Every Deadly Kiss

by Steven James

  He strode toward Mannie, feigned a punch, and kicked at the side of the man’s knee with enough force to take most people down, but Mannie didn’t even flinch.

  Instead, he reached for Dylan’s arm, but Dylan pivoted so he would grab his weaker left arm, then he spun, swinging the crowbar directly at the Goliath’s forehead.

  To Dylan, it sounded like the clank of metal on metal, and Mannie grinned slightly, then tapped his head. “Metal plate. Car accident.”

  “Well, that’s handy.” But instead of hitting him there again, Dylan swiveled around and smacked the bar against the back of Mannie’s head.

  There’s that one spot back there that’s ideal for knocking people out. All martial artists learn about it, but not all guys who are the size of a city.

  Mannie’s eyes rolled up, and the giant collapsed onto the floor.

  For a moment, Dylan thought about using the crowbar to make sure Mannie never stood up again, but decided that since this guy was his brother’s friend, he would let him live.

  On a shelf below the window, Dylan noticed the box cutter they’d taken from him yesterday. After retrieving it, he stepped outside into the daylight to find Snowball4.

  75

  11:34 A.M.

  Dispersal in 3 hours

  Ali sat at a long table in a hidden room behind the kitchen at the back of the restaurant.

  Fayed and one of his associates were there with him.

  A man that Ali did not recognize walked through the door and greeted him in Arabic: “As-salaamu ‘alaykum.” Peace be upon you.

  Ali replied, “Wa ‘alaykum salaam.” Upon you be peace.

  The man smiled and switched to English. “I am Fayed,” he said. “I understand that you were detained at the airport in Atlanta.”

  “Wait, you are Fayed?” Ali glanced at the man who’d identified himself earlier as Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir, and who Ali had thought was the mastermind behind all of this, ever since their first meeting in Kazakhstan. “I thought he was.”

  The man who was now claiming to be Fayed said, “Some secrets must be kept for the greater good. His name is Turhan. I understand you took the inhaler during your secondary screening.”

  Now as he thought about it, Ali recognized this man’s voice as one that he’d heard speaking outside his room while he was waiting on the bed at the compound in Yemen.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was afraid they would take it from me. I wanted to make sure nothing got in the way of our plans.”

  “Of course. Alright—water that has flowed past us down the river cannot be drunk. So do you know when you’ll be contagious?”

  “Later this afternoon. Probably sometime between three and five.”

  Fayed took a seat at the far end of the table, then said to Ali, “I understand you work as a translator?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then you know that some English words should not mean the same thing, but yet do.”

  “Do you mean, for example, like ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’? Or ‘surge’ and ‘upsurge’?”

  “Well done. Or ‘void’ and ‘devoid.’ And then, of course, there’s ‘biweekly,’ which can mean twice a week or once every two weeks. That’s a tough one. And some words mean the opposite of themselves, like cleave, which means both ‘to hold close’ and ‘to separate.’”

  “Yes,” said Ali.

  “And today, brother, you must cleave to your mission and also cleave your ties to this world.”

  “I understand.”

  ++++

  Ralph and I arrived at the restaurant even before the SWAT team did.

  SWAT was going to have snipers nearby and would be covering both entrances, but when Ralph and I drove up, we saw three men wearing ski masks entering the back of the restaurant.

  One of them had an AK. The others carried sidearms.

  “Well, that’s not suspicious,” Ralph said.

  “Not at all.”

  “With civilians in there, I’m not gonna wait. I’m going in. Are you with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “I’ll get the back, you take the front, low-key at first. Let SWAT do their job when they get here, but I’m not gonna sit out here on my ass until they do.”

  As we stepped out of the car, I was hit by the humid, asphalty smell of summer heat rising off the pavement.

  “It could get messy in there,” I said.

  “Just the way I like it.”

  “I thought you liked it ‘fast and clean’?”

  “I’m less particular about that than I used to be. Come on. Let’s go.”

  I walked to the front, while he headed around toward the alley that ran along the back of the building. My senses were ratcheted up and I felt the swift rush of adrenaline.

  I pressed open the front door.

  The restaurant smelled of Mediterranean food, and even though I was pretty sure smoking hadn’t been legal in restaurants for a long time, the air was stained with the smell of recent cigarette smoke.

  Quickly, I scanned the place. No apparent threats, no disturbances. The restaurant was relatively high-end and looked nearly full.

  A genteel male greeter who was dressed to the nines smiled at me politely and picked up a menu. “One?”

  “Yes. It’ll just be me today.”

  “Alright, sir. Follow me, please.”

  “Can I have a seat near the back—I’m going to do a little work while I’m in here. Don’t want to disturb the other patrons.”

  “Of course. That’s kind of you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  ++++

  Fayed smiled and said to Ali, “I am reminded of a great man of faith, a warrior who fought pagans and infidels with unparalleled rage, with unequaled ferocity. In the end he was caught through the deceit and treachery of a woman he trusted, and then he prayed, and the Great Lord, the Powerful, the Irresistible God answered his prayers. And so, that faithful martyr gave his own life in order to take the lives of thousands of heretics and idolaters as he died.”

  Ali considered Fayed’s words. “Are you talking about one of the 9/11 hijackers?”

  Fayed shook his head. “This was long before airplanes or skyscrapers.”

  “Who then?”

  “The man I’m speaking about was named Samson. His story is told in the Holy Bible.”

  “He fought the idolatrous Philistines.”

  “Yes. Christians, Jews, Muslims, all the People of the Book, remember his story and acknowledge his valor and his willingness to martyr himself in the service of the All Merciful.”

  Fayed nodded toward the men who’d entered the room a few moments ago, shedding their ski masks when they did. One was Abdul. He went to the back door to guard it. One man walked into the kitchen. The third readied an assault rifle in front of his chest.

  Ali knew Samson’s story and realized that there would be some people who would claim the opposite, that Samson had been motivated to act out of vengeance for the wrongs done to him rather than because of his love for God, but Ali held back from pointing that out.

  Elbows on the table, Fayed leaned forward toward Ali. “You are Samson, my friend. And do you know the secret?”

  “What?”

  “He had to be captured to kill the enemies of the Truth that day.”

  “Captured?”

  “You’re going to be caught, arrested, taken by the FBI.”

  “What?”

  “Our sources tell us that they don’t yet know that you’ve been infected.”

  “What then?”

  “Wrongs must be righted. Courage will prevail. Paradise awaits. Strike terror in the hearts of others. Do not succumb to it yourself.” Fayed laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table. Numbers were written on it. “Memorize this phone number. Call it when the ti
me comes.”

  “What time is that?”

  “You’ll know.”

  “Alright.”

  “We’ll have a suicide vest available, if necessary.”

  “I understand.”

  ++++

  After the host who’d led me to the table stepped away, I studied the restaurant again. Most of the people appeared to be Arab or of Middle Eastern descent. I saw no evidence of any armed men, so I rose and walked toward the kitchen, which I guessed opened to the alley for deliveries.

  As I passed a table that hadn’t yet been bussed, I picked up the plates, unholstered the Glock, and hid it beneath them. It would at least give me a way to enter the kitchen without immediately attracting too much attention.

  ++++

  Fayed said, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has monitored and spied on our mosques, infiltrated our educational centers, and harassed and profiled Muslims for far too long. To strike at the heart of the FBI is to strike at the very heart of the infidels.”

  When his phone buzzed, he glanced at the screen.

  “What is it, brother?” Turhan asked.

  “There is a sniper getting into position across the street.”

  “A sniper?”

  “Police, FBI, it’s unclear who. We must leave.”

  ++++

  As I entered the kitchen, the three cooks, who were all too short to have been any of the men wearing ski masks, glanced my direction, but when they saw I was carrying the plates, they seemed more curious than alarmed.

  I set the plates down, held a finger to my lips to signal for the cooks to be quiet, then waved my gun to indicate for them to get out of the room. They fled around the stove and into the restaurant rather than through the exit door.

  Where’s Ralph?

  Where are those three armed men?

  A sizable pot of boiling soup was on the stove, but the walkway beside it was cramped and I needed to turn the handle to the side to keep from knocking it off the burner as I edged past it.

  A man appeared and started shouting at me in Arabic.

  He was holding a handgun, but by the angle, I couldn’t tell what kind it was or how many rounds it might hold.

  Glock raised at him, I identified myself as FBI, told him to drop the weapon!

  But he targeted my chest. I spun as he fired, and he barely missed me. From a crouched position, I returned fire, three shots, center mass. Dropped him. As the report of the gunshots echoed through the kitchen, I heard shouting in a back room and screams coming from the restaurant behind me.

  This was going down.

  It was going down now.

  Movement on my right caught my attention, and as I turned, I realized it was one of the cooks who’d returned to the kitchen. He shoved me violently toward the stove, and when I was off balance, he came at me with a kitchen knife, but I managed to grab his right arm, and using his momentum to keep him moving forward, I pivoted toward the stove and drove the knife as well as his hand into the boiling soup. As he screamed, I punched him in the face and he went down.

  Gunshots in the back room.

  Get back there, Pat!

  Though I wasn’t about to kill this guy, I couldn’t just leave him here either. I quickly patted him down and cuffed his uninjured wrist to a pipe under the sink, then, Glock out, I rushed toward the back room.

  76

  I tossed the door open.

  Assessed the scene.

  Two men were down. The AK lay beside one of them. Ralph was standing over a third man who was on his knees with his hands behind his head. The guy’s face was covered with bruises and he had a black eye. Ralph yelled, “Three of ’em are outside. Go!”

  I threw my hip against the door’s pressure bar as I cranked it open with my elbow, keeping both hands on the Glock in ready position.

  Except for a dumpster on the left, the alley was empty.

  Before sprinting toward the street, I checked behind the dumpster and inside it.

  Nothing.

  I took off down the alley.

  By now, I could hear sirens.

  When I reached the street, I scanned both directions. Fifty meters from me, a dark sedan was flaring around the corner. Hoping to get a look at the license plate, I darted toward it, tugging out my phone as I ran.

  I made it to the corner as the car was disappearing farther down the block, but managed to click two photographs. Maybe Angela would be able to pull something from them.

  I called dispatch and told them where the car was heading to see if we could get an eye on it from traffic cams or businesses that it was passing.

  SWAT guys were pouring out of a van, detaining the people who were fleeing the restaurant.

  Impeccable timing.

  I turned toward the alley again to go back and make sure Ralph was alright.

  ++++

  Ali lay on the floor, his hands cuffed behind him, his cracked rib creasing his side with pain.

  The agent who’d stormed into the room and taken out two men, including Turhan, before they could even get off a shot had pushed him down, cuffed him, and checked him for weapons. Ali begged him not to shoot him. Not to kill him.

  “Tell me, where did they go?” the agent demanded. “Where did those men head to?”

  “Please—”

  “Where?” he yelled.

  “I don’t know,” Ali stammered.

  The agent removed everything from Ali’s pockets, including his car keys and the twenty-dollar bill with the numbers on it. They’d been written in different places on the bill to disguise the fact that they formed a phone number, with half a dozen extra numbers to further hide the truth of what it was.

  Fayed had told him just moments ago that he was going to be captured just as Samson was, in order to strike at the heart of the FBI.

  Ali doubted, however, that having Turhan and one of the other men here in the room get killed was part of the plan.

  A team of heavily armed police stormed in, and in less than a minute, they’d hustled Ali to a van and locked him inside with two officers in tactical gear. He heard one of them mention the federal building, and he wondered if, perhaps, this had been exactly what Fayed had in mind after all.

  ++++

  From his vantage point a block away, and using his phone to zoom in and study what was happening, Blake watched the SWAT van drive away with one of the men. He didn’t know if it was Fayed or not, so he called Mannie to have him prepare Dylan for the transfer, but Mannie did not pick up.

  That wasn’t like him, and Blake couldn’t help but think of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of his brother. If Dylan had gotten away, the exchange for Fayed wouldn’t happen, and justice for Maria’s death would never occur.

  Blake quickly headed to his car to get back to the factory and check on Mannie to see if he was alright.

  ++++

  I met up with Ralph inside the restaurant.

  “The guy’s injured,” my friend told me. “They’re taking him to the Detroit Detention Center, then, if he can be transferred, to the federal building. You and I know more about this investigation than anyone else in the city, so I contacted Kennedy. Guess who gets to do the interview with our man?”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “As soon as we fill out the paperwork for what just went down here.”

  “I don’t think we can wait until next week to speak with him.”

  “Ha.”

  As we left, I said, “Looks like you Hawkinsed those guys in that back room.”

  “You did some Hawkinsing yourself there in the kitchen.”

  “Learned from the best.”

  It used to be that if you were involved in a shooting while on duty, the law enforcement agency you worked for wouldn’t take your gun away because they wanted to ind
icate to you and to the rest of the department that they still trusted you. However, with the public outcry over police shootings of unarmed civilians over the last few years, that’s all changed.

  Now, typically, you’d be put on paid administrative leave until the agency could investigate the shooting, but here today we were dealing with extraordinary circumstances. Ralph got clearance from the Bureau’s Director himself to allow us to remain active and armed so we could respond to the “potentially imminent and catastrophic threat” and resolve this as quickly as possible without any civilian casualties—or especially without the release of a biological weapon in a major U.S. city.

  I said, “I propose we dictate our reports on the way to the federal building so we can have a chat with our friend right away.”

  “I accept. Just don’t tell Brineesha you proposed to me.”

  “Right.”

  ++++

  Sharyn parked at the 9th Precinct and waited for Detective Schwartz to join her.

  Outside the door, Julianne was speaking with three officers: her brother, Kramer, and Kramer’s partner—a man Sharyn didn’t know. Pat had told her he was the man who’d mentioned the grenade.

  Schwartz walked past them and joined Sharyn at her car. When he got there, he asked, “So what do you have in mind?”

  “I’m trying to find Dylan, and I’m getting notifications on my phone. If we get one that looks like it might be from him, I want you to back me up.”

  “Notifications? The guy’s gonna let you know where he is?”

  She realized she hadn’t updated him on what she was doing regarding the Hook’dup app. “In a sense, yes.”

  As she explained things, in order to lure out the Bluebeard, Sharyn changed her status on Hook’dup to “Hot and Ready.”

  ++++

  Blake shook Mannie, and the huge man groaned twice before finally stirring and opening his eyes. “What happened?” Blake said.

  “He had a crowbar,” Mannie replied, fierce anger in his voice.

  “He must’ve hit you hard.”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  “Concussion?”

  “I’m fine.” And then, before Blake could stop him, Mannie pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s go find your brother.”