“Will do. Echo One out,” replied Delacorte, who then looked up at Tim and said, “How do you want to play this?”

“Let me get us some muscle so we can walk shotgun. I’ll be right back.”

Removing his credentials, Fiore ran up to two large men who had just helped extricate a woman from her badly damaged car and said, “U.S. Secret Service. I have a priority injury I need your help with over here.”

The men followed Tim back to where Amanda Rutledge lay on the litter next to the sheared SUV. “She don’t look so good,” one of them commented. “Are you sure you want to be moving her?”

“We don’t have a choice,” replied Marcy. “If we don’t get her to help soon, she’s going to die.”

“You’re the boss,” said the other man as he waved his buddy to the rear of the litter while he grabbed the handles near Amanda’s head.

“Gently now, fellas,” said Fiore. “On three. Ready? One. Two. Three.”

The men delicately lifted the litter as Tim and Marcy took up security positions on either side.

Looking down again at the young woman who lay unconscious on the litter, one of the men remarked, “Hey, is this who I think it is?”

Marcy was about to respond, when there came the sound of groaning metal followed by cries of terror. The group turned to see the number seven subway train on the upper deck behind them teetering on the edge of an enormous blast hole that revealed the river below and sky above.

A moment later, there was the horrible sound of metal scraping on metal as subway cars tumbled one after the other through the hole on the upper deck, straight down through the hole on the vehicle level and then plunged toward the East River below. It was one of the most horrific sights any of them had ever seen.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, suddenly, the bridge beneath their feet began to shake violently. Large pieces of metal buckled and yawed as the structure prepared to meet its watery death.

Not a man to mince words, Tim Fiore looked at his group and yelled, “Run!”

WASHINGTON, DC

This is a real bad time to be asking me for favors,” Stan Caldwell, the exhausted forty-two-year-old deputy director of the FBI, said into the phone.

“Who’s asking for favors?” replied Gary Lawlor, who had been both Caldwell ’s mentor and his predecessor before moving over to DHS and the Office of International Investigative Assistance to head its covert counterterrorism initiative known as the Apex Project. “I’m asking you to do your job.”

“I am doing my job, and I’m up to my eyebrows in shit right now. Do you have any idea what the preliminary death toll is coming out of New York City?”

“It’s not good. I know. I’ve been getting the same reports you have.”

“You’re goddamn right it’s not good.”

“Stan, I’m not trying to make more work for you,” he said from his office across town, “but there are a couple of things here that don’t make sense, and I need you or somebody in your office to get to the bottom of it for me right now.”

“There’s nothing to get to the bottom of. Whoever your guy talked to at the JTTF office in New York is wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Stan. We’ve got too much history together. I want to know what the DIA’s role is in all of this. Why were they posing as JTTF agents for Sayed Jamal’s handoff?”

“ Gary, I’m going to tell you one more time, and then I’ve gotta get back to my desk in the SIOC. The men your agent worked with in upstate New York are JTTF, plain and simple. Whoever pegged them as DIA is wrong. Tell your man that if he wants to help out in Manhattan, I suggest he grab a hard hat, attach himself to a search-and-rescue team, and start digging.” With that, Caldwell hung up the phone.

“Did he buy it?” asked FBI Director Martin Sorce.

“I don’t think so. Especially since he had to leave four messages over here before I called him back.”

Sorce turned to the other man in the room and said, “What should we do now?”

From behind his frameless glasses, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s chief of staff, Timothy Bedford, fixed the two FBI men with a steady gaze and replied, “Nothing. We’ll handle it from here.”

As Bedford stood up to leave he added, “And, gentlemen, please remember the national security implications of this issue. As far as anyone is concerned, our meeting never took place.”

Once Bedford had left the director’s conference room and the door had shut behind him, Sorce remarked, “I never did like that guy. It’s no wonder Waddell uses him to do his dirty work. What does he mean, this meeting never took place? At least two dozen people saw him come in here. What an asshole.”

Caldwell smiled. “The fact that his tie is knotted a bit too tight notwithstanding, what are we going to do about this?”

“What can we do?” asked Sorce as he stood up from his chair. “You saw the letter he was carrying from the president. We’ve been told in no uncertain terms to stay out of their operation.”

“And in the process lie to people we should be working with-in particular, Lawlor, who’s a former deputy director of the Bureau?”

“I don’t like it either, Stan, but that’s the way it is. Listen, we’ve got too much on our plates now anyway.”

“And it could skyrocket if Gary is right about a secondary attack,” said Caldwell as his attention was drawn to an urgent message coming in on his pager.

Sorce opened the door of the conference room and nodded to his staff that he was ready to return to the floor of the Strategic Information and Operations Center, or SIOC, for a quick morale booster. But before he left, he turned and said, “The next several hours are going to be absolutely critical, so let’s make sure we’re focused on doing our job.”

“Which is, using anything and anyone at our disposal to stop any further terrorist attacks, correct?” queried Caldwell as he looked up from the message on his pager.

The director’s ability to read people was the sine qua non of his successful leadership of the FBI. He knew what his deputy was driving at. “As long as you operate within the framework of the law and remain faithful to your oath of duty, you’ll have my full support.”

“Even if it means potentially pissing off the president?”

Sorce looked Caldwell in the eye and said, “For the record, I left the room after I told you to operate within the framework of the law-”

“And remain faithful to my oath of duty,” added Caldwell. “I got it.”

NEW YORK CITY

Scot Harvath slid his BlackBerry back into the plastic holder at his waist and said, “The official word from the FBI is that the JTTF duty officer has no idea what he’s talking about.”

Herrington looked at him and replied, “He seemed pretty sure of himself to me.”

“Even so, they suggest we find a search-and-rescue team and focus our efforts in that direction.”

“I think I’d rather focus my efforts on catching terrorists.”

“Me too,” said Harvath.

“So where are we?”

“Apparently on the corner of Ignorance and Bliss without a goddamn clue.”

“Why would the FBI cover up the DIA’s involvement in all of this?” asked Herrington.

“Who knows? I can’t figure any of these people out anymore. Subterfuge on top of subterfuge, all wrapped up with prime government red tape. It’s getting harder and harder to believe we’re all on the same side.”

“Agent Harvath,” yelled a voice from behind them. “Agent Harvath!”

They turned to see the JTTF duty officer running out of the revolving door of 26 Federal Plaza.

“I think I might have something for you,” he said.

“Like what?” asked Herrington.

“NYPD picked up a guy at the temporary PATH station at the World Trade Center just off Church Street. They think he was supposed to be one of the bombers.”