“He tried to contact you earlier this afternoon. He left you a message, which you may even still have on your voice mail.”

She was wearing him down, but he did not yet give up on playing at incomprehension.

Gersten backed off a bit. “Would you please read Mr. Pierrepont his rights, officer?” she said.

It was painful watching the musician try to maintain his composure while the cop rattled off his Miranda rights.

“Yes,” he said, answering the question of whether he understood his rights. He said it in an exasperated why-me? tone.

Gersten said, “Mr. Pierrepont, I don’t want to arrest you.” In truth, she had nothing to arrest him for, just yet. “I don’t want to subject you to any unnecessary public scrutiny. I don’t even want to take up too much of your time. But I do want you to answer my questions.”

“This is exactly what he said he didn’t want,” said Pierrepont suddenly. “Exactly what he was afraid of.”

“Okay,” said Gersten. “Maybe you have heard about what happened to another of your fellow passengers? Less than an hour ago, down in the flower district?”

Pierrepont’s shocked expression told her that he had. “You mean, that man . . . he was on our flight too?”

“A second terrorist. I need answers, Mr. Pierrepont. I need to know what you two and Mr. Nouvian were talking about.”

Chapter 49

Dubin had his feet up on his desk, tilted back in his big leather judge’s chair. He was the picture of relief. Stopping the Saudi took heat off him from about eight different directions.

“So what do you want, Fisk? A bigger office?”

Fisk smiled, playing along. “This one is nice.”

Dubin shook his finger no-no-no. “Maybe if you had caught the bastard alive.”

“I know it,” Fisk said.

“He fired on officers. This kamikaze shit is the toughest nut of all. Now I’ve got to put a tac team cop on leave, pending the shooting inquest. No way to keep this quiet, Fisk. This is going out over the news as a big win.”

Fisk nodded, though it didn’t feel that way to him.

Dubin continued. “Won’t know for sure until they test it, but looks like a half pound of TATP in the shoulder bag. The stuff they call ‘Mother of Satan.’ Remember that Shah attempt in Times Square? Same thing. They love that shit. Mixing it makes them feel like fucking mad scientists.”

“But where’d he get it? Traces in his hotel room, but he didn’t make it there. Hasn’t been in town long enough to mix and cool it.”

“The penthouse suite, hmm? Not very Muslim of him.” Dubin pulled his feet off his desk, sitting forward. “It was given to him, I’d say.”

Fisk said, “A half pound of homemade boom is not much either. Where was he headed with it? And a loaded weapon?”

“All compelling questions.”

“And with no detonator.”

“Yeah. I don’t like that part either. Maybe that was his next stop, where he was headed. Or—you can detonate with a gun, can’t you? Even impact. Looked at that way, he did have a detonator tucked inside his shoulder holster. We got the rocket body from beneath his bed. I think he was zeroed in on the fireworks. Forty thousand fireworks for America, one exploding rocket from Al-Qaeda.”

“All they need for impact.”

“It only takes one. Presumably he was going to do some damage—we don’t yet know where—then try to make a late flight back to Saudi Arabia.”

“We didn’t find the igniter,” Fisk reminded him. “For forty-eight hours now we’ve been straight out, trying to find this guy without any hard evidence he was up to no good. Now we have that evidence—and we still don’t really know what’s going on.”

“The picture will become clearer over the next twenty-four hours, once we unravel this thing. Point is, we got him. We did our job. This is a huge boost to Intel, and ought to silence the naysayers—at least for a couple of news cycles.”

Fisk left Dubin with his victory. He flopped into his office chair and awakened his laptop, closing his eyes for a few moments to ruminate on what had happened.

A Yemeni had tried to take over an airliner bound for New York. A flight attendant and some passengers stopped him. Under interrogation, the Yemeni confessed that he intended to crash the plane into midtown Manhattan at rush hour ahead of the July Fourth holiday weekend. Then he clammed up.

Before departure from Stockholm, at least one passenger witnessed the Yemeni talking to a well-dressed Saudi Arabian businessman booked into the business-class cabin. When the Saudi arrived in New York, he avoided the city’s Muslim neighborhoods, hiding out instead in Chelsea. He murdered a contact in Harlem on Friday night, shopped for a rocket and a messenger bag on Saturday morning. The rocket body was discovered beneath the hotel bed. The Saudi had explosives on him when he was killed, though not enough for a major attack.

But they still had no idea how or where he procured them. Or where the rocket igniter was.

Fisk opened his eyes and reached for his phone. He needed to update Gersten, but more than that, he needed someone to help him untangle this mess.

Chapter 50

Gersten ignored her buzzing phone, standing with The Six watching the news update on the hospitality suite television.

The anchorwoman spoke over footage shot from the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Seventh Avenue, showing investigators and members of the coroner’s office—all in white Tyvek suits—going over the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Indigo. Gersten thought she recognized Fisk to the left, talking with someone from the hotel.

“New York City police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s office has confirmed that a terrorist plot has been thwarted. A Saudi Arabian male carrying a loaded handgun and a bag of explosives was shot and killed by police snipers outside a Chelsea hotel a short while ago. Police say the shooting came after an intensive search for the man by New York police. One unconfirmed report states that the dead man was a passenger on Scandinavian Airlines Flight 903, the plane aboard which on Thursday an attempted hijacking was thwarted by hero passengers. We will continue to bring you breaking developments as they come in.”

DeRosier muted the television with the remote control.

The group was shocked.

Flight attendant Maggie said, “What the hell does that mean?”

Colin Frank’s eyes sparked with excitement. “Means there was an even bigger plot at play here.”

Gersten held up a hand to settle them down. “We still don’t know for sure, but one theory is that this man was a backup plan in case the hijacking was foiled. I will say that, for a while today, there was some concern that this man’s target might be you six.”

“Us?” said Maggie, looking at the others.

“Speculation,” said Gersten, “but it made sense. Terrorists don’t need to demolish office buildings anymore. They want to strike at symbols. This is psychological warfare as much as anything else. And you people are the human equivalents of the tower being dedicated tomorrow. Icons of the new post-nine-eleven America.”

Aldrich, the retired auto parts dealer, said, “Jumping Jesus Christ. These animals.”

Nouvian also looked shocked. Jenssen, on the other hand, seemed doubtful about the whole thing.

Sparks said, “So what does this mean for us?”

Gersten said, “For you it means very little. Tonight we have the fireworks at nine P.M. Some of you have expressed interest in attending. We have the One World Trade Center building dedication tomorrow morning at eight—but otherwise, and this is direct from the mayor’s office, the night is yours. If you want to get a bite to eat, if you want to meet with your family if they are local—great. We request—and by request I mean that we strongly urge—that you allow one of us to accompany you if you do decide to head out tonight. Only because it is our job to deliver you to the Ground Zero ceremony safe and sound—and you wouldn’t want us to lose our jobs, would you?”