by Peter Nealen
I rubbed my aching, gritty eyes. “Where?”
“Westminster, Colorado, of all places,” she said. “The invitation is in the usual inbox.” That meant that the target package had actually been saved in the draft folder of a common email account that had been cooked up beforehand. With a muffled groan, I pried myself up off the floor and went to the nearest laptop that was connected to the internet, though it was on the same VPN from hell that Derek had on the phones.
I logged in and checked the folder. Sure enough, there was a fairly complete target package there. My eyebrows climbed as I read. “Where the hell did all this come from?” I asked. What I was looking at was a pretty extensive dossier on several college- and graduate-school-age activists, all of whom at least had some ties to the POCRF. Not only that, but there was a detailed survey of their “operations center,” in a coffee shop north of Westminster itself.
“I followed up on some of their posts, especially after the bombings,” she said. I could hear the satisfied smile in her voice. “Derek’s not the only one who knows the cyber magic, you know. Besides, it was easy. They’re sloppier than they think. Tracking their IPs down was child’s play.”
“You are a woman of many talents,” I said, as I continued to scroll through the targeting info.
“Why, Jeff, was that a compliment?” she laughed. “I might faint.”
If she’d been there, I could have glowered at her, though I was sure she just would have laughed. As it was, I was just kind of stuck, unable to come up with a witty rejoinder to her teasing.
“Jeff? You still there?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I grumbled.
“How are you holding up?” she asked. “You sound exhausted.”
“It was a rough party,” I said, “and things haven’t exactly been calm around here, since somebody decided to blow up half of downtown.”
“About that,” she said, her tone turning businesslike again. “Denver wasn’t the only place that happened.”
That got my attention. “Where else?”
“Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, DC, Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas…” she took a breath. “There were twenty-four in all. Do you really want the whole list?”
“Holy hell.” I ran a hand over my face. “This wasn’t random.”
“Not even close,” she confirmed. “And I don’t think it was anyone domestic, either.”
“Any ideas?” I asked.
“Several,” she replied. “Many of them have us on their target deck as well. Especially you.”
“You’re thinking Caliphate or Iran?” I asked.
“The Caliphate is still about as disorganized as Al Qaeda or ISIS,” she said. “I don’t see this kind of coordination happening. AQ never managed to repeat 9/11, and they still only managed to hit two out of three targets then. Twenty-four? I doubt it. The Iranians? Possible.”
“But you don’t think so.” I didn’t make it a question.
“I have a mental list of suspects,” she temporized, “but it’s still mostly speculation for now. We’ll keep looking into it. The fact that no one has claimed responsibility suggests that it wasn’t typical terrorism, trying to make a point. It was intended to stoke the fires. Notice how everyone’s blaming everyone else? I think that was deliberate.”
I could think of a couple of possibilities just based on that. Neither of which were encouraging. “Somebody’s going to take credit for it, sooner or later,” I pointed out.
“Sure,” she said. “I’m expecting some imam from the Caliphate to pop up with declarations of how it was a demonstration of why the infidels need to be terrified any minute now. But that doesn’t mean they did it. Taking credit for somebody else’s attack has been SOP for the Sunni Salafists since ISIS first popped up on everyone’s radar. Probably before them, actually.”
I changed the subject. “Has there been any progress on finding Little Bob?” I asked.
Her pause told me everything. “Nothing yet,” she said, sounding genuinely upset. “I’m sorry, Jeff. We’re really looking. It’s like he just fell off the face of the planet.”
Which told me almost as much as her earlier hesitation had. It took someone with some serious resources to make somebody disappear that thoroughly. Whoever had him, they were well-funded and well-prepared. It wasn’t going to be easy to get him back once we found him.
“I know that finding him is a priority,” she continued, when I didn’t say anything. “Renton knows it, too, though he’s not happy about it. He’s not looking forward to pausing operations while you guys go after Little Bob, but he knows better than to try to stop you.”
I didn’t have much to say to that. I knew Renton was a big-picture thinker, and as much as he’d worked to be on “our side” as much as anyone was, I knew we were still assets to him. Expendable ones, if necessary. He would probably think of our rescue of Little Bob as a “personal” mission as opposed to the major ones he had in mind. I didn’t give a shit. Little Bob mattered more to me than the Cicero Group or anything else that was going on, as bad as it was. If we sacrificed him for the sake of “the mission,” when we had a chance to get him back, we’d never be able to live with ourselves afterward.
“I should probably let you go,” she said after a moment, when I didn’t comment. “Be careful, okay?” There was sincere concern in her voice.
“You too,” I told her, and was somewhat surprised to find how much I meant it. As suspicious as I’d been of her motives from time to time, the fact remained that Mia had come through for us time and again, and, somewhat in spite of myself, I found that I liked her.
There was a hint of a rueful smile in her voice when she answered. “I’m far away from any targets or likely riots,” she said. “I’m a lot more worried about you than I am about me.” She paused a moment, then said quietly, “Take care, Jeff.” Then the call ended.
I started to read the target package in more detail, then realized that we weren’t going to get it taken care of that night, anyway. We still needed to reset. I hauled myself back over to my patch of floor, lay down, and promptly passed out.
Overall, the entire setup was too easy. Our targets met regularly in a coffee shop in its own building, in the middle of a parking lot, across the street from a brewery and a movie theater. The nearest building was fifty meters away.
The target package pointed out their usual patterns, and they were definitely creatures of habit. Judging by the pattern of IP hits, they could be found at that particular coffee shop during certain set windows during the day: about thirty minutes in the morning, about ninety minutes around noon, and then for a good three to four hours in the late afternoon, early evening. Of course, they were generally plugged in via mobile devices during the other hours of the day, but those were their coffee shop hours, and therefore when they were all together and vulnerable.
Somebody should have told these kids that if you’re trying to be a revolutionary, there are going to be people who are willing to use force to shut you down. If you want to keep being a revolutionary, it helps to have good security habits.
Of course, I was sure that every one of these little fucktards was a rich suburbanite with many years of university bubble-think, who’d probably never even really been punched in the face, and certainly didn’t expect that they’d ever face retaliation for their activities. Force was for other people. They were important. They did the thinky stuff that made Zee Revolushun! happen.
Well, they were about to learn the hard way that in Fourth Generation Warfare, there are no “front lines,” and if you can be found, you can be hit.
The hours they kept were right during the, presumably, busiest hours of the day for the coffee shop. That was going to complicate matters, since there were probably going to be a lot of bystanders, but their information security was sloppy enough that we had photos of all of them.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, after Mia had confirmed remotely that all five targets w
ere on-site, two big pickups and a white-painted, windowless van pulled up in an L-shape around the coffee shop.
Eddie and his boys were in the pickups. Most of my considerably reduced team was in the back of the van. Jack was the only exception, having arrived at the coffee shop an hour earlier. He would be in the back, fussing around on a smartphone. He was lean enough that he didn’t stand out from the hipsters too much, something which he would doubtless get a lot of grief for, later.
As soon as the van lurched to a stop, right in front of the coffee shop entrance, Larry threw the back doors open and we piled out. We weren’t as heavily kitted out or moving as explosively as we had the last time we’d pulled a raid like this, against the Los Hijos nightclub “Los Valientes,” in Culiacan. We’d expected heavy resistance there. Here, we wanted to keep things as calm and low-key as possible while we secured our targets and got the hell out. Didn’t mean we weren’t still ready for a fight; every one of us had a scratchbuilt 9mm bullet hose slung under his jacket.
The five of us walked casually inside. The place wasn’t as crowded as I’d been afraid it would be; there were about a dozen people scattered around the tables by themselves, and a couple more knots of college-age men and women chattering to each other.
Jack looked up from where he was sitting in the back, and nodded toward the fireplace.
There were three men and two young women sitting in the black and red easy chairs drawn up around the fire. They had an array of laptops and tablets across their laps, a couple of small tables, and the arms of the chairs, and were talking excitedly, none of them looking up from their screens.
I recognized two of them right away. Sheila Marquez was, despite her name, a platinum blond, wearing a black beret and a red scarf. The pudgy kid next to her, wearing a pink beanie over his blue-dyed hair and a black turtleneck, would be Pierce Fallon. The rest of them had their backs to us, but it was pretty obvious that this was the bunch.
We fanned out carefully, getting a couple of glances from the other patrons, but not attracting the notice of our targets at all. They were focused on their “work,” and Fallon was talking quickly.
“It looks like there’s a police barricade forming at Arapahoe and Fourteenth,” he said. “Let’s spread the word; if they can get there quickly enough, they might be able to break it up before the pigs get their shit together.” I was behind him by then, and saw the post he was typing up. He had close to a dozen tabs open, with multiple conversations going, along with a couple of videoconferencing calls open in different windows. He was typing, “Pigs r on Arapahoe! Disrupt…”
Before he could finish typing, Jack reached into his backpack, pulled out a nine-banger, yanked out the pin, and tossed it into the center of the coffee shop.
It was far enough from the windows that it didn’t break any of them, but the series of reports was still deafening in the enclosed space of the shop. We all had earplugs in, since this had been part of the plan, but the rest of the shop’s clientele most certainly did not.
People were screaming and diving for the floor, thinking that either another mass shooting like Aurora or Columbine was happening, or that a bomb had just gone off. In the meantime, the rest of us, who’d been braced for the noise, flash, and concussion, moved.
As Fallon flinched violently, ducking away from the blast, I wrapped my arm around his throat and hauled him bodily over the back of his chair.
The other four targets were getting the same treatment at the same time. Fallon’s laptop went over backwards off his knees as I dragged him over the back of the chair, hitting the floor with a crash that sounded muted after the explosion of the nine-banger.
Before anyone could gather their wits enough to react, still dazzled and rattled by the nine-banger, we were dragging our captives toward the door and the waiting van. Even if that hadn’t been the plan, I’d seen enough of their little command and control operation not to want to stick around for long. All it would take would be one person on one of those live video calls getting the word out, and we’d be surrounded by a mob in a matter of minutes. While we’d avoided most of the rioting happening deeper in Denver, Renton and Mia had been keeping us abreast of things enough that we’d seen how fast these things could develop.
Jack had been moving as soon as the nine-banger had gone off, and was forcibly clearing the way to the door, shouldering people, chairs, and tables out of the way. He had his own subgun in his hands, so anyone who was recovered enough to try to resist had sudden second thoughts as soon as that 9mm bore was pointed at their faces.
It wasn’t like there was a lot of distance to cover. In seconds, we had our bewildered, choking, weakly struggling charges to the door and were dragging them out into the light rain outside and the open doors of the van.
One by one, they were shoved into the back. Eddie’s boys were up in the backs of the pickups, guns in evidence, providing security. I tossed Fallon in on top of Marquez, then we were piling in on top of them and I was banging on the wall. “GO!” I bellowed, as Eric yanked the doors shut. We almost all got piled against the doors before they latched, as Sid stomped on the gas. A moment later, everyone in the stark, stripped-down back of the van was thrown against the side wall, as we took a sharp turn out of the parking lot and onto the highway.
The oldest of the five, Tommy DuChamp, was starting to protest. “What the fuck, man!” he slurred. “You can’t do this! We’ve got rights!”
“Shut up,” Bryan snarled, stepping over Fallon and Marquez to reach for DuChamp. When the thirty-something activist tried to bat his hands away, Bryan just grabbed his wrist and twisted, flipping him over on his back with a yelp. In seconds, he was zip-tied.
The rest quickly got the same treatment. Since we were in a windowless van, I decided to forgo the black bags over their heads. For the moment.
“Listen up, fucksticks,” I said, over the roar of the engine. “You’ve got a choice. You can lie there, nice and quiet, and not get roughed up anymore, at least until you get where you’re going. Or, you can be mouthy little assholes, in which case you get gagged and blindfolded. Got it?”
“The people are going to figure out what happened to us,” DuChamp insisted. I wondered if he’d hit his head, or if he was just chemically enhanced. In Colorado, there was no telling. “This will not stand!”
“Bryan, he’s all yours,” I said, since Bryan had a knee planted between DuChamp’s shoulder blades anyway.
“With pleasure,” he replied. We had rags to use for gags, but Bryan apparently thought it was funnier to take DuChamp’s scarf and stuff it in his mouth behind a strip of duct tape, instead.
“We’ve seen your faces,” Marquez said. “Do you really think you’re going to get away with this?”
That prompted a chorus of dry, humorless laughter. “Worry about yourself, Sheila,” Eric said. “You’ve got a lot bigger things to worry about now than what’s going to happen to us.”
That shut her up. I suddenly smelled piss, and grimaced. Why were so many of the players in this little clusterfuck a bunch of incontinent cowards?
A guy I knew only as Ollie, one of Renton’s “associates,” was waiting at the rendezvous outside of Boulder. The RV point itself was on a stretch of narrow dirt road well outside of town. It was easy enough to see that we were clean as we approached.
Ollie was a heavyset guy, who always managed to look like a mobster from Goodfellas or Casino. If he’d been one of us, he probably would have had the callsign “Guido.” He was wearing a leather jacket and leaning against the box truck parked on the grass beside the road. He grinned as we pulled up and I climbed down from the back.
“You boys sure stirred some shit up,” he said. He might look like an East Coast goombah, but Ollie talked with a distinct Midwestern twang. “There’s a mob around that coffee shop right now, demanding justice for The Five. They’re not sure what happened, but they’re sure that they’re pissed off.”
“Any violence, or just a lot of yelling?” I a
sked.
“Just chanting and broken glass, so far,” he replied. “From what I’ve seen online, it’s mostly a bunch of millennial hipsters, so they haven’t got a lot of intelligence or stomach for violence. The hard-core Black Bloc, gangbangers, and racial supremacists are still setting shit on fire and shooting at cops in Denver proper.”
I jerked a thumb at the van. “You need a hand with ‘em?”
He grinned again. “I won’t object. Can only stand so much patchouli on my hands in the first place.”
It took a few minutes to transfer the captives. Marquez was kicking and trying to scream, but ended up just choking on the gag more. Surprisingly, the rest seemed to be in shock. Once Marquez got shoved into the back of the box truck, Ollie hauled down the back door, shook our hands, and climbed into the driver’s seat. The box truck rumbled to life and trundled away down the dirt road.
We climbed back into the van and headed out. There was more work to be done.
Chapter 25
Hicks’ assassination opened the floodgates. It was an escalation that neither side could ignore. So, that meant we were busy. While, technically speaking, we were trying to put out the brushfires, more often than not, it really didn’t feel that way.
We’d been warned that Austin was almost as bad as Denver. The warning was wrong. Austin was worse.
Denver’s violence, exacerbated by the bombing, had been primarily due to “protests” turning into mobs. Austin had seen a few protests, especially after Pueblo, but the cartels and the Aztlanista militias had quickly taken over. Most of the would-be revolutionaries and students had run for cover as soon as the real criminals and terrorists had started a shooting war with the police.
We weren’t going into that mess to try to stop it. That was too much for our little company to accomplish. No, we had a couple of very specific targets.
