She vanishes in plain sight.

The time stamp on the video is five seconds before she appears a mile away in the middle of Times Square.

Five seconds.

One moment she’s waving to us. Another and she’s an angel falling from heaven.

Gerald is shaking his head. “That’s faster than the speed of sound.”

“Wheels up in forty minutes,” shouts Knoll. “I need everyone who is going to New York to be outside and on the shuttle in twenty minutes.”

I look at Ailes and don’t ask. I tell him. “I’m going.”

36

TIMES SQUARE IS a madhouse in the middle of the night. The NYPD has set up screens to block the body from onlookers and shut down the entire block to foot traffic. Not that there’s much point now. What happened has already been photographed and recorded a thousand times over. Late-night cable news programs are playing a clip of the angel’s fall. That’s what they’re calling it on the news. We watched it while we were in the air. Hundreds of camera phone photos of the victim’s naked body are already online. Word about the Empire State Building ticket clutched in her hand and the security camera video still haven’t leaked yet, for what it’s worth.

Twenty of us took the jet to LaGuardia. With the intersections blocked off by motorcycle cops, I don’t think our driver ever did less than eighty miles an hour. A paranormal feat of its own in NYC. A caravan of FBI Suburbans escorted by police cars with flashing lights rushed us down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and across the Queens Midtown Tunnel in under ten minutes. The trip from the tarmac at Quantico to Times Square was under forty-five minutes. Most of the witnesses are still standing around being interviewed by the FBI, the NYPD and the several dozen news crews that are filling the streets and sidewalks outside the barriers.

Our driver had to honk at a reporter doing a live feed in the middle of the road so we could get past. Inside the taped-off area, it’s just as much pandemonium. Every law enforcement agency in New York is here. The New York FBI office, the largest division outside of D.C., is out in full force. They’re already canvassing the crowds and have set up a mobile command post a hundred feet from the body. Men with flashlights are on the roofs of buildings searching for clues while helicopters are flying overhead with their spotlights scanning from above.

Somewhere in the middle of this chaos the Warlock is watching. I know it. This city is the center of the world. Almost a century ago my great-grandfather became a household name just a few blocks away.

Half of our group has gone to the Empire State Building. Knoll pulled me into the Suburban with him to go look at the body while the scene was still fresh.

A New York field agent walks us past the barricades and across the street to an opening in the screen around the girl.