by Mark Wandrey
“I want my phone call.” He nodded, took her things from the ground and slung the pack. He removed a pair of cuffs from his belt.
“Put these on,” he instructed.
“You must be kidding.”
“If I have to put them on you, you won’t enjoy it.” She looked at him closely, then took the cuffs and put them on. With her in tow, Billy headed for the 19th Precinct, about ten blocks away.
* * *
“Agent Volant, can you hear me?” Volant forced his eyes open and saw a man in a white coat flashing a bright light into them. “Ah, there you are.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Volant growled.
“Dr. Alinsky,” he said then turned to examine a device. Volant became aware of the beeping and flashing medical devices surrounding him. He was in a hospital. He was alive. Well, that was something at least.
“What happened?”
“You were blown up,” the man said, then he chuckled at his own wit. “Well, there was an explosion, and you were thrown. The paramedics said they found you against a chain link fence. It likely saved your life.” Pain was beginning to return; his back felt like a Bengal tiger had attacked him.
“How bad?” he croaked.
“You have a slight concussion, three cracked ribs, and a broken left wrist. All in all, not too bad.”
“Good,” he said, sounding better. “Get me some clothes and my gun.”
“Mr. Volant, you aren’t going anywhere. You’re scheduled for surgery in two hours to put some pins in that wrist.”
“No, you’re going to get me a phone and explain just how essential that surgery is. I need to get back to my command.”
“Not really,” the doctor said.
“No, really. Get me a phone or I’m going to twist your pointy head off!” Volant bellowed.
Fifteen minutes later he hung up the phone. The cultists had taken the compound. Twenty-seven were dead, at least 30 taken captive. He’d lost nine agents, the guard, and seven troopers. The rest were scientists and technicians. There were also 50 guardsmen injured. It was a total cockup. But they didn’t immediately need him.
“This surgery,” he asked the doctor, “is it essential?”
“The bones will heal,” Alinsky explained coolly, “however they won’t heal properly. You’d likely lose a lot of mobility as a result.”
“Will I have less use of it during recovery if I have the surgery, than if I hadn’t?” The doctor looked confused. Obviously, no one had asked such a question before. Volant repeated the question.
“I would say no,” the doctor answered. “It’ll be fully immobilized after the surgery, but it would be so painful now, if you tried to do so much as pick your nose, you’d scream yourself hoarse.”
“Fine,” he said, “do it. But, where’s my weapon?”
“The NYPD officer outside has it. There are two of your agents downstairs as well.” Volant grunted. Someone was as paranoid as he was. Good.
“Very well, do the surgery. And wake me up as soon as possible afterward. Do you understand me?”
“Of course,” the doctor said, icicles dripping from the words. Volant nodded. They had an understanding. An hour later, he was in surgery.
* * *
Mindy sat in the small room, handcuffed to a seat, feeling about as dejected as she’d ever felt. She’d been arrested once before, when a drunk boyfriend took a swing at a campus police officer. The room was dingy, noisy, and full of pissed off police officers. Several were wounded during the terrorist attack, and the NYPD historically didn’t take well to cop killers.
When she got to the precinct, the officer who had snapped her up said she wasn’t yet under arrest. He wore street clothes under a tactical vest covered in dust. The tag on his vest said his name was “Det. Billy Harper.” He would have been handsome if he hadn’t just arrested her.
Billy handed her off to a lieutenant who took her ID and asked her the same questions he had asked. She didn’t have to worry about keeping her story straight, because except for the part about receiving an invitation to participate in a secret government program investigating the portal, she’d told the truth.
Mindy managed to absorb quite a few details about what was going on in the city. The cultists who’d attacked the compound were known as the Followers of the Avatar. They held some crazy apocalyptic belief that centered around the portal. She’d stumbled into a damned holy war, over an alien artifact!
After the interview with the lieutenant, he took her to a holding cell, the small room she was now in, and had been for hours. The handcuff was chafing her wrist, and she had to pee. She was also becoming painfully aware she hadn’t eaten for hours and was starting to feel the effects. It didn’t help that the three women she shared the room with all smelled like sweat and ripe sex. They stuck me in a room full of hookers, she thought to herself miserably.
“Mindy Patoy?” a woman at the door asked. She started to raise her hand, only to have it jerked to a stop by the handcuff. She raised the other, dejectedly. The female officer came over and unlocked the cuff, leaving it on the chair. She didn’t put cuffs back on her. “Follow me, please.” Please was better than ordering, she figured. Mindy followed her.
“You need the restroom?” she asked Mindy, who said she did. They stopped by one, and the woman stood outside the stall while Mindy did her business.
Afterward, they went down several hallways. Some of the people they passed were civilians with ID’s clipped to their clothes; others were clearly police. Most took no notice of her whatsoever. Eventually, the officer showed her into a small room with two chairs on opposite sides of a table and asked her to sit on one. The part of her that watched TV expected to be facing a one-way mirror, but she didn’t see any glass or obvious camera. That didn’t mean there wasn’t one, they could have hidden it in the smoke detector overhead, or even in one of the screws in the heavy-duty door frame.
Mindy sat, and the female officer left. She didn’t appear to lock the door. Mindy resisted the urge to get up and check. The table and chairs were bolted to the floor, and the table had a big steel eyebolt in the center with a pair of cuffs locked through the hole. The officer could have locked her to the table. When the door opened again, she didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be inspector Billy Harper with a bag of food and two cups of coffee.
“Decided to feed the condemned prisoner?” she asked sarcastically. He cracked a smile, and she realized he was quite cute, when he wasn’t being a stormtrooper.
“I finished talking with the lieutenant about your case,” he said as he came in and closed the door. The aromas of grease and coffee reached her nose, and her mouth started to water. “I realized no one had bothered feeding you.” Sitting down in the other chair, he took one of the Styrofoam cups for himself, put the other in front of her, and set the bag within her reach. She eyed the bag and tried to feign disinterest. “Falafel, right off the truck,” he told her. “One is veggie, the other is lamb.” She moaned almost silently, and he grinned. “Come on, it’s on me. Eat.” She grabbed the bag and his smile grew.
The coffee wasn’t generic cop-coffee, it was Starbucks, and damned good too. She grabbed the first wrap that came to hand. It was the veggie. The flatbread was warm and recently baked, the veggies gently roasted in olive oil. The sauce carried a subtle flavor of lemon juice and sour cream. She devoured it and found herself looking at the bag inquiringly.
“Go ahead,” the officer told her. “I ate mine while talking to the lieutenant.” She grabbed it. “We’ve finished checking into your story, and didn’t find any inconsistencies.”
“I could have told you that,” she mumbled around a mouthful. The lamb was even better, savory and juicy. She was going to eat every bite, even if it made her sick.
“We called Seattle and spoke to Mr. Binder at SETI.”
“Harold?” she said, surprised. It must have only been six in the morning when they called.
“Yep,” he said, but she could
see the calculating going on behind his eyes. That had been a test too. “The only question we’re left with is the computer.”
“I can’t comment on that.”
He grunted. “Our IT people checked it out. It has full FBI encryption, and it’s up to date. We even called the FBI, and they said it was not stolen, but declined to explain why a customs broker and ex-radio astronomer has one of their ten thousand-dollar encrypted laptops.” Her eyebrows went up slightly. Ten thousand? She finished eating the second sandwich and washed it down with some of the coffee. “We’re certain you aren’t a terrorist; we’re just not certain you aren’t a spy.” She almost giggled at that. He smiled at her expression, and Mindy thought she felt a few sparks flying.
“Then I’m free to go?” she asked, summoning her memories of high school civics class. He sat and looked at her for another minute. She sipped the cooling coffee to avoid fidgeting.
“Yes,” he finally said, and as she almost gasped with relief, he smiled ear to ear. “I’d suggest you stay away from Central Park, Ms. Patoy.”
Not a chance, she thought. “Of course,” she said aloud.
“Then you’re free to go,” he said and stood to go to the door. She sat for a moment before getting up to follow him. The detective took her down the hall to the entry area where a female officer was waiting. She handed Mindy her Osprey backpack. Without realizing they were watching her, she unzipped the bag and quickly went through the contents. The policemen waited patiently.
“Everything there?” Harper asked. Mindy looked up and blushed slightly.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” the female officer said, “it’s your stuff.” Mindy took an extra second and verified the government laptop was there.
“I’m good,” she said and shouldered the bag.
“I’ll let you out,” Harper said and escorted her to the big double doors leading out to the street. Outside, he spoke again. “I’d find a hotel and think about heading back to Seattle.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mindy said. He looked at her using the critical skills a police officer learned from years of dealing with often deceitful criminals. After a second, he chuckled and shook his head.
“Why do I think I’ll be seeing you again?”
“Why, Detective Harper, are you making an inappropriate solicitation?”
He laughed. “Get out of my precinct,” he said and gave a little wave. Mindy left, and she could feel his eyes on her backside as she walked down the steps and into the street. Halfway down the block, she looked back and saw him still watching her. It wasn’t until she turned a corner that she lost sight of him. She took out her phone and began looking for the closest hotel. She needed some rest and a landline.
* * *
As the afternoon wore on in New York City, it was early evening in Cairo, Egypt. The ancient Orman Botanical Gardens just off the western bank of the Nile had been closed to the public for days now. Officials told the public it was an infestation of wasps that were both dangerous and hard to control. It was a weak story which certain intelligence operatives easily saw through.
To make the story even marginally believable, the General Intelligence Directorate of Egypt hired local security to maintain the cordon around the gardens. Only a few intelligence operatives were on site, and they had no idea why officials had quarantined the gardens. Had any of them seen the glowing portal next to a grove of rare palms, they would have known how important their jobs were. Instead, they spent the long evening hours in a car playing cards and drinking. Truth was, the Egyptian government didn’t know what to do with the portal and, as was usual with that deliberative body, argued over the situation.
None in the Intelligence Directorate considered intrusion by a trained force a remote possibility, or they would have assigned more than two disinterested agents in addition to the private security guards. As Cairo began to sleep, black camouflaged figures emerged from the Nile River and silently crept among private boats tied up near the Cairo University Bridge. They used sophisticated NVG, night vision goggles, to scan the area along Nile Street, nestled between the high-rise buildings along the river and the waterway.
The silent observers found what they were looking for by Ahmen Nesen Street, a large private dock which their records indicated would be empty that day. It was. The team fanned out, verifying there was no one on the dock or adjacent to it. They found a security guard at the currently closed El Malke Café on the other side of the street, and neutralized him with a subsonic round. The combination of the low velocity bullet and the suppressor meant the only sound noticeable over the passing truck was the crack of shattering glass as the man fell dead.
More black-clad figures moved north and south of the pier. As they went, they shed their black wetsuits, changed into city workers’ uniforms, and removed warning signs and quick-inflating barricades. Ten minutes after the first of them set foot on dry land, they were setting up road blocks and detour signs at Abd El-Hady Saleh and Wasef Was streets. The light traffic on Nile Street honked and drivers shook their fists in annoyance, but the workers waved and bowed, shrugging their shoulders at the helplessness of the situation. They successfully diverted traffic.
A half hour passed while they established the detour and verified there was no sign of local law enforcement intervention. In that time, a pair of specialists came ashore. They removed their wetsuits to reveal uniforms and quickly headed down the road past the growing line of annoyed traffic on Nile Street. The pair returned in a half hour with two large passenger buses someone had left for them. The traffic workers conveniently let them through, over the loud horn-driven protests of the diverted traffic.
While the bus drivers were gone, still more men came ashore, quickly moving to strategic locations along the river. Some broke into nearby high-rise buildings and went to the top floors where they set up. Sure that no one was observing, a submarine slowly surfaced adjacent to the docks. In only moments, watertight doors opened, and personnel began to swarm out into several dock buildings nearby. The entire operation took five minutes, including already shore-bound personnel jumping aboard and removing a dozen waterproof crates lashed to the rear deck of the submarine.
Just as the last people were jumping clear, the submarine began to submerge once more. Shortly, another surfaced and took its place, and the process repeated itself four more times. When they finished, the five Dolphin II-class subs retreated down the Nile on their silent hydrogen fuel cell powered engines. The normal crew of 27 onboard each sub had been reduced to only 10 for this trip, which made 85 extra spaces. They also used the 10 additional spaces onboard each sub, normally intended for special operators, allowing the subs to deliver a total of 135 people and a great number of equipment cases.
As the lines of honking cars began to grow, the two teams blocking the roads received a simple radio click on the channels they monitored. They abandoned their posts and climbed the nearby hill on foot, slipping off their city workers’ jumpsuits to reveal common street clothing. The buses departed ten minutes later, also heading up the hill, away from the riverside. They left the barricades in place to cause additional confusion.
The nearly overloaded buses with their blacked-out windows climbed the hill to Charles de Gaulle Avenue, where they turned right. The traffic here was busier, but it allowed the huge buses to merge. According to the rules of the road in Cairo, the larger vehicle usually had the right of way. Still, the buses drove slowly, both to avoid drawing attention and to give the dozen men on foot time.
The buses reached the huge traffic interchange at Nahbet Masr, finding it unmanned. During the busy part of the daylight hours, Cairo traffic officers would stand on platforms and direct the hectic flow of traffic through the essentially unmarked and uncontrolled intersection. After hours, the Cairo rules of the road applied. After letting a huge semi-truck towing a container pass by, the buses muscled their way into the lanes heading west.
Starting 100 yards past th
e intersection, hundreds of parking spaces lined the right side of the road. Visitors to the gardens would park there, for a nominal fee, while enjoying the facilities. As the late evening approached, there were only a few cars left. Most belonged to students from the nearby Cairo University Engineering department, where parking was notoriously hard to find. The team on foot had already picked out lines of empty spaces long enough for the buses, and stood by them looking nonchalant. The men nodded to the buses as they pulled in and set their air brakes before shutting them down.
While the buses sat, their engines pinging quietly as the metal cooled, eight of the team moved into the park and contacted the advance unit via infrared laser. They received the proper response, indicating the guards had been dealt with, whereupon they sent radio clicks to the buses, and began spreading out to create their perimeter.
The buses opened, and the occupants began moving out. A few people walking along Nahbet Masr looked on curiously as the buses disgorged 144 people and twice that number of crates. Many of these people were obviously women, and just as obviously pregnant. Who would be going to the gardens in the middle of the night? At the nearby entrance, a pair of men dressed as security guards appeared and opened the chained gates. The strange people began to go in. All but the pregnant women were in teams of two carrying a heavy crate between them. The next day witnesses would report that it had indeed seemed odd, but not nefarious in any way.
None of the off-chance witnesses could know that each passenger on that bus had been hand-selected. They all had several factors in common. They were all between the ages of 19 and 35, they were all able to have children (or in the case of the women were already pregnant), and they all had at least basic military combat and survival training. The training explained why the large group moved with such purpose and order.
The most pregnant woman was less than six months along, so she was still able to do some manual labor. The women past their first trimester arrived in the center of the park and were the first to see the portal. The dais glowed and thrummed with an otherworldly light that made them pause in wonder. They’d received a detailed briefing, yet it lacked firsthand accounts. To see the actual portal up close was astounding, but they quickly overcame their surprise. As the less pregnant women and the men began arriving with crates, they organized the burdens into piles at the side of the portal. Each crate had a number from one to five, indicating their prioritization.
