Page 96 of At Midnight Comes the Cry

Patten pointed at both men. “We turned out half the force and the staties foryourtip.Youguys brought us here.”

“No, the sighting of an Amber Alert suspect brought you here.” Clare could tell Russ was trying to bring the temperature down.

“And you said he was part of this militia bombing thing!”

The Albany officers in front of the monitors were leaning forward, extremely intent on not drawing their commander’s attention. Through the open door, the cops and security guards out of Patten’s direct line of fire were listening avidly.

“When that was our only lead, it made sense—”

“The mall’s got hundreds of people inside and about as many places to stash explosives! If they blow this place up, it’ll be bigger than…” Patten paused, red-faced, struggling for a comparison.

“Nine-Eleven?” one cop suggested.

“Shut your mouth, we don’t dishonor Nine-Eleven like that!”

“Listen to me!”

Even Patten paused at the sound of Russ’s voice. “What? I’m listening.”

“Check March’s phone. He was walking around, making calls. Who was he calling? Where are they?”

“We can’t run a call record from here. We gotta get the carrier involved.”

“You can start with seeing the numbers, though, yeah? Let’s try phoning one or two of them ourselves.”

Patten jerked his head in a nod, gesturing to the cop with the headset. “Tell ’em.” He turned toward Kevin. “And you. Keep looking at that tape until I tell you to stop!”

“The chief’s right.” Kevin stood up. “A big Hannukah celebration is a much more likely target. If they set off bombs here at the mall, they’re going to kill a lot of white people. Families. Presumably Christians.”

Patten snorted. “That didn’t stop the Oklahoma City bombers, and they were white pride nuts, too.”

“That was a federal building. They were attacking the government.”

Hadley stepped forward. “The Empire State Plaza is all government buildings. Even if their bombs aren’t strong enough to bring anything down, they’ll still be disrupting business in a major way.”

“Absolutely true,” Yíxin added. “I work there. If the militia can cripple the elevators and escalators, just accessing parking is going to be a nightmare.”

“That’s their big play?” Patten rolled his eyes. “Make it a pain in the ass for lawyers to get to their cars?”

“No.” Russ cut his hand across the air, as if slicing through the arguments. “It’s just a side benefit. An add-on. The real win is killing as many Jews as possible and striking terror into every Jewish gathering in New York for the foreseeable future.”

There was a moment of silence. Then the communications officer spoke up. “Commander?”

Patten gestured for the man to speak.

“We’ve got the results back from the guys holding March.”

“Do you have a list of numbers?”

“No, sir.” The officer frowned. “He wasn’t making any calls.”

“What?” Patten strode across the floor, holding his hand. “Gimme the headset.” The officer snatched it off and handed it to his boss, who held it up to one ear. “Whaddaya mean he wasn’t making calls? We saw him live on screen talking his head off.” He listened. Heglanced toward Russ. “Uh-huh. Okay.” He handed the headset back. His voice was heavy. “Last call he made was yesterday.”

No one spoke.

“It was a feint,” Clare finally said. “A distraction.” A standard of military deception for thousands of years.

Russ nodded. “Their captain was career army.”