SIXTY-FIVE

“My son’s got a bomb rigged around his neck.” Joshua was talking out loud so Gallagher could pick it up through the earpiece-microphone in his ear. He was making his way through the crowd to the great hall of the terminal.

“Any clue where he is?” John Gallagher snapped back.

“Looks like some room somewhere…not sure where…”

“What are you doing now?”

“He wants me at the grand staircase at the west end of the terminal.”

Gallagher grabbed his personal Allfone so fast he almost dropped it. He had Pack McHenry on speed dial.

“All right. You patriot guys think you’re geniuses. Time to pony up. Atta Zimler’s got to be inside the building, very near the west-end grand staircase. The guy always works alone so the hand-off will be to him. You’ve got the photos of Zimler. I’m sure he’ll be in disguise. Have your remote camera people video scan the suspects in that area to our computer screen here. I’ll confirm which one is Zimler.”

At that moment, two of Pack McHenry’s associates started strolling through the crowds in the great hall heading to the west end, each with micro-video cameras on their lapels. Each time they saw a suspect they pressed the remote in their pockets and took a snapshot.

The pictures started flooding onto the screen in the van.

“So, who are these guys taking the pictures?” detective Cramer asked Gallagher.

“Uh, private contractors…,” Gallagher said, trying to keep a straight face as he said it.

Cramer gave him a funny look. But Gallagher was too busy to notice. He was frantically pressing the delete function for each of the pictures on the screen as he viewed and then rejected them.

“None of these people are even close to being Zimler,” Gallagher growled.

Then he saw one that piqued his attention.

He hit the zoom.

On the screen was an Amtrak officer with tinted glasses and a beard, sitting in a corner, hunched over a tiny laptop. Gallagher zoomed in closer. Then even closer.

“Good disguise,” Gallagher said, pointing to the image.

“That him?”

“I bet it is,” Gallagher said.

“Let’s go in, then, right?”

“Wrong. My guess is he’s got Cal Jordan wearing that Semtex necklace at a position in the terminal very close by. We’ve got to find out where.”

“Close by? How’d you know that?”

“Zimler employs multiple backup plans. Having Cal close to the action as a hostage gives him leverage if things go wrong.”

Then Gallagher picked up his Allfone again. “Okay,” he said to Pack McHenry, “the Amtrak guy with the computer, on photo marked jpg14b, is our guy.”

McHenry said, “Fine. The next voice you hear is our cyber-intelligence chief.”

“Agent Gallagher,” the voice said. “I am positioned right outside the terminal in an ice-cream truck. I’ve dispatched a contact to get in close to Zimler to make a nonintrusive surveillance of Mr. Zimler’s computer. As I understand it, you have reason to believe he may have data on it revealing the location of the hostage?”

“Yeah. The guy’s a cyber-nut. Probably has it in his computer. But he’s going to have it all encrypted. Don’t know how you can break through. We’ve only got minutes here…”

“We don’t invade the digital signal,” the voice said. “We go asymmetrical. If it’s on his computer screen, we’ll get it.”

“You’ve got to be sure of this,” Gallagher shot back.

“Agent Gallagher,” the voice said. “Mr. Zimler’s laptop screen, like any monitor, emits digital signals. It refreshes itself almost a hundred times a second. We scan those signals, run them through our own computer, and decipher them; if you exclude the standard monitor emissions, what’s left are the pixels that form the image on his screen. Very soon we’ll be seeing exactly what he’s seeing.” Then the voice said, “Wait…okay, we’re inputting now. We just need his laptop to stay open and the screen loaded with his images for just another minute or two to produce the image. We’ve got to keep his laptop live.”

Inside the terminal, one Patriot operative, now standing twenty feet away from Zimler, appeared to be absorbed in watching a sports event on a small handheld TV. Inside the device, the electromagnetic sensor was picking up and reading the digital signals from Zimler’s laptop monitor.

For Zimler, the last scene of the last act was ready to be played out. He had already received a confirming email from an Iranian weapons contact, verifying that the introductory RTS documents emailed from Joshua Jordan were authentic. Now he was studying the location of Cal Jordan on the screen one more time. He clicked on the location of the storage room. Then he zoomed in closer to read the clock on the bomb around Cal’s neck. It read 19:28…19:27…

Zimler suddenly looked up and began glancing around the room, as if sensing something. He checked his watch. Looked around again. He noticed a man watching a little remote TV. The man was standing a little too close. Hurriedly, Zimler started to reach down to log off his laptop, but something happened.

“Excuse me,” a woman said, tugging behind her a small roller suitcase. She was trying to address Atta Zimler. “For the life of me I can’t find the listing for the departure time for the train to Dover. Can you help me?”

“No, I’m sorry. Go to the information desk,” Zimler said as he again began to reach down to his laptop.

“I already did,” she insisted. “But they couldn’t help me at all.”

“Please, I’m not the right person…,” he blurted out.

“But you’re an Amtrak official, right?”

For a moment, Zimler was blank-faced as he stared at the woman. Then he quickly caught himself and smiled. “Of course, yes. But train schedules are not part of my job.”

“Well, I’m so disappointed,” the woman said in a huff and walked away. As she passed the man watching the little TV, their eyes connected, just for a millisecond, in a side-glance of camaraderie. She kept walking until she was out of sight.

“Okay, so where are we on this?” Gallagher shouted into his Allfone.

“Just a second. Not sure.” It was the voice of the cyber-intelligence expert. “We’ve got some kind of image, but…”

Inside the terminal Atta Zimler had turned off his laptop, folded it up, snapped it shut, and stood up. He was holding the little laptop with his left hand. He reached down with his right hand, and snatched up a titanium briefcase that had been on the floor next to him. There was a hefty weight to it.

Then he started walking toward the west end, to the grand staircase.

Joshua Jordan was already there, shifting from foot to foot, waiting, with his briefcase in his hand. He was scanning the room for his contact person.

Then John Gallagher heard the voice of the computer expert. He had his Allfone on speaker, so Detective Cramer heard it too.

“Okay, we’ve got the image off of Zimler’s laptop. He was looking at a diagram of the terminal. There was a blinking cursor over a small room…maybe a storage room of some kind…”

“Where?”

“Runs north to south, just off of the grand hall…”

“Got it,” detective Cramer exclaimed. He radioed his bomb squad to break into every storage room along that part of the terminal.

“But tell them to keep it quiet,” Gallagher shouted to Cramer, even though he was only two feet away from him. “If Zimler sees a bunch of NYPD guys wearing padded bomb suits running amok in the station, so help me, he’ll detonate…”