Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  He heard the approach of his visitor before he saw him. “Hello, Kendig,” he said without looking.

  Kendig Neen was the sheriff of Maddox County, West Virginia, and out here that still meant something. Tall and stout, with a waxed handlebar mustache and a speaking voice that was made for radio, Kendig was the law out here. With the nearest state police barracks nearly fifty miles away, backup was hard to come by, and that meant a freedom to occasionally craft new laws on the fly.

  “Morning, Michael,” he said. “Have you got a moment?”

  “Isn’t that an inspiring sight?” Michael said.

  “Smells like airplane glue,” Kendig said.

  Michael gave him a hard look. “You might show some respect. Those people are the reason you have a job, and I’m the reason they have a job.”

  “Will your boardroom work for you?” Kendig pressed. “We really need to talk.”

  Michael led the way from the mezzanine to the shop floor, and out to the executive wing, as he called it. He realized it didn’t look like much, with its Formica tabletop and metal chairs, but it was the best he could afford. For now. If visitors gave the boardroom only a cursory look, they would have seen only the knotty pine paneling and the linoleum floors and assumed it to be cheaply built. You’d have to be an expert, knowing exactly what you were looking for to see that it was a high-tech, soundproofed room.

  Kendig started in as soon as the heavy door found its latch. “What were you thinking, putting that mother and her son up on the Internet for everyone to see?”

  Michael took his time pulling out a chair and lowering himself into it. It was a common trait of brutes not to be able to see the complexity of the proverbial big picture. “I was thinking about the mission,” he said. His voice bore the exaggerated patience of a teacher speaking to a slow child. “We are at war now, Brother Kendig.”

  “And war requires caution. You put faces on their battle against us. What you did steeled the resolve of every law-enforcement agency in the country. In the world. Have you been watching television? Have you heard the kind of resources they’re marshalling against us?”

  Michael scowled, pretending to be confused. “I’ve glanced at the television, but I haven’t seen anything about us. Are you sure?”

  “For God’s sake, Michael.”

  “I’ve heard some ranting about ‘terrorists,’ but I haven’t heard a word about us. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, if you were to ask any of the new media who ‘we’ are”-he used finger quotes-“I bet they’d tell you that we were Arabs. Central Asian, maybe; but certainly Islamists. I don’t think you’d hear a word about devout patriots from West Virginia.”

  “But they didn’t have to know anything!” Kendig insisted.

  Michael leaned back and placed his heels on the table. “Now who’s being silly?” he said. “Of course they had to know. Knowing is part of the greater ruse. While the authorities are all looking for who we are not, we will attack them with who we are. It’s a classic feint.”

  Kendig sat heavily in the seat adjacent to Michael. “Was it necessary to beat the boy?”

  Michael laughed. “Oh, so that’s your moral compass? The killing is okay, but you draw the line at a few slaps and punches?”

  “I draw the line at cruelty. I draw the line at increased incentive to find us. His hands were bound, for heaven’s sake.”

  Michael waved it away as irrelevant. “Brother Stephen told me that the boy was a threat, a troublemaker. Now he’s a frightened boy again. A neutralized threat. No permanent harm was done.”

  “Brother Stephen is a liability,” Kendig said. “I don’t like the way he is with the prisoners, and I don’t like his attitude around the other soldiers. I think you empower him too much by allowing his shenanigans.”

  “He is a fine and loyal soldier,” Michael said. “He and Sister Colleen will both be honored for their service at the bridge in Washington. That was simply brilliant.”

  “So why risk the victory with the broadcast? Videos like that can be traced directly back to you.”

  Michael shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible, Michael. It’s inevitable. The feds have uncanny resources to track down Internet broadcasts. Crazy resources that we can’t possibly match.”

  “I have it covered,” Michael said. He made a point of keeping his voice modulated and under control. He would not honor shouting with shouting of his own. “Brother Kirkland is quite the computer whiz. He assures me that everything about our transmission will trace back to a computer in Flint, Michigan. When we broadcast again, the signature will trace to Islamabad. We will have to let enough time pass for them to believe we took the family to Pakistan, which will fit perfectly with what they want to believe. That will leave us free to operate even less encumbered by the authorities than we already are.”

  Kendig stood again. “Do you hear the hubris in your words? You think you’re invincible, and that’s the kind of attitude that will bring us all down.”

  Michael sighed. This was all such a waste of time. “I apologize, Brother Kendig, if I have sprung too big a surprise. I should have been clearer in my communication. But right now, what’s done is done. The mission is progressing.”

  “Is it?” Kendig pressed. “Is it really? Is my mission progressing, or is it only yours? Is it possible that you’re having too good a time playing with people’s minds?”

  Suddenly, Michael felt very real concern. “Tell me, Kendig, what exactly is your mission? Maybe we have in fact grown apart.”

  “My mission is to set things straight again. To set this country straight again. I’m tired of watching the rich run roughshod over the poor. I’m tired of watching my community swirl down the toilet while places like New York and Washington and Los Angeles thrive in the shade of immorality. My mission is revolution.”

  Michael smiled. He felt warm again, comforted by hearing his own words recited back to him. “And the revolution begins with small bands of operatives creating havoc. We have succeeded in Washington and Kansas City and Detroit. A strike team leaves tonight and another tomorrow to deal more blows to the Users, and after they are successful, there will be more. The rage against the Islamists will be-pardon me-biblical in proportion.” He chuckled at his own cleverness.

  Kendig seemed frustrated, as if he didn’t feel he was getting his point across effectively. “But the prisoners-”

  “Without them, there would be no face,” Michael interrupted. “You were right about that. I am, in fact, putting a face on our mission, and that face-those faces, in this case-will unite America in a desire to bring Islamic terrorists to their knees. The government will finally do what they should have been doing all along, and while they are focused on the phantom we have created, we will move in to cut the head off the snake.”

  Kendig cocked his head. “What are you talking about? What snake?”

  Michael brought his feet down from the table and leaned closer. “ The snake,” he said. “The only snake that matters. The United States government.”

  Kendig cocked his head, intrigued. He lowered himself into a seat again. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Michael smiled. “Ah, but I am telling you. We fulfilled the GSA contract today, Kendig. Our panels will be installed in time for the president’s holiday address.”

  It was the achievement of a dream.

  CHAPTER TEN

  With Rollins gone, the atmosphere in the room felt less homicidal.

  “Why would they take hostages in the first place?” Jonathan asked his assembled team.

  Their chorus of confused looks told him that he hadn’t stated his question clearly enough.

  He explained, “You’re a terrorist group, okay? You’re against this or for that, and you do your big nasty. You make a big mark. You’ve won. Why do you want hostages?”

  “To create more terror,” Boxers said.

  “No,” Gail said. “I see his point. They’ve already scored on a big
scale. They’ve already ruined hundreds of lives. In the showbiz that terrorism has become, imperiling a single family seems like something of an anticlimax.”

  “But they told us what they were looking for,” Venice said. “They told us that their goal is for the United States to abandon its interests in the Middle East and Central Asia.”

  Jonathan stood and started his classic problem-solving pace around the room. “Something’s not adding up for me,” he thought aloud. “If we take them at their word, they’ve already killed dozens of people. They said in the video that the killings would continue until they got their way, but they know they’ll never get their way. Even if a complete withdrawal was imminent, a threat like this would cause a delay, just to keep the world from thinking that the U.S. had blinked.”

  He paused in his stroll to give a long look to the frozen frame of the Nasbes. He kept his finger pointed at them while he turned to face his troops. “With that many people already dead, how do these two rise to the level of bargaining chips? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Maybe you’re thinking too hard,” Boxers said. “They’re terrorists, for God’s sake. Do you really think they’re parsing every word?”

  “Does it matter?” Venice asked, cutting to the chase. “Does the reason they were taken really have anything to do with planning their rescue?”

  He gave her the short answer: “No.”

  Venice turned her attention to her ever-present computer and tapped a dozen keys. “Here’s the easy stuff,” she began. “The transmission site for this Web broadcast is an address in Flint, Michigan.”

  “That’s the Muslim capital of the U.S.,” Boxers said.

  “Yes, it is,” Venice confirmed.

  “The FBI is going to be all over that place,” Gail said.

  “Already done,” Venice said. “According to ICIS, they raided the place about twenty minutes ago.” Pronounced EYE-sis, the Interstate Crime Information System was a largely unknown outgrowth of the 9-11 attacks, in which data from ongoing investigations were tracked by computer with details made available only to a select few law-enforcement officials with specifically approved federal clearances. And Venice.

  “I’m going to guess from the look on your face that they found nothing,” Jonathan said.

  “Just a frightened college student with something of a gaming obsession. They’re going to question him, but nobody thinks he’s the guy.”

  “Any geek worth the tape on his glasses can set up a false routing for Internet transmissions,” Gail said.

  Venice’s eyes flashed. She did not like having her thunder stolen.

  Jonathan scowled. “Is the college kid part of the Muslim community?”

  Venice tapped some more. “Farouk al-Somebody. You’ll have to figure out the pronunciation on your own.”

  Jonathan declined. “No, that’s okay. It’s a Muslim name.” A thought blossomed in his mind, and as it grew, he waved his forefinger at nobody in particular. “So, riddle me this. If you’re a badass terrorist group, and you can reroute your Internet electrons to anyplace in the world you want them to be, why reroute them to the heart of the Muslim community in America?”

  “To throw the authorities off the scent,” Boxers said. It was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “No,” Jonathan said. “That’s why you reroute the signal in the first place. But if you know for a fact that the feds are going to trace the false location to its source, why wouldn’t you tag the signal to a computer in the heart of the Bible Belt? Or to someplace in France? Why the very heart of American Islam?”

  “Because that’s where their friends are,” Boxers pressed. “Dig, you are just thinking way too hard.”

  But Gail was intrigued. “Where are you going with this?”

  “I’m wondering if these bad guys are really Islamic at all,” Jonathan said. “I’ll tell you for a fact that that kid I eyeballed on the bridge last night was the most Aryan-looking Muslim I’ve ever seen. The video they posted shows nobody’s face, and now they deliberately lead the FBI to the very community you’d think they’d want to protect.”

  “So, who are the terrorists really?” Venice asked.

  “I guess they could be anybody,” Jonathan said. “Hate groups are a dime a dozen these days.”

  Boxers shifted in his chair. Furniture always looked too small for him. “I’m still not following.”

  “Think about it,” Gail said, gaining some momentum in her thinking. “Let’s say you’re a terrorist group, and you want to pull this sleight of hand where you convince people that the bad guys they’ve been hunting for the past ten years are still the bad guys. You pull off your shooting sprees and whatever else you’re going to do, but you direct attention away.”

  One of the things Jonathan liked most about Gail was the way she could peel back the onion layers of a mystery and quickly get to its core. A couple of years ago, that tenacious streak had nearly cost him his freedom, back when they were on opposite sides. Intelligence is way more attractive when it’s working with you than when it’s working against you.

  “I’ve got that part,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan picked up the thread. “If you really want to keep the pressure on-if you really want people to get mad at the wrong bad guys, you put a family in front of a camera and make impossible demands.”

  “I’ve got it,” Venice chimed in. “As the deadline approaches, public anger gets more intense, and the public appetite for alternatives other than violence dries up.”

  “It’ll get like a frenzy,” Boxers said, finally getting it. “So, what happens when the deadline expires?”

  Gail’s face fell. “They’ll have to follow through with their threat,” she said. “They’ll have to kill someone. They could even stretch it out. Kill one of them next week, and the other a week later.”

  “And they can always grab more,” Venice added.

  Jonathan didn’t verbalize his thought that that might be a good thing. The more frequently a criminal committed a crime, the more likely he was to make a critical error.

  “So, what’s their end game?” Boxers asked.

  Jonathan shrugged. “Terror. Does it need to be more than that?”

  “I think so,” Gail said. “I mean, it’s all well and good to make people think the bad guys are someone other than who they really are, and I suppose it scratches somebody’s itch to foment hatred, but don’t we have to assume that it’s all being done for a reason?”

  “Where’ve you been living the last decade?” Boxers scoffed. “The bombing bastards got no greater goal than killing people.”

  “I disagree,” Gail said. “The jihadists think that they’re serving God.”

  Jonathan waved her off. “I think that’s bullshit.”

  “How else do you get a thirteen-year-old to strap explosives to his chest?”

  “Well, okay,” Jonathan said with a hesitation. “But that’s what the soldiers think. Their leaders-the ones that we have to blow up-are cynical assholes.”

  “Who have the end game of political power,” Venice said, throwing her lot to the female camp.

  “Okay, so give me a theory,” Jonathan said. “What’s the Army of Allah’s real end game?”

  That question brought silence.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Brother Michael Copley asked, “Are you ready?”

  Sister Colleen’s heart skipped in her chest and her stomach tumbled. “Yes” was such a simple word, yet somehow she couldn’t get her mouth to say it. She settled for a nod.

  Brother Michael smiled, a dazzling display of perfectly aligned white teeth framed by perfect dimples. Colleen thought he was the most stunning man she had ever seen. From his green eyes to his spiked blond hair to his muscled physique, he was as fine as any movie star.

  “Relax,” Brother Michael said. “You are here to be honored, not punished.” He turned to Brother Stephen. “What about you?”

  Brother Stephen snapped to attention, his
deep-set dark eyes locked on a spot on the opposite wall. With his broad, muscled shoulders and his narrow waist, he seemed to Sister Colleen to be the perfect image of a soldier.

  “Couldn’t be readier, sir,” he said.

  Brother Michael patted him on the arm. “You can settle down a little, too.”

  Beyond the white paneled door that separated her from her destiny, the congregation had been assembling for the last ten minutes. Colleen couldn’t yet see them, but she knew who they were. She could see their faces in her mind, and even knew where each of them would sit. They were a young crowd-average age well under thirty-more male than female, but not by a lot.

  They numbered around one hundred souls now, and one way or another, they all worked for the church, whether as factory workers, groundskeepers, doctors, or teachers in the school. They all would be dressed plainly, in blacks or whites or blues, because the compound store only stocked plain cloth. Together, they were the Army of God, servants to the Greater Good, united in their opposition to the evil spawned by the Users.

  Until last night, Colleen had never witnessed the evil with her own eyes. She’d had no idea that the lights of vehicles could be so bright, or that the very air could smell rancid from the pollutants they pumped into Mother Nature’s lungs. It was as sickening as it was exhilarating.

  Even now, eighteen hours after the assault had ended, it was difficult to believe that she had been a part in such a momentous victory. But for her efforts-and those of her brothers and sisters throughout the Army of God-the Users would continue their assaults without end. Her mission at the Woodrow Wilson Bridge-a span named for a warmonger and a money worshipper-combined with the brave efforts of her brothers and sisters in Kansas City and Detroit had made clear to the world that being a User meant being at war with the righteous. Within days, in a dozen other cities across the United States, the lesson would be taught again and again.