Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (12 page)

I thought about that. How a box as small as the one before us could do such unbelievable, unheard-of damage. I also thought about how there could be dozens more ready to go off at any moment.

I lifted my radio and called Miriam Schwartz, who was coordinating from the law enforcement staging area by the bridge.

“Miriam, we found the NNEMP,” I said. “But it’s small, and the experts on scene say there are probably more. We’re going to need search teams. Boots on the ground inspecting rooftops.”

“Search teams? For where? The affected area?” she radioed back.

I stared out at the wilderness of buildings in every direction.

“No—for everywhere,” I said. “There could be more of these things all over the city. I think it’s time to assume that there are.”

THE 59TH STREET BRIDGE
staging area had turned into a full-fledged carnival of trailers and tents by the time we got back to it an hour or so later. To the constant hammering of temporary generators, twenty or thirty FBI agents and double that number of NYPD officers were busy setting up a crisis command post.

We had a meeting under a rain-soaked tent, where we got some of the brass up to speed. As per my recommendation, it was needle-in-the-haystack time all over the city. Cops and firemen everywhere were now in the process of searching rooftops.

At the end of the meeting, Chief Fabretti and Bob Madsen, the New York office’s assistant special agent in charge, who were now jointly running the show, named Emily and me the case’s investigative coordinators.

I was definitely pleased to be getting the case lead but even more psyched about officially working with Emily again. We worked well together. We’d stopped a psychopath who was kidnapping and killing rich kids a few years before, and more recently we helped take down a Mexican drug cartel head. Not only was she particularly adept at appeasing the government pen pushers, she also probably had better back-channel contacts in the Bureau’s various investigative support units than the director. She was all about results.

Emily grabbed us a couple of coffees from another tent after the meeting.

“C’mon, Mike. The rain’s falling off a bit. I want to stretch my legs.”

Emily said this casually, but I noticed her expression was pensive, a little standoffish. Her mental gears were spinning up to speed, I knew. Her investigative approach was like mine, one of ebb and flow. The idea was to gather as much info as possible and then back off of it in order to let things sink in. Give one’s initial and intuitive impressions a little time to set, so that after a while, a telltale pattern could be detected. You couldn’t talk things to death. Especially in the beginning.

I followed her out onto 60th Street alongside the base of the bridge. We walked west, staring out at the Upper East Side. An evacuation had been declared a little after noon, and it was quite a spooky scene, with all the stopped cars in the empty streets. It was so silent you could actually hear the dead traffic lights creaking in the breeze at the intersections and the needles of rain drumming on the pavement.

Up on Second Avenue, we stopped and watched as a National Guard unit wrestled a length of chain-link out of the back of a olive-drab army truck. We stood there and watched as the soldiers unwrapped the fencing and held it upright while strapping it to lampposts on opposite sides of the avenue. When they were done, it looked as if everything north of 60th Street had been turned into a prison.

“What the hell?” Emily said in horror. “That looks so wrong.”

“It’s to prevent looting, I guess,” I said, shaking my head.

The last time I saw something like this was on Canal Street after 9/11. Definitely not a memory lane I liked to stroll down.

We turned right and walked north up deserted Second Avenue.

“How’s the kids, Mike?” Emily said out of the blue. “And Seamus? And Mary Catherine, of course.”

I gave her a brief family update as we walked up the desolate avenue. I left out the part about Seamus’s recent memory troubles. I looked around. Life seemed depressing enough.

“That stinks about Mary Catherine stuck in Ireland,” Emily said. “What are you doing about the kids?”

“Seamus finagled a temporary nanny,” I said. “Some nice Irish college kid named Martin. He actually just started today. How about you? Have you been keeping yourself busy?”

“Well,” Emily said, a little less pensive, “I’ve actually been seeing somebody. For about three months now. I guess you could say it’s pretty serious. At least I think it is.” I was shocked to suddenly feel a little crushed when I heard this. It was probably because Emily and I had almost gotten together a few times during previous cases. There was definitely some attraction there between us, a mostly unspoken chemistry. She was a smart, energetic, good-looking woman. And a heck of a hard-hitting investigator. What wasn’t there to be attracted to? But I really shouldn’t have been jealous, especially since Mary Catherine and I were serious now and getting more serious by the moment.

Emily has a right to be happy, too, right? I thought. Sort-of-ish.

“Hey, that’s great, Emily,” I finally said. “Who is he? A cop or a real person?”

Emily laughed.

“He’s a real person, as a matter of fact. He’s a line cook at Montmartre in DC. He’s also a veteran of Afghanistan—a Special Forces medic. His name is Sean Buckhardt. He’s this tall, serious, tough, hardworking man, but underneath, he really cares, you know? About the world, about being alive. And he’s great with Olivia. He’s smart and sarcastic and funny, like you. I really think you’d like him.”

Wanna bet? I thought, glancing into her bright-blue eyes.

“A line cook? That’s a score. Tell me he cooks for you,” I said instead.

“All the time. Does it show?” she said, smiling. “It shows, right? All the butter sauce. I’ll come home from a case, and it’s Provence in my kitchen, with all the courses and the wine pairings. He makes this lemon-chicken thing. I swear it should be on the narcotics list. I must have put on ten pounds.”

That’s a lie, I thought as I watched her do some kind of re-knotting thing with her shoulder-length hair. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as she walked ahead of me a little. Whatever she was doing, it was working out. Quite well.

But I kept that to myself. Instead, I quickly took out my phone to see if there were any new messages from Mary Catherine.

Bad corner of my eye, I thought.

THE HOTEL DINING
room was all but empty as the last couple huddled together at the best table, right by the low turf fire in the massive river-rock fireplace. The candlelight was soft and low, as was the cozy romantic music playing.

“Ga! Will they never leave?” said Mary Catherine’s cousin Donnell as they hung back by the kitchen door, allowing the American couple celebrating their fiftieth anniversary to enjoy a moment.

“Have a heart. It’s romantic,” Mary Catherine said.

“They’ve enjoyed about a trillion and a half moments already, by my calculation,” complained Donnell. “The sun’ll be coming up soon.”

“Go in and help Pete, ya stone-hearted cynic,” Mary Catherine said. “I’ll get them for you and maybe even pass along the tip if you’re lucky.”

“Thank you so much,” the silver-haired American CEO type said after he finally handed over his Amex. He patted his ample midsection. “The lamb, the wine reduction sauce, all of it was—”

“Just perfect. Really,” insisted his pretty brunette wife. “Especially the dessert you sent over. Who would have thought? Real New York cheesecake in Ireland? Where do you get it?”

“I have my sources,” Mary Catherine said with a smile.

Donnell was nowhere to be found when she returned to the kitchen.

“Where is he?” she asked her other cousin Pete, the chef, who tossed a thumb toward the back door.

“Romance in front and now in the back of the house, too, I see,” Mary Catherine cried in mock shock as she busted Donnell canoodling his girlfriend against the side of her car. “Back to work. You can snog on your own time.”

“Are all you Yanks such slave drivers?” Donnell said as he walked past.

“No, you lazy Paddy. Just me,” Mary Catherine said, whipping him in the butt with a towel.

She grabbed a rack of hot glasses from the machine in the corner of the kitchen and brought them in through the swinging door into the hotel bar.

There were a lot of large and loud red-faced men at the bar and even more in the adjoining banquet space. A three-piece rock band was playing in the party room, and everyone was singing the old Squeeze hit “Tempted” at the top of their lungs and drinking Guinness and Harp Lager as fast as she and the bartender, Kevin, could change taps on the basement kegs.

An Australian-rules football club, mostly firemen and cops from Sydney, was in town to play the local Limerick club at various forms of football, and the place was packed. She smiled at the young and happy drunk men who’d been there for the last three days. She really liked the mostly good-natured Ozzies, but if she heard another one ask her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like this, she was going to start screaming.

The best news of all was that the hotel’s potential buyer, Mr. Fuhrman, a tall, dour German, had come by in the midst of all the merriment about an hour before. He had suddenly seemed pretty merry himself when he saw the place packed to capacity and all the money flying into the till.

“I’m going to make a phone call to the broker on Monday,” Mr. Fuhrman had assured her before he left. “And I think you’re going to like what you hear.”

“Hey, Mary Catherine. Did you see this?” said Kevin, suddenly pointing up at the TV.

She looked up. The BBC was on. Behind a sleek glass anchor desk sat a sharp-faced blonde wearing a deadly serious expression.

Then Mary read the graphic on the screen beneath the anchorwoman, and the glasses in the racks rattled loudly as she set them down heavily on the bar.

NEW YORK ATTACKED
! it said.

“Turn it up, Kevin,” she said as the image on the TV changed to a shot of the stranded Roosevelt Island tram.

“FBI sources have confirmed that this is yet another attack seemingly carried out by terrorists,” said the British anchor.

Another
attack! What?

She flew behind the bar and grabbed her bag and dug out her cell phone. It almost slipped out of her hand, and she had to take a deep breath before she managed to focus enough to find the speed dial for the apartment. She bit her lower lip as she waited, listening to silence.

“C’mon,” she said, waiting on the connection. “Pick up, Michael. C’mon, pick up!”

THAT NIGHT AT
a quarter after seven, cranky, definitely drained, and yet at the same time extremely grateful just to be here, I stepped off my elevator and finally made glorious contact with the loose brass knob of my apartment’s front door.

Sometimes bad days at work depressed me and stayed with me, but this was one of the days that made me happy just for the fact that it was over and I’d gotten through it in one piece.

I was locking the apartment door behind me when a horrendous crunching sound ripped out from the vicinity of the kitchen.

I peeked inside and saw Martin, with his back to me, throwing a bunch of carrots into a blender. He seems to be in one piece, I thought. The same busy, assured, positive, energetic person who’d come to work this morning. First days were tough. Especially ones that involved taking care of double-digit kids. But it was looking like it had gone well enough. Excellent, I thought. So far, so good.

Instead of interrupting him, I peeked into the living room.

Uh-oh. Maybe not so good, I thought when I saw the kids.

All the boys were there except Brian. They were lying all over the place. Eddie was passed out on the ottoman. Ricky was on the carpet, red-faced and staring, dazed, up at the ceiling. Trent, huffing and puffing, was sprawled facedown on the couch.

Seamus, who was on the end of the couch, thumbing through the
Irish Voice
newspaper, rolled his eyes at me.

“What’s wrong with them, Father?” I said.

“I don’t know. I just got in myself, and they won’t say,” said Seamus. “They keep sighing and moaning, though. I believe they’ve come down with some sickness perhaps mental in nature.”

“Help, Dad. Just help,” said Eddie as he looked up weakly from the ottoman.

“He makes us run, Dad,” said Trent, pointing toward the crunching sound in the kitchen. “We were doing drills. Soccer drills.”

“You made Mary Catherine disappear and replaced her with a drill sergeant,” Ricky said. “We’re not that bad, are we? Well, I mean, we’re sort of bad, but this bad? Honestly, what did we do?”

The blender stopped, then whirred again.

“And he says he’s making us smoothies,” said Eddie. “But I saw vegetables, Dad. He bought vegetables from the corner market! I definitely saw carrots and even some green stuff. That’s not a smoothie, Dad. That’s V8 juice!”

“Give it up, fellas,” I said with a smile. “You couch-potato Nintendo athletes could use some running around. Not to mention some vegetables. Mary Catherine would be pleased.”

I WAS TURNING
into the hallway near the back bedrooms when I ran into the female Bennett contingent near the rumbling washer and dryer. They glared at me in unison. Another group of unhappy campers, apparently.

“First the boys, now you,” I said. “What’s wrong? What are you guys up to?”

“Doing our laundry, thank you very much, Father,” said Juliana.

“But Martin can handle that,” I said.

Six sets of female eyes glared back at me in unholy unison.

“Are you nuts, Dad?” said Jane. “Do you know how embarrassing that would be? Martin is not—and I mean never—doing my laundry. Or I’ll…run away!”