The Operative (26 page)

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Authors: Andrew Britton

BOOK: The Operative
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“Of course,” the president said. He looked at Kealey. “I’m not interested in whatever was behind this little flare-up. We have a situation, and we need results. You’re the man to bring us those results. Are you on board with that?”
“Very.” The former agent had gotten to his feet as Andrews was speaking.
“Then thank you again,” the President said, “and please keep Bob in the loop.”
“I will, and thank you, Mr. President,” Kealey said without looking at Cluzot.
“Let us know if there are any names or resources you need, Mr. Kealey,” the FBI director said to his back.
That was as good and sincere a send-off as Kealey was going to get. He left the Oval Office ahead of Andrews’s extended arm.
They walked down the hallway that took them past the outside wall of the study toward the reception area. Tired staff, fewer than in the daytime—but not by much—moved between doorways that ended with the office of the chief of staff. His own door was opened as aides came and went, helping him to coordinate the intelligence briefings that would be presented to the president prior to his meeting with Admiral Breen.
“Still can’t play along,” Andrews said quietly as they made their way along the narrow hallway.
“I hate that goddamn sandbox.”
“No. Really?”
“Anyway, Cluzot will survive,” Kealey said.
“Not the point,” Andrews said. “His organization is the one that got blindsided and humped. You could’ve cut him slack.”
Kealey stopped. “And I’m the guy going up there to
be
humped. He could have been up front about that. You already made the point that I was accepting the assignment—for which push, thank you very much, by the way.”
“Again, beside the point. You know the way the totem is stacked, and you know how the game is played.”
“Yeah,” Kealey said. “You done?”
“I think so.”
The men continued walking. Whether Kealey liked it or not, Andrews would apologize for his snippiness when he went back to the Oval Office. For his own self-respect, Kealey decided to make it “or not.”
“You need a ride?” Andrews asked.
“No thanks.”
“I’ll have Mei make the arrangements. She’ll e-mail the itinerary. Figure on a six a.m. flight.”
“Figuring away,” Kealey said. “Only book me on the Acela. The train is less hassle with more legroom. And it’ll give me time to prep.”
“Okay.”
They stopped at the exit. Andrews didn’t look happy, but he wasn’t angry, either. “It’s been a long day for everyone,” he said. “And all of the bullshit aside, what you did in Baltimore was exemplary.”
“I know you mean it,” Kealey said. “That’s a commendation-level word.”
Andrews showed a little smile. “Honestly, Ryan? I don’t know how you lasted as long as you did.”
“My exemplary deeds.” He grinned back. He sighed. “I’m tired, Bob. Not just of the work and the egos, but of the responsibility.”
“I hear you.”
“And the pain, always up close and too personal,” he added. “I went to see Jon.”
“Shit. I meant to call—”
“It’s okay. He’s pretty out of it. Julie’s facing a couple of surgeries. There was no word on any of them.”
“Thanks for doing that,” Andrews said. “And for going along with this. It’s a little seat of the pants for my taste.”
“That’s okay,” Kealey said, his smile broadening as he turned to go past the guard. “It’s what I do.”
CHAPTER 19
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
T
he “Canyon of Heroes” is the short section of Broadway that runs from city hall to Bowling Green, located just a few blocks from the bottom of Manhattan. It is the traditional site of the city’s ticker-tape parades, which are staged to honor national and international heroes. Plaques set in the sidewalks commemorate the names and dates of each parade.
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, there was another kind of hero at the midpoint of the parade route. Stationed near historic Trinity Church, where the likes of inventor Robert Fulton and founding father Alexander Hamilton were interred, a unit of police officers stood beside steel barricades erected on the east side of Broadway. Their job was to pull over and examine any vehicles—typically vans and U-Hauls—which they deemed to be suspicious. Stopping a van or truck loaded with explosives, of course, would cause the driver to trigger the device prematurely, killing them. But the police stopped the vehicles just the same, as part of their oath to preserve and protect.
The Trask Industries van was pulled over as it rolled down Broadway. A name was easy enough to fake, so the Atlanta tags would have to be checked along with the contents.
Police sergeant Dario Russo approached the driver’s side. It was a warm morning, and the van’s window was already down. There were two men inside, both African American. They looked hot and tired.
“Good morning,” the fifteen-year veteran said to the driver. “May I have your registration and manifest please?”
“Sure thing, Officer.”
The driver, a powerfully built man in his late forties with short gray hair, pulled the documents from a folder in the glove compartment and handed them over. The other man, in his early forties, was in the passenger’s seat.
“You’re not running the air-conditioning,” the officer observed.
“We’re from Atlanta, sir,” the driver said with a smile. “This weather is what we call cool cucumbers.”
“I see. Would you open the rear of the vehicle please?” the officer asked humorlessly as he scanned the papers.
The driver got out and followed the sergeant. He was met by another officer in the rear, a young man whose name tag said HEMMINGS.
“Good morning,” the driver said.
“Good morning,” the young policeman said back.
The driver selected the key from a ring in his pocket and opened the back door. Sergeant Russo handed the bill of lading to his companion and took the registration to the squad car that was parked just outside the barricade.
“Most of these are going to our HQ,” the officer said, mildly surprised and slightly more alert.
“Two blocks down.”
“You’ve made the run before?”
“Just once,” the driver said. “Last winter. After a snowstorm. But the tech upgrades had to get through.”
“We appreciate it.”
“Enough to let me stay parked here so I can just walk the stuff over?” the driver joked. “Those side streets are a bear.”
“Sorry,” Hemmings replied.
The officer leaned in and checked the marked contents against the bill of lading. The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Division was located in a secure block of office buildings, in a modern skyscraper. The bill of lading said the boxes were upgraded radiation detectors for the technology and construction section. That was the division responsible for the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. Routes to the Wall Street area were already watched by streetlight-mounted boxes of technology designed to prevent even a well-shielded dirty bomb from being brought in. They were programmed to watch for radiation, as well, as the chemical signatures of containers in which radiological devices would be stored.
Everything looked to be in order. It was impossible to dismantle all the contents of every vehicle, but officers used the quick check—as well as common sense and profiling—to ascertain whether cargo represented a plausible threat.
The driver seemed relaxed. His accent seemed to fit where he said he was from. The van’s license checked out; the cargo looked right.
The vehicle was allowed to go on its way.
 
Contrary to his concerns, Absalom “Abbie” Bell found a parking spot on Exchange Plaza, a side street that bordered 55 Broadway, the police building. Two workers were sent down with dollies to accept the packages. A third came along to supervise. That left Bell with nothing to do. He offered to accompany his “copilot,” John Scroggins, on his delivery.
“Why don’t you get us some lunch instead?” Scroggins suggested.
“You ate in New Jersey.”
“And I intend to eat again when we get out of this maze. Might as well have some decent food, instead of rest-stop junk. All the Pennsylvania roadside is bad, and it only gets worse as we head west.”
Bell agreed that was a decent idea.
While Bell set out toward Broadway in search of something that didn’t sound like a chain, Scroggins took his own dolly from the forward section of the van and loaded it with a pair of crates that had been tucked beneath a canvas tarp. The other men were too busy to pay him any attention.
Scroggins easily off-loaded the crates one at a time, banded them to the dolly, and walked it west, to Trinity Place. It was amazing how the dolly seemed to have a will of its own due to the sloping, lopsided streets. They had seemed to the eye to be fairly level.
Just like people,
he thought and chuckled to himself as he looked at the people heading to work.
You never know what’s inside
.
His eye caught the reflective glass of One World Trade to his right, the titan rising from the long-gone ruins of the World Trade Center. The tallest skyscraper in the hemisphere was a beautiful sight, its reflective glass skin aglow in the morning sun. He paused to take a cell phone picture. That site, too, seemed so level and firm. Looking at it, there was no way to know the trauma that probably still resonated in the granite below and the buildings all around it. Scroggins was looking forward to getting a better look at the site as they drove by on their way up the West Side as they started home. He only wished there were time to visit the memorial and museum. But staff drivers for Trask were constantly on the move, rarely having time to visit their families, let alone tour cities they visited.
He continued along Trinity to Battery Place and made a right. The wind from the harbor carried the smell of the Atlantic Ocean. He drew it deep into his lungs and smiled. You just didn’t get that in Atlanta or New Mexico or Chicago or Colorado or any of the other places they drove. In the park, to his left, was
The Sphere,
the large metal globe that once stood in the plaza between the World Trade Center towers. Though dented and torn, the Fritz Koenig sculpture was still readily identifiable. It choked Scroggins up to see it there, standing behind an eternal flame that had been lit on the first anniversary of the attacks, tourists pausing to pay their respects or marvel at something that had survived the destruction.
He continued west until he reached his destination. Arriving before the century-old white stone building, he stopped, pulled out his cell phone, and called a number he had been given.
“Dr. Gillani?”
“It is.”
“John Scroggins from Trask Industries,” he told her. “I have a pair of crates for you.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I will send someone.”
“Yes, ma’am. His name will be?”
“Excuse me?”
“For security. Who am I meeting?”
“Oh. Chuck Lancaster.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Scroggins folded away the phone and stood in the warm sunshine. It had been a long, nonstop drive, and as always, it felt good to have arrived. He felt as though he and Bell had earned their pay. Their coworkers at Trask did not refer to what he did as blue collar. So many of them were software geeks that they described his work as “analog labor.” He actually liked the sound of that. It was like LPs and movie film. He liked them, too. They were old but real.
He was thinking that thought just as his eyes wandered across the park to the harbor, where they settled on the Statue of Liberty. She had been whited out by the storm the last time they were here. It had been over twenty years since he’d seen the old analog girl.
“Nice to see you’re still here,” he said from the heart. He took another picture to show his wife. Eva had never been out of Georgia. If he was analog, she was just ... log. Like a native who loved her ancient village and didn’t see any good reason to leave it. She said she was happy to live through him.
“Mr. Scroggins?”
The deliveryman turned as a burly man in a white lab coat came down the front steps.
“That’s me,” Scroggins said.
“I’m Chuck Lancaster,” the man said, flipping out a college ID.
“Yes, you are,” Scroggins said with a smile.
The young man showed him to the small service elevator just to the west of the door. They loaded the crates together.
“Not as heavy as they look,” Scroggins said.
The man in the white coat was silent. Years of sitting in a truck cab had made Scroggins comfortable with not talking. But that wasn’t the same as being antisocial. Scroggins believed in always making an effort.
“Some kind of equipment, but you’d never guess it,” the deliveryman said amiably. “Most of that stuff is transistorized and microchipped. Not like the brutes I used to handle for TI.”
“I’ll take it from here,” the big man said.
So that’s how it is gonna be,
Scroggins thought.
Okay. You tried
.
“Great. All you need to do is sign, please.” Scroggins took an electronic device from a loop on his belt. He held it out.
The man looked down at the tiny screen. “What do I do?”
“Thumbprint anywhere on the monitor,” Scroggins said. “That way, if it doesn’t get where it’s supposed to, we know who to look for.”
He had said it as a joke, but he wasn’t kidding. The other man didn’t laugh. He just pressed his thumb to the screen, immediately heard a little chime, and stood next to a metal door, the service elevator access.
Ten minutes later, after Scroggins used his Minotaur phone to text his progress to dispatch—and received the go-ahead to proceed—he and Bell were back on the road, heading north past the World Trade Center site. Scroggins got only a glimpse as they swiftly headed uptown while the heavy commuter traffic crawled downtown to his left. The west side of the great tower, away from the sun, was comparatively dark and silent. It looked like a monument making the site seem mute and sacred. It choked him up, and he had to look away.
The drivers were actually saner here than they were in Atlanta. He looked forward to being away from all that. They were headed west now, to New Mexico. Neither he nor Bell had been told why. Presumably to pick something up, since the van was empty. It didn’t matter to him. They had a couple thousand miles of open road, his iPod was loaded with Dixieland jazz, and a generous expense account had been allotted for food and lodging. Because the van was empty, they wouldn’t actually have to sleep in it, as they did on many trips.
Scroggins was still reflecting on the things he’d just seen, on how cooperative and accommodating the police had been. Not so much that Chuck Lancaster, but he was young. He wouldn’t have remembered. A lot of people said that it was 2001 that changed New Yorkers, made them more aware of their surroundings but also of their neighbors. Maybe that was true, the same way that his father said World War II brought everyone together.
“Especially when they realized that Coloreds could fight for our country as well as everyone else,” Pop had said.
John Scroggins found it sad that brotherhood should come at such a price. Though it was a good thing to have, he mouthed a little prayer that nothing like those tragedies happened again.
 
Chuck Lancaster did not go immediately to the penthouse. He went to the parking garage, where he loaded one of the crates in the trunk of a beaten-up 2005 BMW. There was a rusted dolly already in the trunk. He had to shuffle the latter around to make room. It was not a car anyone was likely to steal. Even if they wanted to, the spark plugs had been removed. They were upstairs and would be restored at the proper time.
As soon as the crate was loaded, the man went back to the elevator and took the other crate to the penthouse. He was still thinking about his thumbprint and understood why the doc had made sure he did not have a criminal record before hiring him. She wouldn’t want an ex-con signing for equipment being used for experiments in mind control.
Not that an ex-con would know what to
do
with that equipment,
the big man thought. He was an undergraduate psych student at Columbia. He had been working with Dr. Gillani for three months, watching her and Dr. Samson with intense interest, and he still didn’t know what to do with it.
But he was learning. That was why he worked here. He hoped he would be able to continue when the semester started again. Dr. Gillani had said the crate he had just off-loaded was going to a new facility up the river. If it wasn’t too far out of town, he would still be able to commute from the university.

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