The day shift had handed their consoles off to the middies who would work until midnight. Dubin had turned the overtime spigot wide open and put everybody willing to work on the streets. That meant there were three times as many cops looking for Baada Bin-Hezam as there would have been on an ordinary shift.

It was a Friday night just after 6:00 P.M. The Jumu’ah weekly prayer was over. Many observant families stayed close to home in the evening, except for the Westernized young who were in the streets like the rest of New York on this hot summer night. Crowded avenues made it easier for his people to browse among the throng. They also made it potentially easier for Bin-Hezam to hide. But the heat generally brought people outside, so the odds were in his favor.

The agents at their computers flicked through screens of alternating text messages and GPS tracks, showing the locations of their people, passing on updates and summaries to Fisk. In the neighborhoods, years of sidewalk surveillance had given the rakers a sixth sense about who belonged there and who did not.

So far, no one reported any activity out of the ordinary.

Nearly one million of New York’s eight million residents were Muslim. One in eight. There were 130 mosques in the five boroughs. Fourteen Islamic schools. Special parking rules in some neighborhoods for religious holidays. Shops and restaurants mimicked those in Baghdad, Jakarta, Riyadh, Kabul, Karachi, and thousands of other settlements around the world in which there is no god but God.

The search on the street was a standard neighborhood canvass. Smartphones had rewritten the rules of surveillance. Gone were the days of clandestine meetings between spies, informants, and handlers. The reports flickered across Fisk’s screen from Muslim communities in Brooklyn, Queens, and lower Manhattan.

All the same. Negative for contact.

The demographic landscape of New York is forever shifting. The neighborhoods change as constantly and steadily as the ancient glaciers that shaped the terrain under the city, their ethnic blends transformed by migration, fear, whim, and greed. Bay Ridge, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Flatbush, Sunset Park, and Greenwood Heights in Brooklyn were home to vibrant cloisters of Arabs and Turks, further refined by tribal and family connections. Afghans and Pakistanis had settled in outer Queens, most around the two mosques in Flushing. Bosnians and Indonesians claimed Astoria.

Fisk toggled his computer keyboard, bringing up the surveillance camera feeds. Five hundred digital video cameras fed images into a control center in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. The two photographs of Bin-Hezam had gone to the control center slugged with a national emergency priority, but no additional information. Only the most senior of the camera techs had ever seen a national emergency priority request. The order meant they had to drop everything except violent-crime-in-progress alerts to turn the cameras’ attention to look for a single suspect.

None of them had been told why. None of them would ask. Everything they did was need-to-know.

For any pair of human eyes working a camera sweep like this one, the level of concentration was similar to that of air traffic controllers during rush hour. One of the center’s software programmers extracted the eight facial characteristics from the Newark Airport close-up that the computer needed to screen raw images from the cameras. The resulting filter algorithm was then applied to all incoming video. This action cut down the number of possible images of a known suspect by a factor of ten thousand to one.

The possible photos were pumped to duty agents at Intel by the dozens. Those screeners forwarded along any likelies to Fisk, who expected to see three or four faces an hour.

None of the first batch belonged to Bin-Hezam. No surprise. Success was never that easy.

Fisk felt himself slipping into the patient, confident rhythms of intense surveillance, digesting input from multiple sources all over New York. It was pleasurable, the familiar exhilaration of the hunt. These were impulses he associated with Krina Gersten, and he realized that he owed her a call. He speed-dialed her cell.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey-hey,” she said, a bit of relief in her voice.

“Everything good?”

“Fine here.” He heard her walking, and pictured her looking for a quiet, confidential spot to stand and talk. “They’re in with friends, family, their thoughts, or the TV. We’re packing them up soon to head over to Times Square to do Nightline. There was a mini-revolt, or the seeds of one, but they’re all going along with the game plan for now. I don’t suppose you’re calling to get me off this day care detail.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “The commissioner likes you there. He knew you by name. I didn’t know you were wired in with the deity.”

“Lotta good it’s doing me,” she said. He heard her move the phone away from her mouth and tell someone, “Just a minute.” Then she was back. “Yeah, him and my dad ran around a little bit. Staten Island back in the day.”

“Maybe you can leverage that. Get a message to him, get off that hotel detail. Or I could try . . .”

“First of all, my mom gets a Christmas card every year, but, I mean, that’s the extent of it. Second, going over Dubin’s head serves neither of our interests. I have to satisfy myself by living vicariously through you for now, and hope things change later. Where are you at? Pushing ahead with Bin-Hezam, I hope.”

“Full speed ahead. The lid is off the box. Looking through city camera feeds and listening in on conversations. Nothing yet. Even given full access, we need to get so lucky to make this thing work.”

“You’re doing all the usual stuff, I’m sure,” she said, thinking out loud. “Let’s think targets. Obviously, there’s this weekend. The fireworks.”

“Three million people will be watching, spread out all along the West Side looking at the Hudson River. And then the dedication of One World Trade Center the next day.”

“America’s brand-new tallest building.”

“The president is in town for that. The ceremony is just thirty-six hours away.”

“Fireworks display is spread out from Twentieth to Fifty-fifth Street. It goes for like twenty minutes.”

“Twenty-five.”

“That is a nightmare waiting to happen. By contrast, the ceremony’s going to have a thick credential zone. It’s going to be, what, a half mile around the site?”

“Something like that. Two juicy targets. Or, think about this—wait for the ceremony and its dignitaries to draw all security on the island, leaving the rest of Manhattan unusually vulnerable.”

“Jesus,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked.” She was thinking. “Has to be high value, high visibility. Yankee Stadium?”

“Thank Christ, they’re out of town this weekend. L.A. Angels. But don’t forget—it’s going to be big impact, but not necessarily high body count. Bin Laden wanted to dazzle and do damage.”

“The Statue of Liberty. It’s visible from lower Manhattan, from the Ground Zero area. Would be a huge fucking symbolic strike.”

Fisk said, “That’s heavy. But then again, as a target, it’s as good as any. Let’s face it, we could probably spend all night running down New York City’s greatest hits. A tourist could. Right now it doesn’t get us any closer to where and why. All we’ve got is who. Maybe who. We’ve got to go in that way. We’ve got to find some way to anticipate his movements and try to intersect with one of them.”

“Anthrax,” said Gersten. “Or some other bio agent.”

“Always a concern. But nothing from the airport sniffers. Now, if he’s got contacts here, and I assume he does—then it’s possible.”

“He must have help, right? Is he bringing something to somebody . . . or is he here to take delivery? His luggage was searched, so that’s out. Is he here to facilitate something?”