Black Friday by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

Caitlin Dillon didn’t have a great deal to add, she spoke with the kind of fluency where you could
see
the semicolons in her; speech. Carroll found it challenging to take his eyes away from her face.
    “Arch? Are you with us?”
    Carroll gave the room a smile of vague embarrassment as he rose to address the group. All the important, mostly recognizable faces now swung his way.
    Carroll was characteristically rumpled. His long brown hair and street clothes brought to mind underground witnesses and policemen called in drug-related grand jury trials. He’d thought about wearing his one good Barney’s Warehouse sale suit, but then he had changed his mind.
    Several of the principals attending the emergency session knew Carroll by reputation. As a modern-day policeman, Carroll was thought to be appropriately unorthodox, and effective. The team he supervised was credited with helping to make terrorists think twice about their raiding forays into the United States.
    Carroll had also occasionally been characterized as a troublemaker, too much of a perfectionist for the Washington politicians to handle, too Off-Broadway theatrical at times. Moreover, he was increasingly becoming known as an Irish drunk.
    “I’ll try to be brief,” Carroll began softly. “For starters, I don’t think we can make the assumption yet that this
is
an established or known terrorist group.
    “
If it is,
then it probably means one of two groups…. The Soviets, through the GRU—which could include Francois Monserrat. Or a second possibility—
a free-lance
group, probably sent out of the Middle East. Financed there, anyway.
    “I don’t believe anyone else has the organization and discipline, the technical know-how or money to manage something this complex.” Carroll’s intense brown eyes roamed the room. Why did his own remarks sound so hollow? “You can cross out just about everyone else as suspects.” Carroll sat down.
    Walter Trentkamp raised an index finger and spoke again. “For everyone’s general information, we’ve set up an investigative unit down on Wall Street. The unit is inside the Stock Exchange Building, which suffered limited damage during the raid. Somebody from the New York P.D. already released Number 13 Wall to the press. So that’s what we’ll call headquarters.
    “There’s no such address, actually. The Stock Exchange is on Wall, but the actual address is Broad Street
That
maybe significant. See, we’ve made our first mistake, and we haven’t even started the investigation.”
    Most everyone laughed inside the White House conference room, but the irony was lost on none of them. There would be more mistakes; a lot more mistakes before anything was resolved. No. 13 was surely an omen of things to come.
    President Justin Kearney stood once again at his end of the massive conference table. His face registered the day’s stress.
    Justin Kearney said, “I need to clear the air about something else. Something that must never go beyond this room.” The President paused, looked up and down the rows of his closest advisers. Then he went on.
    “For several weeks now, the White House, Vice-president Elliot and I, have been receiving intelligence leaks, steady information about a dramatic counterinsurgent plot. Possibly a scenario involving the elusive Francois Monserrat.”
    The President paused again, deliberately pacing himself. Arch Carroll turned the name Monserrat over in his mind. “Elusive” didn’t quite do Monserrat justice. There were times, indeed, when Carroll had seriously doubted the man’s existence, times when he considered Monserrat as the
nom de guerre
of
several
different individuals acting in collaboration. He was in France one day, Libya the next. He might be reported in Mexico even as somebody else claimed to have seen him stepping aboard an unmarked plane in Prague.
    Kearney continued. “Our intelligence people have learned that Middle Eastern and South American oil-producing countries have