Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

“Kind of looks like one, too, doesn’t it?” I said.

Hobart nodded.

“If it were up to me, I’d go in at two a.m. with night vision. As it is, we’re going to cut the electrical power to the apartment right before we breach, in case Mr. Mad-Bomber-Ass got something rigged.”

Hobart turned and addressed the crowd of black-clad men around us.

“Remember, people, once the door is down,” he called out, “three teams will split up. One per apartment floor. Berger Meister could be anywhere, hiding God knows what, so I want room-to-room sweeps that the fucking upstairs maid would be proud of. Also, check with your team’s bomb tech before you even think about touching anything. Capiche? Good. Now it’s hurry-up-and-wait time. All we need is the green light from the pencil pushers.”

For the next fifteen minutes, we listened to the SWAT guys lock and load and exchange terms like “tactical action parameters,” “secure coms,” and “mission capabilities.” Sitting on a greasy steel bench along the wall of the stifling van, Emily and I tested our earpiece radios and quick-checked our own weapons.

I glanced out the van’s one-way tinted window a hundred feet to the west, where the Ancient Egyptian stone obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle stood against Central Park’s bright blue sky. On the path beside it, a pudgy female jogger went by, followed by a dog walker pulling a ten-dog pack.

I don’t know which was higher, the temperature, my adrenaline, or the tension. I was pumped that we were finally onto Berger, but also wary. I’d seen Berger’s meticulous handiwork firsthand. Not only was he smart, efficient, and completely cold-blooded, but we had zero intel about the place where he was holed up.

We weren’t pulling a crackhead out of a closet, I thought, staring at the photo of the creepy penthouse. It was more like we were reaching into a black hole in the ground to pull out a viper.

“Alpha One, we have a go,” a voice in my earpiece crackled, a long, hot five minutes later. The van roared to life and swung hard to the right with a squeal of tires.

“Woo-hoo! This is it, y’all!” Officer Wong called out with an enormous grin as he adjusted his tactical helmet’s chin strap. “We’re moving on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky-high!”

Chapter 68

WHAT SEEMED LIKE a rapid heartbeat later, Emily slid into me as the van fishtailed with a shriek of brakes. My head almost hit the ceiling as the van crossed Fifth Avenue and hopped the curb in front of Berger’s building.

The back doors popped open, and Emily and I quickly followed the tactical team across the sidewalk and under the hunter green awning. When my eyes adjusted to the dim lobby, I spotted the doorman pressed against the wall beside an immense oil painting, his hat on the floor between his feet, his white-gloved hands in the air. A sign beside him said ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED.

“Not today, friend,” Hobart said, handing the guy back his hat.

Everyone froze in place as the wood-paneled elevator door at the far end of the lobby dinged open. Half a dozen laser sights trained on a tall, gorgeous young couple in business attire. Before they could open their mouths, they were taken facedown onto the Oriental carpet.

“They’re clean, Chief,” Wong said, tossing Hobart the young business guy’s wallet.

A broad, black-haired man wearing blue work clothes and wire-rim glasses appeared from a door beside the elevator.

“The back elevator is here, officers. This way,” he said in a thick Eastern European accent as he waved at us frantically.

A contingent of men was left to secure the lobby while we went through a dusty back hall and packed into a film noir–era freight elevator.

“This is so crazy, so crazy,” the super kept repeating as he operated the manual elevator.

Damn straight, I thought. There was absolutely no joking now or even talking as we watched the floors slide by with a disturbing sound of rattling chains.

At the top floor, we came out into a dingy, narrow, windowless hallway lit by a single hanging bulb. This was definitely the service entrance. A hand signal from Hobart halted us at the corridor’s bend beside some garbage cans. Two men rushed forward and knelt beside the lock on Berger’s apartment’s back entrance, placing the breaching explosive.

They ran back, and Hobart radioed down to some of his men now in the building’s basement.

“In position,” Hobart said.

“Roger. Pulling the switch. The juice is off. You’re a go,” a cop radioed back.

Hobart nodded. Then one of the commandos tapped a stapler-like detonator, and Berger’s back door was blown to smithereens with an enormous crunching blast.

The next few moments were a chaos of running men and shouts.

“FBI!” Hobart screamed in a voice that sounded like it could have knocked the door down on its own. “Down! Down! FBI! Everyone on the floor!”

Behind the SWAT team, Emily and I entered over the remains of the still-smoking door into a high-ceilinged kitchen. Instead of the granite countertops and high-end cabinets I was expecting, there were well-used industrial-size stoves and stainless-steel countertops. But that head-scratcher was nothing compared with the dining room.