CHAPTER 1 FRONT ROYAL, VIRGINIA
Near Shenandoah National Park, which was designated on December 26, 1935.
His cell phone ringing jarred Michael Walker awake, drenched in sweat as always. He fumbled for it on his bedroom night table, and saw ANGELA PIERCE lighting up in the caller ID. He cleared his throat and, for some reason, made sure he was decent before sitting up to take the call.
“Morning, boss,” he greeted.
“It’s afternoon, Michael,” said Angela, special agent in charge of the Atlantic field office of the National Park Service’s police and investigatory unit, located in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
“It’s my day off.”
“Not anymore. Turn on your television.”
Michael fumbled for the remote, just as he’d fumbled for his phone. “What’s going on?”
“Just turn it on.”
* * *
It didn’t matter what television station Michael tuned to; they were all the same, without exception. All with overhead or long-distance camera shots of wreckage, carnage, and a dark, shifting cloud that could only be a debris field dominating the scene on Liberty Island. It took Michael several moments to fully realize that the Statue of Liberty had toppled over backward atop the rubble that had once formed the landmark’s base, glimpses through the cloud revealing that the last remnants of Fort Wood were gone, too.
Oh my God …
The sight was incomprehensible, his mind having difficulty processing the shock that made him feel as if he were still asleep. He remembered a similar feeling back in 2001, when he was just a kid, the Twin Towers first burning and then collapsing downward behind a thick curtain of smoke and kicked-up debris. Somehow, it was worse with the statue, almost like the country itself had fallen.
“Terrorists?” Michael heard himself ask.
“Too early to tell, but what else could it have been?”
Angela Pierce had been the youngest woman, and first African American woman, to become a Special Agent in Charge with the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch (ISB). And she had championed Michael’s efforts to return to the Park Service after an incident on Mount Rainier cost him his left foot three and a half years ago.
Surgery saved his foot, at least temporarily. When a combination of time and physical therapy failed to restore his mobility or forestall an endless series of infections, Michael opted for amputation in order to be fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthetic that would restore a far greater measure of his mobility and independence. Because his knee and much of his ankle had been spared damage, he learned to walk without a limp and found in recertifying to become an Investigative Services Branch special agent that he could do almost everything he could before, just not quite as well or as fast.
The prosthetic had restored a surprising degree of form and function, but not enough for him to handle the rigors of patrolling a park. That explained why he had chosen to become what was essentially a detective, working both in and out of uniform to investigate crimes that took place within the grounds of any property the National Park Service operated. The training had proven rigorous for even a fully nondisabled man. Michael neither was granted nor sought any quarter. If he couldn’t cut it anymore, so be it. The thought of a desk job was more than enough to motivate him through those arduous months.
“Michael,” he heard Angela’s voice blare, “are you listening to me?”
“I was watching the scene. God-awful.”
“And then some. I need you at Dulles in an hour. A chopper will be waiting to get you to the site.”
“ISB doesn’t have anyone detailed to New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force?”
“I’m the proxy right now, which makes you my proxy on-site.”
That Joint Terrorism Task Force, though under the auspices of the FBI, would assume jurisdiction. But the National Park Service would maintain a seat at the table, which Michael would be occupying.
“I’ll call you as soon as I’m on-site,” Michael said.
He turned up the volume on the television so he could hear the latest updates from the scene while showering. He imagined the death toll would stretch well into the hundreds, the number of wounded into the thousands, especially since it was summer—peak season for all the sites maintained by the Park Service.
Michael flipped through the channels as he dressed and fitted his prosthetic foot into place over the bone, shaved and shaped into a stump to accommodate it. He checked the time. The Park Services chopper was already waiting for him at Dulles. He was going to be late. But some things couldn’t be rushed, like fitting his prosthetic in place and going through the everyday ritual of getting used to the feeling of walking with a fake foot.
Michael finished dressing to the background sounds of news reports coming from the scene.
“Do we have any reason to fear that more attacks are coming?” an in-studio anchor asked a terrorism expert.
Yes, we do, Michael thought.
CHAPTER 2 THE STATUE OF LIBERTY
Dedicated from the French to the United States on October 28, 1886.
I dreamed this last night.…
Gina Delgado, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, ducked under the rotor churn of the helicopter that had just landed on Flagpole Plaza, diagonally across from the Statue of Liberty’s information center. The night before, Delgado had barely slept, her slumber roiled by nightmares she couldn’t recall until now.
Her grandmother had been psíquica, Spanish for psychic. Gina got used to her abuela saying matter-of-fact things about what was to come. Like the time she had told Gina the results of a soccer game Gina was going to play in or, more seriously, the time she had refused to let Gina get into a friend’s car and later that day the car had crashed, sending all the girls inside to the hospital.
“You’re going to do something no woman has ever done,” the old woman had said the day Gina graduated from high school, hugging her tight.
And now she was the youngest FBI ASAC in the country, the only Latina, and one of the few women who’d reached that level in the bureau.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Statue of Liberty, officers from the United States Park Police on-site had responded just as they’d been trained to do. They divided their duties between tending to the wounded, controlling the living, and securing the area. The latter meant clearing Flagpole Plaza for use as a makeshift helipad for emergency responders and officials to land, including Gina’s chopper.
Less than five minutes after the FBI received the call at its New York field office, in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on Federal Plaza, an agent was driving Gina and two other ranking special agents from the office toward the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, where a bureau chopper was already warming. Ten minutes later they had landed here on Flagpole Plaza, where Gina would be taking control of the response and ensuing investigation. Her mentor and current boss, Special Agent in Charge Rod Rust, would have been cast in that role if he weren’t out on medical leave. In addition to stepping in for him to run the office, Gina had taken Rust’s place on New York’s primary Joint Terrorism Task Force team, which worked both international and domestic terrorism cases and leads. Law enforcement partners, mostly culled from the ranks of NYPD detectives, handled the task force’s day-to-day rigors, but for a major attack like this, it was all hands on deck.
The sight from the air had confirmed her worst suspicions, the overview of the scene covering the eight acres of Liberty Island providing a viewpoint very different from that of the jumpy cell phone video the news networks were showing. The Fort Wood pedestal on which the statue rested had been the percussion point, ground zero. The fact that virtually none of the pedestal remained intact provided a keen notion as to the type of explosives used and, if she was right, suggested that a very sophisticated enemy was behind this, with access to cutting-edge ordnance. There was also the debris field to consider, which, from the air, looked completely symmetrical to her.
That debris field extended onto virtually the entire clay-colored Flagpole Plaza, sparing only the area of the flagpole itself, near which she’d landed on a makeshift helipad. Within the blast radius, the carnage was horrifying, the very worst centered in the area where the pedestal had been reduced to rubble. The bodies she was able to glean strewn within the rubble were too plentiful to count, not even accounting for those currently entombed. But the survivors, many covered in dust and grime mixing with the blood painting their exposed skins, made for almost as devastating a sight.
How many of the injured had come here with someone who was currently among the missing, a kinder way of saying “buried under the rubble” or “downed somewhere within the blast cone”? From the air, Gina could see that the park police were using their paramedic skills, making the best of limited first-aid supplies from the Liberty Island first-aid station. Gina also spotted a number of civilians, caked in concrete dust, pitching in. That was the thing about tragedy; it brought out the best in people, breaking down all barriers in favor of the intensity of the moment.
It was the kind of scene that she’d been trained to respond to and that nonetheless sucked the breath out of her. To combat that, Gina trained her initial focus not on the carnage but on the spread and relative containment of the explosion itself, focusing on the forensics it would be her first task to assemble. And her initial assessment was that the party behind the attack was at the very least as experienced with setting explosives as she was and that significant access to the site would have been required to plant whatever had toppled one of America’s most enduring symbols.
Gina stopped halfway between Flagpole Plaza and the information center, kicking at the debris before her as she looked toward one of the senior field agents who’d accompanied her here.
“Hey, Paradise,” Gina said to John Milton, who shared the name of the author who’d penned Paradise Lost, “find me someone who can advise on any work crews with access to the pedestal over the past six months. Likely for an extended period of time.”
Milton made a note on an old-fashioned memo pad.
“Forensics teams are just behind us,” the second senior agent, Dan O’Leary, reported, bureau-issue iPhone held high.
“Meet them when they land,” Gina said, as the chopper that had shuttled them here lifted off to make room for the next to land. “And find the ranking Park Police officer on scene. Let him know the cavalry has arrived.”
* * *
From there, Gina embarked on her own recon of the site. In addition to tending to the hundreds who’d been wounded, some seriously, the biggest challenge was the need to evacuate Liberty Island. As near as she could tell, it would take no less than fifteen jam-packed ferry trips to get the job done, maybe more. That meant that an untold number of the survivors, currently being gathered in the open space near the cafeteria and spilling out onto the pier, would be stranded here for hours. She knew herding them together in that location must be standard procedure and protocol for such an emergency and would have to rely on the Park Police to maintain control until a literal boatload of reinforcements from New York City police and fire, not to mention the National Guard, arrived in one of those ferryboats. Once they’d been off-loaded, the initial lot of survivors would be shepherded on, as many as the boat could carry taken back to the Battery Park terminal, where more first responders would already be waiting to board.
She started at the outer perimeter of the debris field of rubble strewn from the obliterated Fort Wood pedestal. She felt detached from the scene around her, as bodies of the dead and injured continued to be lifted from the debris by volunteers and Park Police officers covered in concrete dust, grime, and blood. Not surprisingly, the largest chunks of rubble were gathered closer to the origins of the blast, thinning out farther in the field, explaining how the Park Police had managed to clear Flagpole Plaza for chopper landings so quickly; it was 250 yards from where the pedestal had been standing. And the closer she drew to the blast center, the more it was bodies being pulled from the rubble instead of wounded.
“ASAC Delgado, do you copy?” Gina heard in her earpiece.
“Copy,” she said toward the cordless mic clipped to her flak jacket that she preferred to the standard earpiece, which was more subject to interference.
“ISB is on scene and requesting to see you,” the voice said.
“Tell him or her I’m busy.”
“It’s a him, and I already did, Chief, and he reminded me ISB has jurisdiction until told otherwise.”
“Then tell him otherwise.”
“I tried that, too. He’s not budging until he gets word from his own superior.”
Gina felt her expression crimp into a scowl. “All right, tell him to meet me at the base of the statue,” she said, having drawn even with that. “He can’t miss it.”
Copyright © 2024 by Jon Land and Jeff Ayers
