Tick Tock (3 page)

“We already deactivated the device. Actually, we didn’t have to. It wasn’t meant to go off. Here, I’ll show you.”

I reluctantly followed him into the cavernous reading room. The space resembled a ballroom and was even more impressive than the entry hall, with its massive arched windows, chandeliers, and nineteenth-century indoor football field of books. The last library table in the northern end zone of the elaborate room was covered by a thick orange Kevlar bomb-suppression blanket. I felt my pulse triple and my hands clench involuntarily as Cell lifted it off.

In the center of the table was what looked like a silver
laptop. Then I saw the nails and wires and claylike plastique explosive where the keyboard should have been, and shivered.

On the screen, the chilling and redundant words
I AM A BOMB
flashed on and off before the scrolling message:

“This guy has style,” Cell said, looking almost admiringly at the bomb. “It’s basically like a Claymore mine. Two K’s of plastique behind all these nails, one huge mother of a shotgun shell. All wired to a nifty motion-sensitive mercury switch, only the second one I’ve ever seen. He even glued it to the desk so someone would have to open it and spill the mercury.”

“How… interactive of him,” I said, shaking my head.

By far, my least favorite part of the message was the ominous reference to the next one. I was afraid of that. It looked like somebody wanted to play a little game with the NYPD. Considering I was on vacation, unless it was beach ball, I really wasn’t that interested in games.

“He used a real light touch with a soldering gun to wire it up to the battery. He must know computers as well, because even though the hard drive is missing, he was able to program his little greeting card through the computer’s firmware internal operating system.”

“Why didn’t it go off?” I said.

“He cut one of the wires and capped both ends in order for it
not
to go off, thank God. Security guy said the room was packed, like it is every Saturday. This would have killed a dozen people easily, Mike. Maybe two dozen. The blast wave itself from this much plastique could collapse a house.”

We stared silently at the scrolling message.

“It almost sounds like a poem, doesn’t it?” Cell said.

“Yeah,” I said, taking out my BlackBerry and speed-dialing my boss. “I’ve even seen the style before. It’s called psychotic pentameter.”

“Tell me what we got, Mike,” Miriam said a moment later.

“Miriam,” I said, staring at the flashing
I AM A BOMB
. “What we got here is a problem.”

THE ALEXANDER HOTEL just off Madison on 44th was understaffed, overpriced, and excessively seedy. All the grim, peeling walls, off-white towels, and pot smoke and piss stench $175 a night could buy.

Sitting cross-legged on the desk that he’d moved in front of his top-floor room’s window, Berger slowly panned his camera across the columns and entablatures of the landmark marble library seventeen stories below.

The $11,000 Nikkor super-zoom lens attached to his 35-millimeter digital camera could make faces distinguishable at up to a mile. At a block and a half, with the incredibly vivid magnification, Berger could see the sweat droplets on the first responders’ nervous faces.

Beside him on the desk was a laptop, a digital stopwatch, and a legal tablet filled with the neat shorthand notes he’d been taking for the past several hours. Evacuation procedures. Response times. He’d left the window
open so that he could hear the sirens, immerse himself in the confusion on the street.

He was meticulously photographing the equipment inside the open back door of the Bomb Squad van when someone knocked on the door. Freaking, Berger swung immediately off the desk. He lifted something off the bed as he passed. It was a futuristic-looking Austrian Steyr AUG submachine gun, all thirty 5.56 NATO rounds already cocked, locked, and ready to rock.

“Yes?” Berger said as he lifted the assault rifle to his shoulder.

“Room service. The coffee you ordered, sir,” said a voice behind the door.

No way anyone could be onto him this quickly! Had someone in another window seen him? What the hell was this? He leveled the machine gun’s long suppressed barrel center mass on the door.

“I didn’t order anything,” Berger said.

“No?” the voice said. There was a pause. A long one. In his mind, Berger saw a SWAT cop in a ski mask applying a breaching charge on the door. Berger eyed down the barrel, muscles bunching on his wiry forearms, finger hovering over the trigger, heart stopped, waiting.

“Oh, shit—er, I mean, sugar,” the hotel worker said finally. “My mistake. It’s an eleven, not a seventeen. So sorry, sir. I can’t read my own handwriting. Sorry to have bothered you.”

More than you’ll ever know, Berger thought, rubbing
the tension out of the bridge of his nose. He waited until he heard the double roll of the elevator door down the outside hall before he lowered the gunstock off his shoulder.

A man was standing talking to the Bomb Squad chief down on the library’s pavilion when Berger arrived back to the zoom lens. After clicking a close-up shot with the camera, he smiled as he examined the looming face on the screen.

It was him. Finally. Detective Michael Bennett. New York’s quote unquote finest had arrived at last.

The feeling of satisfaction that hummed through Berger was almost the same as the psychic glee he got when he’d perfectly anticipated a countermove in a game of chess.

Berger grinned as he squinted through the viewfinder, watching Bennett. He knew all about him, his high-profile NYPD career, his
Oprah
-ready family. Berger shot a glance over at the rifle on the bed. From this distance, he could easily put a tight grouping into the cop with the suppressed rifle. Blow him to pieces, splatter them all over the marble columns and steps.

Wouldn’t that stir the pot? Berger thought, taking his eyes off the gun. All in due time. Stick to the plan. Stay with the mission.

“Stay tuned, my friends,” Berger said, allowing himself a brief smile as he clicked another shot of the clueless cops. “There’s much more where this came from. In Lawrence’s honor.”

I DIDN’T HAVE A CARE in the world as I fought the Saturday-night gridlock on the BQE back to Breezy Point. No, wait a second. That’s what I was wishing were true. My real mood was closer to depressed and deeply disturbed after my face time with the sophisticated booby-trapped bomb and cryptic e-note.

Cell and his crew had ended up cutting off the entire library tabletop to transport the bomb out to their range in the Bronx. A quick call to Midtown North revealed that no one in the library or its staff had noticed anyone or anything particularly out of the ordinary.

With the absence of security cameras at the location, we were left with basically nada, except for one extremely sophisticated improvised explosive device and a seemingly violent nut’s promise to deliver more. To add insult to injury, a briefing about the incident had been called for the morning down at One Police Plaza, my presence required.

I hate seemingly violent nuts, I thought as I got on the Belt Parkway. Especially ones who really seem to know what they’re doing.

Even though it was ten and way past everyone’s bedtime, all the windows of the beach house were lit as I parked the SUV and came up our sandy path. I could hear my kids inside laughing as Seamus held court. It sounded like a game of Pictionary, the old codger’s favorite. He was a born ham.

I went around back and grabbed a couple of beers to wind down with on the porch. When I came back, I spotted a good-looking blonde sitting on the steps.

Hey, wait a second, I thought after my double-take. That’s not just a good-looking blonde, that’s my au pair, Mary Catherine.

“Psst,” I called to her, waving the Spatens temptingly from the shadows. “Come on. Run before someone sees.”

We crossed the two blocks to the beach and walked out on the dunes, drinking, taking our time. We made a left and headed north toward a firemen’s bar nearby called the Sugar Bowl that we’d been to a couple of nights after the kids had gone to sleep.

If you haven’t guessed by now, my relationship with Mary Catherine was more than merely professional. Not
that
much more, but who knew where it was heading? Not me, that was for sure. Mary Catherine was a nice-looking female. I, of course, was a handsome gentleman. We were both hetero. Add vacation and cramped quarters,
and trouble was bound to happen. At least, that’s what I was kind of hoping.

“How’s the thesis coming?” I said as we walked along the beach.

In addition to being the Bennett nanny, Mary Catherine had an art history degree from Trinity College in Dublin and was now in the midst of getting her master’s from Columbia. Which made her as smart and sophisticated as she was pretty and kind. She was truly a special person. Why she insisted on hanging around all of us remained a mystery that even I hadn’t been able to crack.

“Slowly,” she said.

“What’s the summer course again?”

“Architectural history,” she said.

I drew a massive blank. Dead air.

“How about those Yanks?” I tried.

As we approached the loud, crowded bar, Mary Catherine stopped.

“Let’s keep going, Mike. It’s so nice out,” she said, hooking a right and walking across some more dunes and sea grass down toward the Atlantic.

I liked the sound of that. No dead air this time.

“If you insist,” I said.

We were strolling beside the rumbling waves at the shoreline when she dropped her beer. We went to grab it at the same time and bonked heads as the surf splattered around our ankles.

“Are you okay?” I said, holding her by her shoulders.
We were so close our chins were almost touching. For one delicious second, we looked into each other’s eyes.

That’s when she kissed me. Softly, sweetly. I put my arms around her waist and pulled her toward me. She was lighter than I thought she would be, softer, so delicate. After a minute as we continued to slowly kiss, I felt her warm hands tremble against the back of my neck.

“Are you okay, Mary?” I whispered. “Are you cold?”

“Wait. Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I’m sorry, Mike,” she said, suddenly breaking away.

In the faint light from the bar’s neon signs, I watched her cross the beach at a fast walk that turned into a jog. Rooted to the wet sand, feeling about fifteen emotions at once, I noticed my hands were also trembling a little now. She passed the bar at a sprint, heading back toward the house.

“Sorry?” I said to myself as I rubbed my hot and sore head by the water. “That’s the best thing to happen to me all day. Maybe even all year.”

AFTER THAT CASANOVA MOMENT, instead of heading straight home, I decided to stop in at the Sugar Bowl to apply something cold to my wounded—What? Heart? Ego? I couldn’t decide. I sipped a crisp Heineken as I watched the Mets lose to the Cubs at Citi Field. It seemed like there was an epidemic of striking out all over Queens tonight.

As I drowned my sorrows, I thought about what had just happened between me and Mary C. Or to be more precise, I lamented what hadn’t happened.

Because I had to admit, it had been a nice kiss. Tender and sweet and surprisingly sensual. I definitely would have liked to stay down there along the water line with her, perhaps reconstructing an outer-borough version of that famous beach make-out scene in
From Here to Eternity
. Instead, she’d run like it was a scene from
Jaws
.

“Hey, you’re cute,” said a young dark-haired woman
next to the pool table as I was coming out of the men’s room five minutes later.

I stopped in my tracks and took in the attractive thirty-something’s barely-there tank and tight shorts, her slightly drunk-looking cute face, the Tinker Bell tattoo on her left ankle. I couldn’t remember the last time a tipsy young woman with a Disney tattoo had hit on me. Probably because it had never happened before. My summer hookup radar was going like gangbusters. Maybe the night wasn’t such a bust after all.

But before I could come up with a snappy, charming response, the text jingle sounded from my cell.

I glanced at it. It was from Mary Catherine. Of course it was. Now she wants to connect? I thought, thumbing the message open.

Sorry I freaked on you, Mike. Putting the kids to bed. Left the back door open.

“The kids?” Tinker Bell said, reading my BlackBerry smartphone over my shoulder. “Where’s your wedding ring? In your back pocket? Get a life, creep.”

I opened my mouth to explain myself but then closed it as I realized Tinker Bell actually was right. What was I doing? I wasn’t some barhopping kid anymore. I definitely wasn’t Peter Pan. I was more like the old lady who lived in a shoe. Someone had to be the grown-up, and unfortunately that someone was me.

I dropped a five on the bar on my way out.

I came in through the cottage’s back door ten minutes
later. I tiptoed through what we called “the dorm,” the big, rambling family room where all the boys slept on pull-out couches and air mattresses. They were all asleep, sunburned, exhausted, and dreaming happy midsummer-night dreams after another day of all the beachside heaven the tri-state area would allow.

My baby, Chrissy, giggled in her sleep as I kissed her good night in the girls’ tiny, crowded bedroom next door. I looked at the massive pile of seashells on the table. At least someone was still having a good time.

As I was heading to my own bunk, I saw Mary Catherine through the crack of an open door. With her eyes closed, she looked ethereal, otherworldly, serene as a cemetery angel.

I tore my eyes away and forced myself to continue down the hallway before I succumbed to the urge to go in and kiss her good night, too.

IT SEEMED LIKE I’D JUST FALLEN ASLEEP when my eyes shot open in the dark, my heart racing. Confused, I lifted my cell phone off the bedside table to see if its ringing was what woke me up. That’s when I heard glass breaking.