“I did,” Gannon said. “Several times. But he doesn’t answer. This is pretty important. I really need to talk to him. Like now.”

Stick squinted as he tapped at his mustache with a knuckle.

“I actually know a few computer nerds in the department that might be of some use. You need to sit down with this guy pronto, huh? Is this about aliens or something? Ancient aliens maybe? On your new farm? No, wait. I got it. Crop circles.”

“Stick, I just need your help, okay? I didn’t come back up here because I miss the dirty snow. It’s important. I’m begging you to help me contact this guy.”

“Okay. Relax. Relax. Just wondering.”

Stick winked as he took his cell phone out of the leather jacket.

“You just sit back and watch the master at work, Mickey, my boy,” he said. “Your wish is my command.”

42

At only a little over two hundred flight miles from Washing-ton, DC, to New York City, it took the unmarked government Gulfstream twenty-one minutes tarmac to tarmac to land Reyland and his men at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport.

At five after three in the afternoon, they disembarked into the gray and cold and transferred everything off the sleek white jet into the three black Ford Expedition SUVs waiting along the open tarmac side fence.

By 3:10, they were on the Jersey Turnpike eastbound with all the traffic heading into the city. But they didn’t head into the city. Right as the traffic began backing up before the Holland Tunnel, the three dark vehicles swerved onto the litter-strewn shoulder one after the other.

Down at the end of a battered off-ramp was a stop sign they blew past into an industrial area called Kearny. Huge chemical tanks went by on their left. A transmission tower. A looming dark steel railroad bridge.

When they came around a bend, a CSX freight train double stacked with rusty shipping containers was rolling out in the opposite direction.

Getting out, Reyland thought, smiling.

While the getting was still good.

A hundred yards farther south down this godforsaken road, the convoy of tinted-windowed vehicles slowed. The potholed drive they pulled onto had a tall razor-wired fence gate across it with a rusted sign that said KEEP OUT New Jersey State DOT.

Reyland’s driver zipped down the window. He fished into his pocket as Reyland listened to the terrific ocean-like roar from the rushing traffic on the turnpike above. Then the driver finally laid his electronic passkey to the fob reader and the rusty gate slid sideways with a rattle and a buzz.

Beyond the gate were salt sheds and stacks of cement highway barriers and columns of road plows that they quickly skimmed past on their way toward a half-dozen construction trailers and shipping containers that were set up in a horseshoe pattern at the truck yard’s rear.

Reyland stared at the bristle of satellite dishes and cell tower masts rising from the huge trailers’ roofs.

Port New York Center 11, as the site was officially known, was one of the very first federal-to-local law enforcement fusion centers set up in the scramble after 9/11.