He reached the front. A few grumbles but no real complaints yet. He faced dozens of police cadets wanding for weapons. Fisk picked out the youngest and approached him with his badge wallet held at shoulder level, right in the cadet’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, Detective,” said the kid. “Nobody armed gets inside this morning. That’s right down from the commissioner. Even your shield won’t get you in with a piece.”

“Your lieutenant. I need him. Now.” Fisk was breathing heavily, not from the exertion of running but from hyperventilating with emotion.

Now people started to get on Fisk for holding up the line. “Hey, what is this?” “Who the hell is this guy?” “Commmmoonnnnnnnnn.”

A patrol lieutenant in dress blues walked up, expecting trouble. Fisk read him in a glance. Old school, not terribly bright, honest. A cop’s cop. Showed up every day, made no waves, took all the tests and made lieutenant. The guy looked at Fisk’s credentials and repeated what the cadet said.

“Not getting in with a piece,” he said. “Nobody enters with a weapon after seven A.M. No exceptions.”

Fisk felt himself getting shrill, and pulled back, keeping in control. Asking these guys to let him pass with his firearm was asking them to put their careers in his hands, something that wasn’t going to happen.

“I gotta get in there,” said Fisk. He showed the lieutenant his open hand. “Lou. Look at me. I’m reaching.”

The lieutenant looked suspicious. “Okay. Slow.”

Fisk went into his jacket and pulled out his Glock 19. He turned it butt-first, slid out the magazine, kicked out the round in the chamber. He handed it all to the lieutenant.

“Good?” said Fisk.

The lieutenant still wasn’t sure. “St. Clair,” he said. “Wand him.”

St. Clair did. Fisk was clean for metal.

“Okay?” said Fisk.

The lieutenant took the wand from St. Clair. “You accompany Detective Fisk wherever he is going. When you get him there, you report back to me on the double. Clear?”

“Yes, sir,” said young St. Clair.

“He is to remain in your line of sight at all times. Clear?”

“Yes, sir,” St. Clair said again.

“Good?” the lieutenant said to Fisk.

“Good,” said Fisk.

Before the lieutenant had even finished nodding, Fisk was through the checkpoint and running at a loping trot down Greenwich Street, trying to figure out which way to go.

St. Clair sprinted after him, catching up with him before Vesey Street at the very perimeter of Ground Zero.

Fisk heard the strains of the NYPD Pipe and Drum Band running scales, warming up. They were to play a medley of patriotic tunes during the live broadcast.

Hearing them meant that he was close. And that the ceremony hadn’t started yet.

Even the upbeat song sounded like a dirge. Fisk had always hated bagpipes. Bagpipes meant cop funerals to him.

Gersten loved bagpipes. This memory struck him with the force of a cramp. She always teared up. Must have been that cop gene of hers.

Across Vesey, the crowd thickened into a shoulder-to-shoulder mass that was difficult to see over. The entrance on the north side of the Ground Zero memorial was a hundred yards ahead. Fisk knew he had to stop The Six from going into the ceremony proper, because once the players were in place, then the central podium area would go into full lockdown—with Jenssen sealed in place, ready to blow them all to kingdom come.

More than a hundred plainclothes NYPD officers, FBI men, and Secret Service agents meandered among the throng. Fisk darted into the crowd, quickly outpacing St. Clair, who yelled behind him, “Wait, wait!”

Fisk ran toward the sound of the bagpipes. Tears burned his eyes. To his distant left, he saw a blue tunnel leading from a small staging area full of trailers.

He heard yelling and noticed a few of the lawmen pointing him out. Others began running in his direction. He hoisted his shield high as he went so as not to be shot down.

His anxiety was electric, apparently; it drew people his way. He was yelling, “Fisk! Intelligence Division!” because no one there knew him, and even if they did, they could barely see his face as he darted around strangers in his path.

As he got closer, he saw that the tunnel was merely a series of tarps knit together, lashed to arched pipe scaffolding, the fabric rippling in the Hudson River breeze. Fisk looked left and made for the staging area.

“Hey, hey, hey!” said a cop as Fisk blew another security barricade without stopping. He gave up showing his shield. Imitation tin was just a couple of dollars online.

What Fisk had going for him was his years on the job: he looked “cop.” That, more than his shield, was what kept fellow officers from shooting at him on sight. He ran past a quartet of Porta-Potties and a hospitality tent manned by support staff. He darted around civilians wearing access passes on neck lanyards, searching wildly, then he saw a trailer with an open door.

In the window of the trailer, propped up against the drawn shade, was a printed sign reading, THE SIX. Fisk raced to the door and burst inside.

Food table, empty couches, a television.

Empty.

A person ran to the trailer door behind him. Fisk whirled around.

It was a cop with his sidearm drawn. Patton.

“Fisk?” he said.

“Where are they?” said Fisk.

“They’re . . . on their way in,” said Patton, pointing. “Where’s Gersten?”

“Obama? Bush?”

“Outside the core. They go in last.”

Fisk grabbed Patton and spun him around, pushing him out of the trailer door. “Keep them out of here!” he said. “However you can. We have a man with a bomb!”

In any other setting, such a claim would require further evaluation. But in this tinderbox of antiterror paranoia, such a warning was treated as verified until proven inaccurate.

Fisk leaped off the top step of the trailer, waving gathering cops out of his way. The pipes and drums had started their medley, being carried throughout the staging area via speakers.

He looked to the blue tarpaulin archway tunnel ahead. The crowd parted a bit, just enough for him to see and recognize the older man starting inside. Aldrich, the auto parts dealer, was entering the ten-foot-wide tunnel. Behind him went the journalist, Frank. Walking one at a time, like entrants at a wedding. Alphabetically. Which meant that . . .

Fisk saw the next entrant, tall and blond, wearing a light blue suit. A coordinator wearing a headset nodded to Magnus Jenssen.

With a long, determined stride, the Swedish terrorist started into the tunnel.

Fisk glimpsed Jenssen’s left hand. The part of his cast visible beneath the sleeve of his suit—it was white. It was not blue.

Fisk yelled, but his voice was drowned out by the music of the pipes. Jenssen was on his way to the stage.

Chapter 72

To Jenssen’s ears, the bagpipers’ bleating was like the furious drone of an overturned beehive. It sawed into his head. His left arm was little more than a weapon grafted onto his torso now—and one his body was rejecting.

He was in the blue tunnel. Fabric rippled as each plodding step brought him closer to glory. Ten paces ahead, the journalist Frank swept his hand through his hair, grooming himself as he made his way toward the stage.

Jenssen stumbled once from the dizzying pain. He was carried along by the will of God and the generous spirit of Osama, who through Jenssen was returning to the altar of victory as a marauding soldier of Allah, at the site of his greatest victory.

. . . and then get resurrected and then get martyred . . .

Ahead of him: daylight.

Ahead of him: glory.

The vague sounds of a commotion behind him barely breached the great commotion ongoing inside his own head. Was it about him? If so, they were too late.

He was inside the heart of the beast. He had reached its soft, sentimental core.