DEDICATION

Dedicated to the NYPD, the greatest police force in the world.

Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Book One

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Book Two

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Book Three

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Book Four

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Dick Wolf

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

January 9

Upstate New York

Half a mile from the Canadian border, somewhere west of Lake Champlain

The explosive noise of the guns had set off a chain reaction, sheets of wet snow dropping from the limbs of the pine trees surrounding Jeremy Fisk. Even after the gunfire stopped, Fisk could hear limbs snapping, snow thudding to earth, a circular cataract expanding, fading away from him like ripples in a frigid pond.

And then the endless forest . . . went silent.

My God, thought Fisk. They’re all dead.

CHAPTER 1

Ten minutes earlier

The Swedes were late. Maybe they weren’t even coming.

Detective Jeremy Fisk of the NYPD Intelligence Division hated upstate New York. Hated the whole idea of it. Even though he had lived all over the world during his childhood, he had spent most of his adult life in New York City and had the passion of the convert for his adopted home. And as a confirmed New Yorker, he despised upstate on principle. Upstate was hillbillies and trailer parks and suicidal deer that plunged heedlessly into the headlights of your car, forcing you to swerve into the nearest ditch. Upstate was country living. Upstate was wilderness.

People who didn’t live in New York thought the entire state was paved from one end to the other. Far from it. In fact, the northern part of the state was as rural as Indiana or Kentucky. And right here, where Fisk and the feds were sitting, there weren’t even hillbillies or trailer parks or deranged deer. Nothing but trees. Trees and snow. Trees and snow and four citified cops waiting to arrest a couple of Swedes sneaking over the border from Canada.

Fisk sat in the backseat of the unmarked Jeep, snow sifting down in heavy waves like shoals of tiny gray fish. The dirt road, now six inches deep in snow, was one of dozens of logging paths, unofficial border crossings that wormed back and forth like scars through the seemingly endless forest between the Saint Lawrence and Lake Champlain.

“They’re not gonna show, Fisk.” The driver of the car was an ICE agent by the name of Ralph Carver. “I guarantee you, those Swedish sons of bitches are sitting in a nice warm room at some Best Western in Montreal watching cable porn.”

A DEA agent, Ari Schaefer, sat to Carver’s right. FBI assistant Special Agent in Charge Mary Rose Palestrina sat in the backseat with Fisk, an empty Thermos and Fisk’s holstered Glock between them. It was the usual federal alphabet soup of agencies who didn’t like or trust each other—the perfect recipe for a law enforcement disaster.

“That’s assuming these jokers aren’t just a figment of Fisk’s imagination,” the DEA agent, Schaefer, added.

The feds didn’t believe that the NYPD was capable of scooping them on a solid international terrorism lead, so they’d been baiting him relentlessly for four hours. Thus far he’d managed to resist the urge to tell them to kiss off. It was his source, his information—his case if you got right down to it—but the mandate across law enforcement agencies was to cooperate, to share, if only to show the media and informed citizens that fighting terror was a team sport. It was Fisk’s show, it was Intel’s interdiction, but still ASAC Palestrina acted like she was running the show. They tried to treat Fisk like a guest at his own party.

“I mean, look at this crap,” Carver said. “What kind of idiot would go out on a day like this?” He was running the wipers nonstop, the heater blowing full blast. They could see okay out the front window, but the side windows were starting to get choked with snow, obscuring their view of the road down which the Swedes would be approaching. The car was pulled off the shoulder slantwise, so their best view of the road was from the side windows.

“Goddammit,” said the DEA guy. “I have no visual. Whose turn is it?”

“Mine,” said Fisk. It wasn’t, but he was tired of being cooped up in the car. He suspected it was the egos clouding up the windows as much as their breath. Carver handed him the fragile pink plastic windshield scraper that was their only defense against the heavy white blanket, and Fisk pushed open the door and climbed outside.

The door closed and the silence was a balm. He stood still, exhaling a plume of thick carbon dioxide, refreshed by the cold. The temperature was hovering just below freezing. Heavy, wet snow had formed a crust of ice over every surface of the car, and Fisk began hacking away at the windows.

Fisk was starting to worry. Two suspects were supposed to be making the run across the border from Canada into the States—Swedish Muslim militants smuggling radioactive isotopes for an explosive they planned to detonate in New York City sometime in the next three weeks. If anybody had told him six months ago that there was such a thing as a Swedish Muslim militant, he would have laughed.

But nobody was laughing now, not after Magnus Jenssen had come within an eyelash of blowing up President Obama at Ground Zero last year. Fisk himself had personally stopped the bomber. Now two more members of the same cell in Sweden, undeterred by their comrade’s lack of success—and, in fact, motivated by his capture and pending trial—were on their way into the States carrying about half a gram of a highly toxic, highly radioactive isotope of the element polonium-210.

Half a gram didn’t sound like much. But one ten-thousandth of a gram was enough to kill a human being.

The original plan for the takedown had included six members of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team tactical unit, an Intel drone, a Border Patrol helicopter, and a team of ICE agents. But the HRT unit’s van had encountered one of the aforementioned suicidal deer on the way up north, causing the driver to swerve and the van to slide off the road, where it overturned, putting one of the team members in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder and ending any chance of the HRT team participating in the bust. The helicopter full of ICE agents had to abort due to the miserable visibility, and the drone was grounded, according to the civilian contractor, “due to suboptimal control surface functionality,” which was jargon for “remote control airplanes can’t fly in snow.”