Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

We stared silently at the scrolling message.

“It almost sounds like a poem, doesn’t it?” Cell said.

“Yeah,” I said, taking out my BlackBerry and speed-dialing my boss. “I’ve even seen the style before. It’s called psychotic pentameter.”

“Tell me what we got, Mike,” Miriam said a moment later.

“Miriam,” I said, staring at the flashing I AM A BOMB. “What we got here is a problem.”

Chapter 6

THE ALEXANDER HOTEL just off Madison on 44th was understaffed, overpriced, and excessively seedy. All the grim, peeling walls, off-white towels, and pot smoke and piss stench $175 a night could buy.

Sitting cross-legged on the desk that he’d moved in front of his top-floor room’s window, Berger slowly panned his camera across the columns and entablatures of the landmark marble library seventeen stories below.

The $11,000 Nikkor super-zoom lens attached to his 35-millimeter digital camera could make faces distinguishable at up to a mile. At a block and a half, with the incredibly vivid magnification, Berger could see the sweat droplets on the first responders’ nervous faces.

Beside him on the desk was a laptop, a digital stopwatch, and a legal tablet filled with the neat shorthand notes he’d been taking for the past several hours. Evacuation procedures. Response times. He’d left the window open so that he could hear the sirens, immerse himself in the confusion on the street.

He was meticulously photographing the equipment inside the open back door of the Bomb Squad van when someone knocked on the door. Freaking, Berger swung immediately off the desk. He lifted something off the bed as he passed. It was a futuristic-looking Austrian Steyr AUG submachine gun, all thirty 5.56 NATO rounds already cocked, locked, and ready to rock.

“Yes?” Berger said as he lifted the assault rifle to his shoulder.

“Room service. The coffee you ordered, sir,” said a voice behind the door.

No way anyone could be onto him this quickly! Had someone in another window seen him? What the hell was this? He leveled the machine gun’s long suppressed barrel center mass on the door.

“I didn’t order anything,” Berger said.

“No?” the voice said. There was a pause. A long one. In his mind, Berger saw a SWAT cop in a ski mask applying a breaching charge on the door. Berger eyed down the barrel, muscles bunching on his wiry forearms, finger hovering over the trigger, heart stopped, waiting.

“Oh, shit—er, I mean, sugar,” the hotel worker said finally. “My mistake. It’s an eleven, not a seventeen. So sorry, sir. I can’t read my own handwriting. Sorry to have bothered you.”

More than you’ll ever know, Berger thought, rubbing the tension out of the bridge of his nose. He waited until he heard the double roll of the elevator door down the outside hall before he lowered the gunstock off his shoulder.

A man was standing talking to the Bomb Squad chief down on the library’s pavilion when Berger arrived back to the zoom lens. After clicking a close-up shot with the camera, he smiled as he examined the looming face on the screen.

It was him. Finally. Detective Michael Bennett. New York’s quote unquote finest had arrived at last.

The feeling of satisfaction that hummed through Berger was almost the same as the psychic glee he got when he’d perfectly anticipated a countermove in a game of chess.

Berger grinned as he squinted through the viewfinder, watching Bennett. He knew all about him, his high-profile NYPD career, his Oprah-ready family. Berger shot a glance over at the rifle on the bed. From this distance, he could easily put a tight grouping into the cop with the suppressed rifle. Blow him to pieces, splatter them all over the marble columns and steps.

Wouldn’t that stir the pot? Berger thought, taking his eyes off the gun. All in due time. Stick to the plan. Stay with the mission.

“Stay tuned, my friends,” Berger said, allowing himself a brief smile as he clicked another shot of the clueless cops. “There’s much more where this came from. In Lawrence’s honor.”

Chapter 7

I DIDN’T HAVE A CARE in the world as I fought the Saturday-night gridlock on the BQE back to Breezy Point. No, wait a second. That’s what I was wishing were true. My real mood was closer to depressed and deeply disturbed after my face time with the sophisticated booby-trapped bomb and cryptic e-note.

Cell and his crew had ended up cutting off the entire library tabletop to transport the bomb out to their range in the Bronx. A quick call to Midtown North revealed that no one in the library or its staff had noticed anyone or anything particularly out of the ordinary.

With the absence of security cameras at the location, we were left with basically nada, except for one extremely sophisticated improvised explosive device and a seemingly violent nut’s promise to deliver more. To add insult to injury, a briefing about the incident had been called for the morning down at One Police Plaza, my presence required.

I hate seemingly violent nuts, I thought as I got on the Belt Parkway. Especially ones who really seem to know what they’re doing.

Even though it was ten and way past everyone’s bedtime, all the windows of the beach house were lit as I parked the SUV and came up our sandy path. I could hear my kids inside laughing as Seamus held court. It sounded like a game of Pictionary, the old codger’s favorite. He was a born ham.