The Intercept (30 page)

K
rina Gersten was posthumously promoted to Detective First Grade. She was buried six days later on a knoll overlooking the Verrazano Narrows at St. Peter’s Cemetery on Staten Island. Police officers from all across the city and the country attended the Saturday morning service, more than a thousand men and women in full-dress uniform.

The NYPD Pipe and Drum Band played “Amazing Grace.” Fisk didn’t hate the bagpipes. Their song was beautiful. Their plaintive cry was his cry.

The long blue line of mourners filed past the open grave and Gersten’s grieving mother. The Six—now five—attended, though Fisk tried to avoid any contact with them.

They were obviously devastated, both by the death of a person they had come to know and by the duplicity of a person they had believed to be one of them.

The flight attendant, Maggie Sullivan, was especially shaken. As was the cellist, Alain Nouvian. He was the only one who made a point of seeking out Fisk, perhaps guessing at his relationship with Gersten. Nouvian’s arm hung in a muslin sling, thanks to his scuffle with Jenssen. He had broken his hand, and his future with the New York Philharmonic was in doubt.

His status as an American hero twice over was not.

Later, Fisk shared a private moment with Gersten’s mother, following the long and emotionally exhausting tribute. Afterward he honestly could not recall a word either of them had said. The way Jenssen had felt when the pain in his improperly set arm overloaded the nerves throughout his entire body—that was how Fisk felt now. He too wished he could self-detonate.

Fisk found Dubin standing with the commissioner after the service. Fisk had been out that entire week.

“I don’t know if I can come back,” he told his boss.

Dubin laid his white-gloved hand on Fisk’s uniform shoulder. “Take some more time. You’ll come back. We need you.”

Fisk did not respond. He had stared into the icy blue eyes of a fanatic. He had crushed his windpipe. But nothing had ended, he knew that. Like a virus, the killing desire had merely jumped into a new host. The defeat of one soldier of jihad gave rise to ten more.

Fisk’s biggest regret was not having killed Jenssen. He almost did. He would have, if not for the cops who converged on them, dragging Fisk away from Jenssen’s unconscious form. They had saved his life, but not his arm. Jenssen was in a military cell now. His arm had been amputated. Supposedly he had already given his interrogators information on the terror cell in Scandinavia, Nordic-looking jihadists existing beyond the limits of crude profiling techniques. The future of antiterrorism had begun its segue from ethnic and religious power struggles toward conflicts of pure ideology.

Fisk didn’t care. The big picture didn’t interest him anymore. This was a war waged by damaged individuals, making victims of the innocent. Trying to be the catcher in the rye, as Fisk had, was insanity.

Then again, despite the Sisyphean aspect of the job, somebody had to do it. Or at least try.

A
few days later, Fisk found himself inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, staring at Monet’s sunflowers. He remembered how it all started, back in that hangar on the airfield at Ramstein Air Base: the digital images that hid the messages to and from bin Laden.

Fisk wasn’t what you would call a museum-going person, but this was as good a place as any to try to figure out his life. Gersten’s life had ended forever, and it wouldn’t seem right to him if his didn’t veer off in some unknown direction now. That is what occurred to him as he thought about the digital rendering of this artist’s vision of an object in nature.

No one knew about him and Gersten. That was a good thing. It allowed him to mourn her alone, and at his own pace. But that was also a bad thing. Everyone understood that he was distraught over the loss of a fellow cop. No one understood that he was also distraught over the loss of a love.

When he stopped hearing the bagpipe music in his head, then he would know it was time to move on. Then he would know the next step.

Acknowledgments

T
hanks to David Highfill and Richard Abate, for their professionalism, enthusiasm, and guidance. To Cliff Gilbert and Bob Philpott, for their decades of advice and having my back. To Chuck Hogan, for his critical insights and creative generosity. To Peter Jankowski, who keeps the train running on time in my television life. But most of all to my children, Olivia, Serena, Elliot, Zoe, and Rex, and my wife, Noelle, who make my life truly blessed.

About the Author

DICK WOLF, a two-time Emmy award–winning writer, producer, and creator, is the architect of one of the longest-running scripted shows and most successful brands in the history of television—NBC’s
Law & Order
. Wolf has won numerous awards, including Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series (
Law & Order
) and Outstanding Made-for-Television Movie (
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
); a Grammy; and an Edgar. This is his literary debut and the first in a series featuring NYPD detective Jeremy Fisk. He lives in Southern California.

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Credits

Cover design by Mary Schuck

Cover photograph by Shutterstock

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE INTERCEPT
. Copyright © 2013 by Dick Wolf. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Epub Edition January 2013 ISBN: 9780062064844

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-206483-7

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OV/RRD
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