cute little five-year-old boy, Terrence. The kindergartner had captured the world’s loving attention by carefully imitating one of the full-dress marines at the inauguration.
I guess it was a good thing Terrence was so cute, because the news report was saying that the prez was due in town today for a series of upcoming UN meetings that were going to clog up city traffic as tight as concrete in a drainpipe.
“You’re up early,” I said as my oldest son, Brian, came in.
“Yeah, I know. I heard some old guy yelling,” he said, elbowing me as he grabbed the OJ out of the fridge.
I glanced down at my flour-covered phone as I heard my text ringtone.
“Fu—I mean, rats,” I said, looking at it, then at the tablet’s screen.
“Furry rats?” said Brian groggily, draining his glass.
I took off my apron and hung it around his neck.
“There are times in life when a man has to pass the baton to his son, Brian. I’m all out of batons, so I’m passing this spatula. Your beloved nanny is in there, and she and the other multiple members of this family are very hungry and counting on you. Feed them well, my son. Watch the toast. Don’t let it win.”
“What? Cook breakfast? Me? I, eh, I have practice.”
“Practice? You have a game at one. It’s eight.”
“Um, sleeping practice.”
“Don’t worry, kiddo,” I said as I headed into the dining room. “You have that skill down pat. Again, beware of the toast, and may the force be with you.”
“Mary Catherine,” I said as I came into the dining room waving my phone. “How can I break this gently?”
“Work? On a Saturday morning?” the blond Irish beauty said, wide-eyed as she gave me a look.
I hated that look. In addition to being my kids’ nanny, Mary Catherine was also my…girlfriend? Significant other? Like everything else in my life, I guess you could say it was complicated.
But does it have to be? I wondered, not for the first time.
“On a Saturday morning?” she repeated.
“It seems so,” I said as I closed my eyes and bowed my head solemnly.
“But we were going to go skating in the park. The kids were looking forward to it. Have all the other flatfoots in the entire city perished?”
“It’s Chief Fabretti or I’d ignore it.” I shrugged. “It’s important. Something is up, I guess.”
“When is something down in this town, I wonder?” Mary Catherine said as I slunk out of there.
Chapter 2
A little over an hour later, I was in Queens, sitting in a large open room on the second floor of an ugly brown concrete-and-glass building off a service road in the south part of the small city that is JFK International Airport.
The building was the Port Authority Police Department JFK Command Center, and outside the window next to me, bursts of white exploded up into the crystal clear air from the massive airport plows working the snow from one of the airport’s four runways.
Between the runway and the PAPD building, there was what looked very much like a parking lot, but on it, instead of cars, were several small white bullet-nosed corporate jets, and from the planes came groups of mostly male passengers.
Some of them were tall and slim and wore dark business suits, and some of them were tall and bulky and wore olive-drab military fatigues. Every once in a while, one of the curious incoming passengers would enter the room I was sitting in and pass on through to one of the conference rooms at the far end, where various closed-door meetings were taking place.
The tall gentlemen were Secret Service, I knew. The guys in the suits and polished wing tips? Presidential protection agents. The guys in the drabs with the long gun bags? Secret Service CAT—counterassault team—tactical agents. From the news report I’d seen this morning, I surmised that the Secret Service people were the forward contingent prepping for the president’s imminent arrival in NYC for the General Assembly at the UN.
What I didn’t know was what I was doing here. I was working in the Major Case Squad, not Dignitary Protection. My boss, Chief of Detectives Fabretti, hadn’t said much in his text except for me to get here forthwith.
As I sat pondering the continuing mystery, I realized that I’d actually been in this building and squad room before. It was in 2001, when I’d been in the NYPD’s ESU SWAT A team. We’d been assigned to assist the NYPD’s Dignitary Protection squad to protect George W. Bush when he came to New York three days after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.