By the time Kezia woke up at noon, stiff all over and still in her clothes from the night before, New York had been shut down, and so had the whole country. Cities nationwide were braced for terrorist attacks like the one in New York. And as long as no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, no one had any idea who the enemy was, or if they intended to strike again. There had been no attacks in other cities.
She took a shower, put on a robe, and turned the news on while she made coffee. She hadn’t realized the physical efforts she’d made, while running from one victim to the next, and helping to put some on stretchers while she offered comfort. Her body felt as if she’d run a marathon or had been beaten, and she was stunned to see on TV that every major city in the country was under lockdown, all airports were closed, the planes grounded. International flights scheduled to fly into the States had been canceled, and those that had been in the air when the multiple attacks happened were turned back across U.S. borders and had landed in Canada or Mexico, or returned to their countries of origin. Domestic flights had landed immediately at the nearest airport. No one was getting in or out of the country until the perpetrators were found and the responsible government or terrorist group was identified. The news reported that intelligence sources were following several leads, but no conclusions had been reached yet. And no one had come forward.
More than four thousand people had been killed in the three explosions, most of them at Hudson Yards when two enormous apartment buildings exploded, a third caught fire along with the shopping mall, trains were crushed beneath five blocks of the structures, and half of the huge mall was destroyed. Another three thousand people had been critically injured, and several hundred had suffered less severe injuries. Countless cars parked close to the bomb sites accounted for more victims. All the hospitals in the city were sharing more than their load of victims. Hundreds of medical and nonmedical personnel had come to assist the first responders and law enforcement. Medical workers had driven in from New Jersey and Connecticut to volunteer. The news anchor said that martial law was being considered. No final decision had been made yet, but residents of every major city, particularly those with iconic landmark structures, were being told to stay home, and all events honoring the national Independence Day weekend had been canceled. The entire military was at the ready for an attack of nuclear proportions. Since the military didn’t know who had done it, all eventualities were being considered and prepared for. It was clearly carried out by foreign nationals, but no one knew which ones.
It was a sobering summary of the situation and what it could lead to. It was by far the worst and most destructive attack on American soil ever, and everyone was warned to be careful. Security measures had been set in motion to protect television and radio stations in the event of an enemy attack or military takeover by a hostile nation. Intelligence services and the Pentagon were hard at work to find out who was responsible. And the death toll was still climbing.
The news report showed a military presence visible in every major city to protect both monuments and people. Most bridges had been closed, federal buildings were under heavy guard, and state and national parks were closed to the public. A second attack was feared in the coming hours. The president and cabinet were meeting that morning, and the nation would be addressed from an underground safe room in an undisclosed location that night. America was braced for another deadly assault.
Kezia tried to reach Felicity again after she watched the news, and couldn’t get through. The circuits were busy, but at least she was safer in France than in the United States. She was with Blake, and Kezia knew he’d take care of her. They couldn’t fly back to the U.S. now, but she’d be safe with him in the south of France. And Kate was in Africa with Jack, out of communication anyway, so Kezia couldn’t reach her either.
There were worse places for Felicity to be stuck than the Hotel du Cap in the south of France, the most luxurious hotel in the world. Kezia wasn’t worried about her. She didn’t like not being able to reach either of her daughters to reassure them that she was okay, but it couldn’t be helped. Kezia couldn’t do anything about it. They were cut off from the rest of the world.
She sent both girls texts and emails, hoping they’d get through eventually, reassuring them that she was fine, which was the best she could do for now. They were both sensible adults. She was sure they were worried about her.
In France, Felicity had called her mother again and again, and couldn’t get through. The United States appeared to be cut off, with its borders closed and sealed tight, and there was no access by phone for the moment. The phone lines were overloaded.
Blake came back to the bedroom from the living room of their suite.
“Did you get through to your mom?” he asked her, and she shook her head with tears in her eyes. She looked very young as he put his arms around her. “I’m sure she’s okay. The city’s locked down. She’ll stay home. And this is probably the worst of it, like 9/11.”
“What if they bomb New York, or there’s a war and we can’t get home?”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. And we’ll be able to get through and you can talk to your mom in a day or two.”
She hoped he was right. “Did you get through to Jen?” Blake’s ex-wife, Jen, and his son, Alex, were in the Hamptons with friends for the Fourth of July weekend. He no longer wanted to be married to her, but she was sensible and responsible and a good mother. He knew his son was in good hands, and he was glad they were out of the city. And Jen’s apartment was on the Upper East Side. They would be far from the damaged areas when they were able to go back to the city.
After the holiday, Jen was going to stay with her parents in Greenwich, Connecticut, for the month of July, with Alex. And Alex was coming to stay with Blake and Felicity in the Hamptons for August. So he’d be out of the city, away from the damage and the tragedy in the aftermath of the attack.
Blake and his ex-wife were both good parents and he knew Alex would be safe with either one. They had managed to have a decent, respectful relationship despite the divorce. And she had no serious objections to Felicity so far. Jen had a boyfriend, so she didn’t care what Blake did. It had been a relatively amicable divorce, and Blake was a good guy, and had been generous with her. He wanted more children, but Felicity was too young to even consider it. If he wanted her, he knew he’d have to wait.
He was the youngest of four, and his two brothers and one sister were all married and had kids, and he saw them and his parents frequently. He had gone to Yale, and Harvard Business School, and his father was in investments, as he was. His father was extremely successful. His brothers had good jobs too, and his sister stayed at home with her three kids, but she had a law degree she’d never used. They were a high-achieving but close family, and Felicity had met them all and liked them. His siblings all thought she was great but too young to take seriously, and it was a shame he hadn’t met her ten years later. It seemed unlikely to them that the romance would last with a young woman her age, and she had every man she met at her feet. But she was faithful to Blake, and very much in love with him.
Blake had tried to call his family too, and couldn’t get through to them either. He was less worried than Felicity. She was younger and close to her mother.
He comforted her gently and convinced her to go to the cabana with him. He knew the hotel well and came often, and she’d been there with him once before, after the Paris haute couture shows. Blake liked spending time in France and Italy. His family had a rambling vacation home in Maine, where he’d spent his boyhood summers, but he was more sophisticated than his older siblings, who were married with kids, and he preferred vacationing in Europe.
The setup at the Hotel du Cap was perfect for them. The cabanas were entirely private, and they could sun and spend the day there, where no one would recognize her or gawk at her. They could have lunch privately in the cabana and swim in the Mediterranean, or in the infinity pool. And they dined at the hotel at night. It was the most romantic hotel in the world.
He finally got Felicity to put her bikini on and they went to the cabana and lay in the sun. He tried to keep her from obsessing about what was happening in New York. The photos on the internet were terrifying, and he promised her that as soon as the planes started flying again, they’d go home. The friends they were supposed to meet had gotten stuck in New York, so they had time together alone.
She relaxed as they lay in the sun and talked. She always felt safe with him. They were both strong with positive personalities. They enjoyed life. He was tall and blond and athletic, as she was. They were a beautiful couple.
They swam that afternoon and made love when they got back to the room at the end of the day.
It was still only noon in New York then, and Blake wondered what was happening, but he didn’t say anything to Felicity about it. She was sleeping peacefully in his arms, and he let her sleep as he watched her, before they dressed for dinner in the hotel’s elegant dining room.
As long as they were locked out of the United States, he couldn’t think of a better place to be while they waited.
Sam sent Kezia a text, which she saw after she tried unsuccessfully to call Felicity. “Are you going back today?” he asked her. She called him after she read it.
“Hi, how are you feeling?” she asked him.
“I hate to admit it, I haven’t done that much heavy exercise in years. I could hardly get out of bed this morning. I feel like an old man.” But he wasn’t—she had looked him up on Google and he was fifty-seven, two and a half years younger than she was. And he looked great. She laughed at what he said.
“You’re not an old man, and I felt that way this morning too.” The stress of the situation all night didn’t help. They’d both had a few hours’ sleep and it was early afternoon. Kezia had a number to call for the woman who was organizing the volunteers, and she said they’d be grateful for some help, but would understand if she didn’t come down. They were still digging people out and finding people alive. When she said it, Kezia knew she wanted to go back to the bomb sites. She felt an inexorable pull she couldn’t explain. She said as much to Sam, and he agreed.
They decided to meet in half an hour, and had been assigned to the World Trade Center downtown. It was shocking that the new building had been severely damaged, although it hadn’t fallen down like the last ones. But there was a risk of collapse in all three locations. And if that happened, it would cause untold damage to the buildings around them, and claim more lives. Kezia hoped that wouldn’t happen as she and Sam shared a cab heading downtown.
“Do you know any of the people in our building?” Sam asked her.
“No, I just arrived a week ago, and didn’t know anyone there before.”
“I knew several people before I moved in, which was how I heard about it. One of my favorite people lives there, Louise Smith.”
“The photographer?” Kezia was impressed.
“Yes, and documentary filmmaker.” He smiled. “I’ve known her for years.”
“She must be very . . .” Kezia tried to find a polite word and couldn’t, and Sam laughed.
“Old? In years, yes; in mind and energy, no. She’s the youngest, most exciting woman I know. She’s turning eighty-nine, and fully active. She’s always traveling somewhere for a shoot, or a book, or to make a film. She’s at every natural disaster, and every war. She knows every head of state. I’ll introduce you to her if you like. If she has time!” Sam said, and Kezia smiled. For seventy years, Louise Smith had been taking photographs that were works of art. They sold for a fortune now, which didn’t matter to Louise. “I met her when I first got to L.A. She was living there then, and then she moved back to New York. She flies all over the world constantly. She’s given me some beautiful photographs. She took a photo of my son, John, when he was a little boy. She blew it up and gave it to me for Christmas. It’s on the wall in my office.” Kezia hadn’t explored his apartment, so she hadn’t seen it. Louise Smith had a unique style that was easy to recognize. She would have identified the photographer if she’d seen the photo of Sam’s son.
“I’ve always wanted to buy one of her photographs. They have such an incredible range, from joyful to tragic. I especially love her photographs of children.”
“I’ll show you the one of Johnny. He was about four or five.”
“How old is he now?” she asked him.
“Thirty-three.”
“He’s ten years older than my youngest, and four years younger than my oldest. That’s a good age. You can be friends with them then, although I have an easier time with my younger daughter.”
“The model who’s in France right now?”
She nodded.
The city seemed to grow quieter and quieter as they rode downtown. There was no one on the streets, except for an occasional person walking a dog. And then they turned a corner, and they saw the building. The entire façade was black, the top had fallen in the explosion, and there was a gaping hole in its side, as though a giant monster from outer space had taken a bite out of it. As they drove around it, from a distance, they saw that the entire rear façade had been sheared off, and every office stood open and exposed. It was such wanton destruction it brought tears to Kezia’s eyes. And if the attack had been planned for a weekday, during office hours, thousands more would have died.
The cab dropped them off at the police cordon on Murray Street, and Sam followed Kezia behind it. She asked where the volunteers were gathering and they were sent to a small tent set up by the EMS again, with people crowded into it, and a larger group congregating outside, come to help. She asked who was in charge and was directed to a young man in an NYU sweatshirt. Some of the students had come to volunteer. Sam and Kezia asked what they could do to help, and she explained that she was a nurse practitioner. The firefighters were still digging through the debris for survivors. Every once in a while there was a shout of excitement, as they found someone alive, and the paramedics rushed forward to help, but more often by now they were finding bodies. It was sixteen hours since the explosion, so there was still hope of finding some people alive. But the blast had been so powerful that most people in the vicinity had been killed. The survivors they found came out covered with ash and soot, and several of the firefighters got injured attempting complicated rescues. They had already gone through the parts of the building that were accessible, but many areas were too unsteady to enter. Most of the people they found had been walking near the building when it exploded. The memorial pool commemorating 9/11 was filled with debris, twisted steel, and mounds of ash.
The rescue work was less frantic than it had been at Hudson Yards the night before, and the area less crowded. The most gravely injured had been taken to hospitals the night before. Kezia comforted people as they waited to get into ambulances, and Sam helped the police hold people back, so they wouldn’t interfere with the rescue work. It was sad just being there.
A reporter spotted Sam halfway through the afternoon and recognized him. She pushed through the police cordon and shoved a hand mike into his face, and he turned swiftly away. He had just watched a young woman’s remains pulled from the mountains of rubble around the building.
“This isn’t the time,” he said gently to the reporter, who was persistent, and kept trying to goad him into an interview he wasn’t willing to give. He finally slipped into the crowd and escaped her. Kezia had watched it happen and felt sorry for him.
“That must happen to you a lot,” she said when she was standing next to him, and they were both drinking water and taking a brief break. Between the heat and the ash and the acrid smell of smoke, they were all constantly thirsty, and sick from what they were seeing.
“I try to be patient about it,” he said, referring to the invasive reporter, “but sometimes it’s just so wrong and they don’t want to get it. I’ve only lost my temper a few times over the years, and I’m not proud of it.” This was a hard time for anyone on the scene. There had been so much loss of life, and there were severed pieces of human flesh and limbs, which made him either cry or want to throw up. He didn’t want a reporter in his face to register his emotions for the public. He was there as a private citizen and a man with a heart. Kezia respected him for it. He could have been at home, watching it on TV.
In slower moments when they took a break, the workers and volunteers all talked about who might have done it. Everyone agreed that it was political, and that the perpetrators were undoubtedly foreign, the attacks some statement of protest, or revenge for something that had been done to their country, or an act of religious zeal of some kind. Whatever slight had provoked the attacks, nothing justified the assault committed on innocent people, and even children, and the enormous loss of life the explosions had caused.
When they finally left the scene at eight that night, Sam and Kezia were quiet on the ride home. He was texting someone and she looked out the window, trying to push from her mind everything she had seen that day and the night before. It was unforgettable, no matter how hard she tried to focus on something else. And the injuries had been terrible from the kind of things the attackers loaded in the bombs, which was part of their special brand of terrorism.
Sam looked at Kezia as they got out of the cab. She looked tired and disheveled and her face was dirty. There was ash in her hair, and Sam surprised her as they walked into the lobby.
“I texted Louise Smith. She says she’d love to meet you.”
“I’d love that,” Kezia said with a tired smile. It had been nice spending the afternoon with him, crossing each other’s paths occasionally but doing different jobs. She had been assigned to help the paramedics again, with smaller jobs this time. The big tasks were done by the first responders and EMS personnel officially working there, but the volunteers had been useful too. It seemed like very little to do, given the enormity of what had happened and what had to be done.
“Louise said to bring you up for a drink, if you want. She just got back too. She was at Hudson Yards all day, and she was at the Empire State Building last night. She was taking pictures. Do you want to meet her?”
“Now?” Kezia was surprised. “I’m filthy dirty and I look a mess.” She had peeled her gloves off in the cab, and her hands were clean, but nothing else was. Even her jeans were smeared with the residue of the debris.
“She said exactly the same thing,” he said to reassure her, and Kezia hesitated. She wanted to meet the legendary photographer and had always admired her, but it seemed like an odd time to meet her now. “I always figure seize the moment. Shall we do it?”
Kezia let herself be swept along. “Can I go upstairs and wash my face first and put on clean jeans? I’d be afraid to even sit down.” She had blood and dirt all over her jeans.
“Sure. But no makeup and high heels,” Sam warned her, and she smiled.
“Should I meet you there?”
“I’ll come with you. I guess I could use a clean shirt and pair of jeans too.” He hadn’t noticed how dirty they both were. They rode up in their separate elevators. She scrubbed her face and hands and nails and brushed her hair when she got upstairs, put on clean jeans and sneakers and a clean T-shirt, and climbed through the hedge on her terrace to find Sam. She called his name to warn him she was there. He came out of his bedroom with his shirt off and fresh jeans on, and she noticed that he was in great shape for his age. He put a clean white T-shirt on while he talked to her. They looked like twins, and a lot cleaner than they had a few moments before.
“I’m glad you suggested that. My jeans left a pool of black grease and ash on my bathroom floor.” And it was deep under his nails since he hadn’t worn gloves that day.
“Are you sure we’re not intruding, or I’m not?” she asked him hesitantly as they rode down in his private elevator.
“If she didn’t want to see us, she wouldn’t have invited us. She said she needs to see people, after everything she saw since yesterday.” Sam and Kezia felt that way too. They needed normalcy and there was none.
The elevator stopped on the seventeenth floor, and Sam led the way. He had been there many times before. There were six apartments to a floor on that level, and Louise had two of them. She used one of them as her studio, he explained as he rang the doorbell. Kezia didn’t know what to expect, although she’d seen photographs of Louise. A tall, very thin woman with long snow-white hair in a ponytail opened the door to them. She had a youthful look and body, but from the road map of wrinkles on her face, it was obvious that she was very old. She was wearing a black blouse and black jeans, with sturdy old vintage military boots that were well broken in. She wore no adornments and no jewelry. She had a beautiful face and a soulful expression in her sky-blue eyes, as though she had seen all the trouble in the world in her lifetime. And she had photographed it as well.
“Hello,” Kezia said shyly, as Louise Smith stood back to let them in. She shook hands with Kezia, smiled at Sam, and then kissed him on the cheek.
“Someone’s kicking our poor country around again,” she said sadly. She had a British accent and Kezia remembered that she was English but had lived in America for a long time. “It’s heartbreaking to see what they did to those buildings, and all the people they killed. How do things like this happen in America? This is supposed to be the Land of the Free. The world was a lot freer when I was a kid. Now everyone wants to kill someone, make a stink, complain about the country, or get pissed off at someone. It’s not ‘cool’ to be happy anymore, or to be grateful for a great country. The pictures I took last night are some of the saddest I’ve ever taken. It’s such a statement about everything that’s wrong in the world.” She led them into a big airy living room, full of primitive African art, beautiful paintings, and some enormous enlargements of her photographs.
She pointed to the couch and they sat down. “Wine, scotch, gin?” she offered, and they both picked wine. Louise had scotch on the rocks. She was a serious drinker and an incredibly talented woman, and she had finished her work for the day. There was a long vintage metal desk, and there were some eight-by-ten prints lying on it. She picked them up and handed them to Sam before she sat down, after she filled their drink order and handed them their wine. “I developed those last night when I got home.” They were the faces of people looking up at the ravaged Empire State Building, looking like it was about to fall, but it hadn’t. They were the faces of fear, disbelief, disappointment, and tragedy. The Empire State Building had been the symbol of New York since 1931, ninety-four years of a monument that was the symbol of America, as well as New York, and now it was severely damaged and might even have to be torn down. It would have to be assessed for its safety and salvageability, but Louise’s photographs had captured the moment perfectly, on the faces of women and men, young and old. The photos were exquisite, and those taken at Hudson Yards were equally so, with the injured victims littering the ground as first responders knelt to help them and comforted those in extremis. Kezia’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at them, and then looked at the artist who had taken them.
“They’re incredible,” Kezia said in a hoarse voice, and Louise smiled.
“I hate it when people think all I do are disasters, but the moments and the faces are so poignant. They tell a whole story of what the loss meant to them, and to us. Sam tells me you just moved to New York,” Louise said to Kezia in a smooth, silky, almost sexy voice. Looking at her, one forgot her age. She was still a very attractive woman, and always had been. “This is quite an introduction to New York,” Louise said apologetically.
“I’m just sorry it happened,” Kezia said.
“You’re a nurse?” Sam had told Louise about her when he called.
“I was. A nurse practitioner, that’s like being a nurse plus. I’ve been a wife and mother for the past twenty-five years.”
Louise looked surprised. “You gave up your calling?” Kezia nodded. “Was it your passion?”
“It was when I was working. I practiced with my father, who was a GP in a little town in Vermont. I loved it, and loved working with him. But then I married and moved to San Francisco. I haven’t worked since.”
“And your father went on practicing without you?” Louise went right to the heart of the matter, in her photographs and in real life.
“He did. He encouraged me to make the move for a new life. I was thirty-five. Vermont was a dead end for me. He got sick a year after I left and died. Everybody in the county loved him. He taught me a lot when I worked with him.”
“If you love nursing, you should go back to it. Sam says you were wonderful at Hudson Yards last night. What a tragedy this whole thing is. I hope they catch the people responsible. They shouldn’t get away with it.” It was twenty-four hours later and still no one had taken responsibility. “Do you have children?”
“Two daughters.”
“I never had children. I was married for a short time. It wasn’t for me. I need to be free, and children require you to give up your freedom. I’m too selfish to do that, and I enjoy my work too much.” She smiled a mischievous smile and Sam laughed. She was a character, and he always enjoyed her company and admired her immense talent. “And I had a traumatic childhood myself. I was four when the war started in England. When I was six, my parents sent me to the countryside to get me out of the bombings in London. They died a few months later in the Blitz. I was ten when the war was over and spent eight years in an orphanage. I was awkward and outspoken, even then, so no one adopted me. At eighteen, I left the orphanage to get a job. I came to the States in 1953. I loved it, so I stayed and became an American. This is my country now. And now we’re being bombed here. I take it very personally.” She was direct and spoke her mind. She was strong and brave and seemed fearless, and had seen all the tragedies in life.
She showed them some more of the photographs she’d taken the night before. She had developed them herself in her own darkroom in the apartment next door. She loved working with old cameras and film. She had a Leica she cherished, which she showed Kezia. An hour later, Kezia and Sam went back upstairs after having a very pleasant time.
“What an amazing woman!” Kezia said to Sam.
“I love her,” he said, and went back to his apartment via her terrace. They were both tired, and needed time alone to recover from all they’d seen.
There were ten CIA and FBI agents and a dozen top-level Homeland Security supervisors pressed into a small locked CIA office on the West Side, ten blocks from Sam and Kezia’s building. It was a discreet gray stone building with a small sign that identified it as the ABC Import Company and a door that opened with a code. Once inside, there were countless electronic devices to identify anyone who entered.
The man at the front of the room, Joe Delano, was the most senior CIA agent present.
The twenty-two men standing and seated were the elite of the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security, and had flown in for the meeting on Air Force planes a few hours before. They were studying a massive bulletin board with photographs covering almost every inch of it. Across the top of the bulletin board, in four rows, were the photographs of forty-six young men between the ages of nineteen and thirty-two. All of them were wearing military-style uniforms of various rank. Most of them were wholesome-looking. No facial hair, no piercings, no facial jewelry. “But lots of tattoos,” one of the Homeland Security officers said, and someone laughed. All of them were based in Texas, in remote towns. And had weekly maneuvers.
“They have training camp every summer. They call themselves the Enforcers,” Joe Delano said. “They started in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and the whole group moved to Texas three years ago. They had nine members initially, and they’ve increased their ranks to forty-five, with a leader. That makes forty-six. We believe that they worked this operation with three teams, with fifteen men on each team, including a leader, and the man who is their overall commander who masterminded the whole thing. They’re anarchists. They want to bring the country down. They sent their advance team of explosives experts here a few days ago. They’ve been staying at a hotel in Times Square. Their leader, Filo Banks, runs his men like a small army. We educated most of them in Iraq and Afghanistan. They hate everything we stand for. We have an informant, who says they bought a lot of their material here and made most of the bombs themselves. More than half of them are expert explosives experts, forty of them have served in the army, two of them were Navy SEALs, and nineteen of them have been in prison, mostly in states other than Texas. Banks and our source hate each other. He wanted to be their leader. Banks double-crossed him and threw him out a year ago. So he came to us yesterday with the whole story. He says they brought an arsenal of weapons in from New Jersey, and most of the bombs in a stolen army truck. Most of them look like nice healthy guys from the sticks, just boys wanting to have fun. They’re lethal and highly trained. One of them dragged his little brother into it. He’s their computer whiz, and can hack into anything, and often does, just for the fun of it. They’re fearless. Born killers. We believe our source. Our informant wants indemnity for charges he has pending in three states. We didn’t believe him at first, but it all checks out.” Two of the CIA agents exchanged a glance. Everyone in the room knew Joe Delano by reputation. He was a hard-looking man in a hard job, with military bearing.
“And are we going to give the informant indemnity?” a Homeland Security officer asked.
“We might,” Joe said. “It depends on how solid the rest of the information turns out to be. What we have now appears to be accurate. He gave us all the names. They’ve been studying the targets for two years. They know every passage and air duct in the buildings they bombed. Some of them took jobs there briefly. They knew the security codes for entry. They want to bring the country down with a military coup. They were destroying the symbols of capitalism. It was meant to be an example of what they can do.”
“By blowing up two major buildings and half of Chelsea?” one of the CIA agents said angrily.
“Banks had a brilliant record in the army, and then he went nuts in Iraq and started killing civilians. He wound up in a mental hospital and was discharged. He was taken prisoner in Afghanistan for three months and tortured. He’s never been the same since, and when he was discharged he went back to Texas and recruited his own army. He’s a tactical genius. He masterminded the July Fourth attacks. He wants to take over the government. July Fourth was just to get our attention and show us what he’s capable of.”
One of the CIA agents handed out folders to each of them then. “All the information you need on these guys is in the folders, along with your assignments.” There was a female agent in the back of the room who had been observing the other agents, and she got a folder too. She was from internal affairs, and the second highest-ranking officer in the room, a retired army colonel.
“That’s it for now,” Joe said, and stood up, indicating that the meeting was over. Now they had to do their job. They had more than enough to go on, to learn who Banks and his men were, their habits and their histories. They had to find Banks and stop him. His goal was to blow up every monument in Washington, D.C., next, take over the government, and kill the president. Twenty-four hours after the explosions that had rocked New York, they knew who had done it, thanks to their informant. Along with the indemnity he’d asked for, he wanted witness protection, to be moved to another state, with a new identity. It was all possible if they got the green light. The secretary of defense and the White House had the final word. They had all the information.
“Are Banks and his men still in the area?” one of the FBI agents asked.
“We think so,” Joe said. “They’re lying low. They’re in the city somewhere. We’ve put out the word to all our usual resources. Forty-six men are out there. Someone will slip or talk. If they find our informant, they’ll kill him. He knows it. We have him under heavy guard in a hotel. We want Banks alive, whatever it takes. They’re going back to Texas after this. Washington is their next target. We can’t let that happen. They’re working on it now. New York was just a practice round.
“Sometime in the next two days they’re all going to disappear. Our job is to find Banks and his men before that happens. I want him and his men in twenty-four hours.” Joe looked hard at them and then left the room, as the twenty-two agents looked at each other and opened the folders. Every one of them knew their jobs were on the line. They had to find Filo Banks and his forty-five-man army. The biggest shock was that they were Americans, not foreigners at all.
The Enforcers wanted to bring down the country. They had the skills, the knowledge, and the materials to do it. Their bombs were simple to build and effective, as they’d proven. They could kill thousands of people in any city they chose to.
They believed that once they took over the government, they would be able to enlist an army of like-minded people who hated the way the country was run too. Their informant had said they were planning to bomb the White House and the Capitol sometime in the next month. They were fueled by hatred and armed with the skills the army had taught them. They were damaged, twisted men, hell-bent on destroying their own country. Banks had trained as an engineer at MIT before enlisting. And the forty-five men were his pawns, and each of them had a score to settle with the government and the army. He had just proven that a small band of highly dangerous men could terrorize a city of millions. In Filo Banks’s mind, this was only the beginning. A month from now, after Washington, he would control the whole country. He had to be found before he left the city. The race was on.