Shoreline

by Carolyn Baugh

  Nora felt herself shaking as well, and she fought for breath amidst the swirls of smoke. But she had to see if anyone else was coming in. She peered around the corner and out through the gaping holes where the glass doors of the building had been. Three more women stood on the lawn, their guns at the ready.

  A police siren could be heard in the sudden silence; a neighbor must have called 9-1-1, for Nora and Anna had had no time to do so. At the sound, the three women slung their weapons over their shoulders and mounted their motorcycles, gunning the engines.

  “No!” Nora shouted. She tore through the lobby and leapt out through the shattered glass of the entryway, skidding onto the lawn as the bikers peeled away.

  She raced into the middle of the street, planting her feet.

  This time she did not aim for wheels. She shot directly at the closest woman, who crumpled.

  The motorcycle wobbled out of control and plowed into a parked car with a crash that reverberated throughout the street. The approaching sirens drowned out the sound of the engines as the remaining motorcycles turned down State Street and disappeared.

  No. Not again …

  Nora galloped toward the squad car. The driver slammed on the brakes at the sight of her, and she hurriedly holstered her gun and pulled out her badge, holding it aloft.

  “Follow those motorcycles!” she shouted as she ran up to the window. She was gesturing wildly at the place where last she had seen the women. “Call for backup! Do not let them get away!”

  “I need to see your fucking credentials!” the policeman shouted back.

  “I’m showing you my fucking badge,” Nora, outraged, screamed at him.

  “You don’t just shove something in a cop’s face and expect him to chase off wherever you order him,” the cop shouted back.

  Anna was on the lawn now, shouting. “Do what she says, goddammit, Mike!”

  At a word from his partner, the driver of the car punched the accelerator and the car tires squealed as the car flew down the street, skirting the wreckage of the third biker.

  Nora sank to the pavement in the middle of the street, overwhelmed. Anna ran to her side. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine. We need ambulances, Anna. Those people…”

  “I called them.”

  “That little girl…”

  “I called them,” Anna said. She knelt on the ground next to Nora and clutched her shoulders. The late morning air was suddenly swollen with the sound of sirens.

  * * *

  Even as his PD colleagues were attempting to keep the television cameras at a reasonable distance from the crime scene, Mike Szymanowski was under attack from all sides and wasn’t going quietly. “What was I supposed to do? All of a sudden a black woman with a gun is running through the street and then telling me what to do—”

  “What bothered you more?” Nora snarled. “That I’m black or that I’m a woman?”

  Mike snapped, “That you had a gun, okay? It’s not an everyday occurrence in the streets of Erie.”

  “We have a problem with vanishing bikers, Mike,” Sheila was saying. The forensic team borrowed from Erie PD had finished photographing the scene. Now, they were all standing in the middle of the street outside of the International Institute, as the ambulance and EMT workers began the work of carrying out the nineteen bodies from within. The third biker had been disentangled from her motorcycle and carried off to the intensive care.

  “They can’t just have vanished,” he said petulantly.

  Sheila looked at him fiercely. “They vanished. Again. Now, what are we going to do about it?”

  “Well I imagine you are going to question the only perp that your agent didn’t kill and get her to tell you what’s going on.” The accusation of incompetence was explicit in both his tone and his words.

  Nora’s anger burned dangerously hot. Anna saw the look in her eyes and jumped in. “I think we understand now the importance of cooperation. Now that you have met Special Agent Khalil, you will be able to work together in the future for a better outcome.”

  “Yes, well, working together doesn’t mean bossing me around, either,” Szymanowski said.

  “So it isn’t that I’m a black woman, it’s that I dared to give you an order?” Nora asked. “In the middle of a fucking firestorm?” She wasn’t usually one to swear. She particularly disliked the word fuck, but she found it was spilling comfortably off her lips, providing exactly the emphasis she needed to deal with Officer Szymanowski.

  “Nora isn’t black, by the way, Mike,” Anna supplied.

  Nora held up a hand. “It’s all the same to them,” she said, walking away.

  “Them? Who’s them?” Mike shouted after her.

  Various reporters overheard this and took up the cry, brandishing fat microphones. “Who’s ‘them’? Agent Dixon! Agent Dixon!” they called to Anna, who ignored them with a practiced air.

  Nora strode into the International Institute, trying without much success to shake off her anger. The broken glass doors had been removed altogether to allow the teams to enter and exit more easily. She found she was hugging herself tightly as she walked through the lobby. She stopped to stare at the place where the little girl had lain.

  An acrid smoky smell hung heavy in the air, but this was not what was making breathing difficult.

  “Nora?” She turned to see Special Agent in Charge Joseph Schacht bending slightly to pass under the low doorframe.

  She felt a rush of relief. A familiar face. Her SAC was famous for being florid of face, wearing ill-fitting shirts, and sporting the ugliest neckties in the Bureau.

  He shook her hand hard, then grasped her elbow with his left hand, immobilizing her arm as he looked intently into her face. “You’re looking well,” he said, after a searching gaze in which he seemed to reassure himself she was alright. After a moment he smirked. “New position agreeing with you?”

  Nora gave him a half-smile. “Well, if you’d asked me two days ago, I’d have said it was pretty boring.”

  “You shot three violent criminals, Nora. You’re to be commended.”

  “Shot them too late, sir. A massacre occurred while I was in the next room.”

  “Under a hail of gunfire.”

  Nora inhaled, swallowing. “You got here fast.”

  “Every once in a while the good guys get to use the company jet.”

  She nodded distractedly.

  “We were just about to land when we heard the latest development.” Schacht surveyed the room and then said, “Let’s debrief a little in the car, shall we? Air conditioning.”

  She followed him to a blue minivan, clearly a rental from the airport as the Erie agents had been unavailable to retrieve this Philadelphia delegation. Anna saw her following Schacht and gestured that they would meet back at the office. There were two other agents in the van. Nora remembered seeing their faces back in Philly, but she couldn’t recall their names. Schacht solved the mystery by introducing them as Special Agent Derek Ford and Special Agent Venkatram Chidambaram. They looked young and a little haughty. Ford had rugged good looks, but for an ugly scar that marred his right cheek and caused his right eye to slope a little. Chidambaram looked to be of South Asian origin, with skin darker than hers but soft, wavy black hair that framed his face. He was short and slim; his suit looked more expensive and a little tighter than necessary for a day at the office.

  She figured the shock of having to travel to Erie, Pennsylvania, wasn’t sitting well with them.

  Schacht and Nora settled into the middle row of seats as Agent Chidambaram plugged the office’s address into the GPS and began navigating through the crush of reporters and television cameras.

  Nora said, “It’s just … just turn on State Street and go north. It’s not, you know, GPS-worthy.”

  Schacht smiled at her. “Busy week?”

  “I feel like the world just turned upside down. We had nothing to do except stalk the perverts. And now all of a sudden … we can’t keep up.”
>
  “It’s very serious. They’ve been warning us about domestic terrorism for a long time now. We’ve been able to head a lot of things off at the pass. But rapid multi-pronged attacks, carefully planned, with several different teams … We are under-equipped to deal with it. We’re going to try, though, Nora.”

  “Head things off like what, sir?”

  Schacht shrugged. “Well, we had a bank robbery a few months back in Virginia. The express purpose was to rob the bank in order to get money to buy arms for a race war.”

  “Race war?” Nora asked skeptically.

  “That was the plan, Nora. Sounds nuts to you and me, but it was very real and very imminent for those involved. They had been training and needed more funds for their arms suppliers. Who were, absurdly, Mexican.”

  “Pretending to be,” Agent Ford interjected.

  “Yes, pretending to be. They were our guys. Actually Honduran and—where, Derek?”

  “Honduran and Chilean. But those idiots couldn’t tell, of course.”

  “Of course,” Nora said softly. “You think that’s what this bank robbery is about?”

  Schacht shrugged. “Don’t know. Just saying there’s precedent. War costs money.”

  She looked out of the window at the crumbling factories, then back at him. “What kind of arms?”

  “Everything. Rocket launchers. Automatics, semi-automatics…”

  “Bombs?”

  “No bombs. Grenades, though.”

  “You think these guys here can get rocket launchers and stuff?” she asked Schacht.

  “We both know anyone can buy a rocket launcher off the Internet. Do they know how to use one? That’s different. They’ll need someone ex-military. And the way we treat our vets, it’s certainly not impossible to find disaffected ex-military.”

  Nora shook her head.

  “But why here?” she demanded. “Why target this backward little city that doesn’t even matter?”

  Schacht looked at her as though she were a very poor student indeed. “Nora, it’s urban hubris to suggest that the rural areas don’t matter. Rural poverty is far more widespread than urban poverty. The latter just makes for better movies. There are more discontented country folk than there are city dwellers. Their opinions are deeply entrenched. The last election taught us that they’d felt unheard in all the previous ones. Their man promised them jobs, promised he’d get rid of the foreigners, promised they hadn’t suffered for nothing. But the system could only allow for so much. So … maybe they can get their views across with arms. Collectively, the gun owners of America have more firepower than the armed forces of certain countries.”

  Nora took a deep breath but found she had no way of responding. It had taken her a very long time to overcome her distaste for her gun. She knew she needed it. She had saved lives with it. But still …

  Schacht continued, “Many Americans are angry. Truly angry in a way that you can’t fathom. They see their way of life under assault. Language issues, religious issues, the way we teach kids in school, the way we interact with each other. For some people, multiculturalism means the death of tradition, and tradition links them to their fathers and grandfathers and their people.…”

  “Keeping you mired in racism…”

  Schacht tsked. “Loving your roots and wanting to preserve them isn’t wrong. This methodology is wrong, of course. But then again it’s the whole freedom fighter versus terrorist argument. Their cause is noble. Get back to … well, someone’s interpretation of what the world should look like. The guy they had hoped would lead them there showed them quickly enough that his own self-interest and gold potty were his real concerns. Even though he’s in office, they’re expected to pay taxes and tolerate foreigners diluting the gene pool.”

  “So the logical response is shooting up women and children at a refugee center?”

  Schacht shook his head sadly. “Tragic. But what a message! How many women engage in mass shootings?”

  “One prior to this,” she said.

  “And now five women. Five women on motorcycles. No helmets, no Kevlar. Just walking in and taking matters into their own hands. If the women aren’t worried about shooting other women and even children, then what does that say about the mission?”

  “Urgent?” Nora ventured.

  “Urgent and clear. Unambiguous and just. And finally … necessary. So women are called in from whatever other things the group envisions women should be doing. They’re called to fight. And they’re normalizing the fight for other women who might be watching.”

  They fell silent.

  Nora thought for a moment about her father and everything that he hated about her life and her choices. She wondered if she could boil it all down to a love of roots and tradition. She had always seen it simply as an effort to control her.

  She dug deep into memory and found her mother’s voice reading to her in classical Arabic, making Nora read poetry aloud, making sure Nora did not lazily elide any letters that did not exist in English.

  “These words are a living bridge to centuries of love and pain and joy and desire and loss,” she would say, tucking Nora’s unruly hair behind her ear. “Don’t ever forget how to walk across this bridge.”

  Nora looked at the men in the front seat. “Do you have more reinforcements or did you just bring these two guys?” she asked Schacht.

  Ford twisted in his seat to cast a scathing gaze upon her.

  She would not be cowed by either the good looks or the scary scar. “What?” she demanded. “I’m not saying you’re not a genius, man. But we need bodies. Since yesterday we’ve had a heist, a bomb, a murder, an abduction, and a massacre. We don’t even have a forensics guy. Not one.” She realized part of this rant was a poorly-veiled complaint to Schacht for consenting to such an exile for her.

  Schacht said, “Sheila wisely called in the CIRG, but it generally takes about four hours for them to get themselves together. These two are CIRG but based out of our office, so I brought them with me—my own private brain trust. We have press handlers coming from DC. Chid here is our behavioral analysis expert and Ford specializes in domestic terror groups and militia movements. Pittsburgh is sending a whole forensics team and their best hostage negotiator. It’s handled. You just have to show up for work.”

  Nora scoffed, then leaned forward to direct Chid where to park. He glanced at her, then back at the road. “Khalil, is it? Arab?”

  She pursed her lips at him. “Irish,” she said caustically. “Turn here into the parking garage.”

  “Y’all validate parking?” he asked.

  “Not for city slickers,” she declared.

  * * *

  When they walked into the office, the plasma screen was full of Vance Evans’s face.

  “Public reaction to the shootings at the refugee center was strong and clear: this is not Erie.”

  He was standing about a block from the building that Nora had just left in ruins. Around him, onlookers milled, awaiting their moment of fame on the camera.

  The first to speak was a black woman whose eyes were red from weeping. “My neighbors. These people comin’ in here were my neighbors in my hometown. They weren’t foreigners. They were new Americans.…”

  A biker was next. “I heard these women were on bikes. I’m here to tell you, that ain’t us. Bikers just wanna ride, you know? Disgustin’ what these people done. It’s disgustin’.”

  The camera fell on a thin boy weeping on the curb. Evans explained that his family had been inside the center when the shooters entered. They had survived war in the Congo only to be separated permanently here.

  With a grave voice, Evans peered into the camera.

  “Just say, ‘Oh, the humanity!’ and get it over with,” snarled Sheila, muting the TV and stomping into the conference room.

  After multiple introductions, and Maggie grumpily appearing with a tray full of tea and coffee, they all gathered around the conference room table.

  Nora wasn’t keen to speak up firs
t, but she had forgotten to ask Anna about the call she’d received while they were at the institute.

  “It was Sheila,” she said. “This Baker fellow had made another announcement. Released it to Vance Evans.”

  “What did he say?”

  Pete called it up on the screen. Gabriel Baker looked fit; his blue eyes gleamed with energy.

  He was handsome, Nora thought. He was handsome in a way that would attract people. It wouldn’t be easy to write him off as just some wild-eyed redneck.

  Fellow patriots, all those who want to take back our country from the filthy parasites besieging it: now is the time to rise up and join our cause. Do not fear your strength—wield it! As to the rest of you: Welcome to the First Day. It will be stormy.

  “First day?” Nora asked. “First day? How many days are we looking at?”

  “Shit,” Special Agent Chidambaram said. He started to laugh. He shook his head, as though shaking it off, then burst out laughing again.

  Silence descended on the room as the other agents stared at him.

  Pete spoke for the group. “Dude.”

  Special Agent Chidambaram shrugged. “The last piece just fell into place.”

  There was some shifting in seats. Finally, Sheila, utterly exasperated, said, “You wanna be slightly less cryptic? We have no time here. None. The world is exploding all around us, Special Agent Chidambaram.”

  “I go by Chid, if you don’t mind, ma’am. And actually there will probably be several more explosions,” he said. “There will be body counts that are way more than the ones we’ve had so far.”

  Again, the agents around the table seemed on the verge of pummeling him.

  Special Agent Chidambaram looked at the printout he had with him. “Look, the words ‘preliminary evening’ in and of themselves could have meant nothing. Coupling them with ‘first day’ might also have been nothing. But when you throw in the word, ‘stormy’…” His voice trailed off.

  They continued to stare at him.

  “No?”

  Even Schacht was losing patience at this point. “Chid, you’d better just out with it.”

  “Ring Cycle. Opera. Richard Wagner.”

  It sounded to Nora like he’d said “Vogner,” but she saw Anna write “Wagner” on her yellow pad. They all exchanged glances. Sheila frowned rather menacingly.