“It’s her,” he said.

Dubin said, “You’re sure?”

“DNA will confirm, but”—Fisk again looked at the dead eyes staring out of the head protruding from unzipped plastic—“it’s her. Strangled in Central Park. Time of death, approximately twelve hours ago.”

“Murdered? Christ.”

“Nothing found at the scene.”

“Christ,” said Dubin again, with more emphasis this time. “Where does it end?”

“With whoever killed her, maybe.”

Dubin said, “Cameras in the park? I’m assuming there’s zero witnesses.”

“Cameras take time. The One World Trade Center dedication starts in two hours.”

“You still think it’s that?”

“I can’t imagine what else it could be.”

Dubin said, “Am I missing something? About how all this makes sense?”

“Same thing we’re all missing. There’s a piece we haven’t seen yet.”

“Goddamn it. Next step?”

Fisk shook his head, at that moment the only living person in an overlit room of seven corpses lying on seven stainless steel tables. “Call off the bint Mohammed alert. Raise the threat level.”

Dubin said, “Raise it to where? We’re already doing traffic checkpoints looking for car bombs. We’ve got men with automatic weapons stationed all over lower Manhattan. We towed away parked cars all day yesterday. Rounded up undesirables midweek. We’re running random bag searches, radiation detectors. And a cell phone blackout starting at eight A.M. down around Ground Zero.”

Fisk waited patiently for him to finish the list. “If this is about the boom, one pound or thirty isn’t going to matter to that building. The target isn’t the structure itself.”

“It’s something to do with the ceremony,” said Dubin. “Terrorism is theater. And the curtain rises in two hours.”

Chapter 66

At 6:30 A.M., the heroes were loaded into the Suburbans in the VIP parking garage beneath the Hyatt, their motorcycle escorts’ engines burbling outside the already-raised chain-link gate.

Secret Service agent Harrelson was back with them today. He came up to DeRosier and Patton after spending some time with his finger pressed against the radio in his ear. “We gotta get moving,” he said.

Patton hung up his phone. “Still nothing.”

“Her cell?” said DeRosier.

“What?” said Harrelson.

Patton said, “Gersten, the other detective. Can’t raise her.” To DeRosier, he said, “I tried the room phone a couple of minutes ago.”

DeRosier needlessly checked his watch. If The Six didn’t get down to Ground Zero in time, it was their jobs. “Maybe she got hung up in the lobby, getting coffee?”

Harrelson shook his head. “We’ve got a specific window for penetrating the security bubble downtown. We miss it, we’re fucked. All of us. So we’re not gonna miss it.”

DeRosier said to Patton, “I’m not getting written up because she decided to sleep in. When did she leave the bar last night?”

Patton shook his head. “She wasn’t there when I left. But I don’t remember her saying good night either.”

“Ask Jenssen,” said a voice from the lead Suburban.

The Intel detectives turned. The rear window was halfway down, and DeRosier looked inside and saw Joanne Sparks sitting forward in her seat, her head in her hands. Hungover.

“What’s that?” asked DeRosier.

“Ask Mr. Sweden where Gersten is.”

DeRosier and Patton exchanged looks, then went and did just that. Patton tapped on the closed window of the second Suburban, and it was lowered. Journalist Frank sat with his head tipped back, sunglasses on. Maggie Sullivan sat on one side of him, Magnus Jenssen on the other.

“Mr. Jenssen?” said Patton.

“Yes?” answered the Swede, looking apprehensive.

“We’re wondering, do you know what time Detective Gersten left the lounge last night?”

He thought about it, then slowly shook his head. “She left to take a call on her telephone at one point. I never saw her come back. I left a short time later.”

Patton and DeRosier nodded, backing off. “Okay. Just wondering. Not a problem. Thanks.”

They stepped away, not wanting to get the group riled up over nothing. Harrelson looked over at them from the first vehicle. They nodded to him.

DeRosier said, “I’ll call Fisk en route, let him know.”

Patton climbed into the front passenger seat of the second Suburban. From the back, Maggie asked him what was wrong.

“Nothing,” he answered. “Just looking for Detective Gersten. Could be she went in ahead of us,” he lied.

Agent Harrelson climbed into the middle row, sitting in front of Jenssen. As they pulled out of the garage, Jenssen eavesdropped on Harrelson’s coded exchanges with the Secret Service detail at the first checkpoint.

Except for the missing Gersten, everything was going according to plan.

Chapter 67

Fisk zoomed up FDR Drive and was on the Queensboro Bridge on his way to Queens when DeRosier finally reached him. “Gersten didn’t make the trip.”

Fisk said, “What? Why not, what’s wrong?”

“Don’t know. What’s wrong is she was a no-show. We couldn’t wait. Not answering her phone.”

Fisk was not expecting this. He tried to think of the last time he spoke with her. “Nothing happened overnight?”

“No. Nothing to speak of.”

Fisk knew she wasn’t one to oversleep. “No word at all?”

“Nada.”

“You knock on her door?”

“Couldn’t. No time. Didn’t realize she wasn’t coming down until too late. And this leg of the journey is the Secret Service’s show.”

“Okay. So you guys are gone.”

“We are in the chute.”

“No worries. I’ll follow through. You guys got the update on bint Mohammed?”

“Another dead Muslim,” said DeRosier. “Not the kind of pattern you want to see on a day like this.”

“Listen, stay alert, okay? Look sharp.”

“You think The Six are at risk?”

“Somebody on that dais is. You and Patton have a privileged vantage at this thing. I don’t know what we’re looking for, but chances are you’ll be in the best position to see it.”

“Shit. All right. You got it.”

Fisk rang off. Trying her cell was the most obvious first thing to do. His call went right to voice mail.

“It’s me,” he said. “Where are you? Call.”

He hung up and checked his call register, remembering trying her once late last night, getting her voice mail. That was at 12:13 A.M.

No call back from her. No text. No nothing.

Not that unusual, the gap in communication. But now it formed an inconvenient hole in time.

He tried his own apartment landline. Covering every base.

After four rings, voice mail.

“Hey. It’s me. Trying you here. Give me a call.”

He was off the bridge, and now faced with a decision. Either go back to Intel, make one last run at his rakers for street information, and keep waiting for Gersten to announce herself. Or check on her back at the hotel.

It went without saying that he truly had no time for this errand. But in the end, the two choices melded. There was that little voice inside of him saying that the two were related.

Fuck it, he thought, hating to give in to the paranoia. He switched on his grille flashers and banged a U-turn.

Fisk dodged a few early Sunday travelers towing suitcases to the reception desk, making his way to the row of a dozen golden elevator doors. One opened to his right and he pushed inside, half expecting to find Gersten exiting, instead making way for an attractive woman with a Prada shoulder bag who glared at him with the hard-edged confidence of a hooker on her home turf.

The doors opened on the twenty-sixth floor. Fisk turned left into the hallway, and realized that he did not know Gersten’s room number. He ducked into the hospitality suite and found a woman clearing away food-stained dishes. He asked her if she knew anything about the room arrangements on that floor, and she answered him in a dialect of Spanish that Fisk did not understand.