The meeting took place in a warehouse in Brooklyn on Essex Street. There were renovated slums in the area, as well as gentrified apartment buildings and warehouses. They all straggled in after business hours. There was a side door and a freight elevator they all rode up in. And, once on the top floor, there were reinforced bulletproof security doors, and all the electronic devices they had in all their offices around the city. Six CIA agents and two FBI special agents had been brought in from Texas, to see what they could add.
They were moving quickly, and the deal had been struck with their informant, with the attorney general’s approval. It was a highly sensitive operation, and one slip could blow it sky high. What played in favor of the government agencies was that all the members of the Enforcers were young. They had been involved in violent crime before, but never at this level, with a highly coordinated synchronized attack. Filo Banks had proven just how dangerous they were. The president wanted them in custody, and all forty-six of them alive, if possible, to be brought to justice as an example. With federal charges, the death penalty would apply. And the intel they were getting at the agencies was that the Enforcers were cocky and jubilant, having pulled it off.
It was unthinkable to every one of the forty-three agents in the room that the horror perpetrated on the Fourth of July had been conceived of and executed almost flawlessly by a group of Americans. There were no foreign nationals involved. No Middle East oil groups were financing it. No clandestines from a government the U.S. was helping to overthrow. No conspiracy to bring down a foreign government had backfired. These were red-blooded American boys, most of whom had served their country in the armed forces, who had plotted it carefully. All were criminals, and their leader was a misdirected genius gone mad. But the plot had worked, tragically. It was a strike at democracy from within that was a revolution in its infancy, a cancer in the very heart of America that had to be stopped. The Enforcers were ex-cons and vets whose minds were irreparably twisted from the action they had seen in wars that never should have been, in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were bright minds that should have been put to better use. It was a tragedy for the country and a symptom of a dangerous sickness at our core. Banks’s army, the Enforcers, wanted anarchy instead of democracy and were willing to sacrifice innocents to achieve it.
Close to a hundred agents and computer data analysts and experts were working to make sure that they scraped the last of this poison out of the country’s veins. The goal was to capture all forty-six men, take them alive, and see that they would stand trial. The Enforcers’ plan had been almost flawless. The one fatal mistake they had made was that they had stayed in New York afterward and lingered for several days. The city had shut down so quickly, they hadn’t been ready to make their exit. They had planned to hang around for a few days and make a silent escape in twos and threes back to Texas. But the lockdown had happened too quickly and they didn’t want to stand out. So they stuck it out, in twelve rooms, divided between two huge convention hotels near Times Square.
Some of them had even cruised by the bomb sites wearing OES jackets and carrying clipboards, just to admire their handiwork at close range. They wanted to make sure that people were hurting as badly as the Enforcers had been hurt by the system and by the wars to which they’d been sent. Some of them came from good families who would be deeply ashamed once they knew what their sons had done. The Enforcers had trained diligently for two years for this event. They were anarchists to the core, hell-bent on tearing the heart out of American society, striking back at an enemy they couldn’t even define. It was a mission built on hatred and revenge, and every single operative involved had to keep a cool head and not react to their own feelings about it. The cleanup and the capture were missions for consummate professionals.
Joe Delano, the senior agent in charge, was getting direct orders from the military, the Pentagon, the White House, and the heads of the CIA and FBI. Everything had to be minutely synchronized for success. No one could deviate from the plan by even seconds.
Five days after the lockdown began, before the airports and bridges opened, the Enforcers were going to split into groups of two and three and make their move to their exit plan, dressed as street cleaners and police officers, cab drivers, and subway engineers. Everyone had a role to play. And hour by hour, they would leave the two hotels. According to the informant’s own sources, they had already disposed of most of their weapons, and the explosives, in both rivers within an hour of the attack while chaos reigned. They’d only kept enough weapons to make their escape. They were going to be driving cross-country in legitimate trucks meant to be delivering produce, which was still moving even during the lockdown. They were going to be spending a few weeks in New Mexico, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, and wind up back in Texas in time to resume training for their next mission, the attack on Washington, D.C., which had to be even more minutely synchronized than New York’s. They had only just begun. They were going to have the whole country on its knees by September, in the single greatest power play the country had ever seen. Banks was already training more men for that.
The SWAT teams were waiting for the Enforcers when they left the two hotels. The agents knew the Enforcers’ faces and their profiles, how they worked and how they moved. The first four were captured, one of them killing an FBI agent in the process, and the other three were shot and killed when they tried to escape.
The first hotel rapidly turned into a war zone, a melee of highly trained SWAT teams, operatives, and special agents, as it turned into open guerilla warfare, which had been the fallback plan Joe Delano hoped to avoid. They moved on the second hotel the moment violence erupted at the first one. Eight civilians were caught in the crossfire at the second hotel. None were killed, although two of them were severely injured. A maid was taken hostage and found in a closet unharmed later at the first hotel. She was traumatized but not injured.
The men of the Enforcers who had been in the military knew to fan out. Several of them ran out of the hotel toward the subway, and gunfire erupted as the FBI agents chased them down the tracks. Three of them and the agents jumped out of the way of an oncoming train, and one Enforcer and two FBI agents were killed. No agent was going to forget their objective. None of the Enforcers could be allowed to flee and strike again. It was a mission that could have only one of two outcomes: capture or death.
By nightfall, after a life-and-death chase, in cars, in trucks, and on foot, seven of the Enforcers had been apprehended and were alive and being held in a locked interrogation room in a federal building. Thirty-eight of the men who had blown up the buildings on the Fourth of July were dead. One was missing: Filo Banks, their leader, the cleverest of all. It wasn’t what Washington had ordered, but it was the best the combined forces of the CIA and FBI and police SWAT teams could do. The Enforcers were too heavily armed and too skilled with their weapons to be overcome easily. And they fought to the death. The surviving seven would stand trial. Eleven federal agents had been injured, four had died, and two NYPD officers had been killed. In all, forty-four people died in the battle to catch the men who had carried out the Fourth of July attack.
When he left the second hotel, disguised as an engineer, Banks disappeared into the bowels of Penn Station, pursued by six federal agents. He was ultimately trapped between two oncoming trains, and all six agents shot him dead before the trains hit him. It was over.
Fresh teams of investigators were brought in to interrogate the survivors, who were shocked to have been apprehended, and suspected an informant. Their enemies had betrayed them, not their friends.
They were interrogated relentlessly for two days, in the depths of the Federal Building, in locked facilities. Then they were flown to Washington and put in holding pens at a maximum-security federal jail for further interrogation.
The seven surviving Enforcers were proud of what they’d done and showed no remorse. They saw themselves as heroes. The loss of thousands of lives meant nothing to them, and nor did their fallen brothers. It was a holy war to them. They had all seen so much death that it was a sacrifice they thought necessary, and were willing to make, even if it cost them their own lives. They were men with no souls, no regrets, no remorse, only their twisted mission and their blind faith in their leader, who was gone now.
The capture of the seven suspects, and the deaths of the others and of their leader, were announced to the public exactly one week after the men had blown up the three locations. Law enforcement had moved quickly. The informant was never mentioned.
America was in shock. No foreign government was involved, no foreign nationals who had snuck onto American soil. It was carried out by young men who had grown up in America, said they loved their country, had served in the armed forces, and had become bitter and twisted in wars that had warped their minds. They claimed to be heroes and martyrs to the cause of anarchy, led by a sick hero, who had led his men to their death, and killed thousands of innocent people in the process.
Sam and Kezia watched the news together that night and heard the mayor’s and the governor’s speeches telling the American public what had happened. Lives had been lost in order to save some of the attackers, so they could stand trial.
“God, I hate to think what this country is coming to, if our own kids are trying to blow up the country and want anarchy. What a tragedy for all of us.”
“And all the people who died needlessly,” Kezia added, and he nodded.
The entire state, and all the other states, came out of lockdown that night. It was all over in eight days, which was remarkable. It hadn’t taken months, thanks to their informant, who got everything he wanted. There was no question that without him, the Enforcers might have escaped. He had been removed and flown to his new location by midnight that night. It was one of the cleanest operations the federal agencies had ever run. Everyone’s heart had been in it, and failure was never an option. The operatives and agents who had been part of it were never identified or shown, for their own protection.
And in Kezia’s case, it had been an opportunity to meet Sam and become friends.
Both Kate and Felicity flew home the next day. Felicity arrived first and went straight from the airport to see her mother, with Blake. Kezia was stunned by the size of the ring, but it was beautiful. Kezia met with them alone. Sam was busy in his own apartment, and Kezia wasn’t ready to explain things to them yet, and neither was Sam. They wanted to protect what they had, in its early stages. Kezia hugged Felicity and Blake, and congratulated them. They were so happy they were glowing.
They left after a short time, and Kate arrived late that night. She called her mother from the cab on her way into town. She said she was exhausted and would come by in the morning. She claimed she was too tired to make sense. She and Felicity had both commented that the airport had been a nightmare, and probably would be for many days, trying to get travelers back on track to their destinations with an eight-day delay and backlog.
Kezia saved the big news for her until the next day.
When Kate came to see her mother at the penthouse the following morning, Kezia shared Felicity’s news with her.
“Your sister’s getting married,” Kezia told her over a cup of strong coffee. Kate looked shocked.
“When?”
“They haven’t set the date yet, but not too far away, I suspect.” Kate listened to her but didn’t comment for a minute.
“She’s too young to get married,” Kate said, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. Felicity always won all the prizes. She got whatever she wanted, and what Kate wanted too. Kate wasn’t even sure if she wanted to marry Jack. But the last thing she wanted was to have to go through Felicity’s big splashy social wedding, pretending to be a good sport about it, and feeling like a loser and an old maid. Kezia knew she was upset and had expected her to be, but maybe it would prod her to finally make up her mind about Jack, and even move on, if she had the courage to do it. “She told me she didn’t want to get married the last time we talked about it,” Kate said plaintively, as though her sister had betrayed her.
“I guess Blake changed her mind while they were stuck at the Hotel du Cap, waiting to come home.”
“It won’t last,” Kate said cynically as they walked out onto her mother’s terrace. She was silent for a long time, with tears in her eyes, when she saw the Empire State Building. It shocked Kezia every time she saw it too, and made her heart ache for the symbol so badly damaged.
“God, Mom, that must have been terrifying.” Seeing it made it all too real.
“It was, and heartbreaking.”
“What happened to your hedge?” Kate commented when she saw the narrow opening Sam had made by moving one of the sections the night of the explosions. “It looks like someone pushed it out of line, your gardener maybe.”
“I met Sam Stewart that night. We watched the fires together.” She had told the girls he lived there, but she’d never seen him until the night of the attack. And she hadn’t told them she’d met him, until now. Kate looked surprised, but Kezia and Sam were neighbors, so it didn’t seem special or unusual.
“What’s he like?”
“Very human and unassuming and down-to-earth. I want to introduce you and Felicity to him.”
“That’ll be weird,” Kate predicted with a smile. “Having America’s biggest movie star over for dinner. At least you weren’t alone. I’m sorry you had to go through it, Mom.”
Kezia nodded and they sat down. “How was your father?”
“Interesting,” Kate said cautiously. “He’s doing good work, but I understand better now why he bowed out and ran away. He’s not a warm person. It’s all about him. His hospital, his plans, his life. He did his best to bridge the gap with me. I like his wife. But he’s very self-centered and all about the work he’s doing at his hospital. I think that’s all that matters to him. It made me realize how lucky I was to have Andrew.” It was comforting to Kezia to hear it. She hoped that Kate would finally be able to let go of her fantasies about her biological father. If she did, the trip would have been worth it. And in spite of the stress of not being able to come back to the States for a week, and the long trip, Kezia thought she looked relaxed and peaceful.
Kate left a little while later and didn’t mention Felicity’s engagement again. Kezia knew it would rankle, but if it woke Kate up to the fact that she was wasting her time with Jack, then that would be a good thing too. Or that she really loved him. Either way, Kezia hoped that her late bloomer was finally blooming, or about to.
When Kate went home that afternoon, having done some errands after visiting her mother, she started writing and was happy with it. It felt great, like flying, and she knew exactly where she was going with it. The trip to Africa had worked its magic. She had come back a free woman, and an adult.