That’s it, he’d thought, for the thousandth time in his life. Enough with the basketball. They said that biology is destiny, and so it was that a formerly tall-for-his-age fourteen-year-old now spent two evenings a week with like-minded desperadoes throwing himself around a basketball court. He loved the game, but never the sheer exhaustion of running up and down the court—an exhaustion that came more easily these days. Fisk had topped out at five-eleven, never playing college after the JV team at Villanova, riding the bench because everybody else was better and, eventually, taller than he was.

Fisk limped over to the wall. The briefing room was overcrowded with representatives of the various agencies that comprised the JTTF. There were similar task forces in over one hundred cities nationwide, but New York’s was, appropriately, the biggest. Besides the host agency, the FBI, full-time federal participants included the U.S. Marshals Service, the Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Diplomatic Security Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service, the army, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and more than a dozen others, in addition to state and local law enforcement departments.

Such task forces are often derogatorily referred to as “alphabet soup,” due to the large number of acronyms. To Fisk’s eyes, the JTTF was worse. It was alphabet, minestrone, potato leek, French onion, clam chowder, gumbo, and Scotch broth . . . many great tastes that did not belong on the same menu.

Fisk’s department, the Intelligence Division, was not part of the JTTF. It functioned as a separate intelligence-gathering agency within the New York Police Department. He was here as little more than a courtesy.

Fisk shifted his weight off his hurt ankle, leaning against the wall behind a liaison from the Postal Inspection Service. At the head of the room, Cal Dunphy, the current top FBI special agent assigned to the JTTF, was bald by choice, his broad jaw forming his head into a perfect oval. His eyes briefly flashed on Fisk when he entered, but nothing was said. Dunphy pulled notes from a file and consulted them through the lenses of his rimless eyeglasses.

“We’re in his car and on his phone. We’re in his laptop. Mr. Shah is moving with full confidence, and yet has no idea that we’ve got a flashing beacon on his back, bright and strong.”

The FBI and Intel had had many operational differences of opinion in the past. The chief source of friction was their shared jurisdiction: a good old-fashioned turf battle. Two well-financed ops groups with similar but not identical agendas, going toe-to-toe in the greatest and most targeted city in the world. And neither side had either margin or tolerance for error.

They did not work well together. Recently, and too often, they had stepped on each other’s toes, compromising the other’s investigation. Various attempts had been made at improving communication and coordination, but nothing altered the fact that they were two dogs fighting over the same piece of meat.

So each agency kept the other at arm’s length. The FBI had Shah all to itself in Denver. Now Shah was in the Big Apple, on Intel’s terrain. They had learned enough from the mistakes of the past to establish a baseline of coordination, resulting in Fisk’s presence at this briefing. But that didn’t mean they were suddenly on the same page.

As Dunphy went on, it was clear to Fisk that the FBI was merely going through the motions. They were sharing the results of their surveillance info but not the sources. They wanted point on Shah. They certainly didn’t want Intel tracking him independently.

A couple of different liaisons asked questions that were intended to make them appear smart and involved, but without any true interest in moving the issue forward. Groupthink. Fisk saw Dunphy glance his way. Dunphy, to his credit, knew Fisk wasn’t going to let this ride.

Fisk stuck out his hand, as though hailing this train that was going around in circles. “This whole thing makes me itchy,” he said. “I don’t like it. He’s here now. Right in the city. We know what he’s got. We know what he’s here for. I think letting him dangle like this is too goddamn risky. You say you’re confident of his timeline—”

“We’ve got three days, Fisk.”

“Having a GPS tag on a fox who’s already in the henhouse doesn’t reassure me much.”

Dunphy all but sighed. “Nothing would reassure you, Fisk.”

“Grabbing him now would.”

“And give up three critical days of intelligence gathering? Who knows what we can get from this guy? This is crux time. Invaluable. This is the fruit at the bottom, Fisk. The sweet stuff. I understand your skittishness, but we’re holding a strong hand here—”

“It’s not skittishness; it’s common sense. You’re telling me this guy is on a controlled burn. I’ve seen those things get out of hand many times. All it takes is a sudden shift in the wind.”

Dunphy smiled. Fisk knew what that smile meant. He saw parents use it on their kids in the park. “We’ve got the best meteorologists in the business.”

“Predicting the weather is not the same as making it rain,” said Fisk.

The FBI had conducted various undercover terror stings since the dawn of domestic terrorism. For every terror plot that arose organically, which is to say without domestic law enforcement interference—the underwear bomber in a jetliner over Detroit, or the planned attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey—two others originated with the prodding of undercover federal agents. Not unlike actual terror cell leaders, they radicalized vulnerable Muslim suspects by fomenting anti-American dissent and supplying the conspirators with dummy materials, such as fake C-4 explosive or harmless blasting caps. These paper conspiracies were then passed off as major law enforcement victories, vanquished threats to homeland security. But it was no exaggeration to say that the FBI had instigated more terror plots in the United States since 9/11 than Al-Qaeda.

Fisk continued, “My concern is that everyone is on board with your plan—except the terrorist himself.”

“Noted,” said Dunphy, pissed off now, and finished with Fisk. “Anybody else?”

Fisk had heard enough. One of the pleasures of not being beholden to the JTTF was the ability to walk out of a meeting—or hobble, which was just what Fisk did.

Chapter 3

Just under an hour later, Jeremy Fisk limped into the Intelligence Division office in Brooklyn. The building was almost all the way out to Coney Island, a long D train commute from Park Slope. Surrounded by automobile junkyards, the unmarked one-story brick building gave no indication of the important work going on inside.

Not only were the windows made of bulletproof glass, but the entire building was sheathed in ballistic Sheetrock. Cars moved in and out of the lot all day, the electric gate in the fence sliding open and closed, yet strangely no one else on the block questioned it.

Fisk made it to his cube, the ankle tender but not bad, wrapped tight in an Ace bandage. He settled into his chair, switching on his computer—then sat back a moment and closed his eyes. Awaiting the boot-up of his computer was the most restful interlude of his day. He heard the day shift ambling in, listened to coffee cups being set down on desks, chairs being rolled back, jackets being shrugged off. Then for a few moments the symphony of the office faded away and Fisk drifted beneath it, clearing his mind for the day’s challenges.

The NYPD’s Intelligence Division had grown out of the New York City terror attack of September 11, 2001. After being rehired as police commissioner four months later, Ray Kelly determined that federal law enforcement communities had failed New York. He could not understand how every law enforcement and security agency missed a plot involving dozens of people taking flying lessons, crossing borders, shipping money all over the place. Nobody was going to take care of New York, he realized, except New York’s Finest themselves.