by Roland Smith
Mom and Roger wrote the first check, a big one, then said that all the proceeds from their concerts for the next two weeks would also go to the fund.
When Buddy T. heard about this, there was a third explosion in Washington, D.C., but Mom told Buddy T. to get over it, they were donating the proceeds, and hung up on him. No fatalities.
The terrorist attack and the fund-raising effort would change the entire tone of the concert. Mom and Roger started discussing how they were going to handle it. I don’t think they even noticed when Angela, Charlie, and I left the Solarium.
Charlie said he was going to brief the president and that he would see us later. We found P.K. in his bedroom, watching the disaster on television. He had changed into starched khakis, shirt, polished shoes, and a blazer.
“Guess the concert’s still a go,” he said. “Bethany made me change into these. Thought I’d be able to take them off. Now I have to leave them on.”
“You look sharp,” I said.
“Are you going to change clothes?”
“Probably,” I said, although no one would notice because Angela and I had several sets of the same clothes, which we wore like uniforms.
Angela put on her sunglasses and lay down on his bed.
“Something the matter?” P.K. asked.
“Nah, she’s just tired. All that walking at the museum wore us out.”
“Did you see the Hope diamond?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“I’m just mad about that rock,” P.K. said.
“Mad about it?”
“Sorry about that. I went to school in England for a couple of years, and sometimes little Briticisms slip out.”
“I kind of like it,” I said.
Angela said nothing. I was sure she was thinking about Malak, wondering what was going on. She wore shades most of the time, but this time she might have put them on so we couldn’t see her tears.
P.K. pointed to the television. “Terrible thing. They’ll blame Dad of course. Goes with the territory.”
“How many people were lost?”
“Sixteen so far. Five in the second explosion. It could have been worse.”
“They’ll catch them,” I said.
“I doubt it,” P.K. said. “The surveillance cameras weren’t working. For the past year graffiti writers have been tagging the parking structure. Before they strike they take the cameras out. It’s happened at least a dozen times. The guy who usually fixes the cameras was on vacation, and they couldn’t find anyone to take his place. So there’s no video of the car coming into the garage, which means this has been planned for a long time. The FBI is looking for the taggers, which at this point is the only lead they have. The press is having a field day with that.”
Just before we got to the White House, Boone called Charlie and told him what had happened at the apartment. Charlie wasn’t going to share the information with us, but Angela insisted. It took another phone call to Boone for Charlie to give in.
By now J.R. knew exactly who planted the bomb, but he was withholding the information in order to protect Malak. If the FBI and Homeland Security knew this, he would probably be impeached. My admiration for P.K.’s dad went way up. He’d be an international hero if he went on television and reported that the perpetrators had been caught and were currently lying dead in a D.C. apartment. Instead, he was keeping his mouth shut while federal agents were rounding up taggers.
P.K. and I stared at the television as they played the worst footage over and over again and interviewed terrorist experts who had no idea who was really responsible for the bomb.
“I don’t get it,” I muttered, more to myself than to anyone else, but of course the sharp-eared P.K. picked it up.
“What?”
“I mean, I understand that this is some kind of religious war and that they don’t like us and they want to kill us, but what’s the point? What’s the endgame? What’s their ultimate goal?”
“Reinstatement of the caliphate,” Angela said without lifting her head off P.K.’s pillow.
“Huh?”
“Angela’s right,” P.K. said. “At least that’s what some people think.”
“Great,” I said. “What’s a caliphate?”
“Several centuries ago the Muslims controlled almost all of the known world,” Angela said. “Their leader was called the caliph, supposedly chosen by Allah, or God, to rule his people. The caliph’s word was law.”
“Except,” P.K. said, “after Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the first—and some say the only true—caliph died, there were huge fights over who should rightfully take his place. He founded the religion of Islam, but it seems he passed away without making it clear who his successor was or how he was to be chosen. Several powerful caliphs came and went over the centuries, but there was a lot of infighting among the various tribes and factions. Eventually, this loosened Islam’s hold on the world.”
“So they’re not just interested in destroying the United States?”
“No,” Angela said. “The radical fundamentalists, of which there are actually very few compared to all of Islam, believe that the infidels, which includes all of us in this room, need to die.”
“It’s worldwide,” P.K. said. “Dad says that the U.S. is like Wal-Mart. If they can take the big boy down, the others are bound to follow. This didn’t start with 9/11. It’s been going on for hundreds of years.”
“Fine,” I said. “So who’s the caliph?”
“There are a lot of guys in line for the job,” Angela said. “And they are all guys. No girls allowed. But no one can agree on who it might be.”
“And now we have people whose daytime jobs are being terrorists,” P.K. said. “It’s what they do, it’s what they’ve always done. They don’t know how to do anything else. If this war ended tomorrow, what are these people going to do for a living? Get jobs at Wal-Mart?”
“Religion and oil,” Angela said.
“Bingo,” P.K. said. “Dad says that the worst discovery in history was oil. The only way to get off it is to burn it all up. Only then will we come up with an alternative energy source. If we didn’t need oil, we wouldn’t be in the Mideast. We could leave the tribes and factions to fight it out among themselves like they’ve been doing for thousands of years. The only thing we’d have to do is make sure they don’t get their hands on a nuclear bomb.”
“And protect Israel,” Angela said.
“Dad says Israel should be moved to Utah, where we can really protect them,” P.K. said. “He’s kidding…I think. Don’t tell anyone that. It wouldn’t go over well.”
“Okay,” I said. “So this whole thing is like really, really stupid.”
P.K. laughed. “Madly stupid. Among the billion or so Muslims there are several thousand committed, well-trained religious zealots who believe with all their hearts they are doing Allah’s bidding by trying to kill us.” He pointed to the television. “What they don’t get is that when they do something like this it really ticks us off. Instead of dividing us it unites us, at least for a while.”
I was way out of my depth. “So who do you guys think is going to be the caliph?”
Angela sat up and looked at the television. “The man who becomes the caliph will be the man who has the most power at the end. It’s like the game I used to play in elementary school, king of the mountain.”
“I used to play that too,” I said. “It got kind of rough sometimes. Did you ever win?”
“I always won,” Angela said.
I believed her. She was a lot tougher than she looked.
Malak climbed into the van in back of the apartment building and drove away with blood dripping onto the steering wheel. Ziv had just grazed her arm, but it felt like a leopard had taken a bite out of it. She couldn’t stop to stanch the bleeding because she was allegedly fleeing from the crazed Eben Lavi, who was probably at this very moment limping out of the apartment building with her blood on his jeans. That was the odd little gadget man with thick black glasses t
hey called X-Ray. “Rub your wound on Eben’s thigh,” he had said. “Otherwise it won’t look realistic.”
Malak smiled despite her desperate situation. She had wiped her wound on the ex-Mossad agent’s leg on the way out the door, with Eben looking as uncomfortable as she felt.
As she fled down the hallway Ziv called out to her in Arabic, “The Leopard found the puppy at a Sonic Drive-In while she and Sean were ordering limeades and burgers.”
If Malak survived the day, which seemed unlikely to her at this point, she would have to sit down with Ziv to find out what else he knew about her twin sister. If Malak had known about the puppy, Elise, Sean, and Amun might still be alive.
About a mile from the apartment she pulled into the parking lot of a drugstore and took her jacket off. In the glove box she found a packet of tissues and bound half the stack to her wound with a strip of cloth torn from one of Elise’s blouses. Elise and Sean had their suitcases in the van and were ready to flee in an instant like the experienced terrorists they were.
Malak wiped the blood off her hand with the rest of the tissues. She looked in the rearview mirror and evaluated her appearance. She was pale and wild-eyed, as if she’d just seen two people murdered before being shot herself. That would never do. The drugstore would have a dozen security cameras. She found a leather jacket in Elise’s bag and slipped painfully into it, then added a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. Malak didn’t exactly achieve the soccer mom appearance she was hoping for, but it was the best she could do. The trick now would be to get what she needed for her wound before the blood started dripping out of her sleeve again. She got out of the van.
Moving quickly through the store would draw attention to herself, as would making a beeline for the gauze and disinfectant. Malak grabbed a cart as if she had several items to pick up, pausing once in a while to look at something that she didn’t need until she finally arrived at the first-aid aisle. Her bad luck continued. There was a woman there restocking the first-aid shelves.
“Can I help you?”
“Maybe,” Malak said. “My son banged up his knees and elbow last night on a skateboard. He’s fine—we got him all patched up—but I thought I should replenish our first-aid supplies for the next time he does a header.”
“I hate those skateboards,” the woman said. “Kids think they’re immortal these days.”
“They sure do,” Malak said, and started pulling what she needed off the shelf.
“How about that car bomb?” the woman said.
“Horrible!” Malak said without hesitation or the slightest hint that she had been in the car that exploded. “I almost didn’t go out because of it. But what are you going to do?”
“You’re right,” the woman said. “Life goes on. But right here in D.C., I guess nobody’s really safe. Does your husband work downtown?”
“No, thank God. He works in Alexandria.”
Malak grabbed the last thing she needed and put it in her cart. “Thank you for your help.”
“Tell your boy to be more careful on the darn skateboard.”
“Believe me, I have.”
Malak loaded her purchases one-handed onto the checkout belt. As they were being rung up she looked at the prepaid disposable cell phones hanging on a rack near the register.
“Are these any good?” she asked the cashier.
“A lot of people buy them. You get twenty hours of talk time, and you can recharge the minutes with a credit card. At least you always know what your cell phone bill’s going to be.”
“I have a cell phone,” Malak said. “But I’m thinking about getting one for my daughter so I can get a hold of her when I need to.”
The cashier smiled. “I’m sure your daughter would prefer an iPhone, but your pocketbook would prefer one of these.”
“I guess I’ll try one… Well, I guess I’d better take two. My son’s two years younger, and I can’t very well get her one without getting him one.”
“I hear you.”
When Malak got to the van there was blood on the shopping cart handle.
Eben limped out of the apartment building with Malak’s blood on his jeans. He looked up and down the street wildly, knowing he wouldn’t see Malak, but he did spot one of the people watching the building. He was young, maybe eighteen years old, talking on a cell phone as he crossed the street toward the building.
Bad timing, Eben thought.
The boy’s eyes went wide when he saw Eben. He snapped the cell phone closed and turned around, but before he reached the sidewalk Eben was on him. Eben had no choice. A crazed, wounded, rogue Mossad agent, bent on revenge for the death of his brother wouldn’t hesitate to assault someone who might have seen his prey get away. He had no doubt the kid was a member of the ghost cell and was on his phone, talking to his handler, when he saw Eben come out. His handler had probably told him to go up to the apartment to find out what happened.
Eben dragged the boy into an alley, slammed his head against the brick wall a couple of times, then stuck his silenced pistol against the boy’s Adam’s apple.
“I will ask one time. If you answer truthfully I will let you live. If I think you are lying, I will kill you right here, right now. Do you understand?”
The boy nodded and looked like he might faint.
“Where did the woman go?”
“I don’t know.”
Eben cocked his pistol.
“I’m telling the truth! I don’t know!”
Eben waited.
“She ran out of the building and went around back. Maybe she had a car. She looked hurt. Her arm.”
“Good!” Eben said. He reached down, wiped his hand on his thigh, and showed the boy the red smear. “She shot me in the leg.”
He hit the boy in the head with the pistol grip. The boy crumpled to the ground.
I deserve a Tony Award, Eben thought as he limped out of the alley and down the street.
Boone and X-Ray watched the act unfold from the roof of the apartment building. They didn’t see what Eben did to the boy in the alley, but they were relieved when they saw the boy stumbling out of the alley, talking on his cell phone.
“Thought he was a goner,” X-Ray said.
“Eben is smarter than that,” Boone said. “On a different subject, with what Ziv told us about himself, do you think you can find out who he is or who he was?”
X-Ray shrugged. “He didn’t give us much, but I’ll do some data mining and see what I come up with. And speaking of different subjects, there’s something we need that would make our job a lot easier.”
“What’s that?”
“A military-grade surveillance drone.”
“You mean a highly classified multimillion-dollar model airplane?”
“Yep. And I want it off the books. No questions asked if the Department of Defense or Homeland Security picks up its blip.”
“You don’t want much, do you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll put it to good use.”
“Who’s going to fly it?”
“Me and Vanessa.”
“Ever flown one?”
“Nope. But I’ve been reading up on it.”
Boone called J. R. Culpepper on his private line and told him what was going on. When he finished he asked him for a militarygrade surveillance drone.
“That’s right… No, we don’t need an operator, just the drone, and we want it off the grid. If anyone asks who’s flying it or what it’s doing up in the air, it’s none of their business…” Boone ended the call.
“What did he say?”
“He’s worried about Malak. He thinks she should have pulled the plug, just like I thought she should. I’m not sure there’s going to be an act two.”
“What about the drone?”
“There will be a white trailer parked in front of Blair House in an hour. Inside will be a three-point-five-million-dollar drone and all the electronic gear you need to fly and monitor it. Keys to the trailer will be on top of the right tire. Doe
s the intellimobile have a trailer hitch?”
“Yep.”
The intellimobile was the SOS mobile communication/ surveillance van. It didn’t look like much on the outside, but inside was a tangle of electronic gear worth more than the drone.
“You ever pulled a trailer?”
“No, but Vanessa has.”
The young guy Eben roughed up and his partner crossed the street and walked into the apartment building.
“Guess the curtain’s up on act two,” Boone said. “Come on, Croc. Let’s go to the White House and put on a different kind of show.”
Malak crossed the Potomac into Virginia over the Chain Bridge and went to the house where she had spent the night with the family. She knew no one would be there. Once the ghosts abandoned a house they rarely returned.
She had left the patio door unlocked. She took a long, hot shower and treated her wound, which was still terribly painful. She changed clothes and put the dirty ones in the wash, with the exception of the bloody blouse with the tear in the arm. That would have to be discarded along with her jacket. She carried only two sets of clothes because that was all that would fit in her pack. Leopards had to stay light on their feet…or paws.
As Malak waited for the laundry she made herself two tuna fish sandwiches and ate both of them. The shower, the food, and the peace of her temporary lair went a long way in soothing her raw nerves.
And I will need all the nerve I can muster for this next part, she thought.
She took out one of the disposable cell phones. She was certain Ziv and Dirk were tracking her and knew where she was, or perhaps Ziv had turned this task over to the SOS team, who seemed to have become indispensable. She smiled when she thought of Pat Callaghan and Charlie Norton. Aside from Angela and Roger, they were the two people she missed the most after she became the Leopard. She checked the time on her Seamaster, and her smile broadened.
