3:30AM: 341 10th Street, Apartment House, Park Slope.
Mike Quinn’s large frame fills a twin-size mattress lying flat on an unwaxed scruffy wooden floor. Looming above his head, a small nightstand is littered with the daily luggage Quinn has borne for more years than he’d like to remember: a gold shield, credentials encased in a very thin three-by-six-inch leather case, a holstered Glock pistol, and an FBI-issued cell phone. His wallet lies nearby on the floor, stuffed with a couple of twenties, dry-cleaning tickets, his son’s high school graduation photo, and recent bar tabs.
The clank of a Culver Line “F” train grows louder, winding its way along elevated tracks near the Fourth Avenue station. The deserted concrete platform is visible just below Quinn’s seventh-story apartment window, fogging up with steam hissing from a nearby radiator.
Across from the window, along a bare wall needing more paint, empty wooden fruit crates support a beat-up turntable and a stereo receiver. Flanking the crates, a few dozen vinyl record albums as old as Quinn’s hi-fi equipment lean against small speakers. (A decorator he once dated described his apartment’s furnishings, after an uncomfortably long pause, as “minimalist.”)
Side one of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, selected by his partner, Bernie Gilliam, put the drunken Quinn to sleep hours ago. But the turntable lacks an automatic shut-off, so the stylus continues to spin over the last groove of the disc every two seconds…A soft muffled bump as the radiator gently hisses… Every two seconds…Bump… Hiss…Bump… Hiss…Bump… Hiss… Quinn dreams.
A coffee pot is hissing outside Eugene X. Chu’s Threat Squad cubicle…31st floor, 26 Federal Plaza…A laughing Terry Downing congratulates me on the new job. But Bernie just glares. The pot hisses louder. Chu shouts at Bernie and points to a commotion by the windows overlooking Foley Square. We rush over and see a gray-haired man, dressed in NYPD blues, running frantically down the courthouse steps, waving his arms, yelling something…Instantly, magically, the Squad is outside on Federal Plaza. We start toward the old cop, but it feels like we’re moving through molasses. The man comes closer. It’s Dad.
“Dad, what is it?” Another hissing sound…I look up. In the distance, over the Brooklyn Bridge, objects in a blood-red sky are approaching very slowly, growing larger and larger, hissing. “Mike!” Dad shouts, almost close enough to touch, now wearing Yankee pinstripes, limping like Mickey Mantle at the end of his career. “I named you for Mantle, not Uncle Michael!” He clutches his chest. “Tell Tommy to watch out for the choppers!”
I reach for him as two helicopters hiss by overhead, their draft sweeping everyone into the air, floating silently upward, just like the book Marilyn read to Danny when he was little, The Night Kitchen.
Below, Tommy in his FDNY turnout gear bends over Dad’s lifeless body, swearing vengeance, then strides slowly, purposefully toward the Federal Building, which is morphing into 2 World Trade Center.
I yell at Tommy to get away. “Don’t go in there, baby brother! Please! Stay with me!” I turn to Bernie. “Why can’t he hear me, Bernie?!”
Bernie points to Omar Sharif drifting my way, majestically waving a robe that keeps him afloat, obscuring my view of Tommy.
I reach for the Glock, but I feel a soft hand grabbing me. It’s Marilyn, the way she looked before she got sick, slithering up my arm. She’s singing in a sultry voice, “Umm Kulthum and Omar Sharif came floating on the jasmine wind,” transforming as she does into Detective Sergeant Salma Uzair, Bernie’s new sexy boss on the Squad.
I float down with Uzair onto an empty Culver Line work-train bench, her silk blouse sliding away, exposing her breasts. I hold her to me as the tunnel under 9th Street approaches. Uzair breathes into my ear, “Watch out for Fatima,” sounding just like Marilyn.
BLAAAT!
The second blast of the F train’s horn ends Quinn’s recurrent dream, the blare competing with another sound, shrill and more immediate. Sweating, his head aching, he reaches up to the nightstand and grabs the cell phone. He turns off the alarm and a torrent of texts from Monday night started dinging, ordering him to report to 26 Federal Plaza. The first text links to an email that pops up, detailing threats posted in a Jordanian forum about atomic bombs in New York and London. Despite his throbbing forehead, Quinn laughs out loud.
He tosses the phone on his pillow and trudges barefoot out of the bedroom. In the pre-dawn darkness, he plods along a narrow hall to the bathroom, washes down two Tylenol, and groans…Quinn thinks the face staring back at him from the ancient medicine cabinet mirror hasn’t sagged that much. But his salt and pepper hair, which had started turning gray almost from adolescence, like all the Irishmen in his lineage, now seemed devoid of the faintest trace of pepper.
The elevator is out of order again, so he takes the stairs, trying to remember just where he parked his Bureau car. Quinn doesn’t think he has a drinking problem. But it’s getting difficult to deny the mounting irritability with his colleagues, and the edginess he feels whenever he thinks about moving on to a new job. All of which dissipated with alcohol. But the heavy drinking is coming with a cost. Like this morning’s hangover. And a foggy memory.
He spots the twelve-year-old Ford Taurus Limited sitting right across the street. Quinn starts wiping away a light accumulation of snow and uncovers an orange Parking Violation Bureau ticket tucked under the wiper blades.
“Damn,” Quinn winces. “More paperwork.” He tosses the ticket on the passenger seat and pulls out onto the slushy road. It takes ten minutes to reach the ramp to the Battery Tunnel, and then twenty minutes of gridlock to reach the entrance as a highway crew slowly finishes up their overnight construction work.
He presses the button for the CD player. Bono starts singing. All is quiet on New Year’s Day. A world in white gets underway. Emerging from the Tunnel, Quinn is still thinking of January and the new job at the Grand Baron Hotel.
I should have told Bernie last night that we got the job. What’s wrong with me?
Inching north along West Street past the rebuilt World Trade Center, he thinks of Tommy again. He used to add 15 minutes to his commute by taking the Brooklyn Bridge to avoid passing this daily reminder of his brother. But then “Claire the Clairvoyant” changed his mind, claiming that the dearly departed thrived on remembrances from their earthly kin.
If it’s true, Tommy would appreciate my thinking about him every morning. And if it’s all nonsense, who does it hurt?
Five minutes later Quinn parked his car in the basement of 26 Federal Plaza, trying to shake off his metaphysical musings.
8:20AM: FBI New York Field Office, 26 Federal Plaza, Manhattan.
“26 Fed” – as every inhabitant called it – was the tallest federal building in the country, its 41 stories and adjacent plazas occupying a swath of pricey acreage along lower Broadway. Quinn took an elevator up from the Bureau’s basement parking area to the immaculately clean and spacious lobby. He passed a bulging Toys for Tots box outside the Fed Kids Center and remembered Kathy bending over to pick up a teddy bear trying to make a break for it. She smiled and he was smitten. He frequently thought about Kathy as he passed Fed Kids. But it was usually a brief fleeting mental nod, not a full-blown emotional flashback…The thought of abandoning all these familiar haunts is starting to have an impact that alcohol can’t deaden.
Three years have passed since Kathy left the Fed Kids job, her stepson and Quinn. The marriage had been on the rocks for a while but took a real tailspin when Kathy saw the sexy text message from “Agent Beth” pop up while Quinn was in the shower that summer Saturday. Unbeknownst to Quinn, Kathy’s midlife crisis came complete with an affair of her own. An over-sexed Yoga instructor found her to be a mother he’d love to fuck and did, often. It wasn’t until the divorce was final that Danny let slip his over-dramatized tale of finding his stepmother in flagrante with “a hippy guy who was chanting.”
Across from Fed Kids Quinn punches his code into one of the four unmarked FBI doors.
Maybe I shouldn’t take the Grand Baron job. Maybe I should pull back my retirement.
The door beeps and he enters a well-guarded bank of elevators. He banters with the uniformed FBI Police, the last line of defense against the crazies who manage to make it past the Wackenhut guards at the street entrances.
“Still snowing out there, Mike?” Charlie Ford asks.
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow,” Art Rhine sings, and Ford joins in, both looking forward to their impending vacation.
“Right you are, guys, more of a Christmas feel,” Quinn smiles.
“Hey, Mike, you still think the Jets will make the playoffs after last night’s slaughter?”
“The dream is over, guys,” Quinn waves, stepping into the elevator. As he presses 31, Rhine shouts, “Dream? That was a delusion, Mike!”
On the 31st floor, five separate squad areas straddle a center aisle stretching for two city blocks. As usual, it’s dark. When neon ceiling strips were installed five years earlier, the glare was so depressing that every squad kept turning them off, preferring the softer desktop illumination and the natural light from the windows. Execs wandering by would switch the lights back on, feeling they’d provided some small manner of support to their hard-working minions. A minute later somebody would kill them again, muttering, “Fucking morons.”
T-6 occupied a rectangular sea of battered and frayed office furniture on the southern end of the floor with only one enclosed cubicle, much bigger than all the rest, for Eugene X. Chu. On the eastern edge of the Squad’s space, floor-to-ceiling windows looked down on Foley Square’s city and federal courthouses with their broad telegenic steps featured in countless crime dramas.
And on the western side, bordering a windowless wall, sat a dark strip overgrown with discarded computer monitors, old file cabinets, and cardboard boxes filled with the proceeds of search warrants. Aside from a ton of paper, a curious rummager might find an operable rocket launcher at the bottom of one of those boxes, wrapped in a plastic bag with live shells, awaiting a tardy Assistant US Attorney’s approval for destruction.
In this area where the warren of desks hid worn, stained carpeting, senior members Downing, Quinn, and Gilliam made their home, farthest from the supervisor’s cubicle. When SSA Chu emerged, frantic to find a warm body to forestall Armageddon, long before he reached the backbench he’d stumble across the eager newcomers from Oshkosh who mistakenly calculated that encamping near their boss would help them learn the ropes quicker.
On this early Tuesday morning, it was still quiet on the floor. Until Al Pisani, T-6’s lone intelligence analyst and Quinn’s immediate work-station neighbor, started clacking away at two keyboards, accompanied by a New Age music soundtrack. A big bear of a man, Pisani’s long, unruly scraggly black hair, splotched with gray, framed a thick beard. He looked every bit of his 52 years.
“Hey, Al,” Quinn called, approaching his desk. “What’s the name of that cut? Music to Slit Your Wrists By? Jesus!”
Pisani smiled. “It’s Sounds of the Season, Mike. Can’t you just feel the winter chill in that flute? What’s your Mellow-osity Factor for it,” Pisani asked, invoking a long-standing staple of their repartee.
“Mellow-osity Factor of 5, Al. But what I need for my last week is Mellow-osity of 8 and above, Analyst Al, if you please.”
“Certainly, Agent Mike. And as a value-added extra, I will NOT get into a volume war with Detective Gilliam’s Classic Soul this week. Just for you.”
“That’s it, only positive vibrations this week, Yoda,” Quinn approved, using his favorite nickname for Pisani, combining a nod to his wisdom in mining data for the Squad, along with a back-handed slap for his strange taste in music.
“I’ll need some good vibrations from you, too, Mike,” Pisani sighs, looking up from his keyboard.
“I’m always down with the excitations, Al, you know that.” Quinn paused to give Pisani a firm neck massage. “What’s up, Yoda?”
Pisani slowly shook him off. “Just got notified by Kent Marley that he wants me to interview some podiatrist to, quote, evaluate whether she’s appropriate for the intelligence analyst vacancy, unquote.”
“You mean your hipster supervisor wants to hire a foot doctor?”
“Yeah, and Marley notes that…” Pisani adjusted his reading glasses and leaned closer to the screen, squinting at his supervisor’s small font. “She comes well-recommended by some Deputy Under Assistant Associate Director at Headquarters or something.”
“Ah! Ergo, I can conclude two things from our brief conversation here this morning,” Quinn announces as he flops into his swivel chair next to Pisani. “One, Marley is too cowardly to say ‘No’ to a superior, so he’s hanging it all on you.”
“Duh. What’s the second thing?”
“She must be incredibly good-looking. Hey, let me know when she’s coming in, so I can help evaluate her too, OK?”
“Yeah, right, that’s the last thing I’m gonna do, Mike, you old letch. First thing I’m gonna do is ask for some writing samples. And that will be that. Interview over.”
“Maybe not. She could have written a lot of interesting prescriptions, you know.”
Pisani strokes his beard, staring into space, then brightens. “Hmmm, now there’s an idea, Mike! God knows we could all use some Viagra around here.”
“That’s the spirit, Al!”
Quinn logs into his desktop computer and starts deleting a long list of emails, accumulated since he and Gilliam ducked out the prior afternoon to beat rush-hour traffic back to Brooklyn and the rendezvous at their favorite bar for Monday Night Football.
RE: T-6 Quarterly Risk Assessment Rankings: LATE
RE: Toys for Tots Ends Friday
RE: ASAC Angela Anderson’s Skiing Accident in Vermont
RE: “Escape Responsibly from Terrorists” – More Training Dates
RE: New Year’s Eve Times Square Assignment Schedule
RE: Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) Actions
RE: UPDATE: ASAC Angela Anderson’s Skiing Accident
RE: Holiday Wishes from the Director
RE: ASAC Anderson’s Accident: Counterterrorism Coverage
RE: T-6 Quarterly Risk Assessment Rankings: PRIORITY!
RE: Holiday Wishes from the Assistant Director
RE: Holiday Wishes from the ADIC’s Executive Officer
RE: T-6 Quarterly Risk Assessment Rankings: TOP PRIORITY!
RE: Holiday Wishes from the Special Agent in Charge
RE: “Escape Responsibly from Terrorists” – Training Slots Filled
RE: Holiday Wishes from the Acting Assistant Special Agent in Charge
RE: New Year’s Eve Times Square Assignment Schedule REVISED
Atomic Duet - An FBI Story 