Outside was cold and overcast. I walked over to the bike rack, spun the dial for my lock, and pulled my mountain bike off the rack. Getting on it I turned and headed down Camino de la Familia, which paralleled REI’s Market Street entrance. Next I would turn left on Alcadesa Street, hit South Guadelupe and head for Cerrillos Road. My apartment complex was located down on St. Michael’s Drive, which crosses Cerrillos, on the city’s eastern side. As I bicycled, ideas flooded my mind. I had a clear memory of the observation deck where the hostages were being held. I knew I could teleport to exactly where the terrorists were standing. And I knew that because of the curve of the deck, with people standing at either end, I would be out of view of the deck’s two security cameras, which peered out from each tramway operator booth. But what then? My memory fed me the location of the Army-Navy store in Albuquerque, a place I’d visited while attending UNM. It held lots of used and recycled military stuff. Bullet resistant vests were part of their stock, along with old Iraq War era parachutes. I’d need both if I was going to face semiauto-armed terrorists.
I looked up at the sky. St. Louis was an hour later than Santa Fe. Which meant my five o’clock was six p.m. in St. Louis. Darkness would arrive there in another hour. While there were spotlights at the base of the arch, pointing upward, there was no artificial lighting of the apex of the arch. Just an airplane warning light on top that blinked steadily to alert low-flying planes. So maybe I could port into the center of the deck without being seen to suddenly appear. Giving thanks that I recalled every detail of the arch construction and display exhibits in the underground visitor center, and the movies shown in its theaters, I realized time was not on my side. Unlike in New York, there was no timeline set for action by the president. Just demands. Which might be made bloody by the sudden execution of one or more hostages. With 22 people under their control, these terrorists would likely feel the need to make a bloody statement. If I could, I wanted to get there before anyone was killed.
♦ ♦ ♦
Gloria Chén sat down across from Janet. Her own seat was on one side of the long wooden table that filled the middle of the Starbucks coffee shop in downtown Los Alamos. She’d arrived there in her rental car a few hours earlier and checked in at the Comfort Inn motel on Trinity Drive. So far she had not contacted the LANL security people, preferring to take her chances on meeting some of the adult children of lab workers as they roamed through the small downtown main street of Los Alamos. Starbucks and several nearby restaurants were popular locations for those adult children who had not moved to Albuquerque or elsewhere to find jobs, which were scarce in Los Alamos. Now, here was Gloria, likely visiting her parents Hui and Jiang Chén. For some reason she’d left her Honeywell job and driven up to Los Alamos, arriving here in the early evening. Why? Well, time to begin.
“Hi there. I’m Janet Van Groot, visiting from Virginia. Are you a native here?”
The tall, trim woman looked up from her café latte and peered at Janet, her expression puzzled. “I don’t know you. Which makes sense if you’re from Virginia. And yes, I grew up here. Why?”
Why indeed? “Uh, I’ve been hired to manage the clothing section at the new Smith’s Superstore on the—”
“East side of town,” Gloria interrupted, sounding irritated. “We all know about it. The old store was just fine and more friendly than this superstore. Why’d you take a job here in Los Alamos? Aren’t you afraid of becoming radioactive?”
“Is there really any danger?” Janet asked, wondering at the young woman’s sharpness.
Gloria scowled. “Never been any danger since the big cleanups in the canyons in the 50s and 60s. But you wouldn’t know that to talk to anyone outside of Los Alamos.”
Interesting how such a smart young woman who tweaked computer databases for Honeywell could act so defensive. “Well, all I know about Los Alamos is what I read on the Chamber of Commerce’s website. I’m a business major graduate from George Mason. Just got hired by corporate Smith’s.” She smiled big, showing the young woman, who was just a year younger than Janet, her friend to Beverly smile. “Thought it would be nice to live in a small town surrounded by forests and hiking trails. Or was I wrong?”
Gloria’s expression moved from scowling to thoughtful. “Oh. Well, pardon my comment. Comes from my years playing soccer for the Lady Hilltoppers. Every time we played a game at another city, the players would tease us about ‘glowing in the dark’. Some said worse than that.”
“Oh? There’s been no atmospheric nuke tests for decades, so it would be kinda hard to glow in the dark,” Janet said, dredging up some of her research about LANL and the other national labs. “But really, what could be worse?”
Gloria’s oval face had relaxed as Janet made her comment about no nuke air tests. The 23-year-old looked to her right as a crowd of other young people came in the door, then looked back to Janet. She raised a black eyebrow. “We’ve been called ‘baby killers’ by idiots whose level of science knowledge is limited to plugging in a toaster. And we’ve been blamed for poisoning the state’s air cause one of our drums of nuke waste popped open in a tunnel of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, south of here. No one got hurt by the accident, but still, anyone from Los Alamos is labeled a crazy nuke-lover!”
Janet took a sip of her own café latte, which was now cold. “Well, I’m choosing to move here, if I can find a condo or small house to rent. Do your parents have a room they’d be willing to rent me? I’ve heard that some retired folks are willing—”
“Nope,” Gloria said quickly. “My parents still work at the lab. And the spare bedroom that was mine until I moved to Albuquerque is in use now. By me. When I’m gone, they keep it available for relatives.”
“Oh?” Janet said, hoping the parent mention would bring up volunteered data on Gloria’s parents. “Do your parents have relatives who visit often? Mine don’t. We’re a small clan.”
Gloria waved at a blond woman who smiled back to her, then looked back to Janet. “Yeah, my uncle Huan sometimes visits from Taiwan, while my grandmother Daiyu flies in from Hong Kong sometimes.” She shrugged. “Only time there’s space in the house is when my parents go to international conferences. Like now. That’s when I like to visit.” She grinned. “Let’s me have parties with my high school classmates, leastwise those who still live here. Gotta go. My friend Louise over there is hailing me.”
“Sure. Uh, any recommends on condo places here in town?”
Gloria frowned. “Try down Oppenheimer Drive. There are several rental duplexes and a big condo complex at the bottom of the street. Maybe there will be a rental available. Good luck. Bye.”
Janet waved as the trim woman grabbed her coffee, stood up and headed over to meet her friend Louise. Then she pulled out her tablet, tapped it on, typed in the access code, and began typing notes on Gloria’s relatives. Minutes later she called up the file record of Mercedes Johnson, the former girlfriend of Jeffrey Webster. Johnson still lived in Los Alamos. She had gotten a seasonal job working for the Forest Service during college, then had later gotten full-time work at the visitor center for the Valles Caldera National Preserve lands to the north of Los Alamos. Might be useful to officially interview her, versus a pretend encounter like she’d done with Gloria.
“Hey!” yelled one of the young men who’d entered with the crowd of other locals. “Look at the TV! Looks like another Islamic terror grab!”
Janet turned and looked up at the flat TV attached to one of the shop’s walls. Someone turned up the sound. She listened as the CNN woman Howden reported the hostage grab at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and their YouTube demands. Then paid extra attention as the network’s senior terrorism reporter Jack Wilshire appeared standing in front of the Hoover building, the place she’d just escaped from.
“Damn,” muttered a young guy sitting next to Gloria and Louise, both of whom were looking up from their corner table. “The explosives sound bad. Wonder if these whackos are going to blow up the arch?”
“
Would be hard to do,” commented an elderly man sitting at the end of the table where Janet sat. “It’s made of welded steel plates over an I-beam frame. But the blasts could sure hurt the hostages. See how they have been herded toward each end of this observation deck? So they’re close to the explosives? That’s to discourage any forced entry by cops.”
Janet thought the man’s comment was insightful. She knew nothing about the arch, other than it existed and that St. Louis was the site of one of the agency’s 56 field offices. And also the location of one of the 71 Joint Terrorism Task Forces that answered back to the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, which had moved out of the Hoover building and into the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia, not far from Tysons Corner. She wondered if SIOC had brought in people from NCTC to start work with them on this new terror attack. Since combatting terrorism was the agency’s top objective, it was likely they had done so. And if Mike Richardson was working today, Wednesday, he would again be on the front lines of response to this latest case of domestic terrorism.
She tuned back into the CNN reporting, hoping against hope that none of the 22 hostages would be killed as an ‘example’ to the world about the supposed helplessness of America in the face of worldwide jihadism. There was much her agency was already doing, but most parts of its response would not be known until after the end of this incident. While St. Louis was too far for a quick response by the HRT copter of the CIRG people, the Fly Team operated by her branch’s Counterterrorism Division was likely already on the way in one of the jets the FBI had at Dulles, ready for a quick flight anywhere in the USA.
Janet stood up and grabbed her purse as she realized she might learn more about current operations from her friend Beverly, if she went back to her room in the Comfort Inn. Once there she could pull out her tablet and text Beverly. It was five p.m. here in Los Alamos, which meant it was 7 p.m. in D.C. Beverly would either be in the SIOC room, watching like before, or be at her leased condo in Bethesda, not far from the Potomac River. Wherever she was, her friend was certain to know more than what CNN was reporting. She went outside and headed for her car in the parking lot next to Starbucks. Time to get in touch with Beverly. And maybe time to see if the Albuquerque field office knew anything about Gloria Chén’s overseas relatives.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Valery Stockton kept watching the CNN report on the hostage situation in St. Louis, even though she hated spending much time on all the negative news in the world. She heard enough tragedy and horror from her counseling of abuse victims without adding in distant tragedies that she could not affect. And she needed a distraction from worry over Justine’s gall bladder operation, set for tomorrow morning. But the usual ABC national news that she watched at 5:30 had now been displaced by this ‘Breaking News’ coverage from CNN and other national networks. Lacking any new developments from the Gateway Arch hostage takers, who had shut down their live feed onto YouTube, CNN’s reporter had taken to reviewing past jihadist terror attacks. As usual the woman Howden, who was competent but limited by what her backstage producer transmitted to her, was doing her best to present a guarded but hopeful picture of the St. Louis incident. Maybe that was why she brought up the Empire State Building hostage taking.
“This recent terror incident is remarkably similar to last Saturday’s incident where three women were held hostage by a single Somalia-born terrorist,” Howden said as the wall behind her filled with an image of the top of the Empire State Building. “While no one yet knows the identity of the Green Mask vigilante who freed the women, all three ladies were effusive in their comments on the young man. They are pictured here. The women were visiting New York City from San Francisco, Rocky Flats and St. Louis. This evening our St. Louis correspondent Jason Maguire has a live interview with Lois Fitzgerald, the woman who spent long hours with a shotgun roped to her neck. Jason, over to you.”
Valery listened to the live interview with the white-haired senior who was standing on the front steps of her St. Louis home, looking patient as the CNN reporter peppered her with questions. But what drew her attention most were the photographs of the three Empire State hostages. They were a young redhead in a jogging outfit, a blond middle-aged woman and white-haired Fitzgerald. What most fascinated her was how closely they physically matched the three women young Jeffrey had talked to her about yesterday. These three were from the same cities and had the same ages and looks as Jeff had described meeting in downtown Santa Fe. What a remarkable coincidence!
But as the CNN reporter sought Fitzgerald’s reaction to the new incident in her hometown, the elderly woman made a comment that caused her to reach for her client notepad.
“Well, Jason, I sure wish our Green Mask liberator would show up and help these people in the arch,” Fitzgerald said, her expression thoughtful. “Our liberator moved really fast, so fast his hands were a blur. Leastwise to me. And my eyesight is still good.”
CNN reporter Maguire, seen in profile as his cameraperson kept both Maguire and Fitzgerald in view, grinned now. “Yes, wouldn’t that be a great surprise? Uh, do you recall any more about this Green Mask vigilante, other than the fact he didn’t want to be known to the public?”
Fitzgerald gave the younger Maguire a patient look. “Well, there are plenty of pictures of him from the copter and I’ve seen some still shots from the 102nd floor’s security camera. He wore bluejeans, a blue hoodie with the hood on top of his head, and had the green bandana covering his face. It covered his face from just below his eyes down to the top of his Hawaiian shirt.” The old woman paused. “I do wish there were more young men like him, willing to step in and help people in need, with no thought of personal gain or benefit.”
“Yes, that is interesting,” Maguire said. “However, New York City is a long way from St. Louis so it is unlikely we’ll soon see Mr. Green Mask. Tell me about your time since your return home. I heard your neighbors put up yellow ribbons on the oak tree in your front yard. Is that true?”
Valery looked down at her notepad. She reread her notes. Jeffrey had described the three women as a redhead jogger from San Francisco, a middle-aged blond from Rocky Flats near Denver and a white-haired elderly woman from St. Louis. And when he’d visited her office yesterday afternoon, he’d been wearing bluejeans and a blue hoodie. Though under the hoodie he was wearing a Denver Broncos t-shirt. Still, she recalled seeing him wear a Hawaiian shirt in earlier months, when the weather was warmer.
Had Jeff seen the CNN reports on these women, liked the good news and then co-opted the details for his sharing with her? While her paranoid schizophrenic clients had their share of hallucinations, such were not usual for persons with deep depression. Had young Jeff felt pressured to give her some good news in his weekly meeting with her? Perhaps. And maybe the minimal description of this Green Mask vigilante had put into his mind the idea that he too could ‘rescue’ some women from a difficult situation. There was of course no way that Jeff could be this secretive Green Mask guy. The young man did not like traveling in planes, preferring trains or buses for long distance travel, or so he’d confided to her months ago. And getting out to New York City, then back in time to go to work on Monday was just not viable using Amtrak or Greyhound. And it was silly of her to think of Jeff as some kind of hero. Reluctant to socialize he was. Isolated he lived. And his depression and guilt over his father’s death while he survived was very real. She would focus more on that deep-bound guilt, and the unresolved grief from losing both parents, the next time she saw him.
Putting her notepad down, Valery listened as more terrorism talking heads appeared and opined on the likely ways in which the hostages could be rescued, depending on what the FBI and local police were doing. Which seemed to be a lot, judging by the number of vehicles gathered around the slanting walkways that led down to the underground visitor center of the Gateway Arch. Flicking off the CNN report, she grabbed her iPad, tapped it on, then tapped its Google icon to look up info on the Gateway Arch. She could research this late
st terror event faster than the CNN desk reporter. And this way she didn’t have to listen to talking heads of both genders try to sound authoritative about something that was not quite an hour old.
♦ ♦ ♦
Andrew Steinbach stood against the wall of the SIOC main room, watching as Mike Richardson put up multiple imagery feeds onto the wall video screens and checked his own desktop computer for the newest updates from the field office in St. Louis. While his principal aide Yamaguchi sat next to him, on his other side sat Jacob Whitson, from the NCTC office in McLean. One video wall screen held a live image from the CNN helicopter that hovered outside the top of the Gateway Arch, its telescopic camera and spotlight fixed on the center of the arch’s steel apex. Another wall screen held a satellite transmitted image from the inside of the Lear jet that was transporting the agency’s Fly Team from the Counterterrorism Division. On board were agents trained in humint, sigint, hostage survival, evidence collection, explosive post blast investigations, biometrics and a lot more.
Before coming down here he’d confirmed the St. Louis field office agents had evacuated the underground visitor center of all NPS staff and visitors, had brought in two SWAT teams from the city and county police departments, and had already sent ten-person rescue teams up the stairwell that climbed each leg of the giant arch. Those two teams were gathered at the foot of the tram doors that allowed visitors to exit and walk up a short flight of stairs to enter the 65 foot long observation deck.
He hoped the local units had explosive sensor devices with them, as the YouTube video transmitted by the terrorists showed a webwork of cord stretched across the opening where the top of the stairwell connected with the deck. In the middle of the web hung a green bottle with a cell phone attached to it, wires running from it and into the top of the bottle. He suspected the bottle held TATP liquid explosives. Which meant it was highly sensitive to sharp jolts and would go off if dropped. The electrical detonation seemed tied into the attached cell phone. That meant one or both of the terrorists held a cell phone actuator even as they pointed rifles at the hostages, who were leaning against the outward slanting walls of the seven foot wide deck. Clearly the hostages were tired after an hour of standing. They were a mix of people types. Elderly women, a few old guys, several young couples, and some solo men and women.
Superpowers 1: Superguy Page 9
