Authors: Andrew Britton

The Operative (28 page)

BOOK: The Operative

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“To where?”

“We don’t know that, either,” Bishop said. “The transponder was shut off, and either it was blown up at sea or some pretty sophisticated technology was apparently employed to erase the image from radar. We’re still looking into that.”

“Who was the agent in on the transfer?”

“Someone from Rendition Group One,” Bishop said. “I tried to contact her. No response. When I called her boss this morning, he told me she was in New York on special assignment. He was not at liberty to reveal its nature. Frankly, I don’t think he knew.”

“You suspect she’s looking for the missing cargo?” Kealey said.

“I hope so.” He didn’t have to add, “Either that, or she’s in on the escape.” “I’ve got a call in to the powers-that-be but they haven’t returned it.”

Kealey considered this. “There’s something a little off,” he said.

“The timing?”

“Yeah.”

Bishop nodded. “Why was she involved before I was informed?”

“Right. I can see that it wasn’t an IA issue, but as a matter of course, they would have wanted a debrief of everyone who was on-site.”

“Ordinarily,” Bishop agreed.

He didn’t have to finish.

“Yet they called you for this,” Kealey said.

“They did. When you think you’ve got a mole or a renegade, who do you go to?”

“Right.” He didn’t have to say it.
You go to someone their actions impacted. Someone who values the takedown more than their own security.
Like Kealey, someone who was hair trigger.

Kealey felt more comfortable with Bishop after that. He wasn’t being critical. What the G-man had said before about Kealey also applied to himself.

“Do they suspect your RG colleague of being involved with what happened in Quebec?” Kealey asked.

“They don’t
not
suspect her,” Bishop said. “That’s one of the things I’m going to have to find out.”

Kealey leaned back into the seat to think about what Bishop had said. He fell asleep instead. The next thing he knew, they were arriving at Penn Station.

CHAPTER 21

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

N
ew York’s Penn Station was a bunker that used to be a palace. When the original station was ripped down and replaced with the new Penn Station and Madison Square Garden—under the theory that commuters would be more inclined to go to events if they were held right above trains to Long Island and New Jersey—the city lost a glorious and majestic landmark. That architectural disaster, in 1963, was one of the triggers for the creation of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The current station was a pair of below-ground hives without character or interest. Since the attacks of 2001, there had been a permanent presence of military reservists there, in addition to the police. Kealey respected their mission, while at the same time seeing hole after hole in the security. It was no different in Washington or at virtually any other train station in the country. Bags went unexamined, were not even spot-checked; tickets to board were glanced at cursorily by conductors as people moved down escalators to the tracks; dozens of shops received deliveries, probably daily, which might not contain bagels or
I HEART NEW YORK
T-shirts or magazines. This, in addition to the fact that tracks were accessible from the outside before trains passed under the Hudson and East Rivers. Kealey guessed that the backgrounds of porters and employees were only superficially examined.

Of course, as the NYPD and Homeland Security knew, applying manpower to what law enforcement called those “open doors” would be a large commitment of resources with low-yield results. The lone bombers, the homegrown terrorists, would invariably find a way to slip through. The cops and soldiers were eyes on-site for aberrant behavior, and that was the best that could be done. Kealey knew what law enforcement also knew: that the al-Qaidas of the world, the real terrorists, were looking to strike in ways that the West hadn’t considered or had not yet faced. That was the unfortunate nature of this war: the only way to catch them was on the intel side, with HUMNIT and ELINT, the people who infiltrated enemy groups or watched their movements from places of concealment, the digital eavesdroppers who listened for cell phone calls and watched computer posts.

It was for all those reasons that Kealey was not entirely surprised by what happened as they left the station.

He and Bishop were booked in rooms across Seventh Avenue, at Hotel Pennsylvania. Scaffolding had been erected along the Thirty-Third Street side of the building, where workers were doing the initial prep work before dismantling the hotel, which was to be replaced by the city’s third largest building.

The sidewalk was jammed with commuters and tourists, some waiting for taxis at the stand to the left, others going to work in the city’s once-thriving garment district. The first muted crack came after a woman had been spun 180 degrees just a few steps in front of Kealey. He had been unaware of her back, her yellow jacket, until she spun with a raw red hole in her forehead and dropped to the sidewalk, on top of her shoulder bag.

A second crack followed a cabbie’s head exploding inside his vehicle as he pulled from the curb. The car, with its screaming occupants, turned into Seventh Avenue and collided with a hollow crunch against several other vehicles.

From the first shot Kealey was on high alert, his instincts registering the attack before his mind had processed it. He pulled Bishop down flat, crouched for a moment, then ran to a trash can several steps ahead. He pulled down a young man in a business suit who was standing beside it; pieces of the man’s heart blew out his back as Kealey acted.

This is for us,
he thought angrily. The cab was to block traffic, but the deaths were to show that the victims could just as easily have been Kealey or Bishop. The gunman was a helluva marksman.

Even though Kealey realized where the sniper was situated, there was nothing he could do about it. Even if he could get to his bag—he’d left it beside Bishop—his handgun didn’t have this kind of range. The shots were from very high up.

Cops were gathering, and as soon as the first two went down, the rest withdrew to the safety of the station to await armored reinforcement.

Kealey knew the gunman would leave before choppers could arrive. He had to get to the hotel. The killer might be expecting that but did not desire it; otherwise, the shots would have been aimed to Kealey’s rear, a signal he should head forward.

Sirens broke through the terrified shrieks and sobs and the honking horns that were all around him. Traffic was trying to maneuver around the disabled taxi, to pull to the curb or down one of the side streets. The police and emergency units were converging from all directions. His ear attuned to them, Kealey heard police radios rasping behind him.

The gunfire had stopped. People were beginning to rise as a terrible calm spread across the scene. They were in pockets behind the concrete walls of Madison Square Garden or behind the newspaper stand or the line of cabs. They were alone, rushing to get back into the station or into the arena.

And then a flurry of awful gunfire cut through them. It came from the same place, from a bolt-action weapon, judging from the delay, a slashing death that took down bodies alternately to the left and right of Kealey.

The gunman was swinging from side to side, sighting and taking down targets in a heartbeat. It was formidable.

Then everything was silent again. Kealey knew the killer was done. He hadn’t had time to get his gun from his bag, but Bishop was ahead of him: he had assumed the former agent was carrying one and had retrieved it. He flipped it over.

Kealey acknowledged this with a hasty salute as he tucked the Glock in his belt. He pulled out his shirt to conceal the weapon so he wouldn’t be shot by police. Then he ran through the now-halted traffic, Bishop close behind.

Yasmin climbed through the window she had broken to reach the scaffolding. She tossed aside the blanket she’d pulled from the bed to conceal herself, sidestepped the occupant—a young flight attendant whose spinal cord she had cut from behind—and stuffed her XM2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifle into a vinyl wardrobe bag. She had already donned the woman’s blouse and skirt while waiting for her audience to arrive from Washington. Cutting the woman’s neck in the back had prevented her from bleeding out on the garments. A deeper cut to get through the sinew and vertebrae, but as soon as the cord was cut, the woman fell, quite lifeless.

Yasmin passed the bed on which she had dropped the key stolen from the housekeeper. The woman lay dead in a hall utility closet, the cheap pen bearing the Hotel Pennsylvania logo that was plucked from her cleaning cart still stuck a good 4 inches into her carotid artery. Less mess would have been ideal, but there just hadn’t been enough time. She glanced at the mirror to muss her hair and assume a look of panic, then grabbed her garment bag and rushed into the hall. Security here was little more than a few cameras, and it didn’t matter if they had captured her likeness. They would know who was responsible for this.

That was the point, she thought—though the thought was not her own. All the young woman had to do was keep from being caught.

She was in the stairwell and on the nineteenth floor before the first police officers reached the room. She was in the lobby and then on the street before the block had been surrounded. She did not see the men whose attention she had been sent to attract. She did not know who they were, only that the spotter in the station had called her cell phone and told her to start.

Yasmin walked over to Broadway to catch a cab headed downtown. She kept the garment bag with her for the ride downtown, instead of putting it in the trunk. She wanted the gun handy, just in case.

The gun and the marble set in a bracelet on her left wrist.

The hotel lobby was jammed with people who had come in from the street. They stood awaiting some kind of instruction, from anyone. Mobs were like that: big, burly, and impotent until someone struck a match.

Kealey knew it was probably safe, but he wasn’t going to be the one to tell them so. Not because he thought they were safer here—they might not be; the gunman could have herded them here to set off a bomb—but because Bishop had a job to do.

“Stay here and look for your cargo,” Kealey said. Bishop had caught up to him as Kealey started weaving through the packed room.

“How certain are you that she’s the one?”

“Call it a strong hunch,” he said. It was a little more than that: the way the line of fire had skipped them during the sweeping barrage was a hallmark of her precision work. “I doubt she’ll come out this way, but we need to be sure.”

Bishop agreed as Kealey literally shoved his way through.

He asked a bellhop for directions and took the stairs. He felt that would be his best chance of running into her, or at least of finding anything she’d discarded. He drew his Glock and held it close to his ribs as he ascended.

Breathless, his legs aching, he reached the twentieth floor and entered the hallway. He had approximated within a floor in either direction that that was where the shots had come from. He was right. Apparently alerted by guests who saw blood seeping from a utility closet, hotel personnel had just discovered the housekeeper’s body.

Kealey stopped and looked around.

“I need the key to that door,” he said to one of the young executives. He was pointing to a door at the end of this section of hallway.

“Is that your—”

“It’s where the sniper was,” Kealey said. “Let me have the key.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for—”

Kealey showed his Glock. “Give me the goddamn key.”

The man obliged. Kealey ran over. He felt the wall to the side of the door. It seemed solid enough. He leaned against it as he swiped the plastic key. The lock clicked. There was no gunfire. Relatively certain she would not be inside, Kealey nudged open the door with his foot. It swung in to reveal the dead flight attendant lying in her underwear on the blood-soaked carpet and the broken window.

“Oh Christ!” someone shouted from behind him.

Kealey shut the door. He didn’t have long before the police arrived, and he didn’t want to answer questions. Still breathing heavily, he looked around the body without disturbing it. Killed from behind, bled out from there. He walked over to the window. It was an old-fashioned type, wood framed, but a lock had been added at the top, so it opened only a crack. Rather than unscrew the little metal piece, she had smashed the window. He looked around. Saw shards on a discarded pillowcase.

With her fist inside that.
He looked out. Large pieces of glass were lying on the scaffolding. She had kicked those out, no doubt.

He took the pillowcase, turned it inside out, crumpled it in a ball, and left the room. The police sirens were screaming from directly below. He tucked the room key in his pocket so he wouldn’t leave prints behind, put the gun back in his belt, and went to the stairs. He ran up to the twenty-first floor and took the elevator down. He did not encounter any police until he reached the lobby. They were directing people to leave by the side doors. The front of the building was a cordoned-off crime scene.

Kealey found Bishop standing on the north side of Thirty-Third Street, watching for him. He had both of their travel bags. Traffic had been stopped on the side street, and Kealey crossed. He cocked his head toward Broadway, and they hooked up as they continued east. The street was a wall of stalled traffic and people either flowing west or staring east. Heads had emerged from windows to look at the carnage. Kealey glanced back. The police were already out on the scaffolding.

“She was in the room of a flight attendant, probably picked her out in the lobby and followed her,” Kealey told Bishop. “Killed a maid to gain entrance, then took the flight attendant’s clothes to get out.”

“So we’re looking for a—”

“No,” Kealey said. “She’d stay in the uniform only for as long as it took to get away from the hotel. And then only for a short subway or probably cab ride. She knows the cops will be looking for a flight attendant.”

“Right.”

“What’s more significant is that our killer had an accomplice on the ground,” Kealey asserted.

“How do you know?”

BOOK: The Operative

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