silently at this disrespect. These kids today. He’d been doing business with the psychopathic Chechen crook for the last year. The least he could do was acknowledge Mr. Beckett’s existence, but alas, no.

Many people were afraid of the twenty-five-year-old, but Mr. Beckett—not only an experienced connoisseur of dangerous people but also a dangerous person himself—did not fall into that category.

Senturk was a problem, without question, but Ahmed was sloppy, often high, and always distracted.

He could, to borrow an expression from an American book he had once read, swallow the slight, girlish fop with a glass of water.

“Ahmed? Yoo-hoo,” Mr. Beckett finally said after a long two minutes.

“Well, my friend, what brings you by for a face-to-face? You miss me? Ha-ha…of course you do. We still have some of that beautiful new Ecstasy from Denmark. Plenty of it. All you want,” Ahmed said.

Mr. Beckett glanced to his left at Senturk standing back by the inside of the interior door, just out of earshot. Good. He slowly crossed a leg as he leaned back in his chair.

“The Ecstasy was excellent, but I don’t need that. I need what we spoke of on the phone, Ahmed. Remember that item I ordered about three months ago?”