Fisk said, “You know I hate to play into the bubble paranoia.” He and Gersten had talked often about the skewed worldview that comes with hunting phantom terrorists seven days a week. “But maybe he’s here to awaken sleeper agents. That makes sense to me. I keep going back to the big beard’s words before his death. He wanted to implement a plan so clever we’d never see it coming. If bin Laden started turning the wheels on a major plan before he died, he would have wanted to use the best of everything. The deepest contacts, the brightest operatives. He would have burned his prime Al-Qaeda sleepers to make it work.” Fisk heard himself pontificating. “Or, and I haven’t taken this off the table yet, this Saudi is just some jet-setting art dealer, whose life is about to be temporarily ruined by one Intel agent’s paranoia.”

“Don’t doubt yourself, Jeremy. Something’s brewing here, something is happening. Get inside this guy’s head. Do that by remembering that, if this is anything at all, it’s something big. Something hard. Everything on the line, nothing ordinary. Nothing small. That’s what bin Laden was planning, right? Something extraordinary. Taking this fight to the next level, the one beyond nine-eleven.”

Fisk was nodding on his end.

“Dammit,” continued Gersten. “I hate being on the sidelines.”

“You’re not,” said Fisk. “This has been a big help. You’ve focused me. You sharpened my pencil.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said dismissively.

“Keep thinking for me,” he said, and hung up.

He reflected a moment on their conversation, briefly smiling. The National Security Agency’s New York field office was monitoring cell phone communications per Intel’s request, routing everything off the Flatbush, Cobble Hill, Astoria, and lower Manhattan cell towers down to Fort Meade’s big machines. They could not process every call, legally or practically, so they were digitally scanning for Arabic words and certain terrorist keywords. He was smiling at the thought of his own conversation with Gersten being flagged. The snake eating its tail.

The bubble. The paranoia.

Thirty-six hours.

If there was to be a terror attack in New York City this weekend, Fisk had two nights and a day to find one man in a city of millions.

Chapter 24

Gersten could have checked out and gone off duty at the end of her shift, but her talk with Fisk had reawakened the dutiful cop in her. She decided to accompany DeRosier, the more tolerable of her two detail partners, to the television broadcast.

The hotel location of The Six had leaked out via media and the Internet, so the first thing they encountered upon leaving the Hyatt—besides a blast of early evening heat—was the bombardment of cheers and applause from a street-clogging crowd gathered to watch them cross the sidewalk into the hospitality vans. The uproar was such that Gersten went on full alert, feeling more like a Secret Service security detail in that moment than a cop.

But the mood of the mob was ebullient. This truly was a hero’s welcome. The only threat was that their enthusiasm could lead to a trampling.

Once aboard the air-conditioned van, The Six looked out the windows, shocked and amazed by their fans.

Aldrich eased into his seat and pronounced the crowd, in his words, “Crazy people.”

“Love it!” said Maggie, waving as though she could be seen through the one-way windows. “We love you back!” she said, laughing.

Frank opened the notebook he had begun carrying and jotted down a few observations. Nouvian winced as though beset by a high-pitched whine.

Jenssen took a seat in the back of the van, looking out the window like a man on a safari. Sparks quickly made her way to his side, Gersten noticed with a smile.

The NYPD escort led them across the city, sirens rising to a scream at every intersection. Gersten thought it fascinating to look out and see pedestrians fighting their way through the July heat to look up at the police escorts and figure out who was in the van and raise their hands in salute. The city was rising up together on a muggy Friday night.

To DeRosier, she said, “I don’t think a ticker tape parade is out of the question.”

They were sitting together in one of the front seats. He nudged her to look in the back. “You see that?”

He was referring to Sparks and Jenssen. Both clad in fresh threads courtesy of Barneys New York, Ms. Sparks was pointing things out to him as the cross streets went past, giving him a guided tour. Jenssen was not uninterested, in both the city and Ms. Sparks, but she was clearly the more aggressive of the pair.

Gersten said, “Ten bucks it ends ugly.”

“It always ends ugly,” said DeRosier. “But what does he care? Oh, to be that Swede here in New York. Wonder if he needs a good wingman.”

Gersten said, “Think your wife would approve?”

“My wife?” said DeRosier. “She’d be first in line to give this guy tongue. You know what I mean—purely patriotically. In a welcome-home-soldier kind of way. Did you know I used to have blond hair too?”

“And blue eyes?” asked Gersten.

DeRosier frowned. “Goddamn handsome son of a bitch.”

Gersten got on her phone, ordering up some more exterior security at the Hyatt. Sawhorses weren’t going to cut it. They needed some fencing and mounted officers for crowd control. She requested some more down-market transportation as well. This van was like a tour bus. She called Patton and asked him to secure the hotel’s delivery entrance for their return.

Nightline was normally produced at ABC News headquarters in Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side. For this special broadcast, featuring The Six and a New York City–centric story, they returned to the iconography of their Times Square studios.

The producers waiting for them outside the side entrance were overwhelmed by the sudden rush of interest from tourists and savvy New Yorkers. The Six were hustled inside, but not before they got a glance at the big media screens all around the Crossroads of the World, showing excerpts from their earlier news conference.

Inside, they were fawned over by the producers and assorted other people associated with the broadcast. The walls were lined with people, and it was obvious to Gersten that not everyone waiting for a glimpse of The Six was essential personnel. Even normally jaded broadcast employees were swept up by the excitement.

The Six were made up, miked, and led into the studio overlooking Broadway. They were introduced to hosts Cynthia McFadden and Terry Moran, who were sharing duties for the fifteen-minute segment. Gersten stood back behind the lights, on the smooth, glossy floor the huge cameras glided over.

After they were seated, the president of the network walked in and introduced himself to each of them in turn. After he left, Cynthia McFadden broke the ice by assuring The Six that the network president didn’t drop in to greet just anyone.

The studio was lit, The Six bathed in a honey glow, seated on high-legged director’s chairs in a wide semicircle across from McFadden and Moran. Moran studied his notes as the stage manager counted them down, and McFadden launched into the segment. Her introduction cited Nightline’s own birth during the Iran hostage crisis, linking that incident of terror to the heroics of SAS Flight 903. She then threw it to a quick package of video of the plane touching down safely in Bangor, with attendant emergency vehicles rushing to meet it. They aired clips from the newly released flight recorder conversations between the captain and air traffic controllers, and then the red lights came back on and the live interview began.

The hosts predictably took The Six through the details of the attack, describing their feelings at the time. Gersten noticed that their answers had become burnished a bit over the past twenty-four hours, as all good stories do. Instead of selfless and self-deprecating claims of unthinking reaction, their heroics were gradually taking on a more deterministic bent. Frank, especially, explained about how he “knew he had to do something,” and that if he didn’t, “the loss of life would have been tragic.”