nine

In her sixth-floor office in the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Federal Building in downtown Boston, Tanya Gibbs was getting ready for tomorrow’s staff meeting when there was a hesitant knock on the door. She looked up and Walter Dresden was gingerly stepping in. He was overweight, with thick blond hair that looked ridiculous on his plain face. He apparently thought he was in the military, for every day he wore a uniform: black shoes, black trousers, white shirt, and narrow black necktie. On the rare casual Fridays, Walter would go wild with a narrow dark blue necktie.

“Ah, Tanya, ah, if I can just bother you for a moment,” he stammered.

She went back to her paperwork, trying to keep calm and friendly. “What can I do for you, Walter?”

He stepped from one foot to another, like a grade-school student looking for permission to use the boys’ room. “It’s like this, ah, I made a mistake when I put you on that raw intelligence distribution list, especially, ah, about that matter in Quebec. The, er, missing shipping container. I was just hoping that, well, I hope that—”

Tanya quickly worked through the number of responses that she had available to her, feeling the first stirrings of her temper. She tried to squash it.

She lifted her head, smiled. “Walter, I appreciate that. I know you made a mistake. You’re one overworked public service employee, just like everybody else in this building. You spend so many unappreciated hours doing what you can to protect America and its people. We both know that some of these raw intelligence reports, if they were to be made public, like the Quebec matter, would cause panic and disorders. That we don’t need.”

Walter still shifted his considerable weight, leg to leg.

She went on. “So as far as I’m concerned, the matter is closed. Don’t worry about it.”

She smiled, lowered her head again, hoping the knucklehead would get the message.

But he pressed on. “But, ah, if I may, Tanya, I feel a duty to pass this along to the Regional Administrator, as a matter of procedure, you know, I mean, based on your past experiences and job history, you must know that—”

Ah, yes, job history. She wasn’t much for being on the street but she loved being behind the scenes, doing paperwork, working intelligence, compiling statistics, going into the New Jersey State Police after a couple of years on the street and being a comfortable, quiet drone in the background at headquarters in West Trenton.

Until 9/11. Until she saw the buildings fall during that longest of all long days. Until she had found out about the last desperate hours of her dearest friend, having to join at least a hundred others who leapt to their deaths from the doomed buildings, falling and falling and falling, seconds dragging by, knowing only pain and obliteration was waiting for you.

So she had gone into Homeland Security, an agency with an amorphous name, tentacles in everything from Secret Service to Coast Guard to border security and lots of openings and opportunities for someone like her. Someone with skin—or blood—in the game. Someone who wanted to make it right.

Her hands grew warm. “Walter.”

“I mean, this was a mistake on my part, and I feel—”

“Walter, do me the favor of listening to what I have to say.”

He did just that. She leaned over her desk and lowered her voice. “If you say one word about this matter to Gordie, that means I’ll get dragged into what was a serious mistake on your part. In fact, Gordie may investigate and reprimand me for not officially reporting this when I had a chance.”

“Tanya, I’m just saying—”

She kept on rolling, hating what she had to say next, knowing she had no other choice. This pudgy man was not going to get in her way. “That happens, I swear to God I will make it my personal mission in life to destroy you. Your career here will be finished. With a termination from Federal employment, that black mark against you—in this endless recession—means the best job you’ll get will be scooping ice cream in Revere Beach. But I’ll only let you have that job if I’m in a good mood, because if I’m not, I’ll have your records hacked to show your future employers that you’re a suspected pedophile. Now. You’ve angered me by threatening to go to Gordie. So I’ve changed my mind about this matter being settled. I know you have your chubby little fingers in a lot of information streams in the Region. Correct?”

“Ah, yes, that’s true but—”

“So Walter, if you want to keep your position, and not be identified as a pedophile—you can’t believe how easy it is to make an accusation like that stick—I want to know everything and anything you learn about the Quebec shipping container. I don’t care if it’s something as small or as stupid as somebody seeing it orbiting Venus. You will inform me instantly, or I swear to God, I’ll hammer you. Don’t think that I don’t have other sources here in this building to know if you’re holding out on me. Have I made myself clear, Walter? Do you have any questions? Do we need to discuss this any further?”

He shook his head so violently it was amazing that his blond hair didn’t fly apart. He backed out of the office, bumped into a potted plant, and then scurried down the hallway.

Tanya sighed, looked out the window at all the nice tall and sleek buildings of downtown Boston, feeling nauseous at how she had treated poor Walter Dresden. This wasn’t how her parents raised her, this wasn’t how she usually conducted business. But there was a threat out there, a serious threat, even if she was the only one to see it, and she wasn’t going to let that threat go unnoticed.

That’s what happened more than ten years ago. There were hints, arrests, even reports of Arab men attending flight schools, and rumors of terrorist plots involving hijacked aircraft … and what happened?

Nothing. Until that beautiful Tuesday morning in September.

Now it looked like it was going to happen again. The raw intelligence came in about a mysterious half-sized shipping container in Quebec, one that got the interest of a lot of law enforcement authorities, and now …

Ignored. Just a mistake. A false alarm. Nothing to worry your pretty little head over.

She glanced over at the little bookcase in the corner of her office, noted the framed photo of her dear Emily, taken at her office at Colby Consulting in the World Trade Center. Now there was no Colby Consulting, no World Trade Center, and no Emily. All burnt, shattered, destroyed, reduced to their base atoms and molecules. Next to her was a framed photo of a woman with glasses and a mane of blond highlighted hair, wearing a US Customs uniform. Diana Dean, who helped foil the Millennium Plot to blow up the Los Angeles airport on the night of December 31, 1999. Dean had been working at the Port Angeles Customs station in Washington State, checking out the last ferry in from British Columbia. One of the drivers—later revealed to be an Algerian terrorist named Ahmed Ressam—was smuggling bomb-making materials in the trunk of his car.

And why had Customs Agent Dean given this man extra scrutiny? Had a threat warning been issued? Were rumors of a bombing plot passed around? Had Ressam been wearing an “I Heart al-Qaeda” T-shirt?

No. Agent Dean thought the driver had been acting “hinky.” So she acted on her gut, on her hunch.

Emily and Agent Dean. Her daily overseers, back over there on the bookshelf.

Tanya took a deep breath, tried to ease the knot in her gut, looked away from the bookcase. In one corner of her office were a sledgehammer and a canvas bag that held a two-hundred-foot rope ladder. If this building were ever hit, she’d go through that supposedly unbreakable window with the sledgehammer and use the rope ladder to get out.

That was for her. And what she was doing now, with the help of that brooding and clear-eyed Coastie up north, was to make sure nobody else would have to worry about being trapped in a burning and collapsing building.

“Not going to happen again, Emily,” she murmured. “Not if I can help it.”