Killer Instinct - James Patterson Page 0,72

my watch. In less than an hour, the first commuter trains of the morning would be arriving, assuming the station was open.

Pritchard stared me straight in the eyes. I stared right back.

“It’s now or never,” I said.

CHAPTER 89

IT WAS NOW.

After Pritchard briefed the director of Homeland Security, immediate around-the-clock surveillance of Penn Station began. A horde of undercover NYPD and FBI was assembled faster than a New York minute.

At some point the soda cans and magazines in every backpack were going to be replaced by actual bombs. The trick was not only to spot each one but also to tail each courier back to the proverbial nest. This was about more than stopping an attack and apprehending some terrorists. This was about eliminating an entire cell, and with any luck, all the cells attached to the Mudir.

And the Mudir himself.

In the eyes of each and every civilian making their way through Penn Station, there couldn’t be anything out of the ordinary. Everyone assigned needed to blend in seamlessly as commuters or employees of the station.

Backing them up would be additional surveillance personnel manning the cameras all around the station, including the new cameras that had been hastily installed to cover the blind spots. Nothing could be left to chance.

We controlled everything except the timetable.

“I have to admit, I was pretty tempted,” Foxx said to me in the back seat of his bulletproof Ford Expedition as the sun began to rise over the East River. His driver, a young operative he called Briggs, was taking my father and me to the safe house in Brooklyn. Foxx needed to file a report immediately for the Agency’s director, and I needed to finally catch up on some sleep. While my father could crash at Elizabeth’s apartment if need be, the safe house was really my only option. Thanks to the Mudir, I was homeless and a marked man.

“What do you mean by tempted?” I asked.

Foxx chuckled. “Letting Pritchard take a swing at you.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“You do have a way of pissing people off, Reinhart.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I said.

Foxx closed his eyes for a catnap, and in the silence that ensued, my thoughts turned to Tracy and Annabelle, and the mess I’d made of our family. I couldn’t help it. As if things couldn’t get any worse, they now didn’t have an apartment to come home to—assuming they were ever coming home again. The idea that I had to call Tracy and warn him to stay away from the city was the ultimate irony. All I wanted was for him and Annabelle to come back. Even if Tracy wanted to, they couldn’t.

Twenty minutes later, in the basement of the Agency’s safe house, I set the alarm on my phone for four hours later. Turned out, I didn’t need to.

After only two hours of sleep, Foxx woke me up.

“We have a problem,” he said.

CHAPTER 90

FOXX DIDN’T bury the lede. He knew no other way.

“Your dinner with Sadira Yavari tonight? It’s off,” he said.

My first question would’ve been why were it not for what Foxx was holding in his hand.

“What’s in the file?” I asked.

“Nothing I can show you,” he answered.

I figured as much. I’ve always admired the almost comical paradox of US intelligence agencies. Everything has a code name and nothing is as it seems except for one thing, the files themselves. If something is top secret, it literally says so with a bright red stamp.

Just like on the file Foxx was holding.

“Okay. So what can you share?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. He’d obviously woken me up to tell me more than just the dinner was off. At least you better have, Foxx …

“Sadira Yavari has killed before,” he said, “and the other victim was also a nuclear physicist.”

I had to let that sink in for a few seconds. The implications. What it could mean. The questions it gave rise to.

“Was he also Iranian?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Was he tied to the Iranian nuclear program?”

“Yes.”

“Was he the same as Darvish? A double agent?”

Foxx suddenly got hard of hearing. I didn’t ask him where the hit on this other nuclear physicist had taken place, but that’s the question he answered. “The guy was on holiday in London, three years ago,” he said.

“Holiday?”

“Just go with it.”

Foxx was more than walking the line on what he could and couldn’t tell me. He was tap-dancing. “How about you just nod at the appropriate moment,” I said.

Any agency can get burned once with a