As the words were spoken, she saw the look on Maggs, saw her carefully built
sandcastle kicked over, and cursed to herself. “Agents?” she said. “Maybe we
should take a moment?”
Bell stood with her arms folded and glowered at Heat. Callan jerked Nikki’s chair
over by its back so he could plant one foot on it and lean on his knee, looming over
the table. “Let’s start by finding out what your number was doing on the cell
phone of a spy we busted in a bioterror plot.”
“Am I to understand you are accusing me of terrorism because someone happened to
have my number in a phone?” He turned to Heat. “Fuck this, I want my lawyer.”
Nikki called a time-out. They left Maggs to stew at the table and adjourned to the
Observation Room. The shouting began as soon as the air lock closed.
“How about a courtesy heads-up before you barge in on my interrogation?”
Bell said, “You’re talking courtesy? Seriously?”
“I looped you in about the arrest.”
“An e-mail after the bust is not looping in,” said Callan.
“Not looping in is what screwed the pooch at the helipad last night,” added Agent
Bell. “We should have been there for the takedown. Not playing catch-up.”
Heat pointed through the glass at Maggs. “His phone number was in Recents on Sharon
Hinesburg’s burner cell. I didn’t want to lose him.”
Yardley Bell moved nose-to-nose with Heat. “Bullshit. You made another unilateral
decision to cut us from this process. From our own fucking case. Why?”
“Because,” said Nikki, “there are too many moving parts.”
“What’s that mean? You don’t trust us?”
Heat didn’t answer. Just refused to blink. Callan finally spoke, in a more civil
tone this time. “Let’s hash all this out later. We have a mission. What have you
gotten from him so far?”
Nikki stepped away from Bell. “Feigned innocence. I was just starting to piece him
off when you came in.”
Yardley stepped away muttering, “Jesus…”
“All right, let’s be pragmatic,” Callan said. “First, he gets no lawyer.”
“I guess I could invoke an Article Nine and hold him for a psych evaluation,”
suggested Nikki. “I’d like to buy some time for my detectives to report back.
I’ve got crews tossing his home and business, and Rook’s doing some financial
digging.”
“What kind of financial?” asked Callan.
Before Nikki could respond, Bell jumped in. “Why are you farting around with a
bogus psych hold, Heat? The National Defense Authorization Act allows federal
officers to detain any terror suspect for an indefinite period, period.” She
brandished the federal DHS badge hanging around her neck. “Now are we a team?”
In their rekindled, albeit fragile, spirit of cooperation, Special Agent Callan
dispatched his top forensic specialists to join Heat’s detectives at Carey Maggs’s
apartment atop the Upper East Side high-rise, as well as at his brewery gastropub at
the South Street Seaport. Much as in the searches that had been made at Salena Kaye
’s SRO in Coney Island, Vaja Nikoladze’s compound upstate, and Sharon Hinesburg’s
one-bedroom, they’d hunt for material evidence like computers, mail, and receipts,
as well as sniff-sweep for bioagents.
Saying he felt his “asshole puckering by the minute” as noon arrived one day
before the bioterror target date, Callan also activated military resources to stop
and search every truck coming into Manhattan, augmenting the spot checks NYPD had
already initiated at key zones around the island. He also triggered the army and
National Guard roll-out of the disaster medical apparatus they had discussed in the
bunker at Homeland headquarters. The Fort Washington Armory uptown in Washington
Heights plus the two armories at opposite ends of Lexington Avenue were being
converted to vast indoor medical triage centers. Underneath the RFK Triboro Bridge,
the soccer fields of Randall’s Island would quietly overnight become a military
tent city for mass casualties.