by Jim Geraghty
It would take two days of meetings and phone calls, and a lot of debate about the distinction between an American intelligence report that stated “some elements of the Turkmeni government may have warned Atarsa” and one that stated “elements of the Turkmeni government probably warned Atarsa.” But eventually the Turkmeni authorities relented and gave Katrina what she wanted.
Chapter 53
DRUID HILLS NEIGHBORHOOD
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, APRIL 1
Ward’s phone vibrated before dawn. He awoke with a start, realized where he was, and turned his attention to Fein’s house. Fein’s car was still in the driveway. No lights were on in the house.
He noticed a Chevy Suburban with tinted windows had arrived and parked itself down the block in the other direction and other side of the street. Hello, FBI, Ward thought.
The sun rose, with no other discernable action. Fein’s laptop was closed, the camera inoperable. Around eight-thirty a.m., Ward’s phone buzzed. “Is Fein still there?” Raquel asked with new urgency.
“Yeah, what’s up?” Ward responded. “There’s an FBI team here sticking out like a sore thumb, must be the bottom of the barrel team that pulled this duty.”
“I called over to the Bureau to let them know that we had our own ongoing independent surveillance,” Raquel said. That explains why they didn’t knock on my window during the night, Ward realized.
“Have you been listening to the car radio or following social media?” Raquel asked.
“No, I’m on stakeout,” Ward declared huffily. “That generally involves consistently paying attention to whoever it is you’re staking out.”
“We’re getting word from the target sites—Atarsa tried their attacks this morning. No, this is not an April Fool’s Day joke.”
Ward swore. He had not expected a morning attack. “Wait, tried?”
“The news isn’t that bad. Guy a block away from Ground Zero pulled out a knife, got shot by NYPD before he could stab anybody. In DC, another guy jumped out of a car, tried to attack the kids heading into Sidwell Friends. FBI was already there, tackled him before he could get halfway to the gate. There were stabbings a block away from Independence Hall, Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, and city hall in Peoria, Illinois, but so far, nobody dead. Police, FBI, Homeland Security responded fast.”
Ward allowed himself a grim chuckle. “Telling us their next targets was a dumb move.”
“I wouldn’t bet on them making that mistake again.”
“This is good,” Ward let his muscles relax slightly. “Their attacks fizzle, right after we bombed the camps in Turkmenistan. Hey, did Katrina and Alec check in yet?” Ward asked.
“Nothing yet,” Raquel answered. She paused a moment. “We’re still missing a piece of the puzzle. Who’s in between the foot soldiers and the masterminds? Where’s the middle management? This all gets done with some guy out in Turkmenistan sending postcards?”
In her Tysons Corner office, she shook her head. “They’ve got to have at least one person stateside. So far, none of the stabbers caught have given anything up.”
“Really?” Ward asked.
“Started screaming for lawyers the moment the cuffs came on,” she sighed.
Ward chuckled. “I could make ’em talk.”
“No, no, don’t tell me!” Raquel snapped. “I don’t want to know! My next polygraph is going to be bad enough, as is!”
CHAPTER 54
DRUID HILLS NEIGHBORHOOD
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, APRIL 1
Norman Fein didn’t leave his house. Dee, remotely monitoring his computer’s activity, said he had checked his Internet a few times throughout the day. Through a window, Ward could see a television on.
“This guy needs to grow up, get a job, and start a family,” Ward said disapprovingly.
Shortly after one, Ward’s phone buzzed again. This time it was Dee.
“Fein still there?” He could tell from her tone something was terribly wrong.
“Hasn’t moved all day,” Ward said. “I had to get out and stretch my legs, getting cramped. He didn’t see me. What’s up?”
“Atarsa adapted fast. They just launched another five attacks. Multiple victims. All in restaurants. An Applebee’s in Ohio, then Nashville, Jacksonville, Boston and The Palm here in Washington. Hit the lunch crowds. All of them ordered steak, then used the steak knives to stab the patrons around them.”
Ward pounded his fist against the top of the steering wheel.
“We can use dogs to sniff for bombs, we can check firearms purchases, but none of that matters with these guys … they just go into a crowded location and we hand them the weapons.”
He opened his browser in his phone; the web and social media were already starting to fill with images of the attack, recorded by restaurant patrons with their phones and nearly instantly shared on social media. In Jacksonville and DC, the perpetrators had gone to the restrooms, put on old, off-white Soviet-style rubber gas masks with large, dark, shaded eye lenses, then attacked the patrons with their steak knives. The videos showed patrons shrieking and covered in blood, tables overturning, glasses and plates crashing to the floor.
“Those gas masks—any poison or something?”
“No sign of that yet,” Dee answered. “Probably just picked them because they’re creepy as hell.”
He debated going into the house, grabbing Fein, and squeezing answers out of him. But the guys in the FBI surveillance van probably would have had an issue with that. Atarsa was attacking again, and his butt cheeks were starting to go numb from sitting in the driver’s seat of his car for hours upon hours.
CHAPTER 55
LIBERTY CAMPUS
TYSON’S CORNER, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, APRIL 1
Dee went to the office kitchenette and microwaved some popcorn. Raquel emerged from her series of meetings and told Ward that the orders had not changed: don’t interfere with the FBI team; the Bureau had the final call on whether to raid Fein’s house.
That decision became a little more difficult shortly after five p.m, when the evening broadcast of WDCW, the Washington-area CW affiliate, was interrupted.
It was a tight, close-in, poorly focused shot of Angra Druj’s face.
“We walk by you on the street. We sit next to you on the bus. We are your neighbors. We are behind you on line at the store. We practice sneaking into your homes and workplaces and every place you thought you were safest, leaving little trace. We just move one thing, just a bit … and we smile, knowing that you will wonder how it moved.”
Then they cut to a series of grainy, green-and-white night-vision camera footage, recording a couple sleeping in their bed. The image abruptly cut to more night-vision footage of a children’s bunk bed. Then a crib.
The video switched to full-color: A hospital hallway. A hotel hallway. An apartment building. All of these sites were too generic to be identified—which was, of course, the point.
“We are everywhere,” she chuckled. “And you never see us.”
Finally, the video cut to a hand, holding a piece of paper, depicting a sketch of the Atarsa symbol. The camera panned up … and down a long open green, visible in the distance was the Wren building on William and Mary’s campus.
“You … are not safe,” Druj’s voice declared once again.
After watching the video on his phone, Ward’s knuckles were white. “Raquel, as soon as the sun’s down, I’m taking him out—wait.”
Ward had set up a motion detector by the property’s back gate, and it was beeping on the laptop computer set up on the passenger seat. He looked up the road and saw no movement in the FBI’s Chevy Suburban. The Bureau’s D-team had failed to watch the backyard, and Norman Fein had crawled under the fence. Ward had noticed the hole earlier and briefly wondered if some dog had dug his way under it. He quickly surmised it was the work of a two-legged beast.
***
Norman Fein
had watched the Atarsa video twice as soon as it was posted to the Internet on news sites, and then closed the lid on his laptop.
Norman had noticed the FBI SUV and concluded he couldn’t take his own car or head out the front door. He left the house through the cellar door that led into the backyard, which was surrounded by a wooden fence. He slipped under the fence using the ditch he had dug a week ago and within a few minutes, he was walking down the street, backpack slung over his shoulder.
Norman Fein knew it was his lucky night. His night got even better when a red-bearded gentleman in a baseball cap slowed his F-150 and asked him if he needed a ride.
“Where you headed?” the bearded man asked.
“William and Mary campus,” Norman answered.
“Hop in,” the man smiled.
Norman Fein smiled back, felt the kitchen knife in his jacket pocket, and felt a little private glee at the way this pickup truck driver had no idea of his true intentions.
He got in and smiled up right up until the moment the man raised his canister of mace and sprayed the entire contents in his face.
“April Fools, dumbass!” the man whispered gleefully.
CHAPTER 56
KARAKUM DESERT
TURKMENISTAN
FRIDAY, APRIL 2
After two and a half days of haggling and negotiating with government officials back in Ashgabat, the Turkmeni authorities outfitted them with their requests. Garayev requested was that the national police be given custody of the key; surely some official was about to be harangued for missing it in the initial inspection of the site. Alec and Katrina spent much of the day driving back down the lonely desert highway, periodically stopping to ensure that they were not being followed. Satisfied, Katrina pulled over and they started checking the vehicle for tracking and listening devices. They found four, left them by the side of the road, and then continued their drive.
A few minutes later, as the sun began to set, they saw a bright orange glow in the sky up over the next hill. Katrina let out a small gasp.
“This is it,” she said. The Darvaza crater was beautiful from a distance, an endlessly burning perfect circle carved out of the desert. She quickly understood how the otherworldly anomaly could earn the nickname “The Gate to Hell.”
The plan was to use the AK-74s first and their own American-made SIG Sauer P320 Compact pistols only in dire emergency. The idea was that if they left any evidence, it might be mistaken for the work of the Russian-equipped local security forces. The sun set quickly.
Katrina looked down the road in her night vision goggles. Even glancing toward the flaming crater in her peripheral vision offered a near-blinding light. She removed the goggles. She realized that if indeed Jaguar had met Atarsa’s leaders at the crater, and anyone from Atarsa was still around this site, their best bet was to approach by foot.
***
When she had just passed the flaming crater, she saw it, on the other side of the crater, reflected by the otherworldly light: A figure. A man.
She hit the ground and yanked Alec down to the ground, wondering if the figure had seen them. A flare of gas burst from the crater, and she saw the figure more clearly—face covered with black scarves, eyes shielded by goggles, dressed all in black or dark gray. The local camel and goat herders she had seen on the drive wore similar robes and hoods, but they were white or off-white, looking unnervingly like desert Klansmen. The wind picked up, and every bit of loose fabric rippled and whipped against him. Katrina contemplated the night vision goggles but found the vision worse in them; in the green light, from this distance, the light of the crater’s fires still offered blinding light—the figure just looked like a black beetle standing on its hind legs.
The figure wasn’t looking into the crater; he seemed to be scanning the horizon. Then, without warning, he walked—almost scuttled—backward into the darkness.
“You figure anybody with Atarsa would have gotten far from here,” Alec said. “Maybe it’s just some local checking out why the desert’s suddenly crawling with military and police.”
“Or maybe Atarsa left a lookout,” Katrina said. “This is a really strange, remote place to operate, beyond the fiery view.”
“Gate to Hell,” Alec declared.
As they circled the crater, they saw no more signs of life, other than the unnerving, otherworldly glow. On the way back to their Land Cruiser, Alec suddenly put out an arm, halting Katrina. She glanced, and he pointed down. A group of camel spiders crept along, directly in front of them. She looked back and realized it was perhaps 100 to 150 spiders, all moving as a cluster. At first glance, the creatures looked like they had ten legs, because of two long “pedipalps,” sensors that help them locate prey. The spiders in the group were about four to six inches long; Alec remembered seeing Internet pictures during the Iraq War that claimed spiders three feet long were bedeviling US soldiers. It was all camera tricks and Photoshop, and the camel spiders’ bite wasn’t deadly. That didn’t make them any less spectacularly creepy.
Katrina and Alec watched the creeping cluster of spiders cross their path, headed toward the flaming crater. One by one, the spiders progressed to the edge of the flames, and then, lemming-like, they disappeared over the precipice.
“I’d prefer a black cat,” she whispered. Between the chill-inducing Island of the Dolls and the mass suicide of the spider herd, she found herself feeling nostalgic for comparably mundane menaces like ISIS.
They returned to the car, and Alec consulted the map. “Nearest village is Erbent.”
They felt the wind pick up, slamming waves of sand against the car windows. It started to ruin visibility. The pair sat there, silently, listening to the wind start to howl. She turned on the night vision goggles again and began peering out in multiple directions. The storm quickly grew stronger, making it almost impossible to see, even with the goggles. Periodically she saw desert critters scurrying to holes, seeking to escape the blowing sand and dust.
“We’re not going anywhere until this storm passes,” Katrina whispered.
“At least nobody else can come out and get us, right?”
For a moment, Katrina wasn’t so sure. Every now and then she thought she saw shapes on the horizon, but then a particularly thick gust of sand and dust would whip through and obscure her vision, and when it cleared, the shapes were gone.
***
The sandstorm kept them stuck by the crater through most of the night. Once it had let up and they could drive again, they made their way to Erbent. They parked the car outside the village, a haphazard collection of small stone and brick structures and more traditional-looking yurts. Dawn was close, but not quite present, just a slight lightening of the Eastern horizon. They got out of the car and felt the chill wind and a spray of sand blown against their faces.
One man led a small group of goats through the dirty street. As they progressed into the heart of the village, something resembling coherent streets formed out of the small square homes and yurts.
An old woman and an old man sat outside one home, its once red-and-white walls faded heavily under endless days and nights of blown sand. Between them was a chessboard and pieces, lit by a lantern. The old woman nodded at Katrina and Alec as they passed, while the old man offered a suspicious stare.
Alec was pretty sure he saw curtains moving in the ramshackle house windows, as barely visible eyes peered out. In the alleys, he saw glowing eyes—perhaps wild dogs.
“Village of the Damned,” Alec muttered. “Complete with the Old Folks Home Predawn Chess Club.”
“The government razed the neighboring village to the ground,” Katrina said. “Probably makes everybody wary of strangers.”
As they walked past a group of herdsmen, each readying a sandy-white hood and bulging, circular black goggles around their heads to keep away the blowing clouds of sand and dust, she didn’t mind the locals’ lack of interest in them.
She walked deeper into the village, breathing softly. Something was wrong. Somethin
g was here. If Gul and Rashin were operating out of a base near here, this was the nearest sign of civilization, the easiest place to obtain food and basic supplies. She kept seeing shapes disappear around corners, hearing footsteps, scuttling noises. The village was awakening, and the word that two strangers—one an extremely out-of-place Caucasian man—would spread fast.
“You have a bad feeling about this place like I do?” Alec asked.
She couldn’t repress her smile. “We’re 120 miles into the desert in a country with a paranoid KGB-trained counter-intel service, and you’re just getting a bad feeling now?”
“This is different,” he said, trying to get some sand out of his mouth. “You know when you go to someplace where something awful happened a long, long time ago, and it’s like you can still feel it? The Budapest Ghetto. The Bataclan Theater in Paris. Ground Zero. You don’t feel …” He waved his hand around. “That?”
“No,” she said firmly. But something in her tone made Alec think she was trying to persuade herself that she wasn’t feeling the ominous presence he described.
There was one obelisk in the center of the village, standing above the tin roofs of the one-story homes and telephone poles. As Alec and Katrina approached, they saw “1931” inscribed at the top. In one corner of the obelisk was a statue of a hooded, sinister figure, clutching his robe to his chest.
“What the hell is that?” Alec gasped. “It looks like the Dark Side of the Force’s version of the Washington Monument.”
Katrina shook her head in bewilderment. A few lines were etched on one side of the stone tower, but Alec couldn’t understand the language.
“The Soviets built this,” Katrina whispered, reading the inscription. “It memorializes eleven supporters of socialism killed during the Basmachi Revolt in 1931.”
Alec approached the statue with trepidation. Something about it seemed … radioactive, repellent. “Basmachis the locals?”
Alec continued to glance around. The villagers were awakening, and there was more foot traffic on the dusty paths and spaces between buildings that passed for streets. But no one approached the Americans; no one even seemed to want to make eye contact with them.
