October 16
8:05 am Eastern Daylight Time
New York City Police Department Counterterrorism Bureau
One Police Plaza
Lower Manhattan, New York City
The place was chaos.
It was early Sunday morning, and Troy imagined that most Sundays, there’d barely be anyone around.
Not today. The terrorist attack on the day before meant that it was all hands on deck. Security was tight just getting into the building. The line was out the double doors, and onto the plaza in front of the 13-story, squat, Stalin-esque concrete monstrosity that was the headquarters of the NYPD.
Troy waited in a long line to first get into the building, then pass through the metal detector, the guards pulling every other person aside and giving them an extra swipe with the handheld wand. He had a pounding headache and what seemed like a slight tremor in his entire body. He was dressed in what he thought of as “uppity,” - boots, khaki slacks, a blue open-throated dress shirt, and a wind breaker jacket.
This wasn’t a wedding, or a funeral. It wasn’t an interview. It was a just a chat.
He was drinking his third cup of coffee in one of those heavy paper cups that were everywhere in New York City. The cup was blue with Greek columns on it. You saw it in every coffee shop, every concession near a subway stop, in every hand, everywhere you looked. He stared at it. It seemed to shimmer and shake. The coffee had already gone cold. He’d gotten about four hours of lousy sleep.
Eventually he got through, rode an elevator to the 12th floor, and a girl he found at a reception desk walked him through a warren of tight corridors to a back room. The wooden door, unmarked - no words, no number, nothing - was the dead end of the hallway. This wasn’t what Troy was expecting. He thought that Colonel Persons…
“Right through there,” the girl said. “It should be open.”
He went in. The man himself sat at a desk in a cramped space directly across from the door. Boxes were piled up on the floor around him. The desk itself was covered in paperwork. He had a laptop computer, which sat on top of various papers.
The only thing the office had going for it was a wide, tall window behind the desk, giving a view directly out toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The map in Troy’s brain suggested that this meant the tiny office was tucked away in the back of the building.
The man stood. Troy knew the guy in his bones.
Colonel Stuart Persons. Retired. Former United States Army Special Forces. Former Joint Special Operations Command. Troy guessed he was just about 50 years old. He was tall, and slim, with sharp edges to his face. His singular feature was the black eyepatch that he wore, the band tight to his mostly bald head. Nowadays, the patch was situated under a pair of glasses. The setup made Persons look older than his years.
Persons had never said what happened to his eye. Rumors had abounded. He lost it in combat in Fallujah. He lost it in a paratrooper training gone wrong in the Arizona desert - his primary chute had failed, he hit hard and plunged face-first into a cactus. A prostitute in the Philippines had gouged it out with a knife during a drunken argument. It could have been none of these, or all of them. Persons certainly had that reputation - some people referred to him as “Missing” Persons (though never to his face). Either way, the eye was gone when Troy first met him.
They shook hands across the desk. “Stark. Thanks for coming.”
“Colonel,” Troy said. “What happened to your eye?”
Persons smiled and shook his head.
It was an old joke. Saying “What happened to your eye?” to Missing Persons was like saying “How have you been?” to a normal human.
“It’s a long story,” Persons said. “Why don’t you sit down?” He gestured to the chair on Troy’s side of the desk. “And call me Stu. All that colonel stuff is over with.”
Troy sat down. The idea of calling this guy “Stu” was about as far-fetched as calling the owner of the Michael Collins bar “Kenny.” Or calling Mrs. Lynch, who lived across the alley from his mother, “Margaret.” None of that was going to happen.
Persons nodded to Troy’s big hands. “How’s your hands?”
Troy looked at them. He hadn’t noticed until now that they were scraped raw along the knuckles from last night’s fight. No. That wasn’t true. He had noticed, felt the soreness there, but had been too tired and hungover to really look at them. The right was worse than the left. That was usually the case. The right was his power hand.
He moved and stretched the fingers. “Uh, fine. Fine. Just a little fishing accident.”
Persons raised an eyebrow. “Little fishing accident, eh? On R&R?”
Troy shrugged. “It’s all R&R these days.”
“I was sorry to hear about what happened,” Persons said.
Troy nodded. “Thank you. I appreciate that.” This wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, not with Persons, not really with anyone. Not now, anyway. It was still too painful. Thankfully, Persons didn’t seem to want to talk about it, either.
“Military life can be a long way from fair. You’re an exceptional soldier, Stark. Among the best. I’ve always said that to anyone who would listen. That’s why I invited you in today.”
He raised his arms and looked around the room. “Welcome to my empire. This is only the beginning.”
Troy eyed him. “I had the idea that you were in the Counterterrorism Unit. Maybe even running it. I was kind of expecting a big room with a bunch of surveillance display screens on the wall, and a row of hackers cracking code. A bunch of guys with headsets on. People running in and out. Something along those lines.”
Persons nodded. “I might have given you that impression. Those guys are down on the eighth floor. Pretty much as you describe. Also, not really my bailiwick.”
“So what are you doing here… in that case?”
Persons spoke slowly, as if carefully choosing his words. “It’s a lot like counterterrorism. You might even say we should be part of that unit. But we’re not.”
Troy glanced around the room, wondering who “we” referred to. There were two people in the room, and Persons was the only one who worked here.
“So…”
“You were part of that unit some people called the Metal Shop.”
Now Troy was the one being careful, suddenly walking in a minefield. “What was I? I’ve never heard of that. The… what?”
Persons smiled, nearly laughed. “I’ve seen your file, Stark. You don’t have any secrets in here.”
“Colonel, I have no knowledge of a unit known as the Metal Shop. Nor if I did have knowledge of such a unit, would I be at liberty to…”
Persons raised a hand. “I know. It’s classified. But it’s why you’re here. I have a job for you, if you want it. It’s not the counterterrorism unit. It’s not a desk job. Your paychecks would come from the NYPD, but your connection to the police would be tenuous at best. It’s an investigations arm, but it’s for people who color outside the lines, so to speak. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
Troy stared at the man. He was locked in on Persons’s one remaining, very blue eye.
“I might. Yes.”
“If you’re willing to start today, your paperwork has already been filled out. Nothing to look over. No orientation. No filmstrips to watch. No one to take your blood pressure or temperature. Nothing to sign. You’d just have to trust me that it’s all on the level, and it’s been put to bed.”
“What would I be doing?” Troy said.
Persons shrugged. “There was a terrorist attack yesterday. You might have heard about it.”
Troy said nothing.
“We think it was a warm-up. The target was random, not terribly high value. A bunch of tourists and day trippers at a weird attraction near the river, and not even that many of them.”
“I heard 48 dead so far,” Troy said.
Persons nodded. “That’s right. As I said, not that many. They could kill a lot more than that, believe me. It was sophisticated technology. What we call slaughterbots. An autonomous drone flew south along the river, turned in at Hudson Yards, and released a swarm of much smaller drones. No one was flying these things. They were simply pre-programmed to take people out. They were tiny, a little bigger than dragonflies. In the head of each one was a charge of TNT, just powerful enough to punch through a skull and do catastrophic damage to the person’s brain.”
“Almost like bullets,” Troy said.
“That’s right,” Persons said. “Autonomous bullets, that pick a target on the fly. But not just any target. Within seconds, they were dropping people all over the place. The whole attack was over in less than 15 seconds. You’d think they were going for a heat signature or something along those lines. But it isn’t true. None of them, not one of them, hit a single child.”
Troy let that sink in. The bots would have needed advanced sensor technology, instantly determining the size and shape of the targets and weeding out the smaller ones. All of this, aboard autonomous drones that were moving fast and were the size of dragonflies.
“High tech,” Troy said. “Probably not a non-state actor.”
Persons shook his head. “We don’t know that. We can’t know that. These technologies are becoming ever more available. Advanced countries could have technology like this. So could advanced corporations. Rag-tag militias? Terrorist organizations? Probably not, not yet. But what we do know is this was a practice run. It showcased their abilities. And we believe something bigger is coming. The clock is ticking.”
Again, with the “we.” Persons was sitting in a cramped room, all by himself, down the end of a narrow hall at the back of the building. Who were we?
“And we have a person of interest in this case whom we’d like to talk to.”
Troy stared at him. There were tens of thousands of cops in this city, plus the FBI, plus the NSA, plus the counterterrorism unit, and God only knew how many weird little sub-agencies like this one. There were the transit cops and the military police units. There were the Port Authority police and the state police, and the state bureau of investigation. There were the National Parks police.
“If that’s true, why haven’t we picked him up yet? What with the clock ticking and all?”
Persons shrugged. “We’d like to pick him up. We’d like to do that today, in fact. But we need to do it a certain way. People have rights. They have the right to remain silent. They have the right to an attorney. They have the right not to implicate themselves in a crime. They have a right to the assumption of innocence.”
Troy began to get it. This wasn’t an offer to become a police officer, or anything like that. Persons had access to Troy’s classified military record, or at least some of it. There were things in Troy’s history that would probably never be recorded in any sort of paperwork, anywhere. But Persons knew enough.
He didn’t want Troy to be a cop. He wanted him to be a black operator.
“Bring a guy like the one I’m thinking of in, and he clams up in a hot minute. Then he lawyers up. Then things become protracted, with endless delays, while the guy says nothing. Meanwhile, it’s not clear that he’s committed any crime. Knowing things isn’t necessarily against the law.”
Troy and Persons were staring at one another again.
“And the clock, as you indicated, is ticking.”
Troy said nothing. He supposed that all along, everything was inevitably leading back to something like this. You didn’t hire Troy Stark to be an investigator. You didn’t hire him to ride a desk. You didn’t hire him to administrate anything, or to be part of some kind of cockamamie task force. You hired Troy Stark…
…to be Troy Stark.
It hurt, a little bit. This is what they thought of him?
But on the heels of that, another thought came:
What else would they think?
Everyone was responsible for who they were and what they had done. No one gets off the hook. No one rides for free.
“It’s up to you, Stark. The city is in a state of high anxiety, maybe even terror. I’m sure you noticed that on your way in here. I was going to give you a week to think about this gig. But then yesterday happened and we need to act fast. You could do a good thing. We could get information that might stop this from happening again. Or you can tell me I’m wrong and you’re not that person. Is that what you’re going to tell me?”
“I don’t have a weapon,” Troy said. And it was true. He didn’t own a gun. He certainly wouldn’t keep one at his mother’s house. He didn’t own any non-lethal weapons, like a Taser or bear spray. The only knives he had access to were in his mom’s kitchen. “I also don’t have a badge.”
Persons opened the top drawer of his desk. He pulled out a black Glock 19 nine-millimeter pistol and placed it on top of all his random paperwork. Then he put two 15-round magazines next to it. Then he placed an NYPD badge there. The nameplate said, “Stevens, Tom.” There was a serial number above it.
Troy indicated the badge. “Is it real?”
Persons shrugged. “Does it matter?”
Troy looked at the rest of the stuff. “Is that it? A gun, some ammo, and a badge that may or may not be real? Is that all there is?”
Persons went back in the drawer and came out with brass knuckles. The knucks would fit over four fingers of either hand and were spiked along the top. One good punch would do A LOT of damage to an opponent’s face.
Persons then placed a four-inch serrated hunting knife and sheath on the desk. The sheath had a strap you could use to wrap it to a leg or upper arm. Then he reached in and came out with a tiny Beretta Nano pocket pistol, with an elastic ankle holster.
He gestured at the Nano. “You never know. Could come down to that.”
Then he placed an old blue cell phone, flip-style, on top of it all. Troy hadn’t seen one like it in probably a decade or more.
“Never use your own phone. There’s a number saved on speed dial in there. Call it when you have something for me.”
Troy nodded. He was in. He supposed that Persons had known it would happen this way all along. “Okay. Now who am I picking up?”