The elevator climbed up through the twenty-eight floors of the building. Quickly, Dewey checked the clip on his gun. His forehead, armpits, and chest dripped with sweat. He looked in silence at the two agents.
“We drop anything that moves,” said one of the agents.
“We find the detonator,” said Dewey.
“Yeah, that too,” said the other agent.
Fortuna walked down the hallway, into the living room. Above the fireplace, he opened the ivory box, removed the detonator, placed it in the duffel bag. He walked to the elevator, dropping the duffel bag on the ground. He walked past the elevator, to the kitchen. There, he opened the Sub-Zero, reached in, pulled out a carton of orange juice, removed the cap, then started guzzling. He’d been at the computer more than two straight hours. He was ravenous, thirsty.
Suddenly, he heard the elevator door bell chime, announcing someone’s arrival.
Fortuna let the orange juice fall to the ground. He sprinted back down the corridor, toward the duffel bag. All he cared about now was the detonator. The elevator was thirty feet away. He galloped down the dimly lit hallway. But then, suddenly, the small green light above the door lit up; the elevator chimed again, and he stopped dead in his tracks; he wouldn’t make it. He turned, ran back to the kitchen, ducking inside just as the elevator doors opened.
Dewey watched the lights climb through the numbered buttons on the elevator wall. He thought of Capitana, of his men. He thought of the remaining targets, along with countless civilians, waiting to be destroyed.
He swallowed, his teeth dry, his eyes focused. As the elevator came to its stop at the penthouse, Dewey raised the Colt.
The door opened and the FBI agents stepped quietly into the entrance of the apartment. Dewey followed. Before them, a brilliant cherry sideboard sat against the opposite wall. A large painting of an American flag hung above it. Next to it was a massive mirror. Dewey looked for a moment at himself. He was a disheveled mess. His short hair looked patchy due to the hasty cut back in the mall bathroom in Cali. His pants were stained with blood and sweat. He thought of the irony; an impartial observer would have thought
he
was the enemy.
He smiled for a mad instant; he hadn’t felt this alive in more than a decade. This was a feeling he’d subsisted on as a soldier; the feeling of mattering, of risking it all for a higher purpose. He was alone in so many ways now, but he felt the warmth of a hundred thousand brothers beside him, American brothers, veterans, men, boys who fought before him, or fought alongside, who died for this country trying to protect it.
Beneath the painting, a duffel bag lay on the ground. Dewey stepped toward it, unzipped it. Inside, he found a laptop, several passports. And the detonator. He held it up, showed it to the agents, then slipped it into the pocket of his leather coat.
One of the agents signaled to Dewey with his hand. They moved right, Dewey left.
In the kitchen, Fortuna searched quietly but frantically for a weapon. He thought he’d placed a Glock 21 somewhere in the room, in a drawer or cabinet, but he couldn’t find it. Was his mind playing tricks on him? He needed to stay calm.
He peeked his head outside the door frame. He saw two SWAT-clad agents, machine guns out, moving slowly, cautiously down the hallway toward the kitchen. He pulled his head back inside the kitchen.
From the knife drawer, he had his choices. There were more than a dozen long, sharp blades, but instead Fortuna pulled out a razor-sharp William Henry steak knife. He gripped the knife in his right hand, blade tip down.
_____
Dewey couldn’t believe the size, the sheer scope, and opulence of the apartment. It opened up into a massive room whose glass wall ran the length of the building and framed an incredible tableau of New York City, the dark patch of Central Park, then lights to the east and south, snow falling in whiteness everywhere. The room was filled with stunning antiques and furniture, with yellow walls and with art everywhere.
He walked down the hallway and entered a bedroom. On the walls were photos of a good-looking man, an American, with dark brown hair. On the dresser were photos of the man, playing lacrosse, in a graduation gown. On the wall, he saw a degree. It was from Princeton. Alexander Blodgett Fortuna, class of 1999.
A cold chill climbed in a vector, up from Dewey’s knees, through his stomach, into his mouth. This was the terrorist’s, Fortuna’s, inner sanctum. He knew it, felt it. He searched through drawers, finding expensive clothing, even a large vial of cocaine.
He walked past the large bed and opened the door. Inside was an office. Dewey looked through the drawers of Fortuna’s desk. In the top drawer, he saw a file with the word “Marks” on it. Inside of it were documents, articles, and photos of Ted Marks.
More files; Savage Island, then Capitana. He pulled out the file and found diagrams of the facility.
Then, he saw words that caused him to stare in stunned silence: “Andreas, Dewey.” He picked up the file and flipped through it. Photos of him going back years, articles on his trial, photos of his wife, Holly, and Robbie.
Fortuna moved calmly into the windowless pantry off the kitchen. On a large shelf, chest-high, he moved several cartons of pasta to the side, then climbed up onto the shelf, eye level to the door. Gently, he pushed the pantry door closed.
Fortuna waited a painstaking minute. He heard no footsteps, nothing,
only silence. Another minute passed. Then it came, as he knew it would. Suddenly, a crack of white light appeared as the pantry door opened.
The black silhouette of the machine gun’s barrel appeared first, followed by the large frame of the gunner, stepping silently into the pantry. Fortuna heard the faint brush of the agent’s hand on the wall, searching for the light switch, just inches from his head.
Fortuna swung the razor-sharp tip of the knife in a vicious strike at the agent’s neck. He slashed the blade sideways, directly into the nape of the neck. The blade carved through skin, muscle, and cartilage, the force of Fortuna’s slash so strong that the blade severed all the way through to the agent’s spine. Just as quickly, Fortuna pulled the blade back out. A gurgled cough was all that came from the man as he dropped to the ground.
Fortuna knew the second agent would be right behind the first, and he quickly climbed down from the pantry shelf, stepping over the rapidly growing pool of blood on the marble floor. He pulled the machine gun from the dead man’s arms, then stepped back into the kitchen, crouching, hugging the cabinets, weapon trained at the door.
The other agent stepped into the kitchen. His eyes looked right, away from Fortuna, searching. Fortuna pulsed the MP7 just once. The low serial thud of automatic-weapon fire interrupted the silence. A pair of rounds shattered the agent’s skull, splattering blood and bone on the white door, dropping him to the ground in a contorted pile.
Fortuna moved, MP7 out in front of him, toward the hallway and the elevator that would deliver him to his escape.
Dewey heard something. Barely discernible, a grunt from somewhere in another part of the enormous apartment. He turned from the terrorist’s files and moved, Colt out.
Dewey crouched and moved out of the bedroom, weapon drawn, finger on the steel of the trigger. He exited the bedroom, moving quickly toward the entrance foyer. He hugged the wall as he moved, Colt cocked to fire. Down the hallway, he saw the elevator, then heard a low chime and watched as the doors opened.
He ran now, weapon out, finger on trigger. A figure suddenly appeared from the other side of the bank, black hair: Fortuna. Dewey raised the weapon and began to fire as Fortuna turned, the barrel of a machine gun aimed at him. Fortuna started firing and a furious wash of lead ripped the air. Dewey dived to the ground, rolled, came up firing. Fortuna anticipated it, stepped back. Dewey’s shots missed, but they forced Fortuna away from the elevator, preventing his escape. The doors of the elevator shut.
Again, the barrel of the machine gun emerged, another spray of bullets. But Dewey had already crawled through a doorway off the hall.
Inside the dimly lit living room, Dewey quickly holstered the Colt at his back, then swung the M203 off his shoulder. From the belt pack, he took a .40mm antipersonnel round, quickly inserted it into the M203 chamber. He slid his hand to the forward trigger.
Dewey moved along the wall of the living room, closer to the elevator. He looked through a crack between another door and the wall, spied Fortuna’s black hair at the opposite end of the elevator atrium, looking for him. Suddenly, Fortuna fired again, auto hail, sweeping the MP7 across the wall at thigh level, and Dewey had to dive to the ground as the line of lead pocked the wall, tearing through the plaster just inches above his head. After the line of bullets crossed immediately above him, Dewey crawled forward, put the tip of the M203 in the door frame and fired the grenade launcher.
The grenade whistled as it traveled across the elevator atrium, striking the wall across from the elevator, then exploding. The floor shook as the explosion destroyed everything in its vicinity, ripping the ceiling down, furniture, art, walls, and scorching the floor. Several small fires sparked immediately. Dewey moved the fire selector to auto hail, and pulsed the carbine trigger, sending 5.56mm cartridges in a furious spray across the wall of the hallway.
Receiving no counterfire, Dewey stood and moved through the door, through the burnt-out elevator atrium, M203 in front of him. The debris from the grenade was choking, blinding. He looked on the ground for the corpse of the dead terrorist, but found nothing. On the ground, the MP7 Fortuna had been using lay, the magazine spent.
Past the demolished atrium, he moved down the long corridor to the kitchen. At the kitchen entrance, he saw the first SWAT-clad agent slumped on the ground, head gone, blood everywhere. The second agent he saw a second later, lying in a large pool of blood, neck gashed. But no Fortuna.
In the back of the kitchen, Dewey saw an open door. A crimson shoe print on the marble floor. A stairwell leading upstairs. He moved to the stairwell, carefully. It was a tight space, and he harnessed the M203 back over his shoulder, took out the Colt, inserted a new clip, then began his ascent.
At the top of the steps, another door, also open. Cold air blew into the stairwell. Dewey moved through the door, inch by inch, expecting the terrorist to attack, but nothing came, and he stepped onto the snow-covered roof. Fresh tracks led across the roof, to the Fifth Avenue side of the building. Then the tracks disappeared over the side of the roof.
Dewey ran to the ledge, looking down. More than halfway down the building, almost invisible due to the falling snow, Fortuna dangled from a rope, desperately descending along the side of the building. Dewey found the rope, reached for his ankle sheath, pulled the Gerber blade out. Reaching forward, he cut the thick nylon rope. Suddenly, the taut line popped and went limp. Fortuna suddenly dropped and disappeared into the blinding snow.
Fortuna’s hands quickly grew bloody and raw as he climbed down the face of the building, toward the street. He descended quickly, moving two floors at a time, trying not to look up or down, bouncing his feet against window frame after window frame as he descended. He let rope through his hands in increments, ignoring the pain as the nylon sliced through the skin on his hands, each length of rope tearing away at his palms.
Suddenly, he felt a tug on the rope, then it went limp. A sense of airlessness bloomed in his spine, then turned into panic as gravity pulled him helplessly toward the cement at least ten stories below.
Fortuna clawed for a window ledge as he dropped away, legs kicking
the air. His fingers grabbed the closest ledge, but the granite was slippery, and he kept falling. He tried to grab the next ledge, again his fingers could not hold, then another ledge, again unsuccessfully, his rate of descent accelerating uncontrollably.
A small terrace came rapidly up at him then, and he saw it as it grew larger in the fraction of a second it took him to fall, and instinctively, in that half second, he braced himself, landed on the hard granite of the terrace with a painful crash, then rolled. He ignored the pain, looking for a dazed moment at his hands, which were now raw and bleeding profusely.
Fortuna kicked in the French door that led to the terrace, entered the apartment, ran limping past an elderly woman, who started screaming. Through the apartment door, he found the stairs and took the final five flights to the building’s basement as blood dripped from his torn-up hands. He exited through the building’s delivery entrance onto sixty-ninth Street. He walked calmly, limping, down sixty-ninth Street to the corner of Fifth Avenue.
On Fifth Avenue, he looked uptown and saw two police cars pulling up to the front of the building, then a pair of black Suburbans. He walked casually to the Mercedes parked a block south on Fifth, climbed in back.
Dewey took the twenty-eight flights from the roof recklessly, jumping from landing to landing, each floor going by in a matter of seconds. He sprinted through the empty lobby, through the front door, past a flock of NYPD officers arriving on the scene. Outside, he looked around frantically. He searched the spot where Fortuna would have fallen, finding nothing but pristine, untouched snow.
On Fifth Avenue, Dewey looked south as a black Mercedes lurched from the sidewalk onto a snow-coated Fifth Avenue. He pulled the M203 off the shoulder harness. From the belt pack, he took the other .40mm antipersonnel round, quickly inserted it into the grenade chamber as he ran toward the fleeing sedan.