Angela was in a different league. She was from a different planet.
“Most of the time I feel like life has no meaning,” she said as she gazed down into the darkness. “Sometimes this place feels like it’s drawing me. Ya know? I think that one day I may end up down there.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Just … everything,” she said in a faraway voice, still staring down into the darkness.
The pain and emptiness in her voice was heartbreaking.
“Angela,” he said, gently taking her arm and pulling her back from the abyss, “a person who is determined to go off to stop terrorists from detonating an atomic bomb, and may very well end up getting herself killed in the process, certainly has meaning in her life and does not belong in a hole that leads down to hell. Only killers—predators who prey on innocent people—belong in a place like that. People like Cassiel, not you, belong in such a place.”
She turned back to look at him with a sudden, wicked grin. “Good, because he’s already down there.”
Once they were back upstairs, Angela locked the basement door and replaced the key. He could see, now, why she didn’t want anyone wandering down there.
Ready to leave, he took a critical look at her. “Are you going to change? You aren’t really going to wear those same cutoff shorts to a gunfight that you wear to tend bar, are you?”
“Yes.”
Jack was at a loss. “Why?”
“Because none of the terrorists we’re going to kill are women.”
“So?”
“Women wouldn’t be distracted by my legs.”
It suddenly made sense. Crazy Angela sense. She was on her way to kill terrorists. Those terrorists were men.
In a fight to the death, any distraction, even if it was only for a fraction of a second, was a precious advantage.
Four of these terrorists had interrupted their mission to rape her. Clearly they were vulnerable to leggy female distraction.
And if anyone’s legs were distracting, it was Angela’s.
In that light, Angela wasn’t crazy at all.
She was deadly.
SIXTY-FOUR
Angela slitted her eyes. The light was too bright for her to open them all the way. She had to squint to see. She yawned and stretched in the backseat as she sat up a little to take in the view out the windows.
She peered all around at the sights going by just off the interstate. They drove past a sign on the right saying they were on Interstate 270. In a moment more, she hunched down to be able to look out the windshield as they drove under an overhead sign for the Interstate 495 East exit in two miles.
She thrust her arm forward, pointing over Jack’s shoulder. “There. You need to take that exit.”
“I know, I know. You already told me that you knew this much about the roads we needed to take.”
Most of the visions from Cassiel were of places where he looked—memories of what he saw. He had looked at that interstate exit because it was so prominent. It was frustrating not to know most of the other roads they needed to take.
Cassiel had looked at buildings, places to eat, stores and businesses that interested him for one reason or another, and in particular, women on the street. A good percentage of his recent memories now residing in her head seemed to be of women’s asses. His vision had been like a heat-seeking missile for ass. Those women were of course long gone, leaving blanks along the route they needed to follow. Those memories explained some of the perverted things he had liked to do to the women he murdered.
She often wished she didn’t have to live as the curator of the terrible visions and memories from killers’ minds. Being in their heads, seeing the things they did, and how much they liked doing them, made her sick and angry. When she killed one of those savages, like when she had killed Cassiel, she at last had the chance to unleash vengeance on them.
She was the wrath of God.
Angela bent forward between the front bucket seats, over the center console, and squeezed herself through to get up front with Jack, her legs finally making it up and over with the rest of her.
Once they had taken the exit and were on Interstate 495 going east, Angela got serious about looking out the windows, scanning from side to side, trying to overlay the scenery with memories, looking for matches for everything she saw, hoping that would help lead them to the place where Rafael had the second bomb. She knew some of the things—besides women—that seemed to have drawn Cassiel’s attention, so she looked for those things. If she saw a shopping center, or an ethnic food store, or a smoke shop, she tried to fit a memory to it.
Hard as she tried, nothing seemed to match.
She didn’t say anything to Jack, but inside she was beginning to feel panicky that her plan was not working. Everything depended on her being able to follow the bread crumbs of his memories to lead them to the nest of terrorists. So far, she wasn’t finding any bread crumbs other than that one sign.
Scanning everything she could out the windows while running memories through her mind didn’t seem to be working. She began to seriously worry that maybe it would never work. She worried that if they couldn’t find the building with the bomb, then Jack might have to call the shadowy intel people he knew.
But how could they ever find it, especially in time? There were only a few hours left before Rafael would detonate the bomb. Even if by some miracle those government forces did manage to find the building, Rafael was prepared for every eventuality. She knew there was no chance they would be able to stop the bomb from going off. They would be the cause of it going off.
If Angela’s plan didn’t work, Washington had only a few hours of existence left, and then the world would change forever. None of the people going about their lives there had any idea they were about to die.
She kept coming back to the same problem. Finding it and stopping it were two different things. Everything she had told Jack about the terrorists’ plans was true. They had contingencies for any kind of attack to stop them.
Being eager to die removed the self-preservation factor. Being eager to die added a level of certainty for success.
Rafael knew they couldn’t win a gun battle or survive a heavy assault, but he didn’t need to win because he didn’t plan to survive, so they didn’t make any plans for it. Their endgame was to detonate the bomb, not win a gunfight with a SWAT team. The bomb was ready to go. If anything happened to interrupt or threaten their schedule they were prepared to simply set it off ahead of time. Either way worked for them.
“There,” Angela said when she saw a store that struck a chord with the memories. “Turn right just before that store on the corner. The one with Uncle Sam posters in the window.”
Jack turned down the street without comment or objection.
Angela sat back, relieved that she had at last recognized something significant. It was proof that she was on the right track.
She let herself sink into a kind of trance as she scanned everything as they drove along. As she watched, the buildings grew gradually more run-down. As she let herself become immersed in Cassiel’s memories, letting them run nonstop through her mind, fragments of images were beginning to make her feel that they were going the right way. She saw a Laundromat she recognized from Cassiel’s memory, and a corner market with hand-painted advertisements for a sale on hamburger. Both the Laundromat and the market were busy.
Cassiel had memories of fat-assed women in stretch pants carrying black plastic bags full of laundry into the Laundromat. Angela had to smile at her own memory of carrying pieces of Cassiel in black plastic bags back to the hell hole.
“Up there, on the right a block ahead, there’s an old abandoned theater. See it? Turn left just past it.”
The vertical theater sign was coming detached at the top, so that it leaned out, attached only by a bottom bracket. Because it was leaning out, it had caught Cassiel’s attention.
As they drove past it, Angela saw plywood nailed up across the door
s and windows of the building to keep people out. Cassiel had looked at the graffiti on that building. The meaning of it all had puzzled him. He had considered how universal graffiti was, how the ghettos in all the countries he’d been to had the same multicolored mess of graffiti.
They turned onto a street lined with older cars and pickups parked along a curb. Homes occupied long buildings, each home painted a different color to make it look like they were individual row houses. Each house had steps and a small porch. Some people sat on the steps, others sat on the porches on rusty benches or overstuffed chairs with padding hanging out of torn seams. Little kids ran up and down the steps, and in and out of the houses.
“Here, take a right at this street, go down one block, then hook a left.”
They drove past empty lots with chain-link fences that had strained newspapers, pizza boxes, burger wrappers, and all kinds of other debris out of the gusty breezes the way a colander strained pasta out of water.
“Go a little slower, please,” she said to Jack from inside her trance of a killer’s memories.
The farther they went, making turns where she instructed, the more unsavory the areas became.
“Are you sure they went on such a random route?” Jack asked.
“It’s not random. They studied the city. They’ve been sending advance people in for years to scout the whole city for locations and routes that would be least likely to encounter scrutiny and searches. They took thousands of photos. They knew that if they drove close to the Capitol Building or the White House there would be a lot of security. They wanted to use poor areas because they would fit in with people in those places. Their cargo van was old and has primer spots so that it wouldn’t raise eyebrows on any of these streets. In wealthier areas they were more likely to look out of place or suspicious.”
“It’s frightening the way they thought everything through.”
“From what Cassiel learned, Rafael, his advisors, and his team have had years—decades—to make sure they eliminated variables, dangers, or problems. They bought an abandoned building eleven years ago. They occasionally ran a small distribution business out of it to look legit and so they could be sure it was kept up just enough. They’ve planned for every contingency.”
“Except for you,” he said.
Angela smiled to herself as she gazed out the windows at a crumbling landscape. In ways, it reminded her of the buildings her grandfather had built. Some of these buildings were painted, but under the layers of peeling, faded paint they were brick. Some of them were long abandoned, now only forlorn shells. Walls here and there had collapsed, leaving piles of rubble, mostly bricks, scattered out onto empty lots beside them. Shopping carts lay capsized among the rubble like ships that had run aground on shoals.
The memories were fitting the scenery more closely the farther they moved into the deteriorated areas.
“These are the kind of dangerous shithole places Cassiel liked to haunt in third-world countries,” she told Jack. “Lots of crime so that the things he did would stand out less, or not at all. He felt comfortable in places like this, so his memories are more vivid along here. He viewed this area through the eyes of a predator. This is a hunting ground.”
“Believe it or not,” Jack said, “we’re not many miles from the center of US government—Capitol Hill and the White House.”
“Expensive homes. Zillions of tourists. Massive security presence protecting it all. Not at all easy to attack directly,” she said. “But easy enough to take out from a distance with an atomic bomb.”
Jack rested his wrist on the top of the steering wheel as they drove slowly past a whitewashed brick building with plywood over the windows. “You’re right. It’s a terrifyingly brilliant plan. Most terrorists just want to kill people at familiar places and take out landmarks. These guys want to take out an entire city.”
Angela gazed out at places that looked like they had already been bombed. A lot of people had long ago fled the area, leaving haunted shells of buildings. But there were still lots of dangerous-looking thugs hanging out on the street corners, on steps, and in alleyways. She saw drug deals going down. She had seen so many of those growing up she could spot them in her sleep.
As she glanced down a narrow alley with overflowing Dumpsters, she saw people sitting on the landings of iron fire escapes. All up the five flights, laundry hung on the iron railings and in the narrow spaces between buildings like colorful flags. Lots of innocent people lived in these areas as well. They didn’t dare to come out much, and when they did, they were often prey.
She saw no-trespassing signs nailed up on dirty white doors in a row of abandoned homes beside railroad tracks. Homeless people were sleeping on the porches of those derelict homes, their collections of blankets and cardboard piled up protectively around them. Many had their belongings piled high in shopping carts parked nearby, like cars parked in front of homes.
“Any idea if we’re close?” Jack asked.
She could understand his impatience. He was risking everything on her word.
“Sorry,” she said. “I recognize places, not distances.”
“We have to be close. We’re going to be at the Capitol Building soon.”
Angela pointed. “Turn right down here.”
One of the abandoned brick buildings had a big white skull painted on the side of it. Her memory—Cassiel’s memory—fit it perfectly. Cassiel had looked at that crudely painted skull.
The area around various buildings looked like garbage dumps. Angela saw a small plastic pedal car as well as other broken toys sticking out of the rubble. It reminded her of the way she had played outside her mother’s trailer when she had been little, making mud pies, picking weeds and putting them in empty beer cans like flowers in a vase, completely oblivious to the poverty, drugs, and crime going on around her. To her, it was simply home and completely normal to walk around winos who tried to entice her from their lawn chairs in front of their trailers, or to hide from scary men under blue tarps covering cars that didn’t run and never would again.
The children who pedaled around on those toys were the innocents who would be vaporized under a mushroom cloud if she didn’t stop that bomb from going off.
As they drove down the street, they began to encounter buildings that looked like giant, stacked building blocks. The blocky structures formed a variety of shapes. It was once a bustling business area.
“Stop the car!” she yelled.
Jack flinched from her scream but put on the brakes, slowing rapidly without squealing the tires.
He looked over at her. “What?”
“Pull over and then slowly back up along the curb.”
He did what she wanted without knowing why.
“Okay stop. Now, roll down your window.”
Jack gave her a questioning look as he held down the window button. “What—”
“Lean back,” she told him, her focus elsewhere.
Angela pulled out her gun, holding it in both hands across in front of him as she aimed out the open window.
It made a soft, muffled pop when she pulled the trigger, along with the metallic sound of the slide cycling to eject the shell and chamber the next round. The small ejected brass casing hit the windshield and bounced along the top of the dash.
Across the street, a man, looking like a puppet whose strings had been cut, dropped straight down. Some of the other people standing down the street didn’t even notice.
“Drive,” she told him as she pulled her gun back.
SIXTY-FIVE
“What the hell?” Jack said.
She looked out the back window to see three men approach the man on the ground. They looked all around, then bent down to go through the dead man’s pockets.
“It was a lookout,” Angela told him. “We’re close.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, his name was Jesus, one of the lookouts they have posted at street level.” Angela pointed. “Up there. See that building with the dark, o
ctagonal, three-story tower at the corner? Turn left there.”
Jack turned the corner. The street became more than a street. It had been used by commercial trucks to load and unload at the buildings rising up at the edge of narrow sidewalks. Some of the buildings had roll-up metal doors with small loading docks. Rusted metal railings kept people from falling in the loading pits. Wooden pallets lay on some of the docks. In other places pallets were leaned up against corners of buildings.
Chain-link fences with barbed wire on top spanned the gaps between some of the buildings. Those canyons between vertical walls were filled with years of accumulated trash.
All the buildings, docks, railings, roll-up doors—everything—had been hit by scribble monkeys. Buildings seemed to melt together in endless gang graffiti, all the tags proclaiming affiliation and territory, or boasting threats.
The tall building on the left at the far corner of the block was different from the others all around it. It was made up of a gridwork of cement columns and beams, with brick filling in the centers and forming the main part of the walls. The brick squares had windows in long rows up high that looked to be for light and ventilation, not for a view. Higher up, the building’s walls were set back, and were all brick as it rose a number of stories more.
A vertical sign attached at the corner of the building said STILTON. The letters had once been filled with rows of lightbulbs, now all missing. She didn’t see that sign in Cassiel’s memories, but she saw the rest of the building. He had gone in and out from a loading dock in an alley of sorts.
“Go left at the end of the block,” she said.
Jack took the left at the corner with the Stilton sign and then took the next one when she told him to.
“What are we doing?” he asked. “We’re starting to drive around in circles.”
“The bomb is in the Stilton Building,” she said.
Jack craned his neck to look back over his left shoulder. “Damn.”
She had him turn the car around and drive around the block again, checking for lookouts and to be on the same side of the street for a better view of the building and for her to get a better shot if she needed one.
The Girl in the Moon Page 41
