Kill Zone: A Lucy Guardino FBI Thriller

by CJ Lyons

  “Want me to take a crack at him? Jenna said he might respond better to a man.”

  The cultural differences were just one more complication in an already tangled mess of a case. She thought about it. “You’re right. You take Raziq in our vehicle and I’ll get what info I can from Haddad.”

  He nodded and moved to the squad car. She watched for a moment, noticing Raziq’s stiff posture as he scrutinized Walden’s credentials, the way he finally bowed his head the slightest bit in agreement and went with Walden to the Tahoe. She’d just turned to retrieve Haddad when he came walking out.

  “Hurry up,” she called to him. “We’re headed out.”

  “Where’s Rashid? I need to talk with him. He shouldn’t be alone—”

  Lucy stood her ground between him and the SUV as it passed them. “Walden is taking him to your offices. We need to go as well. How about if I drive?”

  His gaze jerked from house to house along the quiet street, as if searching for answers in the holiday displays. “No. I can drive.”

  She phoned Walden who stopped the Tahoe at the end of the block to wait for them. Best to keep everyone in sight. She climbed into Haddad’s Suburban, moving a heavy leather bound book from the front passenger seat as she did. A Quran.

  He got in, saw the book in her hand, and took it from her, placing it carefully on the backseat. He turned back, looking a bit embarrassed and defiant. “I was never religious until I met Rashid. My parents weren’t observant, although my grandparents were—they came from Syria.”

  She nodded, interested in the relationship the DEA agent had with Raziq. “You study with him?”

  “Yes. Friday nights.” He looked over his shoulder as he did a quick U-turn using a neighbor’s driveway. “Over there, so far away from anything that made sense, almost dying… it was a real comfort. Finding something to believe in.”

  He cleared his throat, looked away. They hadn’t gone far before Lucy spotted Jenna Galloway’s bright yellow Mustang at the next intersection. She dialed the postal inspector's cell and put it on speaker.

  “Jenna? Change of plans,” Lucy said. “We’re headed to the Federal Building.”

  “What happened?” Jenna asked.

  To Lucy’s surprise David leaned forward and said, “Jenna, it’s worse than we thought.”

  “I was afraid of that.” Jenna hung up and took the turn, the Mustang ending up as the lead vehicle in their tiny convoy.

  “What did you mean, it’s worse than you thought?” Lucy asked the DEA agent. “Haddad, you’d better fill me in. Now.”

  <><><>

  Jenna led the way down Thomas Boulevard. Slipknot blasted from the Mustang’s stereo, but she clicked it off, wanting a few moments of quiet to think. Two girls dead. Her fault? No. She’d warned David and Raziq that the bomber might strike again.

  The DEA had insisted the threats were international in origin. But Jenna’s use of geographic profiling and some magic with traffic cams had narrowed their target area to a few blocks around Ruby Avenue, right here in Pittsburgh. If she was able to catch the subject in the process of sending a threat—either physically by mail or electronically via the Internet—she could nail the bastard.

  She’d hoped to take him in custody in the next few days and so erase the blemish of the failed psych eval from her record. Prove to everyone that she was fine.

  Sure, maybe she had night terrors and day terrors and some anger issues—along with sleep deprivation and overdrinking and screwing total strangers just for the chance to sleep in the safety of a man’s arms. Not to mention a touch of obsession over catching Morgan. But she was still damn good at her job.

  Two girls dead. The words hammered through her mind, unrelenting. Not her fault. Not her fault.

  Her phone rang and she answered it without looking. “Galloway.”

  “I think my amygdala is three sizes too small,” Morgan whined. “You know. Like the Grinch’s heart.”

  “His grew.”

  “Only after he stole Christmas. Did the worst thing imaginable.”

  “Morgan, I’m in the middle of something.” Jenna jerked the steering wheel to miss one of Pittsburgh’s infamous car-eating potholes. “Just this once could we cut the bull? What do you want to do and how can I stop you?”

  Morgan’s sigh whispered through the phone followed by an ominous silence.

  Jenna regretted her words. “Okay, okay. I’ll play along. You want to steal Christmas? What does that mean?”

  “Guess you’ll find out. Gotta go, he’ll be coming soon.”

  “No. Morgan, wait. Who’s coming? Morgan—” Too late. The bitch hung up.

  Had Morgan sacrificed her damned integrity and reneged on her earlier promise to go after one of the guys Jenna had slept with? If so, they were shit out of luck, because Jenna barely remembered what they looked like, much less their names.

  Damn, Morgan was right. She needed to cut back on the drinking. Start facing reality. She needed help.

  Not just for herself. To save Lucy. And stop Morgan. Before it was too late.

  Jenna focused on the road in front of her. At least she could do the first, keep Lucy safe. But she had a sinking feeling Morgan was more than one step ahead of her and it was already too late.

  <><><>

  Text message received at 1804:

  Tres: On the move. Three cars. R in middle SUV with one man.

  Z: Advance team ready. Text when in position to close off escape.

  Chapter 9

  Lucy paid the price for giving in to diplomacy and letting Haddad drive. The DEA agent was distracted and it showed as he followed the cars in front of them, almost ramming Walden’s rear bumper at the first stop sign they encountered.

  “What did you mean it’s ‘worse than you thought’?” she repeated when Haddad remained silent.

  “We figured the threats came from Rashid's work back in Afghanistan. Saber-rattling, old enemies frustrated because he was out of their reach. Well,” he blew out his breath, “I had it pegged that way. Jenna was worried the threats would escalate. But we never dreamed—”

  “You think the person behind the threats killed the girls?” Lucy wasn’t quite ready to make that leap of faith. Not until she saw the evidence. “You said Raziq was helping the DEA back in Afghanistan,” Lucy continued. “Is he still working with you?”

  “For the first few months he worked with us as a civilian advisor. But budget cuts—” He shrugged. “He isn't working for us now, but he still has contacts in that part of the world and lets me know if he hears anything.”

  “Mina had her hands cut off. And then she was burned. Could it have been some kind of tribal custom from Afghanistan? Someone settling an old score?” She didn’t mention the possibility of an honor killing. No sense pushing too hard.

  He jerked the steering wheel as he turned to face her. “Burned? Alive?”

  She hoped not. “We won’t know until the autopsy. Can you think of anyone who’d have that kind of personal grudge against Raziq?”

  A pause. “There’s one guy, but last I heard he was in a VA burn rehab. Marine. Blames Rashid for the fire that burned him and got his men killed.”

  He touched his forehead, the scar there.

  Fire. Burned alive. Like Mina. “Was it the same attack you were injured in?”

  “Yeah. That entire mission was one huge SNAFU—there was no way either Rashid or I could have prevented it. We played it by the book, given the intel we had.”

  “Start from the beginning,” Lucy told Haddad, wanting to explore the DEA agent’s relationship with Raziq. There had to be something she was missing, something that would explain the level of venom she sensed in these crimes. “Tell me more about the mission that went wrong.”

  “It was almost two years ago. I was in Afghanistan working a FAST mission.”

  “Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team?” Lucy had worked a few alongside the Marshals and local LEOs.

  “No. DEA Foreign-deployed Advisory
and Support Team. We were there to help the Afghans, teach them methods to stop the opium smugglers, perform search and seizures, that sort of thing.”

  “What happened?”

  “One day we got a tip about a Taliban opium cache hidden at a school.”

  “I thought the Taliban were gone from power.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. You have to understand, in Afghanistan drugs fuel everything. Insurgents use them to raise funds to topple the government and fight our forces. The militias and local police are under the control of provincial governors who the drug trade to keep their jobs and line their pockets. Then there’s the Taliban who use the trade to keep locals under their control. If your only way to get money to feed your kids is to grow poppies for the Taliban, you have no choice, even if you don’t agree with their ideology. The average guy on the ground over there is stuck between a rock and a hard place with a sledgehammer swinging down aimed right at his head.”

  “Okay, so the Taliban hid their drugs in a school?” Seemed awfully risky.

  “A school for girls. Last place on earth we would have looked for Taliban opium. Rashid and I did the initial recon. Couldn’t barge into a girl’s school with the whole squad, would have been a PR nightmare, destroyed all the trust we’d worked so hard to win.”

  His voice grew rushed as if he was out of breath. “I tripped an IED. Thing was rigged with a delay to get whoever triggered it plus their teammates behind them. Rashid pulled me out just as it blew. I was knocked out for a minute or two, by the time I came around the entire place was in flames.”

  “What about the girls?”

  Haddad shook his head, focused on the vehicle in front of him. It was a moment before he replied. “There was a Marine squad working with us. They saw the flames, heard the girls screaming, but it was no good. One guy managed to get two girls out but he was burned real bad himself. I don’t think the girls made it. The whole thing was a Taliban set up—the other Marines were ambushed while they tried to protect our escape route. They all died. If it wasn’t for Rashid, I’d be dead, too. And you know the worst of it?”

  Like a school full of girls and American Marines killed wasn’t bad enough? “No, what?”

  “There weren’t any drugs present. They’d either already been moved or we'd gotten a bum steer.”

  “After that you arranged for Raziq and his family to come to the States?”

  “Rashid ended up with a bounty on his head over there. He almost got killed; there were a few assassination attempts. Relocating him seemed like the least we could do. It paid off, too. He’s been invaluable, helping us dismantle smuggling routes across Asia and Eastern Europe.”

  “So this Marine who was upset. He blamed Raziq for the bad intel?”

  “Yeah. But how would he know where to find Rashid? Plus, I can’t see him coming after Rashid’s kids. And after all this time…” His voice trailed off.

  Lucy dialed Taylor. “You at the office yet?”

  “Just got here, or should I say back here. Walden has me working background on Raziq. Most of it I’m still waiting for the DEA to release.” Taylor’s tone of disdain made it very clear what he thought of the DEA hogging intel.

  “Give me what you can on—” She turned to Haddad. “What was the Marine’s name?”

  “Stone. Andre Stone.”

  “A Marine named Andre Stone,” she told Taylor. “And talk to the DEA about any unusual activity here in Pittsburgh. Ask Homeland Security to send over the foreign arrival data for the past few months.”

  “You focusing on an Afghanistan connection?”

  She remembered Raziq’s multiple passports. “Yeah, but don’t rule out Pakistan or any other countries in that area.”

  “That’s going to be a lot of names.”

  “Cross check them all with Raziq’s cases with the DEA. I’ll call if I think of anything else.” Lucy hung up and turned back to Haddad.

  “You said Mina had her hands cut off?” Haddad said. His voice was flat, distant, as if willing himself to remain professional. “Sounds more like Mexican cartel style of violence than the Middle East.”

  Talk about your remote possibilities. “Why would Mexicans target an Afghan—and in Pittsburgh of all places?”

  “I don’t know. I was just thinking. It’s kind of our doomsday scenario: if the cartels south of the border ever teamed up with the Afghans, they’d control virtually the entire world’s production and distribution of heroin. Talk about global domination.”

  Given Haddad’s personal allegiance to Raziq, Lucy wondered if the DEA Agent was trying to deflect suspicion from Raziq. After all, most of the time, in crimes like this, a parent was involved. Sad but true. “You think a Mexican cartel would come all the way to Pittsburgh to target a former Afghan DEA informant’s daughters?”

  “No. You’re right.” He blew his breath out. “As horrendous as it is, killing two little girls is small potatoes to the cartels. They’ll take fifty-sixty people in a day—civilians, not even fellow narcos—chop off their heads and hands, hang their bodies from highway overpasses just as a friendly warning.”

  That fit with the briefings she’d read on the violence south of the border.

  “It’s just that we’ve heard chatter about the cartels looking for new routes to expand east of the Mississippi. Detroit, Philly, and Baltimore top the list of potential operation centers. My bet was on Detroit. With the kind of money a cartel has, they could buy the PD and police union, fire all the honest cops, and run the entire city within a week. The way things are up there, the citizens might even be better off.”

  “Detroit, Philly and Baltimore are all port cities.”

  He nodded at her like she was an exceptionally bright student. Lucy decided to let it pass. They had more important things to worry about than her ego. “Right. Control one of those ports and a cartel would have a backstage all-access pass to the entire Eastern seaboard.”

  Pittsburgh wasn’t exactly a “seaboard” city. It had three rivers and tons of barge traffic that went from the Ohio River to the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But she doubted that counted.

  Haddad continued, “All that bullshit about tunnels and submarines filled with drugs? Just the tip of the iceberg, believe me. They’ve already infiltrated California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, moved up into Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. But the real prize is east of the Mississippi. Own that real estate and you’ve hit the jackpot as far as the cartels are concerned.”

  “Let’s leave exotic narcoterrorist schemes aside and concentrate on the threats you and Raziq received.” Lucy said.

  He shrugged. But his detachment didn’t make it to his face. He looked worried, as if he’d missed something. Something that had left two girls dead and the rest of their family in danger. “We’ve been through all this with Jenna. There’s no one.”

  He wasn’t giving her much to work with if she wanted to get Fatima and the baby back alive. Lucy ground her teeth together, a bad habit. Still too many possibilities, too many directions the threats could have come from.

  Then Haddad asked the question she’d been dreading. “Do you think Fatima and Ali are dead already? Or would they keep them alive, use them as bait to get Raziq?”

  <><><>

  Text message received at 1812:

  Cinqo: Ready.

  Z: Bring it down.

  Another text, this time to his man following the federales: Close the trap. Bring R to me.

  He tapped the last character and smiled. Ten men had brought the city of Mumbai, a metropolis of twenty million, to its knees during the terrorist attacks of 2008.

  He had twice that many, plus the gangbangers to use as cannon fodder.

  Pittsburgh didn’t stand a chance.

  Chapter 10

  “Nice to see some familiar faces,” Andre said when Mad Dog and his two boys were half way across the street. More to let the Doc know he had things under control than anything else.

  Funny thing was, for the first
time since being evac’d from Hajji Baba, Andre actually did feel in control. No panic, no dread apprehension as he waited for the pain of the next procedure or the next person who looked at him like he was less than human. Most of all, no sense that anything Mad Dog or the Rippers said or did could affect his life.

  He’d finally done what Grams had urged him to do all those years ago when he first began running with the Rippers. He’d risen above them and become a better man.

  Not a good man, never that, not with the voices of seven dead Marines and twenty-three dead schoolgirls rattling through his brain. But better than these street dogs? Hell yeah. Roger that.

  Mad Dog stopped a safe distance away and tilted his head, staring at Andre’s mask. Then he flashed a grin, complete with gold grill spelling out his initials. Did he have any idea how stupid he looked?

  “Wasn’t sure you’d remember yo’ old friends,” he said, his tone one of rebuke. “Sho haven’t shown us any love since you been back.”

  “Busy. Grams needed taking care of.” Andre took two steps towards home, gauging their reaction. He didn’t want anything they were selling, so best to just part ways here and now.

  “Well, we’s gots somethings need takin’ care of, too. Darius wants to see you.”

  “Sorry, Grams is waiting.” Darius had brought Andre into the Rippers when he was twelve. Taught him everything he needed to know to stay alive on the street—including how to take a fall for the OG’s like Darius when the cops came knocking. When he’d left the Rippers eight years ago, first to Juvie then to the Marines, Darius had run this block. From the way MD talked, it sounded like Darius had moved up in the ranks to major shot caller.

  Mad Dog jerked his chin and his two boys sidled to block Andre’s path. “She needs to wait a little longer. You don’t want to keep Darius waiting. No sir.”

  Andre didn’t move. He simply blinked at MD. He realized the advantage there was in facing another man while wearing a mask. Andre could read every emotion that crossed MD’s face but Mad Dog got nothing in return. Andre’s finger caressed the Beretta’s trigger guard. He could take them all out—pop, pop, pop—and be halfway home before their bodies hit the ground.