Silent Night - By Tom Barber Page 0,26

jacket went after he left the store. Rach had him walking out of the south entrance on 34 Street, a streetlight camera in front of him, but he’d turned to his left and moved out of the shot.

‘Damn,’ Rach said, scouring the cameras.

‘What?’

‘Outside Macy’s is the last I can find of him. Look.’

She ran back the tape and hit Play. Shepherd watched the man walk out of the store, checking his watch, then turning and heading down 34. He switched his gaze to the next camera shot.

But the man never reappeared.

‘Damn it,’ Rach said. ‘Blind spot.’

Shepherd tapped the shot on the left. ‘Go to this camera in real time.’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

She did, and the shot came up. People were flooding the street, all of them milling outside Macy’s, waiting to be allowed back in.

‘Find the trash,’ he said.

She tapped the keyboard and watched as shots appeared on screen. She held the down arrow and the camera slid down. She held the right arrow and it moved to the right. Shepherd tapped the screen.

‘He ditched the coat. Look.’

Rach peered closer and could make out a piece of the familiar red fabric. The jacket had been dropped into a trash can, just out of sight of the initial view of the camera.

‘Shit,’ she said, pulling the camera up to its original shot.

‘Track back,’ Shepherd said.

She nodded and went to wind back the tape, but something in the corner of the computer screen caught her eye and made her stop.

‘Wait a minute, sir,’ she said.

She brought up a shot from the top right corner. It was from about thirty minutes ago, the white lettering in the corner of the shot stating it was at Times Square 42nd Street Sub.

‘Look,’ she said, tapping the screen. ‘This is from earlier. Ten minutes before he entered the store.’

Shepherd looked closer, examining the shot.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the station in the footage, he saw the man in the red jacket, the white bag containing the dark box in his hand.

He was with two other men.

They were each carrying an identical bag.

‘Oh no,’ Shepherd said. ‘No, no, no. Not good.’

Shepherd and Rach watched the trio split up and move off in separate directions. There was a moment’s silence as the implication of what they’d just seen hit them.

Then Rach looked up at Shepherd slowly.

‘Sir, we’re not just dealing with one bomb.’

‘We’re dealing with three.’

TWELVE

Archer and Josh had just arrived on the third floor. The building had been cleared; the only people in sight now were ESU officers or store security scouring each level. They’d had to make a flash decision as to which part of the store they concentrated their search and figured the guy would have wanted to blend in when he planted the device. The men’s department seemed to be as good a place as any to start.

The task-force guys were working in small teams, holding their radiation detectors and sweeping their designated area. Archer started doing the same. Holding the device, he watched the reading on the monitor closely as he walked around the floor. Meanwhile, Josh had moved ahead and was searching the old fashioned way, quickly checking under piles of clothing, behind rails and around cashier desks, searching for any sign of the box or the bag. However, like the rest of the store the third floor was huge, rails and displays filled with clothes everywhere you looked.

Josh ducked down, searching behind a counter, then cursed and reappeared.

‘Anything?’ he called.

Archer shook his head, watching the radiation reading. ‘Nothing.’

What he’d said earlier was true, but only to a point. The bomb would give off a gamma reading, but he didn’t know how strong. Thankfully, the detector’s sensors were extremely sensitive. They reacted to fire alarms as well as to other equipment emitting even tiny levels of radiation. Since the device had come into use, there’d been many occasions when a suspected threat somewhere in the city had been called in, ESU and CRT teams deployed, only to find the reading was coming from an innocent member of the public who’d been undergoing radiotherapy treatment. And here, they could be dealing with an even smaller amount. Tiny even. Archer guessed that Flood and Kruger had not used much cobalt in cultivating the virus. He didn’t know if they were all wasting their time.

Time they didn’t have.

He rounded the corner, the escalators immediately to his right, and looked down at the handheld monitor. The numbers on the display were hovering on 45, the normal readout.

Having just