Page 73 of Cyn
The Christmas season had ended a few weeks ago, so it wasn’t surprising that those looked different. Still, it would be a good place to hide a bomb since they were already out of place.
Clearly thinking the same thing, Cyn started to open boxes as he continued to examine the wall. He found a couple of loose bricks, but none that budged enough to slide out or create a space for a bomb.
Leaving the back wall, he made his way down the side. He didn’t wear a watch, but that didn’t stop his awareness of the seconds and minutes ticking by.
“Joe?” Cyn called.
He’d completed his search of the long wall and stood back by the stairs. “Find something?” he asked, moving toward her.
She was standing on a box, surveying the room. She shook her head when he approached. “Not so much what I found but what I didn’t. Look,” she said, gesturing more toward the ceiling than the room.
Above them, the sound of footsteps echoed on the hardwood floor, letting him know that Six and Anthony had finished with the organ area and returned to the ground floor. Refocusing his attention on the room, as Cyn had suggested, he took it in. It wasn’t the right shape, but there must be something more.
He was about to ask Cyn when the sound of Six’s voice carried down through the old floorboards. She was directing Anthony to look under the altar. From where he stood, it sounded like she was above where he’d first started looking.
“The layout isn’t right,” he said. And it wasn’t. If Six and Anthony were at the altar, then the bulk of the basement wasn’t under the meeting space but rather under the offices. And taking down the offices wouldn’t be the target.
“Onward and upward, as they say?” Cyn suggested. With one last glance around the space, Joe nodded.
They met Anthony and Six in the aisle and confirmed that the pair hadn’t found anything either. Anthony, who’d brought a few pieces of equipment with him, had even tested some surfaces to see if there were any traces of explosives.
After thanking Father Gerald, Six and Anthony climbed into Anthony’s truck while he and Cyn returned to her Range Rover. Again, he got behind the wheel so that she was free to coordinate with Devil, Nora, and Six.
With Anthony following, they traveled to the second stop on their list and then, finding nothing there, to the third. The community center in Allston was the right shape, but they soon discovered that the basement in the original plans had been closed up due to water issues. The only access to the space was through a steel fire door, and based on the dust and the condition of the lock, it hadn’t been opened in years. With the meeting rooms on the first floor and private apartments on the second and third, it quickly proved not to be the final target.
After a quick conversation with Six and Anthony about the fourth location, a church in Brighton, Joe once again climbed into the driver’s seat and led their caravan west. “Any news from Nora and Devil?” Joe asked. The muscles in his shoulders were tense and a familiar hyper-alertness was crawling over his skin, as it had so many times before while on an op.
“Nothing at the first site. There was traffic and an accident, so they just arrived at their second site,” she answered as her phone dinged with a text. She glanced down, and the catch in her breath was audible in the silent car.
“What?” he demanded.
“The FBI issued warrants for Persons, Waters, and Harrow, and Persons and Harrow were just brought in. They aren’t talking, but at least they are in custody, and Beni and her team can keep working on them.”
Not that they had the time for Beni and her team to do that. Unless the two young men started talking of their own free will and talking fast, it was likely that anything they had to say would be a day late and a dollar short.
“At least that’s something,” Joe responded. “Any leads on Waters? You thought he was probably the leader of the three, right?”
In response, Cyn started typing on her phone, no doubt asking Beni the same question. A few minutes later, she muttered a not so silent, “Fuck.”
“I take it no Waters?” he said.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her shake her head. “Not yet.”
“Was there anything on Persons and Harrow that would indicate where they might have been in the city? Any receipts? Anything like that?”
Cyn was ahead of him on asking that question and had an answer already. “Harrows had a receipt for a bagel and coffee over in Brookline, and Persons had a receipt for a sandwich shop over in Allston. The FBI has techs working on the burner phones the boys had in their possession to see if they can get any location data from them.”
“We didn’t have any sites in Brookline, did we?” He knew the answer to that but felt the need to ask. There wasn’t one on the list of the final eight, but maybe Nora had looked at something in the area and dismissed it for one reason or another.
“Nora found three but discarded them. I’m getting the details from her,” Cyn responded.
Joe stifled the surge of panic that threatened to rear its head. If they didn’t find anything at the remaining sites on their list, not only would that mean that they’d have to revisit all the locations that had previously been reviewed and dismissed but it also meant that they’d probably miss their shot at stopping whatever the three suspects had planned. Already the streets and communities were waking up and, from what he recalled, nearly all of the events honoring Dr. King were taking place between ten in the morning and one in the afternoon. They simply didn’t have the time to re-analyze the celebrations that hadn’t made Nora’s initial cut.
“Nora knocked one out because the shape of the building wasn’t right,” Cyn read out the text that had dinged on her phone. “One doesn’t have a basement and is an open-air loft sort of structure, so it would be hard to hide anything. And the third canceled their event earlier in the week.”
He turned into the parking lot of their fourth site and shot a little prayer out to whoever might be listening that they’d find what they’d come to find. Not that he particularlywantedto find a bunch of bombs, but he’d rather find them than not.
They exited the car and started toward the building, a Lutheran church that looked to have been built in the 1970s.
