“Howdy. You have reached Quincey Morris Investigation. If you’ve got this number, then you know what I do. If you want me to do it for you, wait for the beep and leave a detailed message. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Y’all take care, now.”
Libby frowned. Even if Morris hadn’t gotten up yet, he usually kept his phone near the bed – in this case, Libby’s bed. Well, maybe he was in the shower.
“Hi, Tex, it’s me. I’m in Detroit – it’s kind of a long story. Anyway, my flight home is due to leave in twenty minutes, which is supposed to put me at JFK around nine. Give me a call, when you get the chance. Bye.”
Forty-Eight
IN THE DENNY’S restaurant half a mile from Toledo Express Airport, Mal Peters put down his cup of surprisingly good coffee and said, “I bet Libby is just about going to fall over when you hand this to her.”
He patted the briefcase on the bench seat next to him. Inside, carefully wrapped in a towel that the Sheraton was probably going to bill him for, was a piece of very old iron about half the size of a dinner plate. To Peters it was just an interesting artifact from the distant past, but Ashley said she could feel the power coming off it, like heat from a furnace. She had assured him that this was the fragment of Solomon’s Seal that the Knights Templar had been hoarding since the Middle Ages. Where they had obtained it was anybody’s guess, but there was a good chance that someone in their Order had looted it from Jerusalem during one of the Crusades.
“Yes, I think she’ll be pleased,” Ashley said with a satisfied-looking smile. They both kept their voices down, out of long habit.
Some farmer living within sight of the Knights Templar complex must have heard the Hellfire missiles (a name that amused Ashley no end) exploding, gotten up to see the distant flames, and called 911. Fire trucks had arrived about twenty minutes later, and three State Police cars had shown up shortly thereafter. One of them must have summoned the ambulances, which had begun arriving at the compound just as dawn’s first light revealed the full extent of the carnage. The removal of the dead and wounded had gone on all morning and into the afternoon.
Peters and Ashley had observed this activity through binoculars from their high vantage point a mile away. They had passed the time by using Peters’s iPhone to locate a place in Bowling Green that rented construction equipment, and to ensure that the John Deere backhoe loader they wanted was available and would be ready for them to pick up later that day.
The last of the ambulances had departed by 1:00 in the afternoon. The State Police crime lab people had finished their preliminary investigation and left by 3:15. The last State Police officers to depart had put up a bunch of yellow “Crime Scene – Do Not Cross” tape across both the front gate of the Templar complex and the entrance to the turn-off on Route 25. They were gone by 3:40. Ashley and Peters were excavating the rubble by 4:30.
Since Ashley had determined during her covert visit to the compound exactly where the fragment of Solomon’s Seal had been kept, she and Peters had not wasted time in fruitless searching. They had found the Seal, and were exchanging triumphant high-fives, by a little after 6:00 in the evening.
And now it was 8:15 the next morning, after a night of celebratory sex in their hotel room, and the two of them were eating Denny’s scrambled eggs prior to catching the 9:30 plane back to New York.
“It’s been an interesting trip,” Peters said, “but I’m still not a hundred percent clear why we went to the trouble. I mean, you said Libby had already started fucking you again, right?”
Ashley gave him one raised eyebrow. “What’s the matter, Peters, jealous? Or are you just pissed because Libby won’t let you join us? I already asked her, I told you that – it’s not my fault she doesn’t do three-ways.”
“I’m not jealous or pissed,” Peters said. “I’m just wondering about your motives. This isn’t altruism, is it? Not from Ashur Badaktu, Demon of the Fourth Rank, straight from the pits of Hell.”
Ashley stirred cream into her second cup of coffee. “Libby’s pretty cool, as well as being a great fuck,” she said. “I like her. I like Morris, too.” She sipped coffee and put the cup down. “Hell, I even like you, Peters, when you’re not pissing me off with annoying questions.”
“So that’s it? You went through all this trouble to swipe a piece of Solomon’s Seal for Libby, just because you like her?
Ashley shrugged her elegant shoulders, perhaps a trifle defensively. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
Peters grinned at her. “Sounds like the kind of thing one of us sentimental humans would do.”
“Shut up, Peters.”
Forty-Nine
UTHMAN LEANED FORWARD in the back seat and said, “I regret to say that my feeling of disquiet persists, my brother.”
Nasiri looked sharply at the man’s image in the rear-view mirror. “Have you been able to ascertain its cause?”
“Not with precision, but I believe it comes from somewhere behind us.”
Nasiri glanced at the side-view mirror and said, “There is a white car that has been a quarter-mile behind us ever since we left the hotel. Many people travel this road, but still...”
Rahim, sitting in the rear seat next to Uthman, turned and stared through the back window. He saw nothing remarkable. “As you say, brother, there are many who use this highway. Perhaps the white car is there by chance.”
“Perhaps,” Nasiri said. “Let us see if we can find out.”
He had been driving at a steady sixty-five, the legal limit. Even though they had nothing with them that could be considered incriminating – unless one were knowledgeable in the ways of magic, of course – he wanted to avoid the attention of the authorities if at all possible. But traffic was light on this part of the highway right now, and Nasiri decided to take a small risk.
He slowly brought the speed up to seventy, then seventy-five, and then to eighty. The white car behind them maintained the same quarter-mile distance. Nasiri came back down to sixty-five and said to Uthman, “I fear your feelings of unease were justified, my brother. The white car appears to be following us, a situation that we cannot tolerate. Is there anything your magic can do to remove these misbegotten fleas from our tail?”
Uthman reached for his bag of tricks, which sat on the floor between his feet. “Most certainly. Do you wish for me to smite them, my brother?”
Nasiri considered. “Enjoyable as that would be to observe, I fear it might bring us unwanted scrutiny. I would prefer it if you could find a way for them to smite themselves.”
“A most ingenious solution, my brother,” Uthman said. “And I believe I know just how to accomplish it.”
He opened the canvas bag, removed several vials and a small brazier. “This should take only a few minutes, and then we will be rid of them.”
“Excellent,” Nasiri said. “Excellent.”
Fifty
DALE FENTON WAS biting the inside of his mouth in an effort to stay awake. He had thought to catch a few z’s on the plane ride from Detroit to Harrisburg, but the seats in the chartered fan jet were uncomfortable and the noise of the engines would have kept Rip Van Winkle from dozing off. Colleen hadn’t gotten any sleep either, although she was snoring softly now in the passenger seat next to Fenton.
They’d played rock-paper-scissors to see who was going to drive the first leg – “first leg” in this case being defined as “until the bastards in the Continental stop for some reason,” which meant it was likely to be a long one – and Fenton had lost.
He was no chauvinist – especially around Colleen, who’d have belted him at the first sign of his going easy on her because she was female. If he’d won the brief contest, he would have happily handed her the keys. But her scissors had cut his paper, and that was that.
He hoped things wouldn’t get so bad that he’d have to wake Colleen and tell her that he was pulling over to the side of the highway, just long enough for them to trade places. She needed to rest as badly as he did. But fairness was one thing;
crashing the car because you fell asleep behind the wheel was another matter entirely.
Fenton had once read that some academic types had figured out that, for an experienced driver, highway driving in good weather usually took up about forty percent of available concentration. How exactly the professors had made that determination, Fenton couldn’t recall. But maybe if he could find a way to keep the other sixty percent occupied somehow, it would help him stay awake.
He was trying to do the times tables backwards – and had, in fact, got as far as “eleven elevens is one hundred and twenty-one” – when the twenty-foot-high red brick wall appeared in the middle of the highway, three hundred feet in front of the car and closing fast.
The wall wasn’t moving, of course – the car was. Fenton had no time to reason out that there was no way in hell somebody could/would/did build a wall there, and consequently he must be viewing a hallucination. He did what anyone would have – jammed on the brakes, and twisted the wheel hard right in a desperate effort to get around the barrier.
Their rental Ford Focus shot off the highway, smashed through a guardrail as if it were made of balsa wood, and slid down an incline of perhaps thirty degrees. That was enough to roll the car. It made two complete revolutions, then half of another one, so that the Focus ended up on its right side. The two powerless tires on top kept spinning for a while, like the legs of a dog who dreams of chasing rabbits. The gas tank, miraculously, did not rupture; there was no fire.
The two spinning tires slowly ran down to a stop, and then there was no movement at all – not from the car, nor from the two Special Agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had been inside it.
Fifty-One
IT WAS NOVEMBER 22, 1963 – another one of those dates that will live in infamy. Morris was Lee Harvey Oswald, kneeling next to that open window at the Texas Schoolbook Repository, waiting for the target to come into range of his rifle.
He didn’t want to kill JFK, but he had no choice. The President was evil – he was sure of it. If allowed to live, he would set loose an afreet that would destroy –
“Quincey? Quincey? Come on, cowboy, time to wake up now.” Someone was gently shaking him, and the voice in his ear, that voice was...
Libby Chastain gave Morris’s shoulder another mild shake, and kept saying his name. He must really be down in the sub-basement of dreamland. She wondered for a moment if he’d been drinking, but there was no evidence of alcohol in the room, and no telltale odor on Morris’s breath or skin.
Morris opened his eyes, then immediately squinted against the bright sunlight coming in through the window of Libby’s small office. “Libby?” Morris rubbed a hand vigorously over his face. “Shit, what time is it?”
“Just about 10:20,” Libby said. “In the morning, that would be.” She stepped back to give him some room. “Gosh, Quincey, why didn’t you use my bed? It’s a lot better for your back than the chair.”
Morris yawned. “I was planning to – use your bed, I mean. But I guess I spent so much time online yesterday that I must’ve just conked out. Sorry. I found a few interesting tidbits, though.”
“No apologies needed, although I was wondering why you didn’t answer your phone.”
“Phone – shit. I think it’s still in my jacket, which is –”
“– hanging up in the front closet. Yes, I saw it when I came in.” She smiled at him. “I hope your internet time wasn’t all spent at sites like ‘Lesbian Schoolgirls in Bondage.’”
“Hmm. Never came across that one. Have you got the URL?”
“What I’ve got is coffee brewing, and it smells like it might be ready. I’ll be right back.”
She was true to her word, returning shortly with a couple of stoneware mugs full of her own special blend of java. She gave him one, and sat down in the room’s extra chair.
“I’ve learned a few things too, in my travels,” she said. “You want to go first, or shall I?”
“You start. I’m still waiting for my brain to get firing on all cylinders.”
Libby gave him a quick summary of what she had been up to, in the company of their two favorite FBI agents. When she finished, Morris sat frowning.
“So, these presumed jihadists,” he said, “are headed east, with Fenton and O’Donnell on their tail?”
“That was the plan,” she said. “The second part, I mean.”
“And Fenton thinks they’re getting ready to send up the big balloon.”
“That’s the assumption he and Colleen are operating under. I can’t say that it’s supported by a ton of facts, but it’s probably the best conclusion given the limited evidence available.”
“Have they checked in with you?”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t heard from them since they left for the airport last night.”
Morris’s frown remained in place. If anything, it grew deeper. He reached for the legal pad on which he’d made his notes.
“Speaking of conclusions based on limited evidence,” he said, “here’s one for you.” He told her about the “midnight really means noon” hypothesis that a few jihadist experts bought into.
“It seems rather simplistic,” she said. “On the other hand, ‘the simplest explanation that fits the known facts is often true.’”
“William of Occam and his famous razor may take a bow,” Morris said. He scratched his cheek. “There was something else I turned up, kind of late. Hold on.”
He flipped yellow pages, then stopped. “One of things I did was a search of print news sources, using the word ‘oasis.’ I wanted to see what words it was most often associated with.”
“Sounds like a good approach,” Libby said.
“A lot of the connections I found were what you’d expect – stuff relating to the desert. ‘Camel,’ ‘sand,’ ‘palm trees,’ stuff like that. But there were six instances when the word was used in connection with something called the Freedom Tower.”
Libby blinked, but her voice was flat when she said “Really.”
“Yeah, I didn’t bother to write ’em all down, but there was one from the President – Leffingwell’s predecessor, I mean, who said the Freedom Tower had a big garden that ‘would be an oasis of tranquility in the midst of urban intensity,’ or something like that.” He looked at Libby, not noticing that she had grown pale. “What is this Freedom Tower, anyway – some kind of monument?”
She stared at him. “You’re serious? You don’t fucking know?”
He looked back at her curiously. “What’s the matter? Who cares about another hunk of marble someplace?”
“Don’t you watch the news?
“Not much, since I got out of jail. I kind of lost the habit, inside. What’s wrong with you?”
Libby shook her head, then told him, “Quincey, the Freedom Tower is the nickname for a building – brand new, only opened three months ago. It’s official name is One World Trade Center!”
Morris looked at her, as his jaw slowly dropped toward his chest.
“It’s the central building in a whole new complex,” she said. “Taller than all the others, built right on the site of one of the towers that were destroyed on –”
Libby’s eyes grew wider than Morris had ever seen them. Then she said, very fast, “Oh, my Goddess, Quincey – what’s today’s date?”
He shrugged. “Hell, I’m not sure what day of the week it is.”
Libby had bought a copy of the Detroit Free Press before boarding her plane, then stuffed it in her purse when she’d finished reading. She practically knocked the chair over as she sprang to her feet and ran out of the room.
Morris sat there, staring at the doorway as a ball of ice big enough to bowl with seemed to form in his stomach.
Libby was back within seconds, the newspaper clutched in her hand. She thrust the front page out at Morris, pointing to the dateline near the top.
By now, Morris didn’t even have to look, but he did, anyway.
September 11th. The anniversary of the terr
ible jihadist attacks on America in 2001. Today was 9/11.
The terrorists, last seen heading east on Interstate 80, were headed for New York – hell, they were probably here already. They were going to turn an afreet loose to destroy the central building of new World Trade Center, which had been built as a symbol of American resilience in the face of the worst possible kind of adversity.
They were going to turn a fucking fire djinn loose on the Freedom Tower. And they were going to do it in less than ninety minutes.
Fifty-Two
THE SUBWAY WAS not crowded at this hour, and the four men had no trouble finding seats together. Nasiri had said they must not leave their car too close to the target, lest they be caught up in the immense traffic jam that was sure to follow their strike. They had parked at the Port Authority building and would return there, either by subway or on foot, once their glorious task was completed. He wanted to get out of New York before the whole city was closed down.
Nasiri had already written their statement, explaining to the stupid Americans that there would be no safety for any of them as long as their government continued to oppress and murder the people of the Middle East, and to offend Allah by their continued military presence in the Land of the Prophet.
The brief manifesto was in the form of a text message already typed into Nasiri’s phone. Once the tower was in flames, he would press “Send” and the statement would be delivered instantaneously to all the major media markets in the city, along with the Mayor’s Office.
Midnight At The Oasis Page 19
