Twelve Hours by Leo J. Maloney Page A

for whatever might come out. She shivered, pulling her blazer tighter around her torso and wishing she’d worn something warmer.
    He shook his head. “No response on any of the communicators.”
    “Do you have any word from the field office?”
    “They’re mounting a response. That’s all I know.”
    She swore under her breath and dialed the number for the hotel, which returned a busy signal.
    “Agent Frieze!”
    She looked up from her phone to see Peter Conley making his way toward her. “Have you got anything?” he asked.
    “First responders are thin on the ground,” she said as he approached, “scrambling to deal with the three-pronged attack. From what I gather, though, the Waldorf attack has priority one. This place is going to be swarming with people from at least half a dozen agencies within fifteen minutes.”
    “That’s going to be a problem,” he said. “I’ve got a man on the inside, and he just made contact. We’ve got a hostage situation. The people inside are wired with explosives. There’s no way to get them out safely.”
    “You’ve got a man on the inside? We need to establish reliable contact with him and coordinate with—”
    “He’s not going to wait,” said Conley. “And neither is this situation. We need to buy him time to deal with the situation.”
    “NYPD is getting a negotiator here,” she said. “Plus tactical response teams and snipers. Protocol for defusing this sort of situation.”
    “That’s not going to work here,” said Conley. “The hostage situation is just a diversion. The terrorists are leaving through an old train tunnel that goes from the Waldorf to Grand Central.”
    “How do you know this?” asked Frieze. “Who’s this man on the inside? Is he State Department?”
    “He’s a trained black operative,” said Conley. Frieze eyed him, but left it at that. There was no time to quibble about these things.
    “How does he know their plan?”
    “I’d call it a professional hunch,” said Conley. “It’s the only plan that fits.”
    “What if they’re suicide bombers?”
    “Then everybody would already be dead.”
    Frieze kicked the ground. “Goddamn it,” she said. “What the hell do we do, then?”
    “We keep the tactical teams out of the hotel,” said Conley.
    “If this doesn’t pan out, my career at the New York bureau is over on my first day.”
    “Do you think there’s any other plausible explanation?”
    The tire squeal of a halting car cut off Frieze before she could respond. A thickset man with side-parted salt-and-pepper hair and the expression of a charging bull sprang out and pushed through the barrier.
    “Get these people out of here!” he yelled to the policemen at the scene. “I want a perimeter set up on a one-block radius. You.” He pointed at the young cop who had let Frieze through earlier. “Push the crowd back, have the barriers set up on Fiftieth, half a block down that way.” The cop stood still like a deer in the headlights. “ Now would be good.”
    He charged the few additional yards to the front door of the Waldorf. “I’m taking charge of this scene,” he yelled out to all present. “All decisions and new information now go through me. Do we have eyes on the inside?”
    Frieze spoke up. “Agent Frieze, FBI.”
    “Sergeant Pearson.” His cheeks were splotchy red, nostrils flaring at the base of his bulbous nose. “Are you in charge of the scene?”
    “No,” she said. “But I need to talk to you.”

10:15 a.m.
    “Another camera’s gone black,” said Rosso, hunched over the monitors in the surveillance room. “The elevator to the Presidential Suite.”
    Morgan poked his head out the door and looked both ways down the hall. Wisps of extinguisher powder still hung in the air, but it was otherwise empty. “Does that give them access to Track Sixty-one?”
    “Yeah,” said Rosso. “That’s the one.”
    “Then it won’t be long before they blow this place,” said Morgan. He sat down next to