The surprise of him answering threw Jenssen for a moment. “The people of the Word. Those who follow Allah. Inside the body of the faithful, the people who truly believe in Allah and follow him, there can be no strife. Inside the ummah is the Dar al Islam—the House of Peace. Outside—where you live, among the godless and faithless—is the Dar al Harb. The House of War. I welcome prison as a retreat from this world. My actions are a reflection, not of the nature of Allah, but of this world of filth in which you live. It is the ooze in which you crawl, the slime you eat. I am not these things. I am just a messenger. A holy messenger. Holding a mirror up to you. Showing you your own true face.” His eyes shone with self-righteousness. “When the roll is taken at the end of time, it will be clear that you and your girlfriend Gersten were infidels fighting on the side of evil, destruction, perversion, and corruption. And I was fighting on the side of good.”

Jenssen realized he had become carried away, and reacted as though Fisk had gotten him to reveal something of himself that he did not wish to be seen. For a moment, the ugliness that was inside Jenssen almost clawed its way out, wearing its usual vestments of religious fervor.

He made his body relax now, and he smiled again.

“So you eat the cupcake, Detective,” he said. “You put that shit in you. I am pure.”

Fisk’s body felt almost as though it was vibrating, like he was running a low-voltage charge through his entire nervous system.

“You see,” said Fisk, “in spite of everything you did and tried to do, I have not lost the capacity to enjoy life. Not that that was your goal, only your hope. Yes, to be certain—your life in prison is inestimably preferable to mine. Please keep telling yourself that until you choke on the words. And now I will eat this cupcake in front of you, but I will imagine that it is your heart, condemned to an eternity of fear.”

Fisk reached for the small cupcake—and suddenly Jenssen’s hands shot out to the length of their chains, seizing the cupcake and mashing it into his mouth.

It was a supremely violent act. Jenssen stared at him, fire eyed, making quick work of the dessert.

Fisk sat back in his chair, watching him.

Jenssen swallowed the cupcake with less bravado than he had when he began eating it. Fisk’s manner put him off.

Fisk said, “I thought so.”

Jenssen rallied. “You are weak, Detective Fisk. America is weak! Your government, your people . . . You will never prevail. We will consume you.”

Fisk waited until he had been quiet for a while. “You’ve got some frosting right there,” he said, touching his own chin.

Jenssen glared at Fisk until uncertainty crept into his gaze. Eventually he reached up and brushed the frosting away roughly.

Fisk reached across the table suddenly—as though to grab Jenssen by the throat.

The terrorist jerked back in his chair.

Fisk’s reach stopped at the empty baker’s foil cup on the table, crumpling it in his hand, swiping the crumbs into the carton.

“You flinched,” said Fisk.

Jenssen trembled, as if about to explode with anger. Fisk’s eyes remained unwaveringly on Jenssen’s face as he retrieved the cloth hood and pulled it down over Jenssen’s head.

He paused a moment, lowering his head to Jenssen’s ear.

“Have fun dying in prison,” said Fisk.

CHAPTER 13

Mid-September

New York City

Fisk spent most of his morning in the Midtown North precinct, because one of the diplomats from Ghana had spent most of his night there.

United Nations Week wasn’t supposed to be like the navy’s Fleet Week, but for some a short week in the capital of the world was like a Las Vegas convention. The man from Ghana had hired a prostitute who visited him at his room in the Millennium Broadway Hotel. The police only became involved when the escort called them, after Mr. Ghana neglected to come up with the entire agreed-upon fee. There was a currency problem as well as a language problem and a bit of a vodka problem, and then apparently a cultural misunderstanding, and Mr. Ghana wound up in a pair of dirty bracelets, necessitating a six-hour sojourn in Midtown North.

The working girl was let go with a warning, but never recompensed the remaining two hundred dollars she was owed.

Fisk caught the guy’s ticket after a flurry of phone calls and drove over to pick up Mr. Ghana. Only problem was, Mr. Ghana’s shoes had gone missing. They had his belt, his wallet, and his passport, but no loafers. Chasing those down ate up another forty minutes of Fisk’s time. The only upside was that, once he got his shoes back, Mr. Ghana was all smiles and very happy to be chauffeured directly to his consulate on East Forty-seventh Street.

Fisk finally returned to Intel headquarters in Brooklyn—a shabby-looking, unmarked, one-story brick building on a block of auto junkyards and warehouses—just in time for a call about a suspicious car parked outside the Chinese consulate over on the West Side. This dustup was solved with two phone calls: as Fisk suspected, it was the host nation’s own federal police force, the FBI, clumsily keeping tabs on the Chinese envoy in a gray Dodge Avenger.

“Your guys might want to move farther down the street,” said Fisk, on the phone with the FBI field office at Federal Plaza, rubbing it in a little.

CHAPTER 14

In late August, the same week Jenssen’s verdict was read, Fisk’s boss, Barry Dubin, had called him into his office.

The Intel chief was a bald egghead with an impeccably groomed goatee that hung on his face like a soft silver pennant. Ever since his divorce, Dubin wore his chunky Fordham class ring on his ring finger, which Fisk never understood. Maybe he hadn’t been able to give up his habit of twirling something on the fourth finger of his left hand.

The NYPD’s Intelligence Division was formed following the New York City terror attack of September 11, 2001. The police commissioner at the time, tired of seeing his hometown serve as the favorite target for terrorists, determined that nobody could take better care of New York City than the men and women of New York’s Finest themselves.

Many police forces across the country had bolstered their budgets and departments in the wake of 9/11—from large cities to small towns, law enforcement expenditures rose precipitously throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century—but only one municipal agency created its own mini-CIA. The Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the NYPD was the public side of their efforts. It liaised with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an amalgam of law enforcement agencies with a mandate to trade information and cooperation.

But the true face of counterterrorism in the NYPD, the Intelligence Division, was little known and rarely seen. For example, while undercover work is a staple of every big-city police department, no other urban law enforcement organization in the nation worked as aggressively to infiltrate potential terror cells as the Intel Division did. Its employees and advisors included various former national and international espionage experts, educated in the tradecraft of information gathering, interdiction, and threat assessment. Intel analyzed intelligence, gathered both by human means and electronically through the five boroughs that comprised New York City, cultivating a broad network of informers—both sympathetic and reluctant.