by Steven James
The ringing stopped as someone answered but said nothing.
“This is Ali,” he said in Arabic. “They are letting me call this number thinking that I will be able to get you to enter a trap, but they do not realize my resolve. They do not realize that it is already too late, that they are all already dead.”
Whoever had picked up the phone continued to remain silent.
“They know about the virus,” Ali went on, “and they were planning to isolate me, but in order to avoid that, I told them that I would hand you over to them. If they do quarantine me, no one will get infected. They will distribute their stockpiles of smallpox vaccine and inoculate the population. I need to see you, and I need for you to give me a suicide vest. It is the only way. I will put it on, and when they recapture me, I will martyr myself with it. There are only two of them with me, you and your men can kill them if you need to, then I will allow myself to get caught once again. By myself, I can only spread the virus to a few people at a time. If I use the vest, we can infect the entire FBI building at once.”
A voice on the other end of the line, one that did not sound like Fayed, said, “We will get you a vest.”
“I have a place in mind.” Ali told them the site of the abandoned factory that Agent Bowers had located on the east side of the city.
“Why there?”
“Isolated.”
Silence.
“When can you be there?” Ali said.
“Soon.”
“I will be in the basement on the southeast corner.”
Without any further response, the person hung up.
“Well?” Agent Hawkins asked Ali gruffly.
“It is all set,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure that was the case at all. “He will meet us there.”
“How did you get Fayed to trust you?” Agent Bowers asked. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him that I wanted to kill you, and I asked if he would help.”
++++
As Blake was trying to figure out where his brother might have gone, he got a call from the man who’d tipped him off about the meeting at the restaurant. “Who are you?” Blake asked roughly.
“My name is inconsequential.”
“It’s consequential to me.”
“Discretion is paramount.”
“You’re not Fayed. I heard on the news that he was killed at the restaurant.”
“That was Turhan. Someone in my position can never be too careful.”
“So . . . why did you tell me about the restaurant?”
“You have your reasons for what you do. I have mine. If you want to find the man who ordered Maria dead, get to Jefferson Avenue as soon as possible. I’ll send you the address.”
83
2:19 P.M.
Dispersal in 15 minutes
I took over driving so Ralph could be in touch with the black ops team that’d gone in to rescue Ali’s sister. He pulled up a live feed to prove to Ali that the girl was alright.
They’d had to take out Faatina, the jihadist who was guarding her. Now they were in the back of a van rocketing through the streets of Ust-Kamenogorsk on their way to an exfil.
Before handing the phone to Ali, Ralph showed me the screen, and I saw the image of a teenage Kazakh girl who looked terrified.
Azaliya.
++++
Ali could hardly believe that after all these months he was seeing her again.
He spoke to her in Russian.
“How are you, Azaliya?”
“What’s happening? Who are these men? Where are they taking me?”
“They’re there to help you. They’re there to save you. I was wrong when I left, but I did it for you. You’ll be alright. They’ll take care of you. They’ll help you.”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t tell you that right now.”
“They killed Faatina.”
“She would have killed you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
“But when will I see you again?”
“When the time is right, I promise we will be together.”
“I love you, Ali.”
“I love you too, Azaliya. Good-bye.”
++++
When Ali was off the line, I said to him, “Okay, so one more time, here’s what’s happening. You go in, Ralph and I cover from both sides. If there’s more than one person, as soon as you speak with Fayed, I want you to scratch your chin. That’s how we’ll know which one is him. When you do, we move in and this ends. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“If you try anything,” I said, “if this goes south, we will put you down if we have to.”
“Yes, I—”
Ralph cursed, interrupting him. He was staring at a notification on his phone.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The video of Maria. Those pricks released it. It’s all over the web. Looks like Bloodhound couldn’t keep up.”
I tried not to think about how much chaos and panic a video like that could create.
As Ralph was contacting Cyber to see what else they could do, I got a call from DeYoung. “Pat, what is going on there in Detroit? Dr. Qiao tells me that the suspect is gone, that you broke him out of the Field Office.” I’d heard the Assistant Director exasperated before, but never this angry. “And now we’ve got hundreds of thousands of people around the world watching that video of Maria dying. Where are you?”
“Sir, I can’t tell you that.” I was thankful that Ralph and I had disabled the GPS tracking in our phones earlier. DeYoung pressed me, but I only said, “I’ll know more in a few minutes. I’ll call you back.”
After I hung up, I asked Ralph how much farther it was to the warehouse.
“Not far.” Then he said to Ali, “Are you sure you aren’t contagious yet?”
“As sure as I can be.”
And that did not exactly reassure me.
84
2:24 P.M.
Dispersal in 10 minutes
The place where we were supposed to meet Fayed was a vast, abandoned two-story factory that sprawled across an entire city block. Part of the building was gutted. At least half of it was burned out.
I thought briefly of how this place represented someone’s dream, just as I had the other day when I saw the abandoned businesses near the motel. The owner here had this building designed, watched the foundations get poured, the walls rise, the rooms take shape. Then he’d paid those thousands of employees who’d worked here over the years.
And then he had not.
The business folded. The jobs were gone. The dream was gutted, just like this building. Razed and blackened and burned to the ground.
From the material that Starr had sent us, it appeared that the factory’s bomb shelter would be accessible in a stairwell on the building’s southeast corner.
Ralph offered to clear the first floor while I kept an eye on Ali and the stairwell.
“Do you know which way he’ll be coming from?” I asked Ali.
“He would not tell me. It is possible he is already here.”
“And how many people will be with him?”
“I do not know that either.”
“Well.” Ralph drew his gun. “Let’s find out.”
++++
A few minutes from St. Gerard’s Church, Sharyn noticed a car that looked just like her ex-husband’s parked along the road.
A slice of fear as she passed it.
No. It didn’t just look like his.
It was his.
Why is he here? Did Dylan trick him, get him to come?
She wanted to call Kevin, to warn him or to find out if he was alright, but feared using this phone that she’d been given. Dylan might discover that
she’d called him, and if that happened, it would put Kevin and possibly Olivia in even more danger than they might already be in.
Sharyn prayed that everything would work out, and resolved to do whatever it took to make sure they were safe, just like she’d resolved so many years ago when she was on the set of Sanctuary and took those pills to save the woman she wished was her mom from dying in a movie that she’d started to believe was real.
++++
Ralph left us while I led Ali toward the stairwell.
Although wide swaths of the building were charred, the cement-block walls making up the majority of the structure remained mostly intact. Where the roof had collapsed, a bent web of rusted rebar sliced the faraway sky into irregular rectangles.
A few scraggly weeds tried to poke through the debris in those places where the ceiling had caved in and sunlight actually managed to reach the ground, but for the most part, nothing was growing in here.
The walls were blackened from the fire, but colorful graffiti had been spray-painted across many of them just as it was ever-present on so many of the walls in the other abandoned buildings in the city.
With no other lights and the walls coated with soot, the corridor before us looked pitch black, apart from the slats of light every ten meters or so where empty doorways interrupted the darkness.
We were walking through a zebra’s stripes, shadow to light.
Shadow to light.
We came to the stairwell.
“I’ll go in first and make sure he’s not down there yet,” I said to Ali. “I want you to walk right behind me. Put one hand on my shoulder and don’t try anything.”
We started down the steps.
++++
Blake and Mannie arrived at the old factory that the man on the phone had told them about.
Blake had no real idea what to expect inside. Maybe Fayed was in there, maybe it was a trick.
“Stay alert,” he said to Mannie.
“You as well.”
85
The entrance to the bomb shelter wasn’t disguised like the one in Lincoln High School had been, but was clearly visible and had a spinning steering-wheel-type lock, similar to what you might find on the hatch of a submarine.
I opened it and checked inside to make sure no one was there.
This shelter was slightly smaller than the one at the high school, and it appeared to be self-contained since no other tunnels led out from it.
++++
After Agent Bowers cleared the shelter, Ali asked if he could keep the pair of handcuffs with him.
“Why?” the agent asked him.
“It might help me if Fayed gets close enough.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I was trained in Yemen,” he said somewhat evasively. “Trust me.”
After a slight hesitation, Agent Bowers handed them over and allowed Ali to remain at the base of the stairs with a flashlight to await Fayed’s arrival.
As he waited, Ali thought of his time in the desert, of his training at that compound, and of the man kneeling in the sand, the one who just happened to have been raised Shia instead of Sunni.
So the images returned, and as they did, the memories he’d tried so hard to bury forever came crawling to the surface again.
After passing his first test of being left alone in the room for four days, Turhan, the man Ali knew at the time as Fayed, had led him around the back of the building to the kneeling man.
Hands bound behind him.
A black cloth hood cinched over his head.
Then Turhan pointed to the scimitar that the ski-mask-wearing soldier beside him carried.
“Do you wish to watch or to act?”
And Ali wondered if it was another test.
Turhan and his men had killed all those who’d moved from their cots, all those who’d failed the first test.
Ali studied the eyes of Turhan and those of the sword-carrying soldier by his side.
And he knew.
They will kill you if you do not kill this man with the hood. They will kill both of you. Two dead rather than one.
And Azaliya will be sold and will suffer as a result. And her suffering will be harsh and it will be long.
“This man has rejected the ways of true Islam,” Turhan said to Ali. “He is Shia. What do you think should happen to him?”
Better to suffer yourself than to bring suffering to your sister. Better to live and bring relief than die and usher in more pain.
Ali knew that if he took the sword, his conscience would suffer, part of his soul would be lost forever, but only one person would die.
And Azaliya would be safe.
Better your suffering than hers.
“What should happen to him?” Turhan repeated.
“He should be given one more chance to find the true path,” Ali replied.
Turhan’s look was hard to read.
But in the end, he offered the man one last chance, words whispered in Arabic, words that were rebuffed as the man gave a defiant reply.
Turhan stood and said to Ali. “Will you act?”
“Yes.”
It was horrifying that his choice was being determined by the grim arithmetic of death, but in the service of what was good, Ali did what was not right.
He accepted the scimitar that was offered to him. The glint of the indifferent sun worked its way along the rim of the wicked blade, accentuating its edge, the killing edge.
The man who knelt on the ground shook as he whispered prayers to the same God that those who stood around him vowed their allegiance to. Ali knew the words. They were not words of hatred or condemnation, but pleas for forgiveness—but not forgiveness for deeds that he himself had done, but for the forgiveness of the men who were doing this to him. For Turhan and for the soldier. And for Ali.
Prayers.
Ali raised the blade.
Death was in his hands.
The answer.
Suffering would follow.
Birds and stones and bodies in the sand.
He swung the sword fiercely down, cutting through the air and the sunlight and the stark desert day.
But his strength was sapped from all that time in the room, and he was too weak to complete the task on the first try.
“It is alright, brother. Swing again. Allah be praised.”
The muscle and bone in the man’s neck resisted the work of the blade, but in the end they lost to the scimitar.
They lost to Ali.
As he stood there splattered in his fellow Muslim’s blood, Ali’s hands shook as the terror and finality of what he had done gripped him.
Yes, he had killed this man. It was him and not someone else.
He was the one who had beheaded him.
You are a terrorist.
You are a murderer.
Dropping the scimitar, he stumbled backward and fell to his knees.
“You have done well, brother.” Turhan smiled. “You are now one of us.”
The man with the black ski mask took the blade and wiped it clean, and Ali prayed for mercy rather than justice, for justice would have crushed him and mercy was his soul’s only hope.
86
2:29 P.M.
Dispersal in 5 minutes
Sharyn parked beside St. Gerard’s Church.
She’d never been in it before but was familiar with the church from the photograph on her wall. Julianne’s photo didn’t do it justice, though. Before falling into disrepair, St. Gerard’s must have been quite an impressive sight.
Anticipating that, even though the day was bright outside, inside, the church would be infested with shadows, she took a compact flashlight with her as she left the car.
A text came in: Do not call for backup, Scarlett. If you do, I will know.
She would take care of this on her own.
Just like Constance did when she killed the Bluebeard in the folktale that Pat told her: “So, being alone, she had to act alone.”
But she ended up consumed by evil.
No. That won’t happen to me.
First Simone, then five victims here, then Ted.
Dylan needed to be stopped before he killed again.
++++
As Ali remembered that day in the desert, he felt a shiver run through him. Yes, he deserved to die for what he had done. And he would die. The smallpox would’ve been a fitting sentence, but he would be carrying out a more prompt one here today in just a few minutes. And hopefully, if this chamber held up, the virus would not spread throughout the city.
But what if it’s not airtight? What if some of the particles escape? Certainly after all this time, you cannot trust the seal.
The article said it would be airtight. You have to trust it. You don’t have another choice.
Ali would tell Bowers what he was going to do immediately beforehand so the agent could bring in a team to somehow clean up the mess.
All of that infected blood.
++++
To enter the church, Sharyn first had to slip through a slit in the rusted wire mesh fence that encircled the property.
She made her way across the brushy grass toward the church.
The front door was padlocked shut, but a cellar was located nearby, so, warily, she creaked its door open and as she descended the steps, she heard soft, coarse grunting sounds.
Clicking on the flashlight, she angled it into the darkness and saw Kevin standing in the corner.
A stout, rough-hewn joist ran above his head, and his hands were handcuffed around it. There was something in his mouth. At first, she couldn’t tell what it was, but as she came closer, she could see that it was a grenade. She hurried over, but he shook his head frantically.
“If I remove it, will it go off?” she said.
He nodded.
“Is Livvy here?”
He nodded.
“Where—wait, is she hurt?”
