“Tomorrow is yours, cousin. Enjoy a day away. I would like a day’s work with the cart. Here is your day’s proceeds in advance.”

Ahmed leafed through the bills, less than one hundred dollars. He was more confused than grateful. To his credit, a day off meant nothing to him. He worked without complaint. But he was pleased to receive his pay. “Would you like me to help you in the morning, fill the dispensers—”

“No, I will do so myself.”

Ahmed wanted to insist. Routine was everything to him, and he seemed almost offended by Shah’s generosity. But eventually he took his backpack and, with a warm but uncertain nod, started for home.

Chapter 5

Fisk was at his desk later in the day when an attractive young woman tapped the top of his monitor. She had short, dyed black hair that looked like she had trimmed it herself: a note of harshness in contrast to the soft features of her face. Still, he bought the screw-you, punk look. It must have served her well, passing as a hardcase radical in neighborhoods where it looked good to be Caucasian and pissed off at the United States. She had spent the past seven months talking revolution and seeding dissent in order to draw out others eager to make such talk a reality.

“Krina Gersten,” she said, introducing herself. “I was told you asked to see me?”

Fisk nodded, thrown off by what looked to him like a hickey on the side of her neck, just above the collar of her military-style jacket. He felt his eyes flash to it, and then, rather than pull back guiltily like a kid caught staring at cleavage, he squinted, getting a closer look.

“Snakebite?” he said.

She smiled, touching it gently, like a burn. She had a fine neck, which was why the mark stood out so vividly. And her smile showed a tiny space between her two front teeth, giving her face a little extra character and attitude. “You’re the first person rude enough to comment on it.”

“I make an incredible first impression,” said Fisk. “You see, the trick is to suck out the venom without swallowing it and becoming poisoned yourself.”

“You’ve had experience with this?” she said.

“With snake venom?” he said. “Just ask my ex.”

Gersten smiled at that—not amused, necessarily, or even impressed, but rather appreciative of the banter. Intrigued. Fisk could see that, to her, flirtation was less an invitation than a challenge. “ ‘Ex’ as in ex-wife?”

“Ex-fiancée,” said Fisk. “She was a snake charmer.”

“Right,” said Gersten. “Sounds like a fun gal.”

Fisk held out his hand. “Jeremy Fisk.”

Gersten made a point of giving him a good, firm, professional squeeze.

“Easy there,” he said, pulling back his sore hand. “Death grip. Dad in the military?”

“Not the military,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” said Fisk, knowing what was coming next.

“That’s right,” she told him. “A cop.”

“Christ. Second or third generation?”

“Me? I’m the fourth.”

“Gah. Okay. Thanks very much for the warning.”

“You have no idea,” she said. “What about you, Detective Fisk? What’s your story?”

“Me? Just your run-of-the-mill first-generation public servant.”

“Yeah? So where’d you draw the cop gene from?”

“Mutation,” he said. “A defect.”

“Okay,” she said, sizing him up, deciding. “You’re interesting.”

Fisk liked her immediately. Later he would learn that her father had been a sergeant in charge of one of the department’s scuba squads when he suffered a heart attack underwater. Gersten had been thirteen at the time. She still lived with her mother across the Narrows over on Staten Island, which was like a ghetto for New York cops and firefighters. She had also done a tour in Iraq with a national police transition team, following college at CUNY. So for her the cop life had been the one and only course on her life menu.

The big dance was bad business with another cop, but immediately they had that undercurrent of attraction that kept things fun and interesting. Gersten came recommended to him from street raking for her skills, her work ethic, and the fact that she took shit assignments without complaint and wound up excelling at them.

“Did I see you limping?” she asked.

“You might have. Basketball.”

“Hurts getting old, huh?” she said.

He smiled at her insolence. “Maybe you can make heads or tails of this. I had this dream last night. I was at a cocktail party at the police academy, which also resembled my high school. Anyway, I watched as the bartender planted a bomb beneath the bar. I saw all this from across the crowded room . . . but I couldn’t get to him, all because of this limp.”

“Was he Middle Eastern?” she interjected.

“Of course he was,” said Fisk. “You make pizzas all day, you dream of pizzas. You work mosques and shawarma shops all day, you dream of Middle Easterners.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So finally I get near the bar—I’m the only one who can hear this thing ticking—and I go around the end and dive underneath . . . and there’s nothing there. Just the tanks for the soda taps. I look up—and now the room is in flames all around me. Drapes on fire, walls melting—but people still socializing and chatting.”

“Good booze,” she surmised. “Open bar, I take it?”

“I was hoping for a little more insight than that, Doctor.”

Gersten said, “In my dreams now, I am always aware that I’m dreaming. Never used to be that way before I switched over to Intel. Now I’m always conscious that it’s not really real. That I have to be in control, even in my sleep. Takes all the fun out of it, don’t you think?”

“Ever vigilant,” said Fisk. “The nature of the job.”

“The nature of the beast. Not fair, though. I can’t even get away from this stuff in my downtime?”

“No such thing as downtime,” said Fisk. “Remember, you’re not paranoid, you’re alert. I go to movies now, I can’t stop thinking about all the people in the dark around me—who are they, what are they doing.”

She nodded. “They’re enjoying the movie.”

“The way it’s supposed to be. That’s our job. Allowing them to do so.” He sighed. “I used to like movies.”

“And I used to like sleep,” said Gersten.

They caught themselves bitching. Fisk said, “Okay, now that we’ve had our cry . . .”

He brought her up to date on the Shah situation. Just the highlights, for the time being.

“You know the imam who runs the funeral home in Flushing?”

Gersten nodded. “Samara Abad Salame.”

“The FBI’s had him in their pocket for a while. Got into a bit of trouble last year with his taxes. Not enough to get him hauled in, but just enough to soften him up for a visit.”

Gersten got it. “They went salivating,” she guessed.

“Exactly. Now, Salame has given them the goods so far. And they’ve made him available to us, and he’s been on target, so much as we know. But his loyalty is ultimately neither to the FBI nor to us. So I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to consider the fact that he might not be telling the FBI everything. Now, Analytic got me lineage charts on a guy currently in Gitmo who is apparently Salame’s brother, though maybe by a different mother.”

Gersten said, “Family concerns trump all.”

“Exactly. And Shah is also a cousin of his.”

Gersten said, “Let me ask you this. Do you think Shah was baited in Denver?”

“You mean, was he encouraged or otherwise coerced to act? Probably.” Fisk waved it away. “I can’t care. That’s the FBI’s problem. This is our job here. Actual lives are at stake. No matter what brought him to this point, there is absolutely no question he is planning and preparing a terrorist act. He’s a dictionary-definition terrorist.”

“Sounds to me like I’m getting off the street,” said Gersten.

“For now,” said Fisk. “See, they—the FBI—they wanted to let this guy run some more, see who he meets here in New York, gather up more intelligence crumbs.”