Security guard Bascomb followed at a distance, as Fisk went rifling through rooms without explanation. Overturning mattresses, emptying out luggage. Ordering that each room safe be opened.

Bascomb said, “We’re not allowed to do that without a specific search warrant.”

One hard look from Fisk persuaded him otherwise.

Only a few were locked. Fisk was standing next to Bascomb in one of The Six’s rooms, watching him key in a master code on yet another empty safe, when Fisk noticed a stain on the top of the table he was leaning against.

Closer inspection revealed that it was more like a burn in the veneer. He ran his fingers over it, feeling the roughness. He bent down and sniffed the oblong mark.

It smelled vaguely chemical.

“Whose room is this?” Fisk asked.

Bascomb did not know. While he called into his shoulder microphone to find out, Fisk went into the bathroom, checking it again, but more closely this time.

In the corner of the floor underneath the ledge of the vanity, he found a dusting of blue-colored flecks, accumulated there as though brushed away by hand.

He touched them with his fingertip. They felt hard, almost plastic.

He knew whose room it was even before Bascomb reported the answer. Fisk remembered the Swede’s blue wrist cast.

“Magnus Jenssen,” said Bascomb.

Blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian. Schoolteacher, was it? Fisk couldn’t remember anything more specifically about Jenssen. He knew that none of the passengers had self-declared themselves as Muslim. He also knew that the Islamic population of Sweden stood at a little more than half a million, approximately 7 percent of the population—up from nearly zero just thirty years ago. The trend was similar throughout Scandinavia and Europe.

Still, religion was only an indicator. Rarely was it the sole factor in profiles of terrorists.

His mind raced. Had the Swede truly fractured his wrist during the attempted hijacking? Or earlier, before he even boarded the aircraft?

With care, he could have hidden such an injury. The backscatter scanner at airport security would not have revealed it. The terahertz photons used in those machines were just below infrared on the frequency spectrum, and well below true X-rays.

There was no time to pursue this theory now. Fisk had to work with what he had in front of him.

A chemical in Jenssen’s hotel room, staining the furniture. What could it be? Had he hidden it inside his cast?

TATP. More boom.

He wondered what sort of scrutiny the heroes would face inside the Ground Zero security bubble. The answer was: once they were inside, very little, if at all.

And, by his clock, they were already inside.

Fisk had to get down there. He had to leave this place, even with Gersten still missing.

He went to Bascomb. “Give me your phone.”

The guard started to ask why, then instead simply pulled it from his belt. He turned it on and thumbed in his pass code, then handed it to Fisk.

Fisk quickly went to his contacts and punched in his own cell phone number, and his last name in all caps. So that there would be no mistakes. He thrust the phone back at Bascomb.

“I could give this to the cop, but I’m giving it to you. If they find anything about the missing detective, you call me right away. It’s critical, understand?”

Bascomb responded with a trembling nod.

Fisk ran to the elevator.

Fisk had left his car at the cabstand with his grille lights flashing. He realized he didn’t have DeRosier’s number, so he first tried Dubin.

Immediate voice mail. Fisk dialed Intel directly.

They told him that Dubin was down at Ground Zero. Cell phone service within the bubble had been jammed in order to prevent any remote control bombs being detonated using cellular technology, a favorite tactic of terrorists and insurgents.

Fisk informed them about Gersten’s apparent disappearance. He said that The Six had to be sequestered for their own safety—phrasing it that way because, without Fisk there personally, if they tried to collapse on the heroes with force, Jenssen could detonate immediately, killing everybody within range.

If, like Bin-Hezam, he had a half pound of TATP on him, the death toll would be incredible.

He told them to do everything they could to get the message out, then asked to be patched through to DeRosier’s cell phone. That call also went immediately to voice mail—confirming that The Six were already inside the security bubble, and Jenssen with them.

Fisk leaned on his horn, grille lights flashing, willing the traffic to move. He was now in a race against time and gridlock to get from midtown down as close to Ground Zero as he could.

Chapter 70

Holy shit!”

Flight attendant Maggie Sullivan came bursting into the hospitality trailer where the rest of the group, as well as their minders, Detectives DeRosier and Patton and Secret Service agent Harrelson, were waiting with some other VIPs.

Maggie held up her hands as though about to burst into song. “Paul Simon just shook my hand on my way back from the Porta-Potty.”

A woman from the mayor’s office said, “He’s here to sing ‘The Sound of Silence’ at Mayor Bloomberg’s request.”

“He recognized me,” said Maggie, amazed. “Me! He said, ‘Great job.’ Great job! I was tongue-tied.”

Sparks said, “I hope he washed his hands.”

Jenssen sat deeply at the end of a suede-covered couch. A flat-screen television played on the opposite wall, above a small buffet with chafing dishes of Vermont maple bacon, a strata with sausage and egg-soaked bread, hash brown potatoes, and French toast. Carafes of coffee and orange juice were set before trays of cardboard cups.

The pain in his arm was intense. He had neglected to take any ibuprofen, and now the swelling beneath his bomb-laden cast was radiating pain into his fingertips. Droplets of blood appeared from the seam of his palm, which he was discreetly swiping onto the suede fabric beneath the sofa.

The pain was a significant distraction, forcing him to retreat into prayer. It was his sole consolation, yet it isolated him from the rest. He felt their scrutiny and wondered how much of it was mere paranoia on his part.

He focused also on the television images. The Americans had memorialized their own defeat with two giant holes in the ground at the foundations of the destroyed Twin Towers. The inside of each was sheathed in black stone, the names of the dead etched into panels at waist level along their perimeters. Water ran down all four sides of each hole, emptying into reflecting pools at their bottoms.

The view shifted to show the new tower, rising into the sky. Jenssen, for his part, saw it as a headstone.

The camera panned a surrounding garden of oak trees and pathways to the ceremony dais. Tiers of platforms were flanked by a pair of giant broadcast screens like those seen in sporting arenas. Panels of bulletproof glass walled the speaker’s podium at the center. A choir of singers attired in long blue robes stood in ranks to the left and right of the podium.

Jenssen shivered once, due to both the pain and the profundity of the moment. The spirit of hundreds of millions of American viewers would be shattered forever after the live television assassination of their former leader. Obama and the rest were in play as collateral damage, but not necessary. Jenssen had shaken the man’s hand yesterday. He had looked into his eyes and smiled. He had done all this with murder in his heart.

He did not have to assassinate Obama. In the days and weeks and months to come, the photograph of the sitting U.S. president shaking the hand of an Al-Qaeda terrorist would be his undoing.

All he cared about was the infidel Bush. He was somewhere near Jenssen right now—perhaps already within blast range.