Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

York City for all the wrong reasons. But
hand in glove?
I thought as I shook Miller’s hand. I was in charge, but I also had a partner or something? How was that supposed to work? And who was to report to whom? I wondered.
    Miller shook back briefly, as if he didn’t want my soot-stained jeans and Windbreaker to muss his dapper gray suit.
    “Hercules teams have been deployed to Times Square and Wall Street,” Miller said in greeting.
    I assumed Miller was talking about the Intelligence Division’s tactical units, used to flood an area to show any potential attackers the NYPD’s lightning-quick response capability.
    “The helicopters are up, and there are boats in the water. Just got off the phone with the commissioner. We’re going full-court press in Manhattan, river to river.”
    Weren’t such shows of force supposed to
prevent
attacks? I thought.
    “Now, what is this thermobaric bomb stuff I keep hearing?” Miller continued. “That’s crazy speculation at this point, isn’t it? Something like that would take an incredible amount of technical know-how and meticulous planning. We would expect a blip of chatter activity from surveillance before such a large-scale attack, and my team and my contacts in Washington are reporting exactly nada. Couldn’t this just have been a utility screwup?”
    “I don’t know about any of that, Bryce,” I said, eyeing him. “I was actually just with the bomb guys and saw the shrapnel from what looked like pressure-cooker bombs in two separate locations.”
    My phone hummed again as I took a black piece of something out of the corner of my eye with a pinkie nail.
    “No matter how little anyone wants to say or hear it, this was definitely no accident.”

CHAPTER 13
     
    LATER THAT MORNING, Mr. Joyce and Mr. Beckett and Tony were in a brand-new dark-green Ford F-150 pickup truck rolling south down Faile Street in a heavily industrial area of the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx.
    Mr. Joyce took a long, soothing sip of his cold McDonald’s OJ and began humming to himself as he looked out at the sunny day. As he watched, a low LaGuardia-bound FedEx cargo jet came roaring in overhead. Mr. Joyce, being an avid plane spotter, took one look at the shape of its purple tail and knew immediately that it was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11F.
    Searching for and finally spotting the exact location of the aircraft’s aft gas tanks, he vividly imagined shooting them with one of the refurbished FIM-92 Stinger missiles they had at the warehouse. He cocked his head to the left as he calculated the physics of a twenty-two-pound hit-to-kill blast-fragmentation warhead ripping into a six-hundred-thousand-pound plane’s fuel tanks at twice the speed of sound.
    He took another sip of OJ. They continued to roll. All around was nothing but block after grim block of run-down brick warehouses and industrial buildings. There were no residential buildings or even gas stations in the desolate area, and many of its streets didn’t have so much as a sidewalk.
    Which was precisely why they were operating out of this god-awful area. With no concerned citizenry for miles, it was a perfect place to base their operations.
    After another block, Mr. Beckett, behind the wheel, hit a garage-door opener and they pulled under the rolling steel gate of an unremarkable but dilapidated two-story stucco structure wedged between an abandoned warehouse and a stinking recycling center.
    When the steel shutter was closed behind them, they climbed out of the truck and came through the garage door into the lower floor of the small building. The dim, windowless space had black-painted walls and a long, fully stocked pinewood bar. There were neon signs, a jukebox in one corner, a pool table, and even several black-painted circular wooden booths along the far wall.
    “Now, this is what I call a hideout!” Tony said, looking around in amazement. “This is awesome! And unexpected. I would never peg you smart guys for living in