“Sir, let me reassure you, I am capable of handling both.”
His ears reddened and plum blotches mottled his cheeks. “I am anything but
reassured. Now, you may have all the big magazines and primo TV interview shows
courting you, but this is still my precinct. And my order is, you got Wynn, this now
goes to the feds. If not, well, I suspended you once before. Do we need to revisit?
”
Heat flopped at her desk, barely containing her temper. Strictly speaking, Wally
Irons stood on solid ground. The scale of her case had escalated beyond a murder.
The skipper’s demand that she attend to the police work of his precinct—of the
homicide squad she led—made sense. But Nikki didn’t want to make sense; she wanted
to see it through. Thousands of lives in New York City were at stake. Heat asked
herself which motivated her more, her obligation to stop the terrorists or the
responsibility she felt to finish her mother’s work?
She decided they were one and the same, then went to her desk to make the call she
didn’t want to make.
“Nikki Heat, I couldn’t be more pleased,” said Bart Callan. “On behalf of DHS, I
am so glad you decided to join us after all.”
“Well, you sure put the home in Homeland, Special Agent Callan.” Nikki hoped using
his title would quell the effusiveness before things got out of hand.
“Whatever I can do,” he said. And then Heat told him what that was.
Soon Nikki heard the muted phone ring across the bull pen and watched through the
glass of the precinct commander’s office as the federal card got played. Wally
Irons nodded like a dashboard doggy to his caller, but he didn’t appear happy. That
was all right by her. She’d try to be happy enough for both of them.
An hour later, Detective Heat stood before a joint Bioterrorism Task Force in the
basement bunker of the United States Department of Homeland Security, six reinforced
floors under Varick Street in Lower Manhattan. Facing a mixed conference table of
military, police, and intel officers, including Callan and Bell, she briefed them on
her path into the investigation, via an eleven-year-old cold case, and the
developments of the prior month that led her to Tyler Wynn’s dying declaration on
his last ambulance ride.
It all lived in her head, so she spoke without notes, fundamentally repeating the
download she had given the squad that morning up at the Twentieth. She didn’t use a
whiteboard, and felt a bit startled when her peripheral vision caught the large LED
screen behind her filling with text as she spoke. One of the secretaries in the back
of the room was keying in an instant PowerPoint of her report. Resources, she
thought. This is what they mean by resources.
The group questioned her afterward, mainly for details she had decided to spare
them, and she answered everything candidly, holding only one thing back: the code.
When Nikki sat, Cooper McMains, the commander of the NYPD counterterrorism unit,
said he bought the logic of her clue construction that pointed to a bioterror event.
The rest agreed. Without any dissent beyond the prudent caution to keep open minds
for other possibilities, gears shifted to practicalities. Special Agent in Charge
Callan reclaimed the lectern and outlined the basics. “Top priority, we need to
know the what, when, and where of this strike. I’ll ask all of you to ramp up your
eyes and ears with informants and to re-scrub all your data with this threat in
mind. Obviously, we want hard focus on State’s designated groups on the Foreign
Terrorist Organizations list, starting with al-Qaeda and all its cousins, plus
Hezbollah, Mujahideen, FARC, Shining Path, and so forth.”