Carl saw Special Agent Cummings bringing up the rear of one of the assault teams, so he figured she was the agent-in-charge for the assault. He’d already watched her and another agent clear the house next door to make sure no one was home.
Carl noticed that Cummings was in full black tactical gear this time. She looked just as badass as the rest of her men. Her black Kevlar helmet hid her blonde hair, and he noticed that she wore clear goggles to keep shrapnel and spent shell casings out of her eyes. There was still enough of her face showing that he could see her cream-colored skin shining like a beacon among all that blackness.
At the front of the pack, one of the men peeked around the edge of the house and scanned the target house with a small handheld device. It looked like an over-sized flashlight with a small screen attached to it. Erickson said it was a thermal scanner. He said the agent was looking for heat signatures inside the house to determine the number of potential hostiles inside.
Garcia’s mercenaries had predicted that particular maneuver as they had plenty of experience taking down enemy terrorist strongholds. It was agreed the FBI would arrive prepared to deal with all the windows being covered with blackout curtains. The thermal scanner would verify the actual presence and locations of targets in the house and also locate any lookouts peeking through tiny holes in the curtains waiting to ambush them.
All four hostiles were gathered in the kitchen, but they were actually nothing more than mannequins wrapped in electric heat blankets with the temperature regulators set to about ninety-five degrees. One was even seated in a rocking chair with a small motorized piston to keep the chair in motion. Carl considered that deception to be the master stroke of genius of his plan, and it had taken Garcia some serious effort to locate the proper equipment for the thermal dummies.
Erickson and the mercs had promised the handheld scanner was not sensitive enough to distinguish between the dummies and real human bodies. After all, the FBI agents were looking for life-size heat signatures. They wouldn’t be looking for fake heat signatures.
At least, not the first time.
The assault teams paused while the FBI tactical agent continued scanning. Carl knew this was where his plan succeeded or failed. Garcia voiced his thoughts.
“Do you think they’ll fall for it?”
“We’ll soon see.”
Carl realized he was holding his breath, and when the observer moved back into the pack and put his scanner device away, he let out his breath with an audible sigh. Cummings gave a hand signal, and the assault teams converged on the house. Then she and the other agent-in-charge waited by the house next door.
Merc One panned his camera around the neighborhood. Police had converged around the rural area as close as they could without being seen by the target house. Dozens of local PD and FBI vehicles lined the streets out of sight from the target. It was an impressive sight, Carl thought. That was the reception he’d get if they ever found him.
Merc One settled the camera view back on the house. One group of four assault agents ran straight to the front of the house, and the second group ran around the back. The stocks of their assault rifles were pressed against their shoulders, and the agents sighted along the barrels as if the weapons were extensions of their bodies.
On the front porch of the target house the breacher gripped the doorknob, and Carl knew he was gently testing to see if the door was locked. It was not, nor was the back door. Carl had wanted to make the raid as easy as possible for them.
The breacher carefully laid his pole aside, pulled his sidearm, and took his position at the rear of the team as they waited, presumably to make sure the rear entry team was in position. Then the group charged through the door.
There was no sound with the picture, but Carl could imagine the assault teams screaming at the top of their lungs like they had when they attacked him a month ago at the downtown Starbucks. He figured maybe two of each team would head toward the kitchen where the thermal signatures of the hostiles were located, while the rest would methodically clear the other rooms. Carl figured it would take five seconds at most for the units to reach the kitchen and realize they’d been had. He nodded to Garcia.
“Do it.”
Chapter 32
1157 MST Monday
Albuquerque, NM
Garcia spoke into his cell and uttered a command to Merc One, whose real name was Trevor Flosk.
“Roger that,” came the reply over the speaker mounted on the wall under the TV.
Garcia had introduced Carl to all the mercenaries as “Mr. Smith,” and he immediately told them he thought of them only as operational assets. They were illegal combat soldiers, he said, and their function was solely to engage Carl’s enemies with extreme prejudice, a task for which they were being paid extremely well.
Now Carl studied the three mercenaries who had remained at the operations house with him, Garcia, and Erickson. He referred to them as Mercs Two through Four. Like Merc One, the other mercs were dangerous-looking people in their late thirties or early forties. The two men Carl referred to as Mercs Two and Three were named Rich Brewster and Trent Englebaum. They looked very much like older versions of the man he knew as Agent Klipser. They both had the same deadly eyes with empty deadpan expressions and constantly roving gazes. They both seemed completely aware of everything around them.
Merc Four was a woman introduced as Cassiopeia Englebaum. About thirty-five, she looked like a female version of the others. Slender and fairly tall at five-ten, she looked just as capable and deadly as the men. At first, Carl thought the female merc was constantly smiling with a sneer, which only enhanced her deadly look. As he looked closer, though, he could see what could only be a knife scar angling upward from the left corner of her mouth. She and Merc Three on her right stood close together, in each other’s personal space, as he would expect of any married couple. This particular couple carried automatic weapons instead of grocery bags.
He didn’t know any details about the group, and he hadn’t asked where they were from or if they had any kids. All he knew about them was what Garcia had reported. They all had been dismissed from various special operations outfits, either Rangers or Delta or SEAL units. They all had problems with authority, had abused their skills, or enjoyed killing too much. They were all fit and in shape.
They were each receiving two thousand a day, and a five-day advance had been deposited into their bank accounts. The remainder of what Carl told them would be a two-week employment would be paid upon completion of the mission. Mercs Two, Three, and Four stood to the right and slightly in front of Carl and Garcia, and watched the raid unfold. Every now and then they would whisper among themselves, as if studying the opposition’s tactics.
The detonation on the high-def monitor was spectacular. The mercs added their comments of admiration.
“Whoa! That’s gonna leave a scar!”
“Booyah!”
“Man down!”
Inside the target house, Carl knew there had been no red blinking lights as the explosive detonators were armed, no beeping tone or flashing LEDs counting down to let the FBI assault teams realize they were about to die. Instead, the eruption of fire and the concussive blast were so massive and so sudden that none of the tactical team could possibly have had any awareness of their demise.
On the monitor, Carl watched fire wash out of every window and door in the house. The roof lifted and splintered, then collapsed. The front face of the house blasted outward, and the right and left walls collapsed inward after a few seconds.
Carl said, “Shift the view to Agent Cummings.”
Mr. Garcia relayed the order through his cell channel and the monitor showed the front of the house next door. The east wall had significant blast damage, and in the front yard Cummings and her partner were getting shakily to their feet, gazing at the destroyed target house.
Carl pulled his cell phone from his pocket and quickly tapped his way to the text menu. He had already typed out a text message, attache
d a picture, and saved it in the DRAFT folder, so he simply opened the message and hit SEND.
A few seconds later he saw Cummings on the monitor reach into her pocket for her cell. To her credit, she was cool and did not visibly react when she read the message.
I HAVE LISETTE. COMPLY OR SHE DIES. -REYES
The picture she was looking at on her cell was that of her eleven-year-old daughter bound and gagged.
Carl handed his cell phone to Garcia because the agent would undoubtedly remember Carl’s voice from a month ago. She’d know instantly he wasn’t really Reyes.
“Call her. Give her proper English and a very slight Spanish accent, and relay the instructions we discussed.”
Cummings’s cell number was the only number in the contact list. Garcia hit SEND and put the cell on speaker phone. She answered immediately.
“What the hell did you do!?”
“In this business, threats and warnings are useless and would have gone unheeded. You and I both know this. So I gave you a demonstration.”
He paused, and Carl listened intently to the speakers on the monitor. He could hear Cummings breathing heavily. Her voice sounded shaky. Eight of her men had just died. She was the field agent in charge, and her commanders would be looking to her for an explanation.
“Your instructions are simple. I want Agent Klipser here in Albuquerque before nightfall. If he is not here, I will carve your daughter into pieces before I kill her. I will call you before midnight with the coordinates of a destination in north-central Mexico where we shall meet to discuss the return of a particular American girl. Do not attempt to contact me or trace this number. Believe me, I will know.”
“Mexico? We can’t conduct operations across the border.”
“I am not interested in what you cannot do, Special Agent Cummings. I am more interested in what you can do. The US government secretly invades countries all over the world. You can do whatever task you set your collective minds to. Deviate from these instructions at the peril of your daughter.”
He terminated the call and handed the phone back to Carl. “You realize the first thing the FBI is going to do is trace this phone, right?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Carl said. “You weren’t on long enough for them to identify the cell towers the signal went through.”
Erickson had said they’d need upwards of thirty seconds to trace a call. Carl pulled the battery from the device and laid the cell on the floor and stomped on it. “I’ll be needing a replacement now.”
Garcia stepped to the side of the room and retrieved a phone from one of the power strips plugged into the wall. There were ten power strips connected to extension cords along the wall, and each strip was filled to capacity with charging disposable cells. They had almost a hundred more cells to use one time each. Garcia programmed his own cell number into the new cell and handed it to Carl.
“Thank you, Mr. Garcia. I know I said this before, but just as a reminder, I want to make sure you use your personal cell only to contact me. If you need to make other calls, use a different cell and destroy each cell after every use. Don’t give the FBI any electronic trails. I heard that the NSA has a facility somewhere up in Colorado dedicated solely to eavesdropping on cell phones.”
Carl paused and glanced at the monitor again at the bombed-out house. Garcia dismantled the cell he’d been using to communicate with Merc One.
“Call Merc One in,” Carl said.
Garcia retrieved a new cell to make that call, then dismantled that one too.
Carl turned sideways and made eye contact with the other three mercs. He almost addressed them as “Gentlemen and Lady,” but the looks in their eyes told him that would not be appropriate. These people were killers for hire, nothing more. He sensed they expected to be addressed as such.
“People, we’ve broken many laws up to this point,” Carl nodded at the burning house on the monitor. “As of this moment we are America’s Most Wanted.”
He paused for a moment. Carl had seen in the mercs’ eyes that they hadn’t previously considered him a serious player. After all, he was just a civilian. They didn’t care about his agenda or his mission. If the operation folded for some reason, as one of them had said, they’d simply take their advance money and disappear, leaving Carl, Garcia, and Erickson holding the bag.
He expected nothing less from the mercenaries, but now he saw a grudging respect in their eyes. They had all been soldiers, and even as mercenaries they were accustomed to taking orders. They’d planted the explosives in the house because they were paid for that task, but it was clear that until that very moment none of them thought he had the backbone to give the command to kill. Now they had witnessed his conviction.
He said, “The FBI is not even our true enemy.” He paused long enough to let the statement sink into their minds. “My target is an unknown covert agency, and you can be sure they will now take a very intense interest in our operation. These agents tortured me and killed my son. They have proven to me they will do anything to anyone, even innocent civilians, to accomplish their mission. If you get captured,” Carl said with a glance at Garcia, “you can expect them to find your family members too—all of them, everywhere in the world—and they will use them against you.
“They operate with impunity. They are not accountable to anyone, and no one will prosecute them for any crimes they commit in their attempts to find and capture us. They will not negotiate. Instead, they will bend or break any law.”
Carl took a breath and looked at the monitor again. “Finding them is my sole mission, and I have no doubt that as of this moment, we are now their mission as well.
“When this operation is concluded, it is my intention that these covert government agents and their FBI lapdog will all be dead. Like them, I also will do anything to anyone to make that happen. I will not surrender, and I will not compromise. Either they die or we die. Are we all clear on that?”
None of the three mercenaries said anything so he continued.
“I intend to take prisoners, and I intend to treat those prisoners as harshly as these covert government agents treated me, as harshly as they will treat any of us if we are captured.” He paused and evaluated the soldiers again. “Our prisoners will include their family members if I can find them.” He head-nodded toward the bedroom where Lisette Cummings was tied.
“Does anyone have any mental reservations about the mission or any questions about the consequences if we are caught?”
Merc Two raised his hand halfway, and Carl nodded at him.
“Our rules of engagement, sir?”
“I think I just covered that,” Carl answered. “There are no rules other than kill or be killed. Anything else?”
Carl looked at each mercenary, and each shook his or her head. “Very well, then.” He looked at his young assistant. “Mr. Garcia, we are officially in the fan business.”
Garcia’s voice trembled a bit. “They’re coming for us, aren’t they?”
When Carl answered, his voice sounded foreign to him, reminding him of Agent Klipser’s gravelly voice. He gave Garcia a grunt that sounded more like a growl.
“Actually, for the next few hours they’re going to be looking for a man named Alfonso Reyes. So now it’s time to give them another head fake.”
Chapter 33
1357 EST Monday
Arlington Heights, VA
Aaron McGrath watched the unexpected terror event on the center monitor in silence. The perspective was from a camera he knew was mounted on the nose of a police helicopter. His second, Nancy Palmer, stood next to him in the ops center.
Palmer shook her head slightly, then brought both her hands up and finger-combed her short hair back. She’d been asleep upstairs until two hours ago when he hit the “All hands on deck!” button on the wall next to the management workstation. Now he was standing close enough to catch a hint of her mild shower fragrance.
“This makes no sense, Aaron,” she said. “He deliberately murdered eight field
agents, and for what? We paid his ransom. What does he gain by this action?”
“He did this specifically to get Cummings to tell us to send Pete out there, presumably to negotiate Melissa’s release.”
After a month, the search for America’s darling daughter had stalled, and the TER team had downsized. Only two analysts remained—Joey, the big bald young man, and Jimmy, the one with the big Afro. Jimmy was on duty now.
It was presumed Melissa had been transported out of the country. No one knew if she was alive or dead because she had not been returned after the ransom was paid. Still, the operation proceeded on the premise that she still lived. Now it seemed she was alive, and Reyes was willing to conclude his terror event.
Mexico had topped the list of possible locations of the girl, only because Alfonso Reyes lived and conducted most of his business in that country. The call from Special Agent Cummings in Albuquerque was the first new intel on the whereabouts of the kidnapper in several weeks.
The room was eerily quiet after the explosion. All conversation had ceased. McGrath realized he could easily hear the fans of the computer stations on the floor. It was mid-day, but the blackout curtains shielded against any outside light. When he looked up at the ceiling to contemplate the enormity of the ambush he’d just witnessed, he noticed the bright bulbs of all six of the halogen floor lamps were angled straight up, and they all made similar rings of light and shadow.
The two workstations on the right side of the ops room were abandoned. The management workstation sat directly behind those two. Jimmy occupied the workstation third from the right, while the fourth analyst had been sent back upstairs for rack time. He’d need to be fresh for his next shift, McGrath had said, because now that Reyes had surfaced again, the team would likely shift into overdrive. And they had been…until the kidnapper detonated the house with the FBI officers inside.
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 17
