Sleeper Cell

by Chris Culver

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my home number. Hannah picked up quickly.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s your husband. Sorry I didn’t call last night. I got wrapped up with work.”

  “I thought so,” she said. “Plus, I figured that if you were dead, it would have made the news. You doing okay? You sound tired.”

  She didn’t know how close her joke cut.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s been a rough day. I don’t have a lot of time, but I wanted to call and say I love you. I don’t feel like I do that enough.”

  “You probably don’t, but I’m gracious enough not to mention it.”

  I smiled for what felt like the first time in days. Then I looked up as somebody’s cell phone rang. And then another rang. And then another and then another. Within moments, seemingly everyone in the room was on their phone.

  “Hey, honey, I need to go. Do me a favor: Don’t go out today.”

  “Something going on?”

  “Yeah, but I probably shouldn’t talk about it,” I said. “I’ll call you later. I love you.”

  I hung up the phone before she could say anything. I looked at Captain Bowers, one of the few other people in the room who didn’t have a cell phone pressed to his head. He looked as confused as I felt.

  Within maybe ten seconds of the first phone calls, I heard heavy footsteps pounding down the hall. Curious, I walked toward the door and found a uniformed officer running from the direction of the stairwell. I didn’t remember his name, but he was the patrol division’s watch commander for this shift. I stepped aside so he wouldn’t slam into me. He nodded his thanks and then leaned heavily against the doorway as he caught his breath.

  “What’s going on, Chris?” asked Captain Bowers, nodding to the officer.

  “We’ve got shots fired at Monument Circle. I’ve already pulled everybody I could from the building, but we’ve got at least five casualties so far. Reports are two male shooters, both with semiautomatic rifles. They might be wearing body armor. We’re not sure. We’ve got about three dozen officers en route.”

  I closed my eyes again and swore under my breath as a heavy, nervous feeling began to build in my gut. If these two shooters had cell phones from Nassir’s camp, we would have had a tactical team on them already. I was wrong. Our teams were in the wrong places. Whatever Hashim Bashear and these bad guys had planned, it was starting.

  And we weren’t nearly ready.

  Chapter 41

  Everybody in the room started talking at once. Mostly, it seemed as if they were trying to figure out whose fault this was. I tuned them out and checked my firearm. It was a Sig Sauer P226 chambered for a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson round. It had a good balance of stopping power, ammunition capacity, and weight. I would have preferred a rifle, but this would have to do.

  I started toward the door but felt a hand on my shoulder before I could reach it.

  “Where are you going, Ash?”

  I turned to see Captain Bowers. He had crossed his arms and gave me a knowing look.

  “Monument Circle. There’s an active shooter.”

  He paused before speaking.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me. “You plan to go after two active shooters, both of whom have tactical rifles. They’re possibly wearing body armor. They’re probably carrying other weapons as well. Your hope is, what, that they’ll run out of ammunition by the time you arrive?”

  “Following the cell phones was my plan,” I said, lowering my voice. “Agent Russel might have taken credit for it, but I came up with it, and I was wrong.”

  “You weren’t the only person to sign off on it, Lieutenant,” said Bowers. “I heard it, Agent Russel heard it, Chief Reddington heard it, probably everybody in this room heard it and had the chance to raise objections. It was the best plan we could come up with given the information we had. We were all wrong. Now we’ve got to do our jobs and coordinate a response.”

  I looked across the room at the window and then to Captain Bowers.

  “I’m the lowest-ranked officer here. This isn’t my place. I should be out there.”

  “And if you were a sergeant wearing a tactical vest and carrying a rifle, I’d let you go,” said Bowers. “But you’re a lieutenant in a sweatshirt. Like it or not, you carry a gold badge now. You’re a command officer. It’s not always easy, but this is what we do. We coordinate, we plan, and we let the very well trained officers who work for us do their jobs. Think you can handle that?”

  I bit back my initial response and nodded.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Bowers nodded and held my gaze for a moment before taking a step back. “If it means anything, I’d rather be out there, too. There are a lot of days I wish I had stayed in uniform.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  Bowers and I stayed still for a few moments, but then Reddington called him over. I walked to the window and looked out. My hands trembled, and my feet itched. Intellectually, I understood why I had to stay, but every part of my body told me to ignore Bowers and run four blocks up the street. I drew in deep breaths, forcing myself to remain calm. It was almost surreal looking out that window on empty streets. Four blocks away, people were dying. For all I knew, I had lost colleagues.

  The feeling was like an ember in my gut, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. After a couple of minutes, my phone buzzed, and I answered without looking at it.

  “Yeah?” I asked, silently praying I wasn’t about to receive a report of other active shooters around town.

  “Ash, it’s Paul. I’ve spent the last half hour arguing with the general counsel at a telecom company about Saleem al-Asiri. I finally got a location on him, and now I feel like I just wasted a lot of time. When’d you pick him up?”

  I covered my left ear with a hand to block out some of the conference room’s background noise.

  “We didn’t pick him up.”

  “Then why is he here?”

  I furrowed my brow, not understanding. “What do you mean?”

  “His phone company gave me his coordinates,” said Paul. “He’s at 39.77 degrees north and 86.16 degrees west. That puts him at 200 East Washington Street. Here.”

  “He’s in the building?”

  “Yep,” said Paul. “Or close enough to it.”

  My heart started pounding. I didn’t really know who Saleem was, but he was connected to this. Not only that, he had absolutely no business being anywhere near this building on a Sunday morning—especially not this Sunday morning.

  The shooting at Monument Circle had cleared most of the police officers out of the building, but even on a Sunday, there still would have been hundreds of civilian city workers. I let some of my pent-up energy enter my voice.

  “Who’s in homicide with you right now?”

  “Emilia Rios, Nancy Wharton, and Elliot Wu. I think Wu and Wharton are interrogating somebody in the box.”

  I thought for a minute. “Tell Wharton and Wu to get their suspect outside. Then I need you and Emilia to clear the rest of your floor. Make sure it’s empty. Lock every door you can. Then take the stairwell to the lobby and wait for me.”

  “You’re ordering me to take the stairs,” said Paul. “If this is a fat joke, I don’t appreciate it.”

  “There are a pair of shooters with tactical rifles at Monument Circle right now. If Saleem is here, we’ve got a problem. I don’t want you stuck in the elevator if he starts shooting. Get going. I’m going to need you.”

  Paul paused for a moment. Then he drew in a breath.

  “I’m on it.”

  I hung up my phone and walked to the head of the conference table beside Chief Reddington. He and Bowers were talking about something, but I didn’t bother getting their attention.

  “Hey,” I said. “I need everybody to listen up.”

  For a moment, the room quieted but then conversations picked up again. A few people shook their heads, annoyed. I cupped my hands around my mouth. />
  “Hey, shut up,” I yelled. Everyone in that room was a command officer of one sort or another. Many of them had dozens of officers reporting to them. A couple had hundreds. Even Chief Reddington didn’t order them around, but that was exactly what I planned to do.

  “We screwed up and sent our tactical units to the wrong locations. We’ve got shooters at Monument Circle, and it’s very likely we’ve got another in the building. We don’t know what floor he’s on, but his name is Saleem al-Asiri. He’s approximately sixty years old and has light brown skin and graying hair. We do not know what kind of weaponry he has, but he’s not here for the scenery. It’s time to put on our big-boy pants because we are the only law enforcement officials left on site.

  “Captain Bowers, call the watch commander and mobilize every uniformed officer in the area. Chief Reddington, call Agent Russel and let him know that we’ve got an active threat in our building. Somebody needs to call the canine unit because we need a bomb-sniffing dog. It’d be nice if we could get some bomb squad officers here, too. Everybody else, call your teams and tell them they need to start sweeping their floors.”

  There were a dozen people in that room, and they all stared at me as if I were crazy. Then I clapped my hands as hard as I could.

  “Fucking move.”

  “Richey, call the bomb squad,” said Chief Reddington, his voice calm and smooth. “Tracy, get in touch with Sergeant Ableson with the canine unit. Everybody else, you heard your orders. Get your squads together and start sweeping the building. If you aren’t IMPD, stay in the room. We’ll lock down the floor.”

  Nobody panicked, but people got out of there in a hurry, leaving just three civilians, Chief Reddington, Captain Bowers, and me. I had met all three civilians, but I could only remember two of their names. Two were attorneys, while the third worked in public relations. All of them looked scared. Reddington looked to me and then to them.

  “Folks, why don’t you go to my office? There’s a TV, and there are sodas in the minifridge. Relax as much as you can.”

  Reluctantly, they nodded and left. Reddington crossed his arms.

  “That was a surprising thing you did,” he said. “My subordinates don’t oftentimes bark orders at me.”

  “Given the circumstances, I thought it was necessary,” I said, glancing at Bowers. Smartly, he kept his mouth shut.

  “It might have been,” said Reddington, raising his eyebrows. “For the sake of your job, you should probably consult with me before you give orders to people who can ruin your career with a phone call. Now what do you need?”

  “Good tip,” I said, nodding. “At any rate, in addition to the cell phones, we’ve been looking for a yellow moving truck. Anybody find it?”

  Reddington flicked his eyes to Captain Bowers and then to me. He shook his head.

  “Not that I know of,” said Reddington.

  I looked to the two men. Bowers was in his mid-fifties. Reddington was a little older. Both were in reasonable shape, though.

  “Are you two armed?”

  Reddington looked at Bowers. The captain drew in a breath and sighed.

  “You think the moving truck is around here,” said Bowers, “and you need help searching the parking garage.”

  “Yeah. I thought it was best if I didn’t bring that up with a dozen people in the room.”

  Reddington narrowed his eyes. “What threat does a moving truck pose?”

  “If it’s here, it’s probably carrying a bomb roughly the same size and composition as the one Timothy McVeigh used to attack the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.”

  For a moment, neither man said anything. Then Chief Reddington drew in a long, slow breath.

  “Okay,” he said, nodding. “I’m going to go to my office and get my firearm. We’ll escort the civilians there out of the building, and then we’ll check the parking garage. Are you armed, Mike?”

  Captain Bowers nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Then let’s go,” said the chief.

  We hurried to his office, where Reddington explained the situation to the three civilians still inside. They seemed more than a little relieved at the prospect of getting out of the building. Before leaving, he tossed his suit coat onto his couch and grabbed a pistol and holster from a locked drawer in his desk. We took the stairs to the lobby, where we met Emilia Rios and Paul Murphy. Both detectives carried police-issue M4 carbines, and both wore black tactical vests over their torsos.

  “Stairwells are open and clear,” said Emilia. “We’ve had forty or fifty people come down already, but nobody shot at us or threatened us in any way. Detectives Wu and Wharton are in their car in the parking lot across the street with a guy they were interrogating. If we need them, they can let their suspect bounce. They don’t think he’s a flight risk.”

  “I’ll get them, then,” said Reddington. “Ash, fill your partners in on what we’ve got.”

  The chief jogged out of the building, and I turned to Emilia and Paul. I didn’t give them many details, just that we were looking for a yellow moving truck that might have been holding a very large bomb. Emilia looked at Captain Bowers.

  “Is it too late to call in sick today?”

  “Yes, it is, Detective,” he said. “That goes for you, too, Sergeant Murphy.”

  “She’s the sick one,” said Paul. “I’m the coward.”

  Bowers looked to Emilia. “I hope you get over your illness very quickly,” he said. Then he looked to Murphy. “And I hope you grow a backbone.”

  “Already on it, sir,” said Paul, rolling his shoulders. “If this van is down there, how many suspects do we anticipate finding?”

  Bowers looked to me.

  “Not a clue,” I said. “Nassir said twelve men came after him at his camp. If two are at Monument Circle right now, we could have up to ten here.”

  Paul looked at us and then toward the exterior door. Detectives Wu and Wharton and Chief Reddington were hurrying across the street.

  “If I’m counting correctly, we’ll have seven on ten,” he said, nodding. “It sounds like a terrible porno.”

  “Or a really good one,” said Emilia, brightly. “It all depends on the director.”

  “You two should probably stop talking now,” I said, pulling my firearm out of its holster to chamber a round. “Reddington’s coming in. Check your firearms. We’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter 42

  The City-County Building was a twenty-eight-story building that housed the consolidated offices of Marion County and the city of Indianapolis. On a weekday, the building held a lot of relatively important men and women, and most of them had marked spots in the garage beneath the building.

  The seven of us took the stairwell down and emerged into a poorly lit concrete garage that smelled just faintly of mold and sewage. There were a couple dozen cars and thick concrete jersey barriers to funnel traffic to where it was supposed to go. To the right of the stairwell was an elevator that led to the cells in which the sheriff’s department held men and women on trial. To my left was an inclined ramp that led out of the building.

  Nothing moved.

  “Fan out,” I said. “Stay behind the barriers. The suspects we’re tracking are bad dudes. Don’t try to take them on yourself.”

  I got a chorus of nods as my team spread out. Our footsteps seemed to echo inside the enclosed space. I crept past one barrier and then to another, expecting a dark form to pop up at any moment. None did, but that didn’t stop my heart from pounding.

  The garage wasn’t big. It had a single story and perhaps a couple hundred parking spots. A moving truck shouldn’t have been able to hide in there.

  “Hey, Ash,” whispered a voice to my left. Emilia Rios knelt behind a concrete jersey barrier and pointed toward the entrance ramp. I thought she was telling me a car was coming down, but she wasn’t. The nose of a heavy truck poked out from a shadowed spot beneath the ramp. My fingers trembled.

  It was here.

  I looked to my left and r
ight and started forward. Emilia followed. By the time I reached the truck, my entire team had seen what we were doing and joined us. The truck’s engine was warm but not hot, which meant the bad guys had likely stashed it here earlier today. Emilia climbed onto the truck’s running boards to look in the cab while Bowers and I walked to the rear. The rolling rear door was padlocked shut.

  TV detectives probably would have shot the padlock and opened the door without a problem. In real life, it didn’t work like that. The lock itself was maybe an inch and a half square, giving us a very small target to work with. Not only that, the bumper it rested on was solid steel. Any round that hit that would ricochet and possibly kill the shooter. And even if I hit the lock, bits of shrapnel would tear me apart. Shooting it out wasn’t an option. I needed a plan B.

  “Look around for something I can use to break the lock,” I said. “Crowbar, hammer, anything.”

  For the next few minutes, we scrambled around the parking lot for tools. Thankfully, Detective Wu had a better head on his shoulders than the rest of us and ran outside to his car in which he kept a pair of bolt cutters in his crime scene kit. I cut the lock, handed him the cutters, and rolled the rear door open to expose a nightmare.

  The truck’s cargo hold held at least a dozen black fifty-five-gallon drums. Wires connected each barrel to the one beside it and led into a duffel bag on the floor.

  “Shit,” said Paul, his voice so low I almost didn’t hear it.

  “Unless you know anything about electronics or explosives, you should get out,” I said, reaching up and grabbing onto the handle built into the side of the truck for leverage as I stepped up. The duffel bag held what looked like a home’s electrical panel. I knew how to wire a circuit, but I didn’t know the first thing about explosives. If our bomb squad had an hour or two to study this thing, they might have been able to disarm it, but it was well beyond me. I looked over my shoulder. “Unless one of you happens to be an explosives expert, I suggest we back away slowly and hope we don’t set this thing off inadvertently.”