separately into someone’s office.”
“Why? Do you think we were followed last night?”
“We’ll find out.”
The elevator doors opened on the twenty-sixth floor into a small lobby. There were no security guards here, and maybe there didn’t have to be if you’d already gotten that far.
There were, however, security cameras mounted overhead, but whoever was watching the monitors was probably paid six bucks an hour and had no clue what or who they were looking for or at. Assuming they were awake.
On a more positive side, Kate and I had to again punch a code into a keypad to enter our corridor.
So, to be fair, security at 26 Federal Plaza for floors twenty-two through twenty-eight was good, but not excellent. I mean, I could have been a terrorist with a gun shoved in Kate’s back, and I’d be in this corridor without too much trouble.
In fact, security hadn’t improved much here or probably anywhere in the last two decades despite clear evidence that there was a war going on.
The public was only vaguely aware that we were at war, and the government agencies that were conducting that war had never been told, officially or otherwise, by anyone in Washington that what was happening around the world was, in fact, a war directed against the United States of America and its allies.
Washington and the news media chose to see each and every terrorist attack as a single event with little or no connection, whereas even an imbecile or a politician, if he thought about it long enough, could see a pattern. Someone needed to rally the troops, or some event needed to be loud enough to wake up everyone.
At least that was my opinion, formed in the short year I’d been here, with the advantage of being an outsider. Cops look for patterns that suggest serial killers or organized crime. The Feds apparently looked at terrorist attacks as the work of disorganized groups of malcontents or psychopathic individuals.
But that’s not what it was; it was something far more sinister and very well planned and organized by people who stayed up late at night writing things on their “To Do” list about ways to fuck us up.
My opinion, however, was not popular and not shared by many of the people working on floors twenty-two through twenty-eight, or if it was, no one was putting this viewpoint in a memo or bringing it up at meetings.
I stopped at a water cooler and said to Kate between slurps, “If you’re questioned by a boss, or the OPR, the best thing to do is tell the truth and nothing but the truth.”
She didn’t reply.
“If you lie, your lie will not match my lie. Only the unrehearsed truth will keep us from having to get a lawyer.”
“I know that. I’m a lawyer. But-”
“Water?” I offered. “I’ll hold the handle.”
“No, thanks. Look-”
“I won’t push your face in the water. Promise.”
“John, fuck off and grow up. Listen, we haven’t really done anything wrong.”
“That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. What we did last night was because we’re dedicated and enthusiastic agents. If you’re questioned, do not look, act, or feel guilty. Act proud of your devotion to duty. That confuses them.”
“Spoken like a true sociopath.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“This is not funny.” She added, “I was specifically told five years ago not to involve myself in this case.”
“You should have listened.”
We continued our walk down the corridor, and I said to her, “My guess is that if they’re on to us, they won’t let on right now. They’ll keep an eye on us to see what we do and who we talk to.”
“You’re making me feel like a criminal.”
“I’m just telling you how to deal with what you started.”
“I didn’t
“Don’t worry about it. A day without trouble for John Corey is like a day without oxygen.”
She smiled and kissed me on the cheek, then walked to her workstation in the big cube farm, greeting her colleagues along the way.
My workstation was on the other side of the room-away from the FBI-types-among my fellow NYPD detectives, both active-duty and retired contract agents like me.
While I enjoyed the company of my own people, this physical separation between FBI and NYPD bespoke a separation of cultures wider than ten feet of carpeting.
It was bad enough working here when I didn’t have a wife on the high-rent side of the room, and I needed an exit strategy from this place, but I didn’t want to just resign. Poking around the TWA 800 case might get me kicked out, which was fine with me and wouldn’t look to Kate like I was bailing out of our nice working arrangement, which she liked for some odd reason. I mean, I embarrass everyone I know, even other cops sometimes, but Kate, in some perverse way, seemed proud to be married to one of the problem cops on the twenty-sixth floor.
Maybe it was an act of rebellion on her part, a way of saying to Jack Koenig, the FBI SAC-special agent in charge (sometimes called affectionately by the police detectives the MFIC-the motherfucker in charge)-as well as to the other bosses, that Special Agent Mayfield was not totally housebroken yet.
Well, that was my deep thought for the day, and it wasn’t even 10A.M. yet.
I adjusted my tie and thought about a facial expression. Let’s see… I was quite possibly up to my ears in deep shit, so I decided to look upbeat and happy to be here.
I got the face right and strode toward my desk.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I greeted my colleagues by name, hung my suit jacket on a cube hook, and took my seat at my workstation.
I turned on my computer, entered my password, and read my e-mail, which was mostly interoffice memos. Sometimes there was an Orwellian message on the screen warning you about a new government Thought Crime.
I played my phone messages, and there was one from a Palestinian-American informant, code-named Gerbil, who said he had important information for me that he couldn’t talk about over the phone.
Mr. Emad Salameh was, in fact, a nearly useless source of information, and I never could figure out if he just wanted to feel important, or if he was a double agent, or if he only needed an extra twenty bucks now and then. Maybe he just liked me. I know he liked Italian food because he always picked an Italian restaurant for me to buy him lunch or dinner.
The last two messages were hang-ups, which didn’t come up on my Caller ID, and which always intrigue me.
I shuffled through some papers on my desk.
My biggest challenge on this job was trying to figure out what to do. As a wise man (me) once said, “The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.”
With homicide work, there’s always an active caseload of past and present murders, whereas with terrorist acts, you try to anticipate the crime.
After the Asad Khalil case a year ago, I was assigned to a special team, which included Kate, and whose sole mission was to pursue that case.
But after a year, the clues and leads had run out, and the trail was cold. Not wanting to waste government money, our boss, Jack Koenig, had begun assigning Kate and me and the other agents on the team to different duties.
I had been specifically hired by the Anti-Terrorist Task Force as a homicide specialist, just in case a terrorist-related homicide occurred, but that hadn’t happened since the Asad Khalil case, so now my duties consisted mostly of surveillance, which was what most of the NYPD-types did for the FBI. Kate was into threat
