Sleeper Cell

by Chris Culver

  Even though they were trying to flee, the motorcade was still in a heavily populated residential area. The Secret Service wouldn’t risk going eighty or ninety miles an hour for fear of hitting a civilian trying to cross the street. Not only that, the curve in the street and the generally poor condition of the asphalt wouldn’t allow them to speed more than fifty or sixty. Batul knew when to strike.

  “Ashhadu Alla Ilaha Illa Allah, Wa Ashhadu Anna Muhammad Rasulu Allah.”

  The president’s limousine came next. Batul’s finger hovered over the switch. He held his breath.

  “Allahu akbar.”

  As the driver’s door passed his position, Batul depressed the plunger on his switch and breathed his last, an exalted smile on his face.

  Despite its massive weight, the explosion rocked the car. The rear end fishtailed violently, throwing the occupants against the doors and then back to the floor. The driver regained control of the vehicle and floored the accelerator. President Crane gasped and then coughed.

  “I think I just broke a rib,” he said.

  “Can you breathe?” asked Navarro, already reaching forward for an oxygen bag embedded in the divider between the front and rear seat compartments.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Get off me. Everybody get off me.”

  The Secret Service agents atop him repositioned themselves to give the president more room, but no one got up.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re staying here until we’re clear,” said Navarro.

  “Are we hit?” asked Senator Hill.

  Navarro popped his head up to look around. A black, billowing cloud rose up behind them. Three black SUVs swerved around it, following them. His team frantically checked in, trying to ascertain the status of the president as well as the rest of the protective detail. Navarro keyed his microphone. As the team leader, he silenced the line with a push of a button.

  “Stagecoach is rolling. Cohiba has minor injuries. Roadrunner, coordinate with locals. We need ambulances. Halfback, what is your status?”

  Navarro paused for a moment. Halfback was the chase vehicle, one of the decoys. They had stashed the first family in it.

  “Halfback, respond.”

  No voice came on the line. Navarro felt a catch in his throat.

  “Halfback is down, then. Nichols, are you alive?”

  He waited a second, praying his old friend could still breathe.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have tactical authority on scene. Birds are inbound. Coordinate with Magic. We are proceeding to Cowpuncher. Stagecoach out.”

  The interior of the presidential limousine plunged into silence, but it lasted only a moment before three more explosions blasted behind them in rapid succession. These felt farther away than the earlier devices. Immediately, the tactical team on the ground began sounding off, but no one seemed to have been hit. His team would figure out what happened, but for the moment, Navarro needed to focus on the situation in front of him.

  “Where’s my family?” asked President Crane.

  “We’re working on that, sir,” said Navarro. “I need you to stay down and calm.”

  “Where’s my goddamn family?”

  “Sir, you’ve got broken ribs and potential internal injuries,” said Navarro, trying to sound soothing. “I need you to stay calm until we arrive at Air Force One.”

  The president struggled beneath the Secret Service agents and gasped and then shouted at them to get up. In addition to transporting the president to safety, the Beast could turn into a mobile operating theater with a few presses of a button. It had several pints of blood on reserve in a refrigerator built into the door in case the president was shot. It also had a full complement of surgical instruments and drugs. Normally, a physician would have traveled with them, but he evidently hadn’t made it into the car in time for their evacuation. Navarro looked to one of the other agents in the protective detail and gave an order he never thought he’d give.

  “We need to sedate him. There are syringes of midazolam and haloperidol in the cabinet. Get me a small one.”

  The agent hesitated, but then reached into the drug cabinet. Everything in there was already carefully measured for the president’s physiology. He pulled a syringe out and handed it to Navarro. Navarro popped the cap and then hovered over the president’s thigh.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but this is for your own good,” he said, jamming it into the muscle. The president kicked and fought at first, but then his movements slowed as the drugs passed through his body. The drug combination was often used in psychiatric emergency rooms to sedate patients who presented a danger to themselves or others. President Crane would have a hell of a headache, but he wouldn’t hurt himself further by fighting them.

  The drive to the airfield seemed like the longest ten minutes of Navarro’s life. The base personnel had already cleared the surrounding area to half a mile, but a competent sniper could still make even that shot. The Beast skidded to a halt approximately five meters from Air Force One. Navarro stepped out and looked around. Nothing moved.

  “Let’s get him in the plane.”

  The president was conscious and aware, but he didn’t fight what was going on around him. Two Secret Service agents carried him to the plane while Navarro escorted Senator Hill. The moment they were onboard, the truck with the staircase pulled back, and the massive jet started rolling toward the runway. Once they were airborne, the plane’s physician would take a thorough look at the president, but in the meantime, Navarro handed him the syringe.

  “President Crane needed to be sedated,” he said. “This is what we used.”

  The physician shook his head. “That was dangerous. The president is not a young man. You should have waited until I was there.”

  “I kept him alive. That’s my job. Do yours.”

  Crane’s doctor didn’t say anything, but he helped the Secret Service agents strap the older man into a beige leather seat. Agent Navarro ran to the communications center above the cockpit and strapped himself into a seat so he could monitor the situation on the ground. An Air Force communications officer synced the duty station at which Navarro sat with the Secret Service’s encrypted digital system. As he did that, the pilot started taxiing down the runway.

  At first, Navarro felt very little, but as the plane built speed, the momentum pressed him back into his seat hard. As the plane’s wheels left the ground, the front of the plane lifted in a steep climb.

  Through it all, Navarro listened to the teams on the grounds. Things were moving fast, but the attack seemed over. No one said anything, but listening to the chatter, Navarro knew he had lost a lot of agents that day. Eventually, as the plane leveled off, a Secret Service agent entered the communications center and walked to Navarro.

  “Sir, the president wants to know the status of his family.”

  Navarro had dreaded this moment because he already knew the answer. President Crane was never their adversary’s target.

  He cleared his throat and leaned forward and keyed the microphone.

  “Roadrunner, this is Agent Navarro on Cowpuncher. The president is asking for a status report on his family.”

  The voice that answered his own sounded strained. It trembled.

  “The situation is still fluid, sir.”

  “Tell me what you can,” said Navarro.

  Roadrunner coughed. “Uhh, Camus is down. Eeyore is down. Pooh Bear is down. Tigger is down. Owl is down. Piglet is down. Roo is critically injured but breathing.”

  “What about Christopher Robin?”

  Navarro could hear the tremble in his communication officer’s voice even as he tried to hide it.

  “We can’t find him. His mom was carrying him. We’re looking.”

  “Do what you can do,” said Navarro.

  “We’re going to get them for this,” said Roadrunner.

  Who or what they were going to get, Navarro didn’t know, but he nodded.

  “Yes, we are,” he said. “Good luck, Roadrunner.�
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  Navarro hung his headset back up and looked to the Secret Service agent who had walked in.

  “Did the first family make it out?” she asked.

  Navarro swallowed hard and shook his head. “Is the chaplain on board?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good,” said Navarro, nodding. “We’re going to need him.”

  Chapter 14

  I walked back to my car and felt the sweat drip from my brow. My shirt stuck to me, and I had mud all over my shoes, but I didn’t care. I had a lead to follow.

  Once I sat down, I took out my cell phone, planning to call Agent Havelock for assistance in tracking down the imam. Before I could get him on the phone, I found I had three voice mails and two text messages from my wife. All of them said the same thing: Please come home.

  New plan, then. I pulled my legs into the car, slammed the door, and drove out of the parking lot, a worried knot growing in my stomach. When I reached the house, I pulled to a stop and ran through the mudroom and into the kitchen.

  “Hello?” I called.

  “In the living room,” said Hannah, my wife. I followed her voice and found her sitting on the couch. She had tear streaks on her cheeks. “The kids are in the basement playing. I didn’t want them to see this. Maybe I shouldn’t have called you. I don’t know. I didn’t want to be here alone if things got ugly.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, putting a hand on her back. “What’s going on?”

  She nodded toward the television. She was watching the news.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows, but it’s bad,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s really bad.”

  I sat down beside my wife on the couch. I didn’t know what channel we had the TV on, but it was broadcasting a live feed from a helicopter hovering over what looked like a school. Smoke billowed from multiple spots on the ground, while first responders sprinted across the grass. There was so much going on that it was hard to see any single thing until the camera focused on a particular spot on the ground. At first, it kind of looked like we were looking at a stick. Then the view zoomed in. It was a leg unattached from its body. Once the details became clear, the view pulled out quickly.

  An anchor immediately came on and apologized. It was the aftermath of a bombing. Dozens of groups had claimed responsibility, but already the network analysts were jumping to conclusions. One said it was obviously the work of sophisticated terrorist groups, possibly working on behalf of North Korea or maybe even Russia. Another said it looked like attacks he had seen in Afghanistan. A third suggested it bore the hallmarks of a certain domestic terror group. I reached for the remote and muted it.

  “Depending on what happened, this could get really ugly,” I said. “We’ll need to stay inside for a few days. If we need to, we can have groceries delivered.”

  My wife didn’t say anything, but fresh tears fell down her face. She drew in a breath and nodded.

  “I hate the people who did this,” she said. She looked at the TV. “You know it’s going to come back to us. It’s going to be al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or al-Shabaab, or some group we’ve never even heard of. How do I tell people we’re not like them? How do I do that? How do I protect my kids?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We were quiet for another few moments. The analysts talked on TV for a while, but then they switched to footage of the actual attack. I didn’t want to see it, but I couldn’t look away. Hannah gasped every time something exploded. I held her hand without saying a word until my little boy came up from the basement. He looked at the two of us and then started to look at the TV. I grabbed the remote and shut it off before he could see anything. Kaden was five. He didn’t need to know we lived in a world where people committed mass murder in God’s name.

  I looked at him and forced a smile to my face.

  “You look sad, Baba,” he said.

  Hannah scooted close to him and took his hand so that she had mine and his. “We’re glad to see you.”

  “Want to wrestle?” he asked, looking at me. I forced a smile to my lips.

  “More than anything in the world,” I said.

  Some things were more important than work, so I stayed home the rest of the day. Hannah and I put the kids to bed that night at about nine. The White House press secretary had held a press conference that evening to say the president had survived the attack with minor injuries, but he gave few details about what had happened. We didn’t tell the kids anything, mostly because we had no idea what to tell them. They weren’t in school, so for the moment, we could control what they were exposed to. I appreciated that.

  After we put the kids to bed, I held Hannah on the couch. I knew a lot of strong, intelligent women, and I was lucky to have them in my life. Hannah stood shoulders above everybody. No matter what happened, as long as I had her and the kids, things would be okay. We’d get through this.

  At a quarter to ten, I kissed her for the last time that evening, and she went to bed. I wanted to join her, but I couldn’t quiet my mind. I kept thinking about what I had seen on TV. The media focused on the president—and rightly so—but the attack had killed hundreds of people outside, too. That meant there were hundreds of families who had lost children or parents or siblings. I didn’t want to think about that, so I forced myself to think about my assignment with the FBI.

  At the time of his death, Jacob Ganim was working a case. His superiors thought he was hunting terrorists, but I hadn’t found anything to substantiate that. Instead, I found pictures of women in hijab. If those women were being trafficked, I could certainly see him investigating. At the same time, though, he could have worked that kind of case under his own name. Instead, he lied to his superiors and hid within Nassir’s group.

  And even that wasn’t enough to keep him alive.

  I needed to go back to the beginning and rethink this. Motive, means, opportunity. That’s what this case came down to. What was Jacob Ganim working on, who wanted him dead, and why?

  Unfortunately, I had no idea how to answer any of that.

  As I paced my living room, trying to put things together, a pair of headlights lit up the front of my house. Hannah and I lived in a sprawling neighborhood with streets that seemed to meander lazily across the landscape. Visitors got lost all the time, but since we lived on a cul-de-sac, they didn’t have to pull into anyone’s driveway to turn around. This was someone who was coming to see us. It wasn’t a colleague or family member because they would have called first. It probably wasn’t someone who wished us harm, either, or they would have pulled up with their headlights off. This was something else.

  I walked to the front door so my visitor wouldn’t get the chance to ring the doorbell.

  The car in the driveway was a dark gray four-door Jaguar, and a tall but thin man in a suit stood near the hood. As I pulled the front door shut behind me, an enormous man stepped out of the passenger door. He was about six foot four and likely weighed well over three hundred pounds. Though he was in his early sixties, he could probably break me in half if he wanted.

  In my internal monologue, I had dubbed him the Hulk, but his actual name was Lev. I didn’t remember his last name. It had been a while since I had seen him, but he was the brother-in-law of Konstantin Bukoholov, the largest supplier of cocaine in the region.

  Though the Hulk was a dangerous figure in his own right, Bukoholov was the real threat. He was intelligent and politically connected at all levels of government both locally and statewide. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn he had people in the Department of Justice as well. I crossed my arms and leaned against one of the support posts on my porch as I looked at the Hulk.

  “What do you want?”

  “My uncle needs to see you,” said the thin, tall man.

  “And you are?”

  “Michael,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to continue. He didn’t.

  “You got a last name, Michael?”

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bsp; “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Now please get in the car.”

  I looked from Michael to Lev and then back. “It’s late. If your uncle wants to talk to me, he can have his lawyer call me. We’ll set up an appointment. That’s how normal people conduct business. They don’t show up at people’s houses in the middle of the night with requests to get in cars. Consider that a tip in case you guys ever pretend to go legit.”

  “Get in the car, Lieutenant,” said the Hulk. He had a high voice that made even the most ominous threat sound a little ridiculous. It was a bit like being ordered around by Mickey Mouse.

  “I’m pretty good here, but thank you,” I said. “If you guys would leave now, I’d appreciate it. I’ve had a long day.”

  “My uncle needs to see you, Lieutenant,” said Michael. “It’s important. Get in the car. Please.”

  I looked at him up and down, sizing him up. His voice was confident and strong. That surprised me. This was a man accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. If I had been holding my cell phone, I probably would have taken his picture and taken it to our organized crime section.

  “Given your uncle’s age, I’m guessing you’ll be taking over soon,” I said. “Good for you. I have the feeling we’ll be seeing more of each other in the not-too-distant future.”

  Michael looked to his father and then back to me. “My uncle has terminal cancer. His doctors don’t give him much time. He wants to see you before he passes away.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. “His dying wish is to see me?”

  “It’s not a wish. It’s a hope. He has something to tell you before he dies.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, but wouldn’t he rather be spending that time with his family?”

  “Yes,” said the Hulk. “Which should tell you how important he views a meeting with you. It concerns your brother-in-law.”