The Days Before: A Prequel to the Five Roads to Texas series (A Five Roads to Texas Novel Book 8)

by Brian Parker

  Grady caught her and held her in his arms for a moment. She looked into his eyes, concern was reflected back at her. A tingling sensation of warmth spread throughout her body, radiating out from the butterflies in her stomach. They stared at one another for several moments until the truck horn broke the silence. Against her side and under her thighs, she felt a tremor in his bulging biceps as he held all of her weight.

  He set her down gently and reached around her to open the tailgate. “You should have opened it first,” he chastised. “Don’t take stupid risks. If you get injured, it affects everyone else, not just you.”

  Whatever passed between them was unspoken, but Hannah knew that something had changed in her relationship with her team leader. All the time they’d spent getting to know one another in DC and the constant posing as a married couple during their travel for the past week had certainly contributed to the natural attraction between them.

  “Yeah,” she replied, breathlessly, wondering what in the hell had passed between them. “Sorry. That was stupid.”

  He nodded and pushed her butt as she scrambled into the bed of the pickup. Then he jumped up nimbly behind her and closed the tailgate. She sat near the stove, still in shock.

  Grady fed a few pieces of wood into the stove, and then slammed the door shut as the truck lurched forward. He stared at the stove for a moment, purposefully avoiding her gaze as the truck picked up speed. Hannah stayed silent, allowing him time to work through what had happened. Likely, it would be the same as it had been before: anything more than friendship could jeopardize the mission and risk lives.

  Just as Knasovich was typecast as a raging asshole, Grady Harper was one of those guys who’d put the mission and the safety of his team above any needs of his own. It was just how he was wired, and Hannah knew that she needed to suppress any feelings she had for the man.

  Finally, he broke the silence and looked up at her. “I’m big spoon,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, not understanding the reference.

  “You said you were big spoon. I’m not risking my junk getting frostbite. I’m big spoon.”

  It wasn’t quite what she expected him to say, but it was a start. Maybe there was a future between them after all. First, they had to finish this mission so she could get paid, then they could explore the other options.

  SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  LAGUARDIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, QUEENS, NEW YORK

  MARCH 20TH

  Sayeed felt the slight pressure change as the large plane began to descend toward the airport. He rehearsed his lines once more. Why was he coming to the United States? Did he have anything to declare? He patted the small bottle of eye drops in the pocket of his suit jacket and smiled. He and his brothers had a lot to declare, namely the destruction of the West for their godless capitalist expansionism.

  He pulled out his cell phone and reinitiated the Spanish language application. For this to work, he had to be classified as a Brazilian national. Speaking the language was key. As part of his training, his instructors had told them that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, but they didn’t have anyone who knew the language, so they’d decided to go with Spanish. Besides, Americans were too stupid to know the difference between the two.

  Thirty-five minutes later, Sayeed stood in the queue to go through customs. His suitcase had been scanned upon arrival and he’d picked it up from the baggage carousel emblazoned with a sticker stating that it’d been checked. In his hand, he held the small, rectangular blue and white form to give to the US Customs agent at the checkpoint ahead. He’d declared nothing on the form.

  He shuffled his feet dutifully, absently patting his suitcoat pocket every couple of minutes. The small bottle of eye drops rested comfortably inside where he’d placed it for safekeeping upon boarding the plane in Brazil. It was far too precious to leave alone in his carryon baggage.

  Sayeed wondered if this was the time to use the drops on himself. The instructions hadn’t been clear as to when the Blessed Ones were to infect themselves—or anyone else for that matter. In truth, the young man didn’t know what the serum would do to him. Would it give him superhuman strength as some of his brothers had surmised? Doing so would allow him to kill hundreds of infidels before being martyred.

  But why then would he have been directed to spray the drops onto others as well? Wouldn’t the others with the same strength band together to stop him? Probably, he told himself as he shuffled forward one more space in the long line.

  That meant the serum had to work in some other way. Possibly some way that none of them had thought about. Whatever it did to him, it would do to others as well. That ruled out all of the beneficial properties that the Blessed Ones had joked about for weeks. If it weren’t beneficial, then it would have to be detrimental. He knew that he’d have to die in some way in order to kill as many of the enemy as possible. That had never been in question. As the time neared, though, the manner of his death gnawed at his brain.

  What are they asking us to do?

  It was a question that he should have asked a long time ago. He never had. He’d simply accepted that everything he’d been told was the Word of Allah. Sayeed was beginning to have doubts.

  His mind kicked into overdrive as his body continued in the slow motion crawl forced upon it by the Customs’ queue.

  What if the eye drops turned him into a bomb? He’d squirt the liquid into his eyes and, what? Arm himself? That made him think harder. Arming himself… That’s why the major had ordered them to make it past the checkpoints until they were with the largest number of people available before administering the eye drops.

  What was his faith asking him to do?

  “Welcome to the United States,” a bored female voice said, startling him. “Passport and declarations form.”

  “N—no,” Sayeed stuttered. He wasn’t prepared for this conversation right now. He needed to think about what he was going to do. He’d been prepared to kill—and be killed—for the mission, but what were they asking him to do? How was he going to die?

  “Do you speak English?” the agent asked. He stared dumbly at her, trying to wrap his mind around his task. “Habla Inglés?” she offered.

  “No!” he replied excitedly, understanding the words she used. For the thousandth time, Sayeed thought that it would have been easier if they just taught him English instead of Spanish.

  “Ugh,” she grunted and held out her hand. “Passport and declarations form.”

  Sayeed didn’t understand the woman, but he knew enough to recognize the word declaration. “Yo non…” He stopped himself. That wasn’t correct. He had to conjugate his verbs, he knew better. He’d even rehearsed the exact phrase for this moment hundreds of times. But now was the moment of truth.

  “Just give me your passport and form,” the woman growled. “Habla Español?” He nodded enthusiastically. “Thought so, you dumb motherfucker.” She tapped the back of her open hand on the countertop, banging her ring loudly.

  Sayeed grinned at her and handed the passport with his form inside over to her. “No tengo nada que declarer,” he stated confidently. He had nothing to declare.

  “Look, I don’t give a shit what you say, Mister… Perez-Rosado.” He grinned wider at her use of his assumed name when she read it from the passport. “I can’t understand you. You can’t understand me.” She opened the book to the last page and swiped the barcode through some type of reader.

  He looked around the customs checkpoint at the row upon row of would-be immigrants and travelers. What had any of them done to deserve the death that surely rested in his jacket pocket? He patted the bottle nervously as the woman typed.

  Her expression changed slightly. The ever-present scowl showed a moment of weakness as her eyebrows shot upward before she got her emotions in check and she scrunched them back down. She reached around and pressed a large red button on the wall beside her.

  Overhead, several red strobe lights began to turn and Sayeed knew that he’d
been had. Somehow, this woman, this harlot, had found him out. He didn’t think. He acted on his training alone, and reached into his pocket.

  “Gun!” the customs agent screamed, ducking under her counter. Her chair went shooting backward into the door of her little cubicle. All around him, people screamed. Some people dove to the floor in panic, while others ran in every direction—except toward him.

  Sayeed pulled the eye dropper from his pocket and unscrewed the lid. He tilted his head back and squirted a generous amount of the fluid into his left eye. It burned like fire. It was as if his face were actually on fire and not just in the figurative sense. He slapped at his face, dropping the bottle in the process.

  “Dammit!” he cursed aloud in Persian, forgetting himself. He rubbed furiously at his eye, trying to expunge the hot, liquid magma that had taken hold of him.

  “Police! Freeze!”

  Sayeed, spun, not understanding what the men said. Everything in front of him was blurry as both of his eyes wept long streaks of tears.

  “I said, freeze!”

  He lumbered forward, toward the sound of the voice. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do to spread the pain that had enveloped him. Was that how the major had intended him to cause death? Was he supposed to spread the fire to others?

  “Tazing! Tazing! Tazing!” someone shouted.

  Sayeed went rigid as the fire spread from his eye and coursed through his entire body. He felt himself falling, helpless to stop it from happening. The ground rushed up to meet him and he smashed face-first into the concrete floor.

  Rough hands pulled his arms behind him and he was under arrest. He’d failed his mission. New York City would be safe.

  Sayeed had grown bored of the men’s constant questions. He was so bored that he was having trouble concentrating on what they said. They barked things at him in Spanish, their words impossibly fast. He hadn’t been trained in conversational Spanish, just a lot of vocabulary words and a few key phrases to get him through the airport security. His classes had never prepared him for this.

  “Let’s get out of here,” one of the officers said to the other. Sayeed looked at them, realizing that they no longer spoke Spanish to him, but now they spoke English, a language that he had no idea how to speak. “This guy isn’t going to talk.”

  The other guy slapped the table, his badge clanging against the cheap metal edge. “Listen here, fuckwad. We know that you have a duplicate passport.” Sayeed understood the word passport, but nothing else. “Another Hector Perez-Rosado, with the same passport number—genius move there, dumbass—arrived from Rio de Janeiro this morning in Sacramento. What’s your game, man?”

  Sayeed repeated the phrase he’d told them fifty times already, “No tengo nada que declarer.” Or at least he thought he did. It was becoming difficult to think straight after all their questions, and his vision, which had cleared for a little while, was beginning to worsen again. And the back of his throat itched.

  “Yeah, I know you have nothing to declare,” the first man replied in English. “And you can drop the fake-ass Latino bullshit. You don’t speak Spanish.”

  “Either that, or you don’t mind us saying your mother sucks the diseased cocks of sailors down at the wharf.” The man who’d mentioned his passport a moment ago said.

  Sayeed grinned. He understood the word for mother. Even in English, it sounded similar to his native Persian. These men must be appealing to him to think of his mother’s honor and give them information about why he was here. Maybe this very reason is why none of the men were told exactly how they would forward the cause, only what they needed to do. Each man was simply a small part of a much larger plan, designed so that if one failed, the others could continue.

  Maybe he should not have rushed to judgement of the Facilitator’s plans. He’d met him once, or at least, the Facilitator had come to their small classroom and observed their training one time. Sayeed remembered being in awe of a man who held so much power and was held in such high regard with the Ayatollah. Surely, he was a man who thought three or four steps ahead of his adversary.

  “I guess he doesn’t care about his mama,” the officer said. “Or it’s true.”

  The second police officer pushed his chair away from the desk and yawned. “I’m done with this guy. He doesn’t understand anything we’re saying. Any word on whether the FBI is sending an interrogator?”

  “We’re waiting on the biologicals to come back so we can try to determine what nationality this guy is. After that, they’ll send a translator and an agent. Until then, we hold him here at the airport.”

  The second officer gave Sayeed a menacing look. “Fine.” He walked to the door and pressed a button. A uniformed police officer opened it.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Move this motherfucker to the holding cell. We’ll ice him until morning and try again. Dude looks sick as hell, so throw in an extra blanket or two in case he vomits on himself.”

  “Yes, sir,” the young officer told the detective.

  Sayeed watched the two men in suits leave through a blurred haze as the new officer came into the room. He fished a small handcuff key from his pocket and walked over to where the soldier sat handcuffed to the chair. “I wish I could take these cuffs off you, buddy,” the officer said, “but we don’t know anything about you, so…”

  He bent behind Sayeed and there was a slight pull on his shoulders as the officer unlocked the pair of handcuffs that secured him to the chair. He did not remove the pair that encircled Sayeed’s wrists.

  “Alright,” the officer said with a grunt as he stood. “Let’s go night-night, pal.” He slipped his hand into Sayeed’s armpit and lifted upward. The soldier complied and allowed himself to be led from the interrogation room.

  Sayeed didn’t know where he was going next. He felt the need to vomit as his stomach roiled. When he stood, his eyes began to weep some type of liquid, but he couldn’t tell what it was since his hands were locked behind him.

  The walk seemed to take hours as the officer led him through the back hallways of the airport to a room full of empty desks with computer monitors and telephones. He was ushered past them to a small room with a lock on the outside.

  The officer shoved him in roughly and said, “Keep your mouth shut and go to sleep. Things at the airport are winding down for the night. The feds will be here to talk to you in the morning.”

  Sayeed’s shoulders were hunched forward as the officer lifted his hands behind his back to remove the handcuffs. Once they were off, a gentle push propelled him into the cell. The door slammed behind him and he heard the lock engage with a finality that made the soldier want to weep. He’d squirted whatever was in the bottle onto his eyes for nothing.

  He looked at his small space. A metal toilet sat inches away from a metal sink. Above them hung a polished piece of metal that acted as a mirror. Jutting from the wall was a metal shelf that held a few blankets and a worn pillow. He had enough room to spread his arms out wide and not touch the walls to either side with only a few centimeters to spare. He rubbed at his eyes and his palm and it came away bloody.

  “What?” he said aloud, startled at how thick his tongue felt in his mouth.

  The lights overhead turned off, leaving only a small observation window in the door to illuminate the cell.

  “Wait!” Sayeed screamed in Persian, darting toward the door. “There is something wrong with me.”

  The lights in the exterior office dimmed as well. He looked through them in time to see the police officer exiting the room through another door. He banged on the door with the palm of his hand, then began to kick at it when that didn’t work. He bellowed incoherently at the door, rage filling him like he’d never felt before. He switched to punching the metal door, satisfied when the small dents appeared. It didn’t take long until his knuckles were bloody. He smiled, drooling.

  And suddenly, Sayeed stopped himself. While it was true that he’d planned to kill as many infidels as he could before be
ing martyred, he wasn’t normally a violent person by nature. What had they done to him?

  He wiped away the blood from his aching knuckles and smeared the gore from his cheeks onto his pants. As soon as he’d done so, he felt more of it seeping from the corners and running down along his jaw past his earlobes. “Oh my, God,” he whispered. “What have I done?”

  Sayeed cast around the small room for a moment, trying uselessly to determine which direction was the east. Finally, he settled on facing toward the dim light streaming in through the window in the door and threw one of the blankets onto the floor. He knelt, weeping and bleeding, to the rough wool and began to pray.

  At 6:34 the next morning, Officer Brandon Hollister walked into the small police substation in LaGuardia’s International Concourse and flipped on the lights. A loud thud and some yelling came from the holding cell. He shook his head and walked over to the counter in the back that held the coffee pot. First things first, after all, he thought.

  The officer pulled the pot from the machine and groaned. The damned night shift hadn’t emptied it last night and now he had to do it. “Simple darn courtesy,” he mumbled.

  A loud bang on the holding cell door made him jump, sending the day-old coffee splashing to the floor. “Aww, man,” he grumbled before looking over his shoulder at the door. “Hold on, dude,” Brandon shouted at the person inside the cell. “I’ll get your breakfast in a minute.”

  He dumped the coffee and rinsed the pot before refilling the reservoir with water. All the while, the detainee in the holding cell kicked and punched at the door, and it sounded like he’d screamed himself hoarse. After twenty-one years on the NYPD, he’d seen it all, and some nutjob coming down from a high wasn’t about to ruin his morning routine.

  After dumping the used coffee grinds into the trash and adding fresh ones to the basket, he pressed the brew button. He leaned against the counter and stared at the door as the blows from inside made it shudder. “Good Lord, they must’ve got themselves one heck of a tweaker last night,” he chuckled aloud. The incessant pounding and screaming was starting to make him nervous. It usually stopped after a minute or so, but this had been going on since he walked in the door.