Ammar paused before responding. He deflected with, “I am also very glad that I was able to meet you and your husband before—well, before it was too late.”
“Too late? Too late for what?” Natalia quizzed. “Ammar, I—”
“I am sorry, Mrs. Stiletto, but the time has come for me to move on. My only regret is that I made your acquaintance at such an inopportune moment in history. I do wish to thank you for your assistance, and I bid you and your husband the best. Good luck.”
And then the line went dead.
Natalia cursed profusely in German and tossed the phone back to Jon.
Jon caught the phone with both hands, fumbled with it, and slipped it back into his jacket. “I take it he didn’t tell you what you wanted to know?”
Natalia bit her lip. “No. But what he didn’t say tells me practically everything.”
Jon nodded, placed his hands on his hips, and gestured to his companion. “We don’t have a lot of time here. Washington, DC, isn’t the safest place to be, and it’s only going to get worse. We need to get this business over with and evac as soon as we can.”
Natalia stood up and moved nearly nose to nose with Jon. “What does that mean, exactly? What do you know that you’re not telling us?”
The other man finally spoke up nervously. “We need to leave because every city, especially this one—has become ground zero.”
Natalia retreated several steps and turned to the man curiously, then whipped her head over her shoulder to me. The time had come to break concealment and join them.
When Jonathon saw me approach, he smiled faintly and held out his hand. I shook it, but didn’t offer him a smile in return. The man with him sent me some questionable microexpressions that I couldn’t put my finger on—almost as if he was trying to remember where he’d spotted my face before.
“Is this your intel guy?” I asked Jon.
He nodded.
“Is he first tier? Or some lackey from the farm?”
Natalia backed away, sensing that it was my turn to do some interrogating.
“He’s—” Jon’s voice sank to a whisper. “He’s one of my floaters.”
I grinned. I wasn’t impressed. “A floater, huh?” I turned to the man, gesturing casually to myself and to Natalia. “Do you know who we are?”
He looked away. After a pause he said, “Officially? No.”
I looked him over for a second before continuing. “How about unofficially?”
His eyes found mine. “Admittedly, yes.”
“Fantastic,” I said, expressing my displeasure. “Thanks a lot, Jon.”
Jon threw his hands in the air at his sides. “Quinn, please. Stop pretending you two aren’t the real-life underworld incarnates of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. You wanted information, he’s got information—the information you wanted. And I think you need to hear him out.”
“Fine,” I said. At this juncture, there wasn’t any point in arguing with him. Like it or not, we were involved now for one reason or another and needed to know why. My stare found its way back to Jon’s companion. “What do you know about these attacks?”
“More than anyone should,” he blurted out.
“Do you know what precipitated them?”
The man cowered behind Jon, pushing his thick plastic-framed glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose. “A signal.”
“What? What kind of signal?”
He apprehensively replied, “Specifically…a negative reply. From a transponder chipset.”
I turned to Natalia, who, judging by the look on her face, had instantly put it together.
“Are you talking about the microchip we used to trail el-Sattar?” she asked.
The man looked away and then back to us. He started to shuffle step as his eyes darted, indicating fight or flight, but Natalia reached forward, forcibly grabbing his arm. “Don’t!”
“Ouch!” the man squealed. “I wasn’t going to—”
“Yes, you were. Now, answer my question,” she ordered, a sinister edge to her voice.
The man nodded profusely. “The chip used to track him and the one I’m referring to are one and the same.”
Natalia let go of the man’s arm just as the expression on her face sank. She reached for her injured arm as if she’d suddenly felt a twist of pain from it. “Jesus. This was us,” she said, almost inaudibly. Then her face turned pale. She looked dizzy—almost faint.
I reached for her and helped her onto the bench behind us while she repeatedly expressed to me that she was okay, her vacant stare telling me otherwise.
“What’s wrong with her?” Jonathon asked, a fretful look on his face. “Is she drunk?”
I ignored Jon’s witticism and focused my attention on the other man. “So this negative reply…what caused it?”
The man shrugged, his eyebrows raised. “Death,” he said colloquially. “Lack of heartbeat or pulse. Nonexistence of brain activity. It was a sum of factors actually, but it’s predicated on the demise of the host.”
“Who designed this thing?”
The man looked over at Jonathon, who looked away and rolled his eyes.
Upon seeing Jon’s expression, I extrapolated the answer. “The agency.”
Jon acted as though he’d heard nothing. The man did the same, only to soon change his tune. He looked back at me and nodded his response with a clenched jaw.
I grabbed Jon’s arm and pushed my thumb into his inner elbow to get his attention. “And I take it the agency had it implanted? During the dental visit Ammar spoke about?”
“No!” he snapped back instantaneously, shoving away my hand. “That wasn’t us! Yes—we designed it. And, yes, it was sold along to various assets for a swarm of reasons. It’s how we’ve been able to track el-Sattar for so long. It’s what helped me secure this op for us. But we didn’t put it there, so please, Quinn. Fucking relax.”
It occurred to me that Jon used the objective pronoun us and the subjective pronoun we. I couldn’t tell if it’d been intentional or a Freudian slip, but his use of them allowed me to home in on their shared antecedent. And I took it to mean that Jon was still very much under contract with the agency.
I snarled. “If the CIA didn’t put it there, who did?”
The nervous man looked around for a moment, wondering if he should answer. Then he spoke up after a pause. “The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.”
I turned to him. “What?”
“It’s a new protocol—a procedure that’s not exactly customary knowledge. Islamists have been using it to track their leadership and to know when a death occurs. What’s happening now, though, is rather unprecedented. el-Sattar’s death wasn’t always a trigger mechanism, but it somehow manifested into one—due to recent events.”
I took in a deep breath. My nerves were nearly shot, and I could feel my patience waning. I warned him. “You’d better start making sense.”
“I’m sorry, I’m trying. I’m not the best…talker. I don’t get out much,” the man said, his voice shaky. “You see, we have it on good authority that el-Sattar came here only to seek asylum.”
“Asylum from whom?”
“Islam,” he replied flatly. “He was making arrangements…planning to renounce his position as imam and abandon his beliefs.”
“Holy shit,” Jon said.
“Yes, holy shit,” his companion said, gesturing his agreement. “We are of the belief that his supremacy had begun to weigh on him, and he was having, for lack of a better term, second thoughts. By renouncing Islam, he’d become an apostate, which, as everyone knows, is a death sentence. Staying in the Middle East would’ve been out of the question for him. We know that he was brought here under tight diplomatic security—flown in on a military transport—and had arranged to meet with the president and other leaders for what we believe was to be a systematic decommissioning of jihadist terror cells across the country, and to prevent the declaration of the future caliphate.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Jon
said, turning his head away. After a few seconds of studying the area beside and behind him, he reached into his jacket once again, extracting two miniature glass bottles—one Absolut, one Stolichnaya.
“We presume now that ISIS, by some means, managed to uncover his plan and, in turn, instituted a workaround of sorts to move forward without el-Sattar in play.”
“Move forward with what?” I asked.
“Inception. Of nihayat al’ayam,” he replied cavalierly, as if for some reason he thought I knew what he meant.
“The end of days,” Natalia filled in, not having so much as moved from her seated position.
I’d almost forgotten she was moderately fluent in Arabic. The end of days? This was starting to sound more like a vicious nightmare.
The man drew in closer after taking a highly distrustful look around. We were all huddled together now, close enough to become intimate if we elected to. “That’s right. And it begins with the crippling of America.”
“Keep going,” I said.
“It’s their final checkmate…a summation of their foreign policies,” he whispered. “It’s a portion of what Islamic Law refers to as ‘offensive jihad’—their violent expansion into non-Muslim-ruled countries. The attacks we’ve seen so far today are just the beginning. It’s going to expand and it’s going to escalate. And it’s going to get a lot worse, and it’s going to stay that way.”
I turned to Jon. “Did you know anything about this?”
He shook his head while swallowing down the last droplets from the two mini bottles. “Bits and pieces, Quinn, only bits and pieces. We never saw anything like this coming.”
“But you should have,” Natalia said, her voice and her empty stare showing her anxiety.
Jon’s companion advocated, “These attacks were planned and coordinated over a span of decades and came into being a long time ago. I assure you, the company had nothing directly to do with them. Whether el-Sattar ordered them into being or they ignited on their own, resultant of his death, this event was inevitable.”
“Is there any way to stop it?”
The man shook his head and readjusted his glasses. “How much do you know about ISIS?”
I sighed. “Apparently, not enough.”
He nodded. “It’s okay. Don’t feel bad, you’re no different than most.” A pause. “The general consensus is they’re just a bunch of psychos running around blowing themselves up haphazardly, but that’s just not the case. ISIS is a religious faction with meticulously considered beliefs. It fundamentally rejects peace, craves genocide, and deems itself the foremost purveyor of the coming apocalypse.” He paused and covered his mouth to cough. “Early this morning and today, it was plane crashes, attacks on government buildings, police stations, military bases, hospitals—”
“Schools,” Natalia broke in.
The man nodded. “Yes, my apologies. I was about to mention soft targets. It’s unfortunate, I know, but before long, it will escalate, I assure you. Oil refineries, bridges and tunnels, hydroelectric dams, power plants, and, eventually, the entire electrical grid will be affected. When the lights go off and gasoline stops flowing, the trucks stop running, and the economy will tank. America falls to its knees. And then they’ll go local with an entirely different type of jihad—the ‘scare the living shit out of you’ kind. They’ll forcibly institute sharia law, and we’ll see instances of public beheadings, amputations, crucifixions, and the like. ISIS is compelled to not only destroy its enemies, but terrorize them into submission beforehand.”
“Jesus. We didn’t cut the head off the serpent,” I said. “We ignited the fuse to some newfangled holocaust.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t bring along good news,” the man said. “Jon said you needed information, and I’m good with information. For nearly half a decade, I’ve been the company’s foremost expert on Islamic terror.”
I looked at him strangely. “That’s quite a position to fulfill.”
He shrugged casually. “Let’s just say no one knows more about it than I do. And I can promise you, there’s nothing virtuous or attractive about Islamic apocalypticism.”
Natalia stood up and folded her arms over her chest. She looked perplexed, but the color was returning to her skin. “Do you have any idea when this ends?”
The man looked confused. “I’m sorry?”
“How long are these attacks expected to continue?” she asked again. “When does this stop?”
He hesitated, his expression blank. “Um, well…it doesn’t.”
“It doesn’t?” I asked.
“No,” he uttered while motioning his head in the negative. “It goes on. Forever. Until nothing remains.”
Jon turned his head away and began laughing in his own characteristic fashion. “And you guys wonder why I drink.”
Sixteen
Mayflower Hotel, 1127 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC
Friday, March 28
Nihayat al’ayam plus 15 hours, 2 minutes
After our meeting ended, I escorted Natalia back to the hotel so she could get some rest. Considering our most recent discovery, I felt we’d reached a point where we needed to cut bait and get the hell away from here. We needed to liquidate our assets and make arrangements to return to Europe before the situation here worsened and our amnesty elapsed.
I ordered her room service in the form of a grass-fed, twelve-ounce, medium-rare ribeye steak, a side of blanched broccoli and asparagus, and two glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice. I departed only after kindly requesting that she eat and drink everything before my return and try to get some sleep. Natalia’s body required the nourishment, and she needed to feel like herself again as quickly as possible before we encountered the taxing predicament we now knew was inbound.
America had become a war theater—a hostile environment—seemingly overnight, and I had a hunch we were about to embark on a precarious journey in the coming days. I needed her to be as close to one hundred percent operational as possible.
I hailed a yellow taxi to transport me to an Enterprise Rent-a-Car five and a half blocks away from the hotel. After a half hour of haggling with a skinny, well-dressed Jamaican man smelling of spearmint gum and marijuana, I threw down a cash deposit, along with Joel Donovan’s American Express card, and drove out of the lot in a silver Audi A8. I assumed the wife would approve of my choice, even though the Americanized version of the three-liter turbocharged sedan wasn’t exactly made for the autobahn.
As I pulled onto the street amongst the incessant horn-blaring traffic, I made a mental note that it was indeed time to dump Mr. Donovan’s identity and assume a new one before day’s end if time allowed.
My next stop was at a Nordstrom not far away to purchase two pieces of rolling luggage that I assumed were large enough for the load they were destined to carry. I tossed them into the trunk of the Audi and then made my way through traffic, up Eighteenth Street and back down Connecticut to Brooks Brothers for some specific clothing items I required. My ultimate destination was a rather elite one and, I assumed, would have more of an appreciation for someone wearing business attire, as opposed to the blue jeans, long-sleeve T-shirt, and North Face jacket I had on at present.
With those tasks behind me, I exited the District and drove over the Fourteenth Street Bridge into Arlington, stopping at the Wells Fargo Bank in Crystal City, where Natalia and I had procured a safe deposit box years ago, one of three in the metropolitan area, and one of just under a hundred in the world. We’d chosen this location and others like it because they utilized a retinal scan for identification purposes instead of industry-standard biometrics like most other financial institutions. One effortless insertion of a smart contact lens, and our identities remained as they’d always been—completely surreptitious.
After presenting the proper credentials to a Wells Fargo employee wearing a red cocktail dress and a pair of scuffed four-inch heels, she escorted me to the vault, where I was asked to approach a terminal for the retinal scan. A few s
econds later, the screen glowed green and welcomed me, and the clerk handed me my laser-cut key along with a smile and then closed the privacy curtain behind me after I’d stepped inside.
I laid the rolling luggage on the floor and unzipped the top, just underneath the deposit box door, then inserted the key, twisted it, and typed a four-digit pin code into the number pad. It beeped, opened, and revealed a bounty of personal items, along with some professional ones.
Passports, driver’s licenses, assorted IDs, credit cards, and one hundred thousand dollars cash, minus the ten grand I stuffed into the front pocket of my new pleated Brooks Brothers wool dress trousers, were amongst the contents I dumped into the case. Several burner iPhones wrapped in mylar bags and an Iridium 9575A military-grade satellite telephone with spare batteries, USB connectivity cabling and a charging kit followed, as did two third-generation PVS-7 night-vision devices.
At the bottom of the container lay a French-made Glauca B1 folding tactical-duty knife, which found its way promptly into my right pocket, two FN Five-seveN high-capacity auto pistols, and finally, a custom Steyr TMP machine pistol with extra thirty-round magazines and matching suppressor. I took a quick glance over my shoulder to verify I was still alone, placed the weapons, ammunition and accessories into a separate zippered area within the case, and took a breath.
My business here concluded, I tossed the key back to the clerk and took my leave of Wells Fargo. I loaded up the Audi and made for Reagan National Airport for the purposes of chartering a private jet that would take Natalia and me back to Germany. I soon found though, my plans to leave the country weren’t going to materialize as I’d have preferred, in spite of the coin I’d spent on this faux Cary Grant–look-alike outfit.
The attendant behind the desk at the Charter Flight Group hanger was a balding man in his late forties. When I inquired in earnest about procuring a trans-Atlantic flight, he offered me a confounded look and said, “You do realize Homeland Security raised the threat level to orange, right? There’re attacks popping up all over the country now. Word is, they’re going to raise it to severe before long. It hasn’t been that high since…well, since ever.”
Until Nothing Remains: A Hybrid Post-Apocalyptic Espionage Adventure (A Gun Play Novel: Volume 1) Page 16
