“What makes them think that?” asked Harvath.

“They found him with a backpack full of explosives that failed to go off. There’s nobody from our office who can get over there right away, so I’ve been authorized to give you first crack at him, if you want it.”

“Authorized by whom?”

“Stan Caldwell, deputy director of the FBI.”

As Scot and Bob walked toward the NYPD’s 1st Precinct on Ericsson Place, the street scenes were surreal. On some there were absolutely no signs of life. On others, entire avenues were taken over by throngs of people still pouring out of lower Manhattan, making their way north. As part of the city’s emergency plan, the subways had been shut down and many streets were restricted to emergency vehicles only. The drivers who were still out, searching for a way off the island, faced an absolute traffic nightmare, with most of their routes blocked by people who had abandoned their vehicles and had fled on foot.

To make matters worse, the sky was obliterated by a smoky haze, while a powdery gray ash, as if it were the cremated remains of the victims themselves, had begun falling across the city.

Harvath, though, tried to force the macabre scene from his mind by focusing on the matter at hand. “For some reason, Stan decided to throw us a bone” was all Gary had said when Harvath called him to relay the update.

Turning to Herrington, Harvath wondered aloud, “First Caldwell says the JTTF duty officer doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and then he sends him chasing after us with an interrogation on a silver platter. It doesn’t make sense.”

“There’s a little too much fruit in this salad, but what do I know?” replied Herrington. “As far as I’m concerned, we shouldn’t look the gift whore in the mouth.”

While chatting with the arresting officers, Harvath was handed the evidence bag that contained the few items the man was carrying when he was picked up. His backpack was with the bomb squad and held nothing of interest other than the explosives that failed to go off.

Scot and Bob were shown into the brightly lit interrogation room. Cuffed to a chipped Formica table in the center was a Middle Eastern man in his early-to-mid-twenties. His face and arms were covered with cuts and bruises. Whether the injuries came from having been in the PATH tunnel when one of his colleagues’ devices went off or if he had “slipped” getting into the squad car, Harvath didn’t really care. What he wanted was information, and he hoped this bomb jockey had something that they could use.

“Masaa al-Khair,” said Harvath as he pulled the metal chair out from the other side of the table and sat down. “Kayf Haalak?”

The man looked up at Harvath and spit at his face.

Why were they all spitters?

Herrington, who had been trying to up the intimidation factor by leaning against the wall behind the prisoner, sprung forward, grabbed a handful of his hair and jerked his neck back so that he could stare into the man’s face. “My friend asked you how you were doing. It would be polite to respond.”

“Elif air ab tizak!” groaned the Middle Easterner.

Bob, who could also speak Arabic, was familiar with the insult involving the placement of an unfathomable number of male private parts into a certain orifice of his body and responded now with an even less tasteful insult of his own, “Elif air ab dinich.”

The prisoner was enraged with the reference to his religion and struggled to free his head from Herrington’s grasp. “Bastard fuck you. Bastard fuck you,” he yelled over and over again.

Harvath signaled for Bob to let go of him and step back. Upending the evidence bag, Harvath poured its contents onto the table and said, “Any more spitting and I’m going to leave you and my friend in here alone for some etiquette lessons. Understand?”

“Lawyer. Give me lawyer,” the man replied in his broken English.

That really pissed Harvath off-just as much as the fact that there were Americans who would fight to the death to see that this piece of shit got a fair and just trial. Where was the justice for the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Americans who had just been killed by this asshole and his pals? “You don’t get anything unless you cooperate. No lawyer, no judge, nothing until you give us some answers. Let’s start with your name.”

“I no hear you. I talk lawyer.”

Harvath signaled Herrington, who came off the wall and slammed the man’s head right into the table.

“Can you hear me now?” asked Harvath as blood gushed from the man’s broken nose.

When he didn’t respond, Herrington cuffed him with an open-handed slap to the left side of his head and added, “How about now?”

Waving Herrington back, Harvath stated, “Let’s talk about this brand-new Casio watch of yours. They make pretty good detonators, don’t they? Your colleague Ramzi Yousef used one of these to detonate a little saline solution bottle filled with nitroglycerin on a plane bound for Tokyo a while back. He called it his microbomb, but it didn’t bring the plane down like he hoped. We caught him before he could improve upon the formula, Allah be praised.”

“Waj ab zibik!” yelled the man, wishing Harvath an infection in a very private place for invoking the name of his god.

Harvath ignored him and continued, “This watch wasn’t meant as a detonator, though, was it? I’d be willing to bet that all of you got the same new watch for synchronization. Am I right?”

The man said nothing. He just sat there as blood rolled down from his nose, along his chin, and dripped onto his shirt.

“How about the phone?” pressed Harvath. “Motorola iDEN. Pretty nice, but a bit out of your league, don’t you think? I mean, digital wireless phones like this are meant for business people. Two-way digital radio, alphanumeric messaging, fax capabilities, high-end Internet access. That’s a lot of features just so you and your buddies can set up blow-job parties at the local mosque, Allah be praised.”

“Nikomak,” the man growled.

Harvath ignored the suggestion of what he should do to his mother and toyed with the phone as he continued posing questions. “Since at least one other bomb went off in the PATH tunnel, we’re assuming you were either a primary or a contingency operative, or was the plan to wreak as much damage as possible?”

The man remained silent.

“How were you recruited for this job? Who contacted you?”

Nothing.

“When were you first contacted?”

Still nothing.

“What else do your colleagues have planned? More bombs? Something with an airplane? Other cities? What is it?”

At this, the prisoner smiled.

Bob was about to reach out and strike him again, when Harvath stood up and stated, “I’m going to post a flyer over at the World Trade Center site to see if there are any lawyers willing to represent you.” Turning to Herrington he said, “Let’s go.”

Once outside the interrogation room, Bob stopped Harvath and said, “We were just getting started in there. The fear was absolutely wafting off that guy. You could smell it.”

“I was definitely smelling something, though I don’t know if it was fear. Listen, we’re both fans of the art of not-so-subtle persuasion, but we don’t have the time to work this guy over the way we’d like to. Even the NYPD is going to have a limit as to what they’ll let us do to a terrorist suspect in their custody.”

“So let’s remove him from their custody,” said Herrington. “We’ll take him back to 26 Federal Plaza, or to a quiet hotel room, an abandoned building, wherever. It doesn’t matter. He knows something. You could see it in his face.”

“What he knows is that we’re desperate. If we put the testicle clamps on him maybe he’ll tell us something of value, maybe not. We’d need to have psychological leverage-have his family in custody or something like that. But at this point, we don’t even know his name.”