Angel Killer (22 page)

Knoll calls out from the phone. His boxer face looks sad and confused. “Forensics is sending us a photograph. They say she’s holding on to a ticket. Just a second . . . It’s a ticket to the Empire State Building observation deck.”

What?

Knoll puts his hand on the mouthpiece. “The time stamp on the ticket was ten minutes before she fell.”

The Empire State Building is a mile away. Someone could walk the distance in that time. She certainly couldn’t jump that far. It doesn’t add up. It’s incomplete.

Ailes feels the same way. “What do you think?”

There’s more. This is all part of the deception. “Without the ticket, it’s straightforward, I guess. I’m not sure what he wants us to think. It’s just a visual image right now. A mystery inside a mystery, maybe. I don’t think we’ve seen all of it. There’s another part to this.”

Knoll quiets us down again. “New video coming online. NYPD just got this from security at the Empire State Building. They’re streaming it to us.”

The screen cuts to a live feed from inside what looks like the security center of the Empire State Building. Several NYPD officers are standing around a monitor while a detective and a security guard roll through recorded video. The person holding the camera brings the lens closer to see what they’re looking at.

“You getting this, D.C. and Quantico?” asks the detective in New York.

Knoll confirms over the phone.

The detective has the security guard play back a video. It’s from a security camera showing the corner of the observation deck. We all crowd in for a closer look. We know something is going to happen. It feels like we’re watching live.

A blond girl, our angel, is wearing an overcoat. She steps to the edge of the deck by the fence and waves at the camera. She smiles. A bright, big smile. She starts to glow. For a moment the screen is filled with a blurry rainbow. There’s a flash of light and then she’s gone.

She vanishes in plain sight.

The time stamp on the video is five seconds before she appears a mile away in the middle of Times Square.

Five seconds.

One moment she’s waving to us. Another and she’s an angel falling from heaven.

Gerald is shaking his head. “That’s faster than the speed of sound.”

“Wheels up in forty minutes,” shouts Knoll. “I need everyone who is going to New York to be outside and on the shuttle in twenty minutes.”

I look at Ailes and don’t ask. I tell him. “I’m going.”

T
IMES SQUARE IS
a madhouse in the middle of the night. The NYPD has set up screens to block the body from onlookers and shut down the entire block to foot traffic. Not that there’s much point now. What happened has already been photographed and recorded a thousand times over. Late-night cable news programs are playing a clip of the angel’s fall. That’s what they’re calling it on the news. We watched it while we were in the air. Hundreds of camera phone photos of the victim’s naked body are already online. Word about the Empire State Building ticket clutched in her hand and the security camera video still haven’t leaked yet, for what it’s worth.

Twenty of us took the jet to LaGuardia. With the intersections blocked off by motorcycle cops, I don’t think our driver ever did less than eighty miles an hour. A paranormal feat of its own in NYC. A caravan of FBI Suburbans escorted by police cars with flashing lights rushed us down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and across the Queens Midtown Tunnel in under ten minutes. The trip from the tarmac at Quantico to Times Square was under forty-five minutes. Most of the witnesses are still standing around being interviewed by the FBI, the NYPD and the several dozen news crews that are filling the streets and sidewalks outside the barriers.

Our driver had to honk at a reporter doing a live feed in the middle of the road so we could get past. Inside the taped-off area, it’s just as much pandemonium. Every law enforcement agency in New York is here. The New York FBI office, the largest division outside of D.C., is out in full force. They’re already canvassing the crowds and have set up a mobile command post a hundred feet from the body. Men with flashlights are on the roofs of buildings searching for clues while helicopters are flying overhead with their spotlights scanning from above.

Somewhere in the middle of this chaos the Warlock is watching. I know it. This city is the center of the world. Almost a century ago my great-grandfather became a household name just a few blocks away.

Half of our group has gone to the Empire State Building. Knoll pulled me into the Suburban with him to go look at the body while the scene was still fresh.

A New York field agent walks us past the barricades and across the street to an opening in the screen around the girl.

She’s just like the photograph. Amid the already bright lights of Times Square, work lights make the scene feel like day. I can see my own reflection in her blood.

It was hard to tell from the two-dimensional photograph, but I can clearly make out where part of her face has been caved in from the impact. The asphalt is also dented. It appears as if she hit the ground hard.

All the evidence makes it seem like she really did fall from a tremendous height. But how is that possible?

A tech with a portable ultrasound unit is checking her bones as a fingerprint tech clears an area on her outstretched hand. The ultrasound screen shows hundreds of fractures. Her left shoulder is pulverized.

After taking it in for several minutes, Knoll turns to me. “What do you think, Blackwood?”

I’m not sure what I think. I can only say the obvious. “It looks like she fell. But I guess the question is where and when?”

He kneels down to examine the body more closely. “You don’t think here? It’s been planted?”

“I don’t know. There’s just not enough information. We know what he wants us to think. What happened is a different matter.”

A local agent introduces the deputy police commissioner to Knoll. Dressed in khakis and a T-shirt under his coat, Floyd Greene looks like he was just pulled out of bed. In his fifties, with gray hair and sharp features, he resembles an Irish cop out of an old movie. He gives me a polite nod before talking to Knoll. “Any observations, Special Agent Knoll?”

Knoll cranes his head and looks at a helicopter overhead. “No copter was overhead at the time?”

Greene leans in to say something privately to Knoll. He looks at my FBI ID around my neck again, then includes me. His voice is low, almost a whisper. “We’ve had five surface-to-air missile batteries around this island since 9/11. We’ve got radar that’ll tell us if a mosquito takes a piss in Central Park. Nothing gets past it. We didn’t see a thing.” He nods to the body. “Either our little angel here fell from heaven or someone planted her body here. There’s no way she got here any other way. Radar would tell us.”

Knoll scratches his head. “Balloon?”

“Anything big enough to carry a person is going to show up on radar.”

“What about a train of them?” The words sound stupid as I say them.

Greene gives me an intense gaze. “Explain?”

I only think of the idea because he said a balloon would be too big. “Instead of one large one, a few dozen smaller ones all tied to a long rope. Each one no more than a couple feet across.”

Greene turns to Knoll. “Who is she?”

“Agent Blackwood is the one we bring in to figure this kind of stuff out. Kind of an outside-the-box thinker. Real outside-the-box.” He says the last part matter-of-fact. Nowhere near the skepticism when we first met.

Greene nods his head. “Oh. I heard of you, now. Well, in the umpteen million meetings I’ve had going through every scary scenario that could happen in this city, nobody ever mentioned the possibility of sneaking in a large object, like a bomb, using a series of low-radar-profile inflatables hooked up like that.”

My cheeks turn red. “Sorry. Just asking a question.” I feel like I’m ten and interrupted my grandfather in the middle of one of his stories.

“Don’t be sorry, Agent. I’m paying you a compliment. We try to imagine the unimaginable. Now I got to go yell at somebody for not thinking of that. Hopefully he’ll tell me that our radar would catch it.”

Knoll rolls the idea around in his head. “You think that’s it?”

I shake my head. “No. I don’t. I don’t think she fell here. At least not from that high up. I don’t think the Warlock would chance setting off a hidden missile defense system. I was just thinking around things.”

Knoll makes a kind of grunt. I’m not sure if that means he gets what I’m saying or is just frustrated.

The girl’s eyes are looking right at me from the reflection in the pool of her blood. It’s as if they’re telling me something.

We’re missing a clue.

It’s got to be an obvious thing, like the feather or the sand.

Oh my God!

“What?” asks Knoll.

“Just a second!” I hold up my finger and pull out my phone to call Gerald back in Quantico. He picks up after three rings. “Gerald, you told me the girl’s name. How did we find it out?”

His voice still sounds hurt. “I found her photo in the database. But she doesn’t have a twin. A lot of close matches. But nobody with the same birth date.”

Knoll steps closer to listen. I explain to him and Gerald at the same time. It’s the Transmitted Woman effect. “He doesn’t need a genetic match. Just a girl who’s close enough physically. Like Swanson and the pilot. We’re meant to assume there was only one body. He picked two girls that look alike. This girl and another. That’s who we saw on the observation deck.”

“What do you mean?” asks Knoll.

“Chloe died almost two years ago. The Warlock used her and her twin because he needed to make it look like she only died hours before we found her. But this is different; the Warlock knows we’ll find out the identity of this girl. The other girl, the one who vanished from the Empire State Building, she’s not a twin. Just a double. The moment she vanished, this girl was planted here. Two girls.”

“I think I get it. But how?” asks Knoll.

I shake my head. “That’s not important right now. The other girl, she might still be alive! He knows as soon as she sees her face on the news, she’s going to talk to someone. That’s if he doesn’t already have her. We can still save her!”

“Christ!” Knoll radios the head of the field office and the NYPD to broadcast the image of the girl on the observation deck to the news. Hopefully she’ll see her face and call in. That’s if she’s not in on it or being held captive. I hadn’t thought about that until just now.

I bite my lip trying to think around the problem. The Warlock had to have thought about that situation. He’s still several steps ahead. He’s already got a plan to get rid of the girl from the Empire State Building.

I interrupt Knoll. “Check all the international flights that left in the last few hours from LaGuardia and JFK. She might be an out-of-town tourist. Maybe from another country. For all we know, he could be waiting on the other end to kill her.”

If the Warlock was in Manhattan when the angel fell, he could have sent the other girl unwittingly away so she’d be out of the city by the time this broke on the news. If he wanted to meet her at the other end of the flight, it’d be as easy as routing her through some extra destination. He could fly direct and pick her up at the other airport.

Knoll relays my instructions. As soon as he’s done we climb back into the Suburban and go downtown to the Empire State Building. I give the angel one last look and pray we can save the girl who vanished.

This murder has to be the last.

If he kills again it will be my fault.

H
ELICOPTERS OVER THE CITY
hover like wasps beyond the protective barrier around the observation deck on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building. The NYPD copter searchlights paint the city with disks of light. News helicopters, told to keep a safe distance back, patrol in wide circles, covering events with their long-range cameras.

The size of the police presence makes me think of newsreel footage of World War II battlefields and the more recent coverage of cities in the Middle East under siege. All this hysteria, created by one man.

Knoll has been circulating the image of the girl right before she vanished as widely as possible. While the manhunt for her plays out, we’ve come here to look for some kind of clue as to who she was and how she vanished.

None of us know what we’re searching for, other than some kind of explanation for what we can only describe as paranormal. A girl vanishes in plain sight from the top of the Empire State Building. Seconds later, her angelic twin crashes to the earth in the middle of Times Square. How do you begin to investigate something like that? I know part of the trick; at least I’m sure there are two girls. But that doesn’t explain how it happened.

Dawn is still a few hours away, but the city is wide awake. People who were up late to see the news called friends to tell them to turn on their televisions or go online. No official connection to the Warlock has been announced yet, but they already know. The media have been going crazy. The tourist videos and the photo of the fallen angel strike the same chords as the mysterious reappearance of the Avenger and the graveyard body consumed by flames. I remind myself her name was Denise. I’ve got to remember her as well as Claire, and not fall for the deception. There were two girls there, just like here; only this time, one could still be alive.

When we left Times Square, piles of flowers were being laid next to candles. I’m glad some people realize there’s a victim in all this spectacle. At least I hope they see her as a victim. We passed hundreds of people lined up on the sidewalk trying to get a look at what they saw on television. Their faces were filled with awe and wonder. We spotted several people holding signs declaring it the end of days. A street preacher was perched on a trash can giving an impromptu sermon.

On the elevator to the observation deck, I try to imagine how the public will react to this latest deception. Those people in the streets still haven’t seen the video of the girl vanishing. The fallen angel is the tragic and strangely beautiful conclusion; the vanishing is the first all-out magical miracle that people will be able to watch over and over again.