Nikki Heat: Deadly Heat Part 26

He rocked his head. "I'll tell you this." And when he had their attention, he said, "You're all still guessing."

Heat flung the door with both hands, and it smacked the wall in the Observation Room. "I can't break him."

"You did great," said Callan.

Bell said to Rook, "You both did great. Couldn't have played it better."

Through the window, they saw Maggs slouched in his chair with his head tilted back, eyes closed. He could have been a commuter dozing on the train to Connecticut instead of the prime suspect in a ma.s.s terror plot. "He's got b.a.l.l.s," said Rook. "He comes just to the point you think he's going to crack, and he sucks 'em up."

"What's he got to lose?" said Bell. "You laid it out yourself. An upside of billions, if he keeps his mouth shut; life in prison if he suddenly gets a conscience."

"After five o'clock," said Callan. "I say we move off traditional means and take him for a ride to the Black Barn."

Rook's face lit up. "You guys really have a Black Barn?"

Callan frowned and looked at Nikki. "Is he for real?"

"Well," insisted Rook, "do you?"

Nikki said, "He's not going anywhere. We don't do that."

Behind her, Yardley Bell chuckled softly. Agent Callan said to Rook, "She's right. Sadly, this is US soil. Much as I wouldn't mind doing a little tenderizing, we're going to have to keep working him const.i.tutionally." He walked to the window and said, "Let's take five. When we come back, I get my shot at this p.r.i.c.k."

Heat found her voice mail stacked with messages when she got back into the bull pen. Lauren Parry had left word she had some interesting postmortem news to share. Nikki saved that one in order to first return Detective Ochoa's call.

"Where are you guys?"

"Team Roach is currently inside Brewery Boz at South Street. How's it going with Maggs, anything?"

"Nothing yet. He just keeps acting like he's going to put me on some Amnesty International list just below North Korea."

Ochoa said, "Unfortunately we're not going to be any help. And, trust me, we swarmed his apartment and the brewery like an Indy pit crew. Forensics, too. That includes NYPD and the DHS geeks with their R2-D2 vacuum sniffer things."

"Everything's clean?"

"Not just clean. Antiseptic."

After they hung up, she'd just started to fill Rook in when one of the precinct aides rushed in and interrupted. All she said was, "Rainbow."

Nikki reached out to grab the phone. Rook surprised her by clamping his hand over hers, holding down the receiver. "Rook."

"Take your time. Let him wait."

"I might get something out of him about the attack, I can't wait."

"Same as Maggs, if he smells that, you're dead." He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and released his. "Remember what I said. You played his game; make him play yours."

Heat pondered that, and even though it ran counter to everything she felt-to everything she so desperately needed at the eleventh hour-she agreed. If Rainbow smelled desperation, Rainbow ran the table. She waited a full thirty agonizing seconds before she picked up. "Heat."

"What? Are you keeping me on hold to run a trace?" She recognized Glen Windsor's voice and gave Rook a nod to affirm. "I'm not an idiot. I know how to set up a phone so it can't be pinged." And then an inspiration struck Nikki that scared the h.e.l.l out of her. She didn't examine it, she didn't weigh it, she simply acted on her impulse.

She hung up on him.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n," said Rook.

Just as she felt nausea's burn greeting her with the notion she might have just made a fatal mistake, the line purred again. Heat snapped the record switch on the junction box and let one more ring pa.s.s before she answered. Windsor jumped in before she even spoke. "What the f.u.c.k was that about?" His voice cracked with agitation. The power of the game, she thought.

"Glen, I'm busy." It took all her effort to sound detached.

"f.u.c.k you busy. We need to talk."

"Hang on a sec." She covered the mouthpiece loosely and called off to n.o.body, "Just wait for me, OK? Be there in ten seconds. Ten seconds." Rook clench-pumped both his fists to give her encouragement. Committed to the strategy, she waded in. "Listen, if you want to talk to me, why don't you come in? Otherwise, you'll have to wait."

"Have you lost it?"

"No, in fact, I kind of have a clear head for a change. See, I just don't have time for you now. I have something bigger to deal with."

"Bigger?" She could hear his breathing accelerate. "What, that bio plot?"

"You'll have to wait, Glen. Your moment has pa.s.sed."

"You're a f.u.c.king idiot, you know that?"

The more he went over the top, the more flat she made her voice. "You know, I really can't deal with this now."

"You don't know s.h.i.+t. You don't even know where this stuff's going to be released."

She waited, just in case he offered. When he didn't, she said, "No, but I will. I'm going to be there to stop this madness, and when I do, you're going to be no more than an asterisk."

"Bull. s.h.i.+t."

"It's not you, Glen, it's just the way it goes. A bigger fish came along."

"No, I f.u.c.king own this now. At nine tomorrow morning, I'll be gone, but everyone will know I did it. I'll make history, and you can live with it."

"Got to see that. Want to tell me where?"

But he'd hung up.

Heat raced out of the squad room, saying, "Nine A.M. Let's tell Callan."

Rook kept pace with her down the hall and said, "Considering that you're someone who hates to play games, remind me never to cross you."

Nikki hurried into Observation One and found it empty. A creeping certainty weakened her limbs. She rushed to the gla.s.s to look into Interrogation.

The room was empty.

"Maggs is gone," she said to Rook as she ran back out the door. "And so are Callan and Bell."

The desk sergeant had seen them lead Maggs out through the lobby but thought nothing of it. Why should he? They were federal agents escorting a prisoner. In a knowing act of futility, Heat and Rook trotted out through the gla.s.s doors onto 82nd. All they found was the air-conditioning puddle where Callan had parked his SUV and an empty street between them and Columbus.

"Looks like we have one additional moving part," said Rook.

Heat spent the next hour working to reach them. The obvious calls came first: to Callan's cell phone, then to Yardley Bell's. Heat left voice mails that she knew in her heart would be ignored, if they even were listened to. Rook followed up with e-mails and texts to Bell-even posting a heavily masked Tweet about getting in touch.

The hour stretched into a full night of fruitless outreach. Nikki called every number she had at Homeland Security, her gut telling her that she was hollering down a black hole. She tried NYPD Counterterrorism and managed to get connected to her colleague on the DHS counterterrorism unit at his home. Commander McMains said he'd look into it, which she took as code for letting the feds have at Maggs all they wanted. "We are coming to the brink, Heat, in case you hadn't noticed."

In desperation, Rook even called Paris and woke up his Russian spy pal, Anatoly Kije, just to try to shake loose any private numbers or e-mail addresses he might have. The secret agent cursed in Russian and told Rook to get real; his Rolodex of American spooks was slightly limited.

When they had exhausted their options, they made the same rounds again with nothing in the end to show for it all but lost energy and time. "Know what the h.e.l.l of this is?" said Heat. "The effort we're putting into chasing our own people is pulling us away from heading off that event tomorrow."

Rook checked his watch. "You mean today. It's after midnight."

"Excellent."

"But the other side of the coin is they may do better at heading this off than we will. I mean ethical questions aside."

Heat snapped at him, "We don't put ethics aside, Rook. It's not who we are. It's not who I am, anyway. Don't you think I would love ten minutes alone in a locked room with Carey Maggs?"

"You mean to work out your mom stuff, or to stop the smallpox attack?"

She thought about that and said, "I guess I have the luxury of not having to know the answer." A moment pa.s.sed and she asked, "What about your mom? Did Margaret get out of town?"

"Oh, yes, Oswego-bound, hours ago. I have a feeling that, at this very moment, Broadway's 'Grand d.a.m.n' is in the lounge, on her third Sidecar, and the Drama Festival committee is wondering what they got themselves into."

"You know, Rook, we've done our best. No points off if you want to leave. You have your place in the Hamptons."

He took both her hands in his, looked into her eyes, and said, "Yeah, I'm outta here." And after they both laughed at that, they kissed.

Since they were all alone, they made it count.

In the overnight Heat didn't dare leave her desk. She dozed in ten-minute intervals in her chair and left her cell phone on ring instead of vibrate so she'd be sure to get any calls. Raley and Ochoa checked in just after four when they wrapped Brewery Boz. For the h.e.l.l of it, she asked them to swing by Varick Street and door-knock the Homeland HQ to see if they could create some movement. They called back an hour later with no joy.

At sunup the commander of NYPD's counterterrorism unit called from his staging area at the 69th Regiment Armory near Gramercy Park. He didn't want Heat to think he had dismissed her, and rea.s.sured her that he had put calls out through all his sources to learn what he could about the whereabouts and status of the DHS agents and Maggs. Heat told McMains he was a good man and asked him to keep her posted. "And G.o.d help us all," he said.

After too many days and nights in the same clothes, Nikki budgeted herself five minutes for a quick shower in the locker room, which did a world to make her feel sharper for the day ahead. After she toweled off, she smiled, amused that she was actually resorting to changing into her backup bag of backup clothes, and wondered if she should have a backup for that, too. The brown leather jacket she'd been wearing seemed a little warm for the forecast, so when Heat returned to the bull pen, she hung it on the coat rack and got down the blazer Yardley Bell had returned to her after its DHS bioagent sweep.

When she slipped it off the rack, she noticed a clear plastic evidence bag had been looped over the hook of the hanger. Thoughtfully, the Homeland Security scientists had emptied her blazer pockets and returned all their contents with an inventory slip. Nikki looked inside. She found a lipstick, her sungla.s.ses, a notepad and golf pencil, and an open package of Reese's peanut b.u.t.ter cups. She doubted she would want the remaining candy and took it out to throw away. Her hand froze above the trash can.

"Rook," she called.

Couch springs groaned from the break room, and he appeared in the door with bed hair and one s.h.i.+rttail out. "What?"

She held up the blazer. "Now I know where I picked up my contamination. Come on."

TWENTY.

Detective Heat's Crown Victoria ripped across West 79th Street rolling Code Three, full lights and siren. She had Rook speed-dial her phone for her so she could keep her hands on the wheel while she called the dispatcher to rally her crew and the counterterrorism unit downtown at the protest march Carey Maggs had helped sponsor. Rook held her cell with one hand and gripped the door handle with the other as she wove around slow cars or braked, then g-force accelerated through stoplights. At that hour on Sat.u.r.day morning, traffic was light, and in record time she steered them around the rotary onto the Henry Hudson Parkway heading downtown.

In her call to Dispatch, she described what to be on the lookout for: a red 1870s London Fire Brigade wagon with a large copper boiler kettle on the back. "I believe that's the container holding the bioagent, so proceed with extreme caution."

Seeing clear lanes of straight highway ahead, Rook spoke to her, elevating his voice above the siren. "What was your lightbulb? What made you connect it?"

"The peanut b.u.t.ter cup," she said. "I remembered I ate the peanut b.u.t.ter cup the morning I visited Maggs at his brewery."

"You are amazing. How the h.e.l.l did you remember something as trivial as that?"

"Because it wasn't trivial. I was p.i.s.sed at you when you called from Nice. With Yardley."

"And the candy fits in because...?"

"Because I ate it in a rage binge. I was furious at you for being so G.o.dd.a.m.ned stupid and completely insensitive." She paused to make a quick maneuver around a sanitation truck. "Hey, some people kick trash cans, I break out the Reese's."

They rode in silence. At last, Rook said, "Glad I could play a role."

It only took Heat and Rook fourteen minutes to get to Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan, but when they arrived, Emergency Services, the Hercules team, and the counterterrorism unit had already gathered at their staging area on State Street and Bowling Green in the plaza near the old Customs House. Nikki wove between riot cops and bright rows of pink tulips in full spring bloom until she found Commander McMains marking up deployment maps. "Hard to think of a worse scenario, Detective."

They surveyed the situation across the street in Battery Park, where several thousand protestors had gathered behind the giant banner stretching across the Hope Garden declaring the Walk Against Global Oppression. Heat spotted the logo for Brewery Boz as corporate sponsor. "This is the event Carey Maggs has spent all year promoting. Doing all he could to draw a big crowd-so he can release the smallpox on them."

"Sunny skies, gentle breeze, unfortunately a perfect day for it," said the commander. "Latest guesstimate from the airs.h.i.+p puts them at four thousand marchers. That includes kids and toddlers in strollers." He shook his head. "And they're still streaming in."

"Why can't you stop them?" asked Rook. "Just move them out."

"Great idea, here you go." The commander held a bullhorn out to Rook, then pulled it back. "Sorry for the smart-a.s.s, but I'm going to guess you have limited experience breaking up a protest mob. They tend to fight you on that, and this group's no different." McMains s.h.i.+fted his attention to Heat. "When I got here, I got clearance to announce the bioterror danger to the organizers. They think we're lying, just trying to disrupt their march."

Nikki scanned the area and saw several hundred riot control officers adding gas masks to their preparations. "Any sign of Homeland Security?"

"Right here," said Agent Callan. They turned as he and Yardley Bell stepped in to join them.

"What happened to my prisoner?" demanded Heat.

Callan gave an oblique reply. "Congratulations. Looks like you did better than us, after all."

"I asked you, what happened to Maggs?"

"He's not a concern right now, Detective. Let's do the job first, all right?" He didn't wait for a response but answered for her. "All right. Now describe this fire truck we're looking for."

Once more Heat swallowed her anger for the sake of the mission. "It's a vintage London fire wagon Maggs restored as a promotion for this event."

"And, apparently, refitted with a container to spray the crowd," added Rook. He finished tapping his iPhone screen and held it up. "Here's a promo picture of it from the Brewery Boz Web site."