by Mark Terry
Hutchins waited.
Rizvi said, “I know he spent several years in the Army.”
Moin said, “Army or National Guard?”
“Army, I believe. I’m not certain, but I believe he was in the Army. He seemed to know a great deal about infantry weapons, things like ground-to-air missiles and rifles and bombs. I don’t remember specifics except he volunteered when he was sixteen years old. That I do remember. That’s the earliest you can join.”
Firdos said to Hutchins, “But you can’t be deployed until you’re eighteen.” He turned his attention back to Rizvi. “Do you know how long he was in the Army?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
They questioned him for a while longer, but it was clear he had provided them with all he knew. They thanked him and left. Walking back to Firdos’s car, Hutchins said, “It would be very interesting to find out where and when he was deployed, if he was deployed.”
Firdos clearly had something different on his mind. “I think it would be very interesting to know who he served with and under during his years in the military.”
“Why?”
Turning to him, Firdos’s expression was troubled. “I served in the Navy. I still have friends from that time. Those friends are from all levels and corners of Pakistan society. Some are farmers, some are shopkeepers, some are policemen, some are politicians, and some are still in the military, but much higher up.”
He was quiet a moment. “It’s possible the men he served with are part of his support group here in Pakistan. Believe me when I say this, that not all people in Pakistan are happy to see Americans here. And not all people in Pakistan are happy with President Tarkani’s support of the global war on terror and his opposition to al-Qaeda.”
Hutchins met his gaze. Firdos had something specific on his mind, but Hutchins had no idea what it was. Perhaps the Pakistani wanted more evidence before he voiced his suspicions. “You’re saying?”
“I am saying that we should be careful.”
CHAPTER 21
The flames roared to life, hungrily eating the furniture, the carpeting, and reaching for the ceilings and walls. Derek shifted his weight forward. His feet hit the ground and he stood up, gripped the chair rungs awkwardly and swung it as hard as he could against the kitchen island.
The vibration nearly snapped his wrists, but the chair didn’t break. Damned oak chair.
Sweat broke out over his entire body and was immediately dried by the flames.
As Derek watched, the flames found his Go Packs and devoured them. Heat blasted through the house in rippling waves.
He shuffled around the kitchen island. His gun, his sat phone, and his knife rested on its granite surface.
Greg Popovitch’s body caught on fire. The skin reddened, then blackened, his features obliterated.
He turned away. It felt like his hair was on fire. Frantically he leaned over the island and got his mouth on the knife. He bit back a howl as the metal burned his lips. Straightening up, he dropped the Emerson knife to the floor and knelt beside it, no easy feat with your wrists strapped to the rungs of a captain’s chair.
The air was easier to breathe down here, but not by much. It was still hot, and he hoped the fire wasn’t hot enough to cause flashover—so hot that everything caught on fire from the heat itself.
He laid down on the floor, thunking awkwardly onto his side. Derek felt like a turtle struggling to flip over. He was nose to nose with Jed, whose features seemed to be melting in the flames that rose from his clothes and skin.
Derek concentrated, twisting. He still couldn’t reach the knife.
He started rocking himself in the chair, levering his legs beneath him. His clothing begin to smolder. He was no longer sweating. His eyes felt parched, his skin papery and hot.
Derek nearly flipped over the chair, but lost his traction and fell. His back screamed at the assault.
Again! His shoes scrabbled for purchase on the vinyl tile floor, which was starting to melt from the heat of the flames. He coughed. The smoke was marginally thinner close to the floor, but he knew that the vapors emitted by burning vinyl and plastic were toxic. A coughing fit racked his body and he lost his balance again. This time his head snapped against the high back of the chair. Red and black starbursts exploded before his eyes.
He roared in anger and frustration, legs pumping, feet sliding, and the chair tilted sideways and onto its back. His hands were now inches from the floor, trapped in the curve of the chairback.
Now he really felt like a turtle—a roasted turtle.
Twisting and bending, he looked down to locate the knife. It was about a foot from his hands.
He tried rocking the chair, but it didn’t seem to get him anywhere. His arms could slide up and down the chair rails, but he was still too far from the knife. The flames went fwoof! and the curtains caught fire in the living room.
Derek tried to take in a breath, but the air was so hot it felt like inhaling lava. He gasped, coughing, afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop. The chair was smoldering.
Feeling like a contortionist, he slammed his feet down onto the floor, heels striking the ground. His back arched. Using all his strength, he pressed his heels down hard and strained his thigh muscles. The chair slid a couple inches.
Again!
Closer.
Again! His back screamed in agony, but his fingers closed on the Emerson knife. He found the button and popped the blade out. Switching directions, he sliced through the plastic flexi-cuffs like they were mozzarella cheese.
Free!
He rolled to his feet, grabbed his sat phone and gun, which were so hot he almost dropped them.
The flames roared around him.
He picked up the chair with one hand and flung it at the rear windows. The glass shattered. Air blasted into the house, fueling the fire that exploded around him. His shirt caught fire.
Derek plunged after the chair, rolling on the dry California grass. His hands pounded at his hair, at his shirt, rolling, rolling.
Finally, flames extinguished, a few yards from the inferno, he struggled to his feet, gulped in cool morning air, and staggered away.
Not far away he heard the wail of sirens. He didn’t want to be around for that. He walked steadily west, figuring if he didn’t find a place to clean up first, he’d at least hit the ocean eventually.
Derek walked through middle-class subdivisions. Inside the homes kids were getting ready for school, eating Cap’n Crunch and drinking orange juice. Mothers and fathers were eating Raisin Bran and drinking coffee and wondering how they would make it through their workweek. Sometimes he resented their ordinariness, how blithely they went about their comfortable, safe lives, unaware of the danger that people like him faced daily so they could sleep well at night.
He didn’t know how long he walked. His entire body ached. The sun rose off his right shoulder, and the day started to heat up. Cars began hitting the roads in force. Finally, he looked up to see a river of white sand bordering the blue of the ocean.
On a park bench a homeless man, looking like a pile of refuse, was curled up on one end. Nearby was a public restroom. He ignored the street guy and pushed his way into the restroom. The face staring back at him from the mirror didn’t look so great. His normally wavy brown hair was blackened and charred in spots. His eyebrows were almost completely missing. His face was unusually red as if he’d been sunburned.
He cautiously touched his face. It was hot to the touch. His hands, he noticed, were worse. They were blistered from burns. His shirt was blackened and torn, holes scorched through it. His shoes looked odd, as if the rubber had melted.
Derek cupped his hands and took a drink of water. A little more cautiously he pressed the cool water to his face. It felt wonderful.
He tried to clean himself up as best he could, but in the end, understood that he would be hard-pressed to continue before getting a change of clothes, some first aid for his hands, and possibly some kind of antiburn lotion for hi
s face. He was also hungry in a physical way that was mitigated somewhat by his aches and pains and general feeling of crappiness. The machine had to be fed, even if the person didn’t feel much like eating.
With a sigh he pulled out his sat phone. When he checked, though, there was no power. He fussed with it for a few minutes before deciding it had been damaged by the fire. In disgust, he went searching for a real rarity—a pay phone.
He found one two blocks away in front of an open-air deli that hadn’t opened yet. It took two phone calls before he got hold of Cassandra O’Reilly.
“I need help,” he said. “It’s a long story, but I need you to pick me up at the Windward Plaza at Venice Beach.”
O’Reilly was quiet for a long time, then, “What happened to your voice? It’s sort of—”
“It’s a long story, Sandy. Just please come. And if you’ve got a first-aid kit, that would be good, too. I’ll be waiting for you.”
He hung up and plodded back toward the beach. The homeless guy had woken up and moved on. Derek took his seat on the bench, listening to the ocean and watching the seagulls fly overhead.
CHAPTER 22
Cassandra O’Reilly and Shelly Pimpuntikar reluctantly left their surveillance post outside a high-rise apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard in Century City. They had not found Ali Tafir to be at home, nor had they found him particularly easy to locate. The brown glass high-rise had well-trained security who had informed them that Mr. Tafir had left the building in the last hour. When they had pressed the guard about where Mr. Tafir had gone, he had assured them that he did not know, and if he did, he wouldn’t have provided that information without a warrant or subpoena.
So they had found a parking spot on Wilshire with a view of the building’s front entrance and decided to wait. Cassandra was convinced it was a waste of time. They wouldn’t even recognize Tafir if he came up and knocked on their car window.
The man had no criminal record and no files existed on him at FBI or in any of the other criminal databases Shelly had checked. Shelly had asked Helen Birch to get a couple people digging into the guy’s past, at least finding out where he worked and what he did for a living. They had decided to give it a couple hours and were just debating what to do next when Derek’s cryptic phone call came.
Pulling away from the curb, O’Reilly set sail for Venice Beach, wondering how in hell Derek had ended up there. She didn’t like how he sounded, as if his throat had been scraped raw. What had happened to him over the last few hours?
And a more disquieting thought: “What happened to him over the last few years?”
“Who?” Shelly asked.
Mired in rush hour traffic, it was a few seconds before O’Reilly realized that Shelly was talking to her. “What? I was just thinking out loud, I guess.”
“Wondering what happened to Derek over the last few years?”
“Well, closer to fifteen, actually. Never mind.”
O’Reilly could feel Shelly’s gaze on her. She met her eyes and said, “Really. Never mind. What’s the update on Dallas?”
Shelly had just gotten off the phone with her supervisor in D.C. “One fatality, but they haven’t identified it yet. Or even really confirmed it, although it’s clear someone was at ground zero. The bomb was a lot smaller than anybody expected, and they think it might have been ANFO mixed with medical waste. The radiation levels are really low.”
O’Reilly frowned. ANFO stood for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, the same mixture that had been used in the Oklahoma City bombing. But in that case, Tim McVeigh had filled a Ryder truck full of the material, enough to almost destroy the building. “It must have been very small, then. That’s weird. Did you get any specifics on the radiation levels?”
“No. That’s just not my area.”
But it was O’Reilly’s. She had three degrees, including a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. In addition to her years with the IAEA, she had worked with the CIA as well as for the Department of Energy’s intelligence division. She remained on a NEST team—Nuclear Emergency Search Team.
She wasn’t at the moment convinced that al-Qaeda had access to a nuclear device. She was even less convinced they could have gotten one into the country. And she was rather doubtful that if al-Qaeda did have one, that they would detonate it in Los Angeles, when New York City or Washington, D.C. would be significantly more devastating, both politically and in terms of fatalities.
But as she knew, you didn’t prepare for what you thought the enemy might do, you prepared for what they could do.
It took them a while to fight their way through traffic, but after forty-five minutes, O’Reilly found a parking spot near the beach and she and Shelly trotted to where Derek had said he would be. They found him curled up on a park bench, asleep.
Shelly gasped and O’Reilly felt her stomach do a slow flip-flop at his appearance. What the hell had happened?
Derek stirred, opened his eyes and groaned as he sat up. “Morning.”
“Derek, what’s going on?”
Derek shook his head, blew out air, and said, “I fell asleep.”
O’Reilly’s blood pressure spiked. “Dammit, Derek. What have you been doing all night?”
He eyed her with suspicion and exasperation. O’Reilly thought, Oh, here we go again.
So she was surprised when he looked at Shelly and said, “Why don’t you take a walk on the beach. Or better yet, I’m going to need some clothes and a cell phone. How about I give you my sizes and you try to find me some jeans and a T-shirt. That work?”
Shelly frowned, her posture changing. O’Reilly saw that Shelly didn’t like being excluded from whatever Derek had to say.
Derek did too. He sighed. “Shelly, unless you want to spend a great deal of time testifying under oath before Congress, why don’t you go shopping.”
Oh shit, thought O’Reilly. She raised an eyebrow at the FBI agent. “I’ll decide whether or not to fill you in,” she said.
Shelly said, “What are your sizes?”
Derek told her. O’Reilly followed Shelly back to the bucar and retrieved her own Go Pack, which contained a first-aid kit. She said to Shelly, “Figure out where the nearest emergency room is around here, too. And pick us up some food. And lots of coffee.”
Shelly hesitated.
O’Reilly said, “No, Shelly, I’m not making you the gofer. Just let me get a handle on this situation, okay?”
Shoulders hunched in anger, Shelly agreed, climbed in the bucar, and drove off. O’Reilly returned to the bench. There were some early morning joggers and beachcombers in the area. Derek was leaning forward, head in his hands, elbows on his knees.
She said, “I hope you’re kidding, but you’re probably not.”
He shook his head, but didn’t look up at her.
She said, “Take off your shirt. And tell me what you’ve been doing since we parted ways last night.”
He said, “First off, that cop we ran into outside Bongos? They had Greg under surveillance. So they played me a tape—”
As he talked, he struggled out of his shirt. She noticed he was having problems with his hands, but concentrated on the shirt first. These burns didn’t seem too bad, although “too bad” was a relative thing. “Do these hurt?”
“Yes, they hurt!”
“Good. No nerve endings were destroyed.”
“A fucking silver lining, O’Reilly.”
“Hang on. I’ll be right back.” She jogged over to the rest room, wet down paper towels with cool water, and returned to Derek. She gently patted the burns on his back and right side, which seemed to be the extent of the burns on his body besides his hands. She didn’t want to deal with the hands just yet.
He winced, but otherwise kept quiet. “You’ve got more scars than I remember,” she said.
“As Indiana Jones said, ‘It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.’”
“Keep talking,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Maybe I should keep this to myself.
I don’t think you’ll find Congressional hearings much fun.”
“You’ve had your share over the years.”
“Unfortunately. At least the majority have been closed-door sessions with intelligence committees. Anyway, I decided Greg knew more than he was telling me.”
“Clearly.”
“So I kidnapped him.”
O’Reilly closed her eyes, sat back, and hung her head. She pressed her palms to her face for a moment. When she looked up, Derek was watching her. “No comment?” he said.
“Was he any help?”
