The newspaper vanished.
Now the camera was showing six unshaven men—his men—sitting on the floor in manacles and flanked by four men wearing hoods and holding large swords.
One of the hooded men stepped in front of the camera.
“Heed this message from the New Guardians of the National Revolutionary Movement,” he said in heavily accented English. “Our court has tried these infidel spies and has found them guilty of crimes against humanity. The penalty is to pay the fine, or execution.”
The footage cut to a hooded man stepping to one of the seated prisoners and forcing him to bow his head as a sword rose over it. The captors shouted at the bound man. Fear filled the eyes of the other hostages. They were haggard, exhibiting signs of beatings, sleep deprivation.
Felk’s stomach churned.
The man chosen for execution began moving, his back heaving up and down. He was sobbing. They’ve broken him, Felk realized, just as a horrible guttural keening distorted the video’s sound.
“Ivan! Don’t let me die!”
The man’s cry pierced Felk.
The prisoner was his younger brother, Clayton.
“Ivan, please! Don’t let me die!”
The first hooded man blocked the image, his head filling the frame again.
“You have twenty-six days to pay fine.”
The video ended.
Felk’s nostrils flared as he struggled to steady his breathing. It took a long moment before he could slow his heartbeat.
Unger knocked at the door.
“Ivan, we’ve got something coming up on a newscast from New York.”
Felk joined the others in the living room. The cash was stacked neatly on the coffee table.
“How much?” Felk asked.
“Six point three,” Northcutt said.
Felk acknowledged the amount just as VNYC cut to a news anchor at a desk. A Breaking News flag stretched across the screen’s bottom.
“An eyewitness? Jesus Christ, what could they have seen?” Dillon asked.
“Nothing,” Unger said. “No one saw anything. We took every precaution. It’s bull. What do you think, Ivan?”
Staring intensely at the TV news report, the image of his brother still burning into his heart, Felk grappled with self-reproach.
Why did he hesitate? Was it because he was distracted? Was it because she wasn’t a cop? Was it because she pleaded?
All he could do now was torment himself for his mistake.
Morrow watched time tick down in the glowing green numbers of the clock on his nightstand in his home.
Three hours of sleep.
He deactivated his alarm before it was set to go off and in the darkness, he felt his wife’s warmth against him, heard her soft breathing. Part of him yearned to stay here and hold her. Instead, he stared at the ceiling while self-reproach coiled around him for not telling Elizabeth what he was facing.
The notion of failure evaporated as scenes of the four notifications he’d made late yesterday swept over him again.
In Brooklyn, the first guard’s wife had refused to let Morrow and the others into her home in Flatbush. A curtain had fluttered, someone had seen them coming to her door. Morrow shot glances at her priest, the FBI grief counselor and the armored car company exec, who kept adjusting his glasses. Through the door the wife said she’d heard news of a heist on the radio. “I know Phil was working up in Ramapo.” She knew it but had refused to accept it: “It’s a goddamn lie! It’s not true!” She screamed through the door until Morrow noticed it was not locked, opened it and caught her in his arms just as she let go.
The second guard also lived in Brooklyn, in Bensonhurst, where he had recently separated from his wife. She was a bank teller in Gravesend. They took her into her manager’s office to break the news. She went numb. Froze, except Morrow observed how she kept twisting her wedding rings.
The third guard was to be married in a few weeks. His fiancee shook her head, repeating “No! No! No!” then collapsed against the doorway of her apartment in the Bronx. They called an ambulance and two neighbors.
The last notification was some sixty miles north on 1-95 in Connecticut. The agent in charge of the FBI’s New Haven Division met Morrow and two other agents at the Bridgeport resident office on Lafayette Boulevard. From there they went in separate cars to a tree-lined street where Special Agent Gregory Scott Dutton had lived in a split-level with his wife, Jennifer.
Others had joined them. Jennifer’s father, who was a retired Hartford detective. They also called her priest. Jennifer’s face contorted as if it had broken, when they’d confirmed her worst fear. “I kept calling Greg’s phone, and calling and calling.” One hand covered her face. The other covered her stomach as if to shield her baby from the nightmare that had befallen them.
In the shower, Morrow welcomed the hot needles of spray.
He would clear these four deaths.
Then he would clear his own with Elizabeth and Hailey.
By 4:45 a.m. he was dressed and ready to leave, when he peeked inside his daughter’s bedroom. Hailey was a fourteen-year-old vegetarian, intent on becoming an environmental lawyer. Her walls had posters of rock bands he’d never heard of. She had a new poster he liked that said, Give Earth A Hug Today. She was pretty as hell, with her mother’s eyes.
He could lose himself in their eyes.
Morrow was not afraid of dying. What he dreaded was the idea of never seeing them again. Yet, since Art Stein called, Morrow realized that a small part of him hoped that maybe, just maybe, the diagnosis was wrong.
It is an indestructible pillar of human nature to hope until the end.
He saw it in the victims straining from broken windows in the towers, waving shirts, jackets, flags of desperation, signaling hope to be rescued from the inevitable.
Morrow felt hands on his waist from behind.
