Tick Tock Page 2

  I turned as Trent opened the sliders to the deck.

  I was prepping my father-son sit-down about racist dumb-asses when I saw that he was holding something. It was my work cell, and it was vibrating. I threw a panicked glance back toward the Manhattan skyline. I knew it. Things had been too good for too long, not to mention way too quiet.

  “Answer it,” I finally said to him, pissed.

  “Bennett,” Trent said in a deep voice. “Gimme a crime scene.”

  “Wise guy,” I said, snatching the phone out of his hand.

  “That wasn’t me,” I said, turning down the radio. “And you can keep the crime scene.”

  “Wish I could,” my new boss, Inspector Miriam Schwartz, said.

  I closed my eyes. Idiot! I knew we should have gone to the Grand Canyon.

  “I’m on vacation,” I protested.

  “We both are, but this is big, Mike. Homeland Security big. Just got off the phone with Manhattan Borough Command. Someone left one hell of a bomb at the main branch of the New York Public Library.”

  I almost dropped the phone as a pulse of cold crackled down my spine and the backs of my legs. My stomach churned as memories of working down at the World Trade Center pit after 9/11 began to flash before my eyes. Fear, sorrow, useless anger, the end-of-the-world stench of scorched metal in my clothes, in the palms of my hands. Screw that, I thought. Not again. Please.

  “A bomb?” I said slowly. “Is it armed?”

  “No, thank God. It’s disarmed. But it’s ‘sophisticated as shit,’ to quote Paul Cell from Bomb Squad. There was a note with it.”

  “I hate fucking notes. Was it a sorry one?” I said.

  “No such luck, Mike,” Miriam said. “It said, ‘This wasn’t supposed to go boom, but the next one will.’ Something like that. The commissioner wants Major Case on this. I need my major player. That’s you, Mickey.”

  “Mickey just left,” I groaned. “This is Donald. Can I take a message?”

  “They’re waiting on you, Mike,” my boss urged.

  “Yeah, who isn’t?” I said, dropping the spatula as my burgers burned.

  Chapter 4

  A DAY OR TWO AFTER 9/11, a dramatic photograph of a firetruck crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on its way to the burning Twin Towers was splashed across the front page of the Daily News. It’s an incredible shot, even before you learn that every fireman on the truck, Ladder 118, ended up dying in the subsequent collapse.

  As I rolled my beat-up Suburban along the same route under the famous bridge’s arches back into the city toward my date with a bomb on 42nd Street, for some strange reason, I couldn’t stop thinking of that picture.

  I skipped the backed-up FDR Drive and took the side streets, St. James to the Bowery to Park Avenue South. Half a block west of Grand Central Terminal, wooden NYPD sawhorses had been set up, cordoning off 42nd Street in both directions. Behind the yellow tape, a crowd of summering Asian and European tourists stood front-row-center, cameras aloft, taking in some action.

  After I badged my way through the outer perimeter, I parked behind a Seventeenth Precinct radio car half a block south of 42nd Street. As I was getting out, I spotted a shiny new blue Crown Vic and a couple of tall and neat-looking guys in JTTF polo shirts sitting on its hood, talking on their cell phones.

  I doubted they were here to play polo. Calling in the Joint Terrorism Task Force Feds at the slightest hint of the T word was standard operating procedure in our jittery post-9/11 metropolis. The Feds didn’t seem too impressed with me or my gold shield as I walked past them. I knew I should have put a jacket on over my Hawaiian shirt.

  When I arrived at the corner diagonal to the library, I could see more barricades far down 42nd Street at Sixth Avenue and three blocks in both directions up and down Fifth Avenue. The silence and lack of traffic on what was usually one of the busiest intersections on earth was zombie-movie eerie.

  “¿Sarge, qué pasa?” I said, showing my bling to the Hispanic female uniform at the inner perimeter’s aluminum gate.

  “Seems like some skell forgot his overdue books so he returned a booby-trapped bomb to the library instead,” she said as I signed into her crime scene logbook. “We got the place evacked, including Bryant Park. The Bomb Nuts are inside. Midtown North Squad took a bus of witnesses and staff back to the precinct, but I heard it ain’t looking too good.”

  Among the library’s columns and fountains, I passed nervous-looking Midtown North Task Force and Seventeenth Precinct uniforms. Some of the cops were holding what appeared to be radar guns but were really radiation detectors. An unmarked van geared with god knew what kind of testing equipment was parked at the curb.

  At the front entrance of the library, a redheaded guy in a white marshmallow-man Tyvek suit was walking out with a yellow Lab on a leash. The Labrador wasn’t a seeing-eye dog, I knew, but an EDC, an explosive-detecting canine. I loved dogs, just not at crime scenes. A dog at a crime scene means bombs or dead bodies, and I wasn’t particularly jazzed about seeing either one.

  Ain’t looking too good seemed like the midsummer evening’s theme, I thought as I climbed the stairs between the two giant stone lions.

  Chapter 5

  A BIG BALD GUY with a twirly black mustache and tactical blue fatigues met me beneath the landmark building’s massive portico. With his mustache, Paul Cell bore a striking resemblance to the guy on the Bomb Squad’s logo patch, depicting a devil-may-care Red Baron–looking guy riding a bomb in front of the skyline of Manhattan.

  “We got the parked cars and street furniture sniffed, so I’m pretty sure there aren’t any secondary devices,” Cell said. “Think about it. Draw in the first responders with a decoy. That’s what I’d do. Look at all these windows. Some jihadist could be behind any one of them right now with his finger on the button, watching us, aching for that glorious thump and flash of holy light.”

  “Christ, Paul, please,” I said, clutching my chest. “I skipped my Lipitor this morning.”

  Cell and his guys were the world’s elite in bomb handling, as tight and quick and efficient as an NHL team. More so probably since the penalty box on this squad was made of pine. All cops are crazy, but these guys took the cake.

  “Fine, fine. You ready to see the main attraction?” Cell said, ushering me through the library door with a gracious wave of his hand.

  “No, but let’s do it, anyway,” I said, taking a breath.

  We passed another half dozen even more nervous-looking cops as we crossed the library’s monster marble entry hall to a flight of stone stairs. More bomb techs were helping their buddy out of the green astronaut-like Kevlar bomb suit in the ostentatious wood-paneled rotunda on the third floor. Another guy was putting away the four-wheeler wireless robot and the X-ray equipment.

  “Uh, won’t we need that stuff?” I said.

  Cell shook his head.

  “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 white 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 WASN’T SUPPOSED TO GO BOOM, BUT THE NEXT ONE WILL. I SWEAR IT ON POOR LAWRENCE’S EYES.

  “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. Al
l 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.”

  Chapter 6

  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.”

  Chapter 7

  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?”

  “Architectur
al 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.