The Intercept

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 i

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

Thanks 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 ru

About the Author

DICK WOLF, a two-time Emmy award–wi

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Credits

Cover design by Mary Schuck

Cover photograph by Shutterstock

Copyright

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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