by Brandt Legg
“I skimmed it,” Flint said. “But I got the gist.”
“Yeah, war. Our enemies have the advantage and start hitting us with terror strikes here and abroad. Imagine if it isn’t just the rag tag groups, but nation-states, even Russia and China, all covertly sponsoring attacks.”
“Notre faiblesse cachée,” Flint said in a perfect French accent.
“Exactly.”
They both knew the story. Back in the late 1960s, as the Cold War grew increasingly hot, a member of Red Envelope coined the phrase after the Soviets “turned” several agents in France to be double-agents for the USSR. Notre faiblesse cachée translated to “our hidden weakness.” The analysts painted several scenarios where if the US was hit by multiple small attacks while in the middle of a national crisis, such as Vietnam protests, assassinations, and, later, Watergate, the mighty United States could crumble.
Gunner, in the middle of preparing his rural Training Fields compound for an imminent attack, took a call from his source.
“How bad?” Gunner asked, instead of “Hello?”
“We didn’t need Austin,” the source said.
“Austin was an accident.”
“There can be no more accidents.”
“Is that why you called?”
“They are close.”
“How much time do I have?”
“Thirty-six hours,” the source said slowly. “Maybe less, depending on Chase Malone.”
“Is he onto us, too?”
“Not yet, but he’s a smart man. He’ll figure it out.”
“Can you buy us more time?”
“Not without raising suspicions.”
“There’s a way. This is the time to take chances,” Gunner said, silently congratulating himself for authorizing the strike on Balance Headquarters.
“There’ll be agents coming for you, Gunner. Make sure you aren’t there when they arrive, or this will have all been for nothing.”
“We’re winning.”
“Don’t fight. Run and live to fight another day.”
Being in Austin, Flint didn’t feel out of place in his old white cowboy hat, and, once again, he remembered how comfortable he felt in dusty dance halls.
He’d accomplished a lot in a few hours. Austin, now the only city to have experienced two Fire Bomber attacks, was swarming with investigators and high level agents. He’d talked to all the regulars, plus local officials, about the firebomb strike on MatterTech, but he’d also been able to question the NSA’s Fire Bomber point person about the Shasta wilderness fire and the attempt on Chase and Wen—did the NSA have any data on a connection to the fire and the Bomber? He’d also grabbed an in-person conversation with the lead FBI investigator. Yet, even with all those important matters, as he stared down at his scuffed up cowboy boots, Flint Jones had to admit he’d rather have stayed in Taos with Tess.
In a happy coincidence, Flint learned that Michael Hearne was in Austin playing a gig and wasted no time getting there. Hearne’s familiar picking style as he sang “The Songwriter,” one of Tess’ favorites, made Flint wish she could have been there.
He’d learned a lot about the case, and felt sure the ring was closing in on the Fire Bomber. Still, the connection and threat to Chase was as perplexing as ever. He watched Hearne on stage, eyes closed, singing out the line, “. . . to a magical place where we feel we belong where secrets are safe and the medicine strong,” and he felt her in his arms going around the dance floor the night before.
Oh, Tess, he thought. But it might be weeks before he’d catch up with her again.
When Flint put down his beer and looked up to see Tess enter the room, she literally took his breath. He wanted to walk across that old wooden floor, take her into his arms, tell her everything he felt, all the things she knew anyway but they had never spoken, and then kiss her, the kind of passionate, never-ending kiss he’d imagined that neither one would ever forget.
There was too much at stake; not just the lives of Chase and Wen, or whoever the Fire Bomber’s next victim would be, but something more. When she reached him he did get an embrace, not the one he wanted, not the one people write poems about, but it felt good. She felt good. They both held on longer than they ought to, but nowhere near as long as they wanted.
“Shall we dance, or do you want to talk first?” Flint asked.
Tess, wearing a rare skirt and not looking as exhausted as he knew she was, looked up at him as if he’d made a joke, then held out her hand.
Mike Hearne winked his recognition, surprised to see them so far from home. He was singing The Girl Just Loves To Dance. On the first sweep around the room, neither one spoke as they fell back into each other, like putting on that favorite old pair of faded jeans.
“Have you read the report?” Tess asked.
“Yeah.”
“So you know?”
“Yeah. This one’s different.”
Forty-Two
Just after four AM on a warm, moonless night, Ryker, Damon, and Tarsoni left their vehicle almost a quarter of a mile away and moved stealthily toward Chase’s parents’ house. They had been studying the property and the movements of the two security officers via a live feed transmitted in real-time to a tablet computer. A cool breeze told them the prevailing winds were from the north. They knew every detail of the weather, the route, when sunrise would happen, and the exact distance to the neighboring houses.
Once they reached the Malone's property, each man concealed himself behind a large hedge and took one last look to orientate themselves. The three of them had been on countless operations such as this, facing far more opposition, in hostile environments, with zero intel.
“This,” Ryker had said, “will be so easy, it might actually be fun.”
They each snapped on a special wrist screen which, at the touch of a finger, would display high-altitude drone footage of the property—they would know where everyone was at every moment.
Flint had assigned three shifts to protect Chase’s parents. Each two-person team were retired San Francisco police officers who knew procedures and the area well. The first pair had gotten off at nine PM, the two on now still had less than an hour remaining of their shift. The two officers were experienced, but it was their first night, and they were tired and ready to head home. However, they were also professionals and remained alert. One of them had just returned from their small van parked in the circular driveway. It was a makeshift headquarters for hot coffee and supplies. He headed to the front door of the house, where he’d spent most of his time patrolling. The officer didn’t see the two men, dressed in black, waiting in the bushes.
In the backyard, Damon pulled the first officer down from behind and quickly injected him with a specially formulated anesthetic that would leave him out for at least an hour. Seconds later, near the front door, Tarsoni and Ryker jumped the other officer. Ryker thought they should terminate the security officers, but Westfield had given strict orders that this was a no-kill mission.
“Use the parents as bait to draw out Chase,” he told them. Then “after having a talk with Chase” and extracting whatever information he had concerning the Fire Bombers, an operation codenamed horUS, and anything else relevant, they were to make sure that the billionaire should die in a staged accident.
They took the body of the second officer around back and laid the two unconscious men behind the shed, quickly cuffing their arms behind their back with zip ties and gagging them in case the drugs wore off early.
Entering the home with equal precision, again Ryker and Tarsoni went in the front while Damon took the rear. Picking the locks almost instantaneously and, although they were prepared, hearing no alarm, the three men moved quickly up the stairs, silently entering the master bedroom with light-equipped guns drawn.
“Where’s the husband?” Ryker asked as Tarsoni grabbed Chase’s mother.
She woke with a terrified scream, a look of horror in her eyes.
“Sorry about this,” Damon said, shoving a
gag into her mouth and expertly binding her arms and legs.
“Bring her,” Ryker hissed, leaving the room to search for the missing husband.
Damon threw her over his shoulder as if she were a sack of grain.
“Check those rooms.” Ryker gestured to Tarsoni, touching his wrist pad to see if there was any sign of the husband outside on the grounds.
Damon, still carrying Chase’s mother, followed Ryker down the stairs. A large foyer ran through the center of the house, leading to both the front and back doors. The living room connected to the back corner of the entrance hall across from the kitchen. Damon dumped Daisy on a leather couch in that room and, after a quick glance in the kitchen, rejoined Ryker, who was already heading down the hall opposite the stairs.
“Where is this guy?” Ryker whispered.
Damon pointed at two doors ahead, indicating he’d take the one on the right. Ryker took a couple of steps and reached for the door on the left. At the same time Damon disappeared into the room on the other side of the hall, Ryker reached for the knob.
Suddenly the door flew open fast and wide, slamming him into the wall and smashing his head. As Ryker cried out a string of profanities, Chase’s father bolted down the hall toward the front of the house.
Damon dashed after the father without stopping to see if Ryker was okay. Zack Malone ran full speed into Tarsoni, the two of them landing in a heap right in the middle of the foyer. Zack, twenty years older than his attacker, somehow came up with the gun. He jammed his knee hard into Tarsoni’s groin, rolled, cradling the Heckler & Koch MP5SD 9mm suppressed submachine gun he’d just obtained from Tarsoni, and pointed it at Damon.
Forty-Three
Back at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Powder made a point, this time, to watch the news while waiting for his flight to board. The blast at CrownSight, a manufacturing plant located in Tempe, dominated the cable news displayed on screens throughout the departure gates. The bits of conversations he picked up while moving through the facility were also peppered with the story.
The Fire Bomber had struck again.
Powder continued to check other news sites on his phone, desperate for information. There had been no casualties. Powder had been so extremely careful he’d nearly been caught. CrownSight, like so many tech firms, had brought in extra security since the bombings began. The Doomsday explosives had been left, as usual, in a vehicle by a separate member of the militia hours before his arrival. CrownSight’s team had spread a wide circle. Powder had to wait to pick up his pack and the rest of the gear until a patrol cleared the area.
The real trouble began once he’d planted the Doomsday inside the manufacturing plant. He’d been unwilling to detonate until he was certain, beyond any doubt, that the building had been fully evacuated.
They hadn’t been able to use the bogus firefighters because of all the added security roaming the building and grounds. Instead, the far riskier move of bringing in a legitimate fire crew led to police in full force, including a bomb squad and SWAT team arriving on the scene. Powder had no one to tell him if the place had been emptied out. He knew the bomb squad had three officers inside. He’d seen them go in with his night vision binoculars from a half a mile away. Finally, he used a call relay to telephone the local police and inform them that the bomb squad had ninety-seconds to vacate their position or they would become another statistic in the Fire Bomber’s story.
Fifty-three seconds later, the first one came out. At seventy-seven seconds, number two showed. At eighty-nine seconds, nothing. Powder knew he needed to detonate—threats could not be made and not carried out, there was still too far to go until the mission was complete. Ninety—Powder hesitated, not wanting another innocent death. Ninety-one—his finger hovered only a millimeter above the button. Ninety-two—Power took a deep breath. Ninety-three, ninety-four—the two officers that had come out were looking back at the entrance as if contemplating going back inside. The police had widened the parameter around the building, anticipating the explosion. Ninety-five, ninety-six—Does this guy want to die? Ninety-seven . . .
He couldn’t wait any longer. Sorry, buddy. You’re a dead man.
Powder pushed the button.
The epicenter was one-hundred-fifty yards from the entrance. The fireball formed like a small mushroom cloud and spread out in a melting radius of white heat and erupting smoke. The “dead man” ran from the building only a few feet ahead of the wall of fire exploding behind him, like a Hollywood-made finale. Cautiously, Powder made his way to the car, happy that apparently no one had died, but upset that he’d come just half a second from taking out another victim.
People will die, that’s the curse of war.
The airline announced boarding for his flight. He thought about the destination. The next bomb would be the most important since Gunner had lit the first match.
Chase yawned as Dez woke him around four-thirty AM. “We’re still alive?” He glanced over at the HK MP5/10 submachine gun and the SIG Sauer 9mm pistol that security had given him last evening when they were expecting the Bomber or more assassins.
“Appears we’re breathing, and the building remains standing,” Dez said. “But the Bomber did strike . . . in Phoenix. CrownSight was the target.”
“Ray Griffin,” Chase said, naming the CEO of CrownSight whom he and Dez knew well. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah, no casualties, back to the Fire Bomber’s regular M.O.”
Chase got up from the sofa where he’d crashed. “So I guess we’re off the hook tonight?”
“Apparently.”
“Where’s Wen?”
“She’s waiting for SEER. I inputted the CrownSight attack into the system.”
“Good.”
“And she’s on the phone.”
“At four-thirty in the morning? With who?”
“I don’t know. But she’s talking about CrownSight and defending the fact that she’s in this building.”
Chase realized she could only be on with the Astronaut, who had predicted that the Balance Headquarters would be hit tonight. Chase had brought in nearly a hundred security people, activated and installed dozens of new surveillance cameras.
“All quiet here?” Chase asked, heading to the door.
“Nothing but our security people bumping into each other.” He caught up to Chase in the hall, about to go into SEER. “It could still happen. Not now, but maybe when darkness rolls around again.”
“I know,” Chase said. SEER and the Astronaut had been wrong because the input data was flawed, or rigged, or something. “The Fire Bomber is smarter than we are, and that is the most terrifying thing of all. Whoever’s doing these attacks has anticipated every possible method that would be used to find them or predict where they would hit next. But we’re getting closer.”
“Maybe too close,” Wen said, as Chase and Dez joined her in the windowless inner SEER server room. “Way too close.”
Forty-Four
Zack, having never fired any kind of gun in his life, squeezed the trigger as if he were a special ops soldier on his hundredth mission. Damon, with training and experience on his side, hit the floor, rolling back into the hall as the bullets lacerated the sheet rock wall above him. At the same instant, Ryker, nose bashed and dripping red from the impact of the door, spit blood and charged down the hall toward the Foyer. Tarsoni recovered enough to grab Zack’s leg as he was struggling to escape into the living room. Zack kicked Tarsoni hard with his other foot while managing to flip onto his back and fire the 9mm submachine gun at his assailant. The bullets ripped into his chest and up his neck like red footprints in snow. Tarsoni, a bloody mess, died instantly.
Chase’s father dove into the living room and scrambled around a big armchair. He spotted Daisy, who had somehow managed to roll herself off the couch, squeezed between an end table and the wall. Intent on nothing but her rescue, he lunged toward her. Their eyes met in an instant of panicked love and relief, then her expression changed to absolute terror.
> Zack spun around in time to see Ryker’s blood soaked face draw into an evil smile as he fired his gun. Chase’s father squeezed his trigger at that same moment, but he never saw the results of his shooting, collapsing onto the hardwood floor in more pain than he’d ever imagined possible. Upon impact, his borrowed submachine gun fell from his hands and slid several feet. After that, everything became a paralyzing, muffled blur.
Damon scooped up the gun as he and Ryker flew into the living room. Daisy, no longer hiding, had kicked over the end table and a lamp while screaming through her gag. Rolling toward them, flexing like a snake, she groaned as if dying herself. Damon couldn’t tell if she was trying to get to her dead husband, or attempting to attack them. Probably both. He swallowed hard, regretting that the mission had deteriorated to such a point—the needless death of Chase’s father and Tarsoni completely breached protocol and compromised positions. But they were still in it, and had to still make it out.
“We’re exposed. You’re going to have to get the car,” Ryker said. “We can’t stay here, and we sure as hell can’t carry her a quarter of a mile without attracting attention.”
“It’s not light yet. Let’s risk it,” Damon said.
“No,” Ryker said, kicking Daisy, who had by now reached him and was contouring her body in an attempt to knock him over. “Look at her, she’ll wake the world.”
“We could give her a sedative.”
“Go! Now!”
Damon, not in the mood to argue anymore, went to the front door. He tried to look out the narrow window next to it, but it was that frosted and distorted-type of decorative glass that let in light but nothing more. Damon slowly pulled the door open and stepped out. The window he’d just tried to look through exploded, sending glass and metal shards across the foyer. He fell back into the house, kicking the door shut as two more shots splintered the wood trim.
