by Fritz Galt
Lester Friedman and Defense Secretary Murrow Hughes watched the Pentagon’s top general, Leo Pollo, stand over a sweating signals officer as one frantic message after another came over the speakers.
First it was a pilot’s voice as intimate and clear as a lover’s whisper, “This is Whiskey Five Two. We’ve acquired the target.”
“Whiskey Five Two, you have permission to fire,” Leo said, stepping forward.
“I have engaged the target. It is dust.”
Lester turned to Murrow Hughes with an exuberant, “Yes!”
Leo raised an eyebrow, but managed to maintain his composure.
Then the AWACS came over the airwaves. “The target has just disappeared off the radar screen.”
Leo turned to the secretary of defense and the director of the CIA with a satisfied smile. “I believe that’ll do it for the evening.”
Lester was trying to contain his excitement and maintain some sort of professional dignity. “And I thank you from the bottom of my heart. America thanks you.”
Then he sank into a chair and closed his eyes with relief.
Congressman Ralph Connors didn’t have the time or desire that night to dress properly before driving off to the Pentagon.
The secretary of defense had just phoned him with devastating news. Their pilots had found Ferrar and shot his plane out of the sky.
As he wheeled through the streets of DC, Connors grabbed the cell phone out of his flannel shirt pocket and dialed the head office of the FBI.
“Since when are we firing rockets at Ferrar?” Connors yelled over the phone at Hank Gibson.
“I wasn’t aware—” Hank began.
“How could you not be aware? You’re leading this operation, aren’t you?”
“Apparently the military thought it was their call.”
“Like hell it is,” Connors shot back. “They don’t have all the pages of the game book. What kind of an operation are you guys running over there anyway?”
“I’m at a loss—”
“Yeah? Well let me tell you something right now. I want to see the FBI, the CIA and the military top brass all assembled in one place, singing from one song sheet at the Pentagon in twenty minutes. This is no way to run a railroad.”
After Connors suffered a few hassles with the guards at the Pentagon parking lot, a call from Leo Pollo helped free his car and he drove straight into the basement, screeching to a halt at the elevator lobby. To hell with striped parking spots.
Then he noticed the limo of the CIA’s Lester Friedman already there. “Now we know who’s been pulling the strings around here,” he muttered to himself.
Connors burst into the Ops Center from one door just as Hank Gibson of the FBI entered from the opposite direction. Between them stood Leo and Lester like two cats savoring the aftertaste of a canary dinner. Behind them sat the secretary of defense, an eternally serious look written across his furrowed brow.
“Where is the president in all this mess?” Connors demanded.
The three others gathered together shoulder to shoulder in front of the Secretary of Defense, as if to form a united front.
“Why the sudden charm offensive, Connors?” Leo asked.
“Charm? You haven’t seen charm yet. Now who’s leading this screwed-up operation?”
From behind the wall of men, Murrow Hughes spoke quietly. “The president has made it abundantly clear to myself and to the attorney general that this sort of work is at an operational level, and he doesn’t want to get involved with the details. Not only does he want deniability if the press gets involved, but he needs to maintain a calm veneer for the public. It’s a question of civil order, of not causing panic.”
Connors could see the president’s dilemma. He was caged in. If he went public, the terrorists would win. If he kept it under wraps, the terrorists would be able to enact their evil plan.
“If the president’s out of this,” Connors said, “I suggest that your three agencies work out whose job this is. We’ve got a CIA officer running a mission within the United States with the FBI on his back and the full might of the American military trying to blast him off the face of the earth.”
“No,” Lester corrected. “We’ve got a turned CIA special operations commando leading an al-Qaeda operation to nuke the United States.”
Secretary Hughes stood up and walked into the full light. “I’m afraid we have a problem here. We need the input of all our agencies, and we don’t have anybody taking leadership in this matter. May I suggest that this remain a case for the FBI? They can work with state, county and local law enforcement, liaise with the CIA on an as-needed basis and keep the Pentagon apprised at all times. Here at the Ops Center, we will evaluate every piece of information and determine the proper and prudent course of action from the standpoint of national security.” He looked at Hank and Lester for consensus.
Hank nodded. “This is principally an FBI matter now. I’ve already called the energy secretary to dispatch his Nuclear Emergency Search Team from Nevada to San Francisco.”
“See?” Murrow Hughes said to Congressman Connors before leaving the room. “The bombs are the last piece to the puzzle, and Hank Gibson already has the situation well in hand.”
Just then a voice squawked over the speaker. “Sir, we’ve got a slight discrepancy.” It was the head of NORAD calling the secretary of defense from his bunker deep within a granite mountain outside Colorado Springs. “We have a conflict of information here. It appears that the target was heading straight for a range of mountains when it was struck. It would have crashed anyway.”
The room fell silent.
“What does that mean?” Connors demanded to know.
“It means he’s dead,” Lester said. “He would have died anyway.”
“No,” General Leo Pollo said coolly. “It appears that Mr. Ferrar has flown the coop once more.”
“How could that be?” Lester asked, his voice suddenly sounding dry.
“It means,” Leo interpreted, “that he bailed out somewhere between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean.”
As Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office, Perry O’Donnell shivered in his modern office on the 13th floor overlooking Golden Gate Avenue.
It was midnight on the West Coast. He watched nervously as the date on his wall clock flipped to December 11.
Fog had rolled over the bay and smothered San Francisco in another of its frosty winter nights.
But it wasn’t the lack of heat that caused Perry’s involuntary shiver. In fact, he was feeling plenty of heat from Washington to find the al-Qaeda terrorists before they turned his city into the next Hiroshima. It was the sheer impossibility of the task—finding a handful of terrorists in twenty-four hours in so huge a metropolitan area—that made his blood run cold.
The FBI’s lead agent in San Francisco, Perry was point man for a nationwide manhunt. And everyone was descending on his city.
He had spent a career moving from one field office to another, from his native Brooklyn to San Francisco, getting to know each jurisdiction like the thick veins on the back of his hands. By now, he knew the area like a seasoned cop.
He had agents at the airports. He had staff calling all the police precincts from Oakland to San Jose. The only thing he had to go on was the physical description of a metal container four feet high, eight feet wide and ten feet long. Counter to his training to avoid ethnic bias, he threw in a description made out of whole cloth: look for Middle Easterners.
The call from FBI Director Hank Gibson in Washington had been the final blow. A rogue CIA operative was also on the loose, potentially masterminding the plot. At least Perry had a name, a photo and a description of the suspect: one George Ferrar, a handsome looking guy, from his most recent security photo. Black hair, square jaw, dark brown eyes, rugged physique.
But looking for one man in the vast urban sprawl of the Bay Area and the untamed forests of Northern California was going to be more than tough. It was next
to impossible.
Nevertheless, he had given Ferrar’s name to Eddie Lucas, his Assistant Special Agent in Charge of Organized Crime, Drugs and Terrorism to look into connections with Ferrar.
Perry’s office was working the phones feverishly for leads on the bombs and fugitive, and thus far, nothing had materialized. They had every associated agency working the problem for them. They had contacted the California Highway Patrol, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration & Naturalization Service, the United States Customs Service and all the city police departments within the area of his jurisdiction. He was getting calls every other minute from the FBI divisions in Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego as well.
But he still didn’t have the feeling that the net was tight enough.
Eddie Lucas had dug up the only promising lead and was going at it full tilt. Eddie had phoned the CIA and learned from Ferrar’s personnel file that he had once been a student at the University of California at Berkeley during the Seventies. He had had a girlfriend there named Bonnie. If she still lived in Berkeley, admittedly a small chance, Ferrar might be holed up there.
Eddie had called the FBI’s Resident Agent in Oakland to look for all former Berkeley coeds named Bonnie specifically in Ferrar’s age range and to crosscheck the names against the Bay Area phone book.
Perry O’Donnell sighed. It was a slim chance, but his only hope.
Chapter 25
Ferrar stood waiting at the bus stop on Castro Street in San Francisco, muscle-worn and weary from a night spent flying evasive maneuvers, parachuting over rocky terrain and hitchhiking in a beat-up pickup. He had spent the last few hours in transit also fighting the demons of his past with Bonnie.
He remembered this same bus stop from a previous, aborted trip to see her. He had tracked her down several years earlier, found her phone number, jotted down her address from a telephone book, screwed up his courage and ventured out to discover what had become of Bonnie Taylor.
He had gotten to the foot of a set of stairs that led to a mysterious house in the affluent neighborhood of Twin Peaks. He remembered that he had taken one glance up the steps and kept on walking. After all, what if she had seen him? He had had no right to barge back into her life and potentially damage any permanent relationship she might have formed with somebody else. For all he knew, she was married. He was no home-wrecker.
It was amazing how little he knew about her life for the past two decades. The last he had seen her was saying good-bye to her on campus as she headed off to Connecticut for the Coast Guard. Or was she saying good-bye to him?
How could she have forgotten that brilliant summer in Bar Harbor when everything had been so perfect? He would pick her up after work at The Trap, where she was spending the summer waitressing for rich Bostonians on their vacations. They would sneak down the back alley and avoid the souvenir shops and lobster joints and head for her house for a stimulatingly new, but inevitable romp between the sheets.
On weekends, they would escape the flotilla of ferries and whale watching boats and row out to his family’s deserted cottage. Barefoot, braless, her hair down, she had come on to him in the woods, on the shoreline, on the pier. He had tried repeatedly to direct her thoughts toward the future, but she had sprung back from his ideas like a trampoline artist, chasing him back into the present. The future was something she never dealt with well.
And after she had left college, she had never looked back. She had never written or tried to contact him in any way. She was off living in her eternal present.
But as he stood there in the predawn light of Castro Street, the exhaust fumes of cars in his face, he realized that her future had finally arrived. And so had her past.
All he had left in his pocket to catch the early morning bus up the hill was a pair of quarters, jingling in his pocket against his cell phone, a roll of Lifesavers and the digital spy camera from the listening post in Peshawar.
Spry young men walked up and down the street, their bright teeth shining at him. He heard the clatter of coffee cups in Starbucks, the rich gourmet aroma helping him return to the present.
Across the street, the dark Castro Theater was featuring John Wayne in a revival of The Green Berets. The incongruity of that movie playing in the heart of the gay capital of the nation brought a smile. Perhaps Bonnie had reveled in that very sort of irony, being a female serviceman living in a sea of men with cotton candy-pink hair.
His eyes traveled upward to a steady stream of headlights trickling down the hill. He checked for a bus once again. No luck. He’d have to climb up to her house.
Fifteen minutes later and his legs aching, he was lost on a winding road. He was beyond the busy streets and wrapped in a thick blanket of fog.
Stopping beneath a dim streetlight, he read the street sign on the pole. Corbett. His heart suddenly paused. He had been there before. It was Bonnie’s road. Her house lay somewhere up above him in the darkness and mist.
He asked himself one last time. Was he doing this for Bonnie? He and Tray made a terrible one-two punch. The only thing she would get out of him stepping out of the fog and into her life was that the bomb might not go off. She would have her life back, but in emotional shambles.
However, the city would not end up in shambles. He was doing this to stop the bomb.
Walking slowly, he ran his fingers over the pebbly surface of a concrete wall. San Francisco had many such walls holding back the hillsides. But this was no ordinary wall. It was Bonnie’s wall.
He shuffled several feet further until he felt a break in the wall.
Shivering in the impenetrable fog that poured over Twin Peaks, he began to climb the steep steps. Near the top, he reached some thickets. He stopped and felt around. There was a small wooden gate.
A light glimmered through the bushes.
There had to be a back entrance with a garage, some more accessible way for people to enter the house. He slipped along the low wooden fence and circled the property. Reaching the far side, he saw a floodlight burning from a garage onto a stone path that led to a back door.
The door was just opening. A man in Coast Guard dress whites and a service cap stepped out and turned back briskly to close the door. Her husband perhaps?
The man turned, his shoulder boards reflecting in the light.
It was Tray Bolton.
Ferrar slipped the roll of Lifesavers from his pocket and was fortunate enough to snap off a few pictures before Tray passed him.
Tray popped up the door of a silver 512 Testarossa with its distinctive wing-shaped doors and side air-intake system. It didn’t look good, a terrorist in Coast Guard uniform driving a twelve-cylinder drug-trafficker’s car.
The automobile roared to life, waking some nearby birds, and zoomed away down through the mist.
Ferrar advanced on the house at once and rang the doorbell.
There was no answer. Lights still burned inside. Bonnie had to be there.
He rang again, pressing the bell insistently.
Still no answer.
Fine. He leaned a shoulder against the door and shoved. It was locked. Squeezing between bushes that fronted the house, he made his way to a window. Prying upward on one, he found it locked as well.
He took off a leather shoe and hammered the glass near the lock. It shattered neatly without much sound.
He slipped the shoe back on, unlocked the window and slid it open. Within seconds, he was inside.
The house was spacious and simply furnished with a cleanly swept fireplace.
He moved swiftly from room to room, calling out Bonnie’s name. Again, no response. She was nowhere to be found.
But something helpful did catch his eye. A computer sat in a small office just off her bedroom.
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Eddie Lucas spun away from his computer and caught his own reflection in the nighttime window. He had a determined look on his weary round face.
“Whatcha got there?” his boss Perry O’Donnell shouted across the
room.
“Pay dirt,” Eddie said, and waved a single sheet of paper. He crossed the room to explain.
He had spent most of the night hunting down Ferrar’s former girlfriend, Bonnie X. It had taken him an hour to compile a list of “Bonnies” among University of California alumni. Comparing that list of names with Bay Area phone lists produced an even longer list, numbering in the hundreds. Armed with several sheets of phone numbers and street addresses, he then had to find a way to narrow the list, rather than expand it.
At that point, he had started putting the staff to work calling every number. The standard question of “Do you know a George Ferrar?” met with more than a dozen “Do you know what time it is?” replies. But it did yield several positives and some maybes.
As he explained to Perry, he would have to personally handle it from there.
“Okay, take some men with you and hit the streets,” Perry advised. “The time bomb is ticking.”
“Where should I start?” Eddie asked.
“Any in Berkeley?”
“None. I’ve got four in San Jose.”
“Computer geeks. Forget ’em.”
“Two in Palo Alto.”
“Eggheads. Leave ’em for last.”
“Three in Marin County.”
“Rich. Maybe.”
“Two in San Francisco.”
“Bingo,” Perry said. “That’s where you’ll start.”
Ferrar lost no time attaching the spy camera to Bonnie’s Macintosh. She had a cable hanging out of her computer, and he simply plugged it into the USB port on his roll of Lifesavers.
Seconds later, all three photos had automatically appeared on her machine. Ferrar leaned in close to examine the pictures. The date had been stamped in the corner of each snapshot. All the images needed was a little more brightness and contrast, which he was able to add quickly using her software. Within half an hour, he was ready to transmit them to Congressman Connor’s office.
