by Mike Brogan
How could we risk that, Abdul? What choice did we have? You understand . . . You are a martyr for our righteous cause.
Hasham looked down at the young man again, blood pooling around his head. Abdul’s eyes were fixed, staring outside at the heavens . . . where he’d believed seventy-two virgins awaited him in Paradise.
If he’d had a son, he would want Abdul to be that son.
Hasham felt a rare tinge of sadness. But reminded himself that a jihadist was always required to do the right thing. And the right thing at this time was to send Abdul to Allah.
Hasham hurried to the hall closet where he took out a jerry can filled with gasoline. He splashed the gas around the rooms. He took a fifteen-minute military fuse, lit it, and hurried from the apartment.
In minutes, flames would engulf the rooms. All evidence would vanish from the apartment.
And I will vanish from America . . .
SIXTY SIX
Donovan’s phone rang: Bobby Kamal from the NSA.
“What’s up, Bobby?”
“Possible address for Hasham.”
Donovan stood up. “Where?”
“The Bronx. 3489 Matthewstone Street. Apartment 3F. Gray brick, four-story building. One block south of the railroad tracks.”
“Anyone inside?”
”Not sure. We just found it. We’ll start monitoring communications to and from the apartment.”
“Manning and I’ll head there now.”
“One more thing. Hasham plans to meet with the main guy behind this attack.”
“Wait - Hasham’s not the main guy?”
“Apparently not.”
“Who’s the boss?”
“The guy in Yemen who’s been phoning Hasham. The Yemini calls himself Mr. Jones. His birth name is Bassam Maahdi. But we call him Fatty Warbucks because he’s a major money-man for ISIS and al Qaeda, and because he’s fat. CIA and Interpol have targeted him for years. Clever bastard, multiple aliases. Outstanding arrest warrants in seven countries. The guy always hides below radar.”
“When is Hasham meeting him?”
“Three days from now.”
“Where?”
“Rome. Small backstreet hotel. The Largo.”
“Good work, Bobby. If we miss Hasham here, we’ll nail both at the Largo.”
“How’s the search for Hasham going?”
“No leads yet. TSA, anti-terrorist FBI teams and police are watching for him at airports, bus and train stations. So far, no luck. Hasham has vanished. We age-enhanced his eight-year-old photo and emailed it to all TSA personnel and anti-terrorist teams. But Hasham uses disguises.”
“And aliases,” Kamal said. “We’re monitoring four now. An old one led us to his Bronx apartment.”
“Any luck with Hasham’s phones?”
“All burners. Uses them once or twice and destroys them.”
“Keep us looped in, Bobby.”
“Will do.”
They hung up.
“Some good news,” Manning said. “More cable server networks are back up broadcasting IRS check warnings.”
“Good,” Donovan said. “But still, thousands missed the warnings. Some who heard them won’t believe them and will try to deposit the checks.”
Manning nodded. “Like the two men who just dropped dead demanding the bank tellers take their checks. The tellers tried to warn them.”
“Greed trumps brains,” Donovan said.
***
Donovan felt nauseated as he and Manning raced toward Hasham’s Bronx apartment. The death count had rocketed to one hundred sixty-seven. Most deaths occurred in Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs, but many died in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
Manning answered his phone, listened, then slumped against his seat as though he’d been shot. His face turned bone-white.
What now? Donovan wondered.
“Im-fucking-possible!” Manning whispered as he closed his eyes.
Donovan didn’t want to hear this. “What . . .?”
Manning swallowed, shook his head. “Nell and Lindee . . .”
“What?”
“They were . . . just . . . taken!”
Donovan felt like he’d caught a line drive in the throat. He swerved over to the curb to avoid hitting the truck ahead. He gritted his teeth. “How the hell - ”
“ - two guys posing as our FBI agents escorted Nell and Lindee from the apartment building six minutes before our two agents arrived to pick them up.”
Donovan couldn’t speak.
“Hasham’s guys bugged Lindee’s apartment phone. Heard your call to her and sent two fake agents over. They showed the lobby guard FBI badges, went up, then left with Nell and Lindee through the basement rear exit.”
Donovan squeezed the steering wheel hard enough to bend it.
“But we posted an agent right outside Lindee’s apartment door.”
“Unconscious, tied up and gagged in a janitor’s closet. He should recover.”
“We had an officer in back.”
Manning lowered his eyes. “Found his body in a dumpster. Shot in the head.”
“Jesus . . .” Donovan’s rage rocketed.
“We have a very grainy video of the two fake agents taking Nell and Lindee through the basement. They drove away in a black Lincoln Town Car.”
“License number?”
“Taped over.”
Donovan exhaled hard. “Every time we gain traction on this bastard, he skates. I want him bad!”
“I want him dead!” Manning said, his face crimson.
Donovan nodded. Nell will feel Hasham’s rage even more for escaping the bottling plant, taking his flash drives, and looking in his files. He’ll torture her for what she told us. Then he’ll kill her.”
Manning looked numb. One of his agents had been killed, another badly injured. Donovan knew Manning would swab the floor with five-foot-six Hasham if he got his hands on him. And Donovan would help.
“Which means the files and flash drives are extremely valuable to him, and therefore to us,” Donovan said. “We’ve got to extract the data on them. Get the best hackers working on it. Freelance the best. Whatever it takes! No political game playing. Tell everyone to share info. If they don’t, I’ll name names to the president.”
“It will take time.”
“There’s no time for time.”
SIXTY SEVEN
Nell looked out the Lincoln window as the limo drove them through New Jersey. Swastika Witkowski activated the kid-locks, preventing them from jumping out at red lights.
He rechecked their flex-cuffs, put on his ear buds and tapped his foot to the Grateful Dead’s Truckin’.
Lindee leaned close to Nell and whispered, ”What do they want?”
“To know what I told the authorities,” Nell said.
“Will you tell them?”
“Some . . .”
Lindee looked terrified.
Nell touched her sister’s hand and whispered, “Everyone is looking for us, Lindee. They’ll see the security video of us leaving through the basement and - ”
“Shut the fuck up!” Witkowski shouted, pushing his cold gun barrel into Nell’s neck.
She said nothing.
The car’s tinted windows made it difficult to see any landmarks. But based on the sun, Nell knew they were driving north, somewhat parallel to the Hudson River, which she glimpsed from time to time.
The limo bounced into deep chuckholes, passed abandoned stores, a burned-out church, an older strip mall, an A-1 Liquor Shoppe, a Lady Nails, a Mexican discount grocery . . . and a young man with a sign that read Need Help.
Me too . . .
A minute later they drove inside the loading area of a sprawling two-story cinderblock warehouse. The garage door thudded down behind them.
Witkowski gestured for her and Lindee to get out.
They stepped out. Nell smelled grease and exhaust fumes. She saw four of the gray delivery trucks she’d seen at the bottling plan
t. But the signage on the trucks had changed. It no longer read -Ask Mummy for ChocoYummy.
The trucks now read - J. Smith Medical Supplies.
Men were changing the trucks’ license plates. More misdirection, Nell realized. Hasham wanted police wasting time searching for ChocoYummy trucks that no longer existed.
Nell watched a long black limousine drive into the garage and creep to a stop a few feet from her.
A tall, thick-necked, muscular man stepped from the passenger seat and stared at her. A chauffeur got out and opened the rear door. A small man stepped out, turned around, and faced her.
Hasham Habib.
Angry.
He walked toward her slowly, his eyes seething. He stepped close, glared at her, then slapped her face so hard she fell back against the car. Her cheek stung and her eyes flooded with tears. She wobbled a bit and Lindee steadied her.
”That’s for taking my flash drives! Including the one hidden on my computer!”
“But I told you . . . I didn’t see any flash drives! I had to run from the cabin because your men were coming inside!”
“Liar!” He started to hit her again, but stopped, took a deep breath. “But . . . you will tell me the truth soon enough, won’t she, Musa?” He looked at the huge muscular man beside him.
“Yes, she will.” Musa’s thick lips bent in a grin.
“Musa, please escort these two women to our limo.”
“With great pleasure,” Musa said in good English.
Musa led them, still flex-cuffed, over to the long black limousine and into the back seat. Hasham got in front, Musa sat in back in the flip-down seat, facing them. The chauffeur drove out of the garage and continued heading north along the Hudson River.
Minutes later, they pulled into the parking lot of the Lincoln Bay Yacht Club, a sprawling marina on the Hudson.
“I trust you are not afraid of sharks,” Hasham said.
She was terrified of sharks.
“I love them. They go through 30,000 teeth in their lifetime.”
She said nothing.
“They love to attack in less than six feet of water.”
She said nothing.
“One man caught a massive 2,700 pound Great White right where we’re going. Imagine that.”
She felt her throat tighten.
“Now, as we walk through this marina to my yacht, you will not speak to anyone. You will not look at anyone or signal them in any way. You will keep your heads down and walk beside us like we’re two happy couples going for a cruise. You will do exactly as I say, do you understand?”
Nell and Lindee nodded.
“If you don’t, you will bleed. If you bleed in the water, the sharks will find you fast. A school of feeding sharks can devour two women your size in under sixty seconds.”
Musa cut their flex-cuffs and led them from the limo.
Despite Hasham’s warning to keep her eyes down, Nell glanced around for someone to signal on the dock or the yachts.
She saw no one.
***
The FBI Suburban skidded to a stop. Donovan and Manning jumped out and hurried toward the burning Bronx building. Donovan saw thick gray smoke pouring out through the blackened windows of Hasham’s apartment and spilling down onto the street. Donovan felt like he was breathing tar.
He and Manning flashed their badges as they hurried past three NYFD fire engines. They stepped over black hoses fat as pythons. The hoses pumped heavy shafts of water into the apartment windows. The fire had destroyed Hasham’s apartment and the one above, but now seemed mostly contained. Frightened tenants shouted for fireman to save their adjoining apartments.
Manning introduced Donovan to a skinny young male FBI agent near the door.
“Anyone in Hasham’s apartment?” Donovan asked, praying they hadn’t found Nell’s and Lindee’s bodies inside.
“One body. Male. Young.”
Donovan’s shoulders relaxed a little.
“His name is Abdul Sanwari. NYU chemistry major. Muslim.”
“Caught in the fire?”
“Caught a bullet in the head first.”
“Probably Hasham eliminating a link to himself,” Donovan said.
Manning nodded, “What else is in there?”
“Fried computers, drilled hard drives, smashed cell phones. Everything hammered and destroyed before they were burned! Lots of disks and flash drives demolished. Scraps of letters from Abdul to his parents in Teheran. We found this in a metal cabinet drawer.
He held out a sales flyer for the Largo Hotel in Rome.
Donovan nodded. “That’s where Hasham plans to meet his Yemeni money man, Bassam Maahdi, aka Fatty Warbucks, in three days. We’ll set our people up in the Largo now. Be ready and waiting.”
“Our tech guys are bagging everything here,” the young agent said. “One question. . .?”
“Ask away . . .” Manning said.
“Does this have anything to do with those IRS letters killing people?”
“Everything.” Donovan said.
SIXTY EIGHT
After a double shift waiting tables at Bob Evans, Emma Stanton grabbed her mail and walked into her 745-square-foot Newark home . . .
. . . her home for two more weeks.
That’s when the landlord would kick her and her two young daughters out - and into the back of her ancient 120-square-foot Chrysler minivan.
She refused to stay with her ex, Karl Gene, an alcoholic, deadbeat-child-support father who lived in a filthy, booze-bottlestrewn two-room apartment that smelled like a urinal cake.
Emma and her daughters were alone in the world. Which was fine with her since they were her world.
She heard their school bus hiss to a stop.
She looked outside as Ashley, eight, and Lily, six, her popsicleskinny blondes, hopped off the bus. Seeing them filled her heart every day – and broke it every day because she couldn’t offer them more in life.
She hurried outside, and swooped them into her arms. She loved inhaling the sweet scent of their warm young bodies.
“Mommy, can we watch SpongeBob?” Lily asked.
“One SpongeBob! Then homework.”
“Okay . . .”
She watched them run into the tiny den, heard the TV pop on with a commercial for something called ChocoYummy, then heard the familiar SpongeBob music.
Emma grabbed the stack of mail. Mostly junk. People complained about junk mail coupons. She survived on them. She flipped through an eHarmony and Match.com dating flyer, three bills - then froze when she saw the next envelope. From the IRS. Her name in the window.
No way! Can’t be another IRS check . . .
She’d already received her $360 refund four weeks ago, and made a partial rent payment to the landlord who complained “ain’t nowheres near enough to stop me from evictin’ you and yer two little brats!”
She ripped open the envelope and stopped breathing.
An IRS check!
Pay to the order of Emma T. Stanton!
$4,650!
“Sweet God in Heaven above!” she said.
Was she hallucinating? She couldn’t believe it.
The check was real. The letter was real – the refund was hers!
Ashley and Lilly ran from the television room.
“Mommy DON’T!” Ashley shouted.
“Don’t what, honey?”
“Don’t touch the Irish mail today!”
“What Irish mail?”
“The SpongeBob man said don’t touch the Irish mail today!”
“The SpongeBob man is just a make-believe TV man.”
“No. The real man came on SpongeBob. The real man told us to go tell our mommy and daddy that the Irish mail today will make us very very sick if we touch it! He told us to tell you right away. Don’t touch the Irish mail, please mommy!”
“I didn’t get any Irish mail . . .”
Then it hit her – the Irish mail is . . . the IRS mail.
Emma dropped the check like i
t burned her fingers.
On the radio, Beyoncé’s Single Ladies was cut off and an announcer said . . .
“We interrupt this program for an urgent
bulletin from Homeland Security about deadly
IRS checks arriving in today’s mail . . .”
She listened in disbelief to the warning . . .
“Mommy, is this the Irish check? Ashley reached for the check.
“Don’t touch it!”
Emma snatched it by the corner and put it, the letter and envelope on top of the bookshelf.
She ran to the bathroom and washed her hands for several minutes, dialed 911 and was told the police would arrive in minutes to retrieve the check. Then she sat down and prayed, waiting for the police . . . and waiting for the symptoms to hit her.
Her throat felt raspy. Was it raspy before I opened the IRS envelope?
She couldn’t remember.
Minutes later, she felt tightness in her chest and grew terrified. Was that a symptom? Probably. The girls were going to watch her suffer and die right in front of them. They’d remember it forever. Please God, don’t let that happen. And please don’t let Karl Gene get custody! Please . . .
The doorbell rang.
She jumped up, opened the door. Her jaw dropped open when she saw the policeman.
This is all a dream! Has to be . . . It’s just too bizarre!
The policeman was Ethan Miller. Nice, gentle Ethan, her prom date years ago, whose family moved to Florida with him three days before the prom. Ethan who then got posted to Afghanistan. Ethan now standing at her door . . . Has to be a dream!
“Hi Emma . . .”
“Ethan . . . I thought you were in Afghanistan.”
“Got back two months ago. I heard your 911 call at the station. You feeling okay?”
“I think so.”
“How long ago did you hold the check?”
She checked her watch. “About seventeen minutes ago.”
He smiled that same beautiful smile that melted her heart in high school.
“That’s a real good sign, Emma!”
