by Cliff Ryder
“Agent Spencer, are you confident that you are doing everything in your power to assist in this investigation?”
“Yes, ma’am, we are pursuing every approved lead we’ve uncovered. In fact, we’re heading to a new source of information at this moment, but I’m afraid that I cannot say any more than that at this time.”
“I understand. Have there been any issues with Agent Wentworth that you wish to discuss?”
“She has performed her job superbly in all regards and is a pleasure to work with.”
“Very well. Then I’ll let you get back to it. Thank you, Agent Spencer, and good luck.”
“I never believe luck has anything to do with it, ma’am.”
“Well said. Keep us informed as to any new develop-ments.” Kate disconnected just as an e-mail popped up on her screen from NiteMaster, another of Room 59’s hackers.
Hey boss,
Here’s the list. Keep in mind that this does not bear any relation to that distasteful law-enforcement practice known as racial profiling, and I will deny any implica-tion as such. Hope it helps.
NM
Kate grinned. The list was a summary of the racial backgrounds of the employees of all the various transportation and other companies that might have the capability to deliver such a weapon within a hundred miles of El Paso. The problem was a suitcase nuke could be easily hidden so every freight company, truck and rental-car agency, small-airplane service, cab company, train line, courier service, import-export company and pretty much any that worked with boxes or vehicles had been tagged.
In clear violation of several federal laws, NiteMaster had cross-referenced the ethnic backgrounds of each company’s employee roster, looking for a certain percentage of Middle Eastern or Indian workers. The prevailing logic was that the cell most likely worked together, perhaps at the same company, or in similar lines of work. However, even that list had more than one hundred companies on it.
With a weary sigh, Kate split the list into two parts, sending the A-M section to Denny, and keeping the N-Z for herself. She added a note:
Denny,
I don’t care if you parcel this out or handle it yourself, but I need the ten most likely candidates for our loose nuke from your list by 0800 hours tomorrow. Have fun—Iknow I will.
Kate
She looked at the first company on her list. “All right, let’s see what’s cooking at the Nabcon Waste Removal Company.
Oh, yeah, another night of glamorous data crunching.”
Tracy thought she had reined in her temper fairly well at the hospital, but Nate’s actions since then had put her on a slow boil, and now she felt her anger building like steam—white and scalding hot.
After he had hung up with Stephanie, he handed the phone back to her and didn’t say a word as they drove back to headquarters. He signed out what was obviously an undercover vehicle, a late-nineties Chevrolet Silverado with tinted windows. He didn’t say anything as they got in and headed back to the south side of El Paso. They pulled into a cul-de-sac as the sun began to sink below the horizon. He parked about a block and a half away from a two-story stucco house hosting a loud party. Every light was on, and loud music was blasting from a sound system as figures clad in baggy shorts and jerseys or tank tops wandered in and out, drinking, smoking and talking.
Nate took his binoculars out and scanned the house, looking at the partygoers for several minutes.
Finally, Tracy couldn’t stand it any longer. “All right, I’ll bite. Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here, or do I get the silent treatment until the bomb goes off, and we have to explain to our superiors how, when the terrorists were blowing up the city, we were sitting on our asses watching gangbangers?”
Nate lowered the glasses and handed them to her. “Take a look out there and tell me what you see.”
“I am getting really tired of this.” Tracy raised the field glasses to her eyes and watched the scene for a minute.
“Typical Mexican street gang, operating out of a neighborhood headquarters. I’m surprised that the police force hasn’t taken them out yet.”
“They’ve got juice with the local police. From what I can tell, it’s a sort of a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours situation,” Nate said.
“Also quite illegal. Do you know any of the people in that house?” Tracy asked.
“As far as I know, they’re all American citizens. Our paths have crossed in regards to a relative or two once in a while.”
Tracy lowered the glasses. “Which begs the question again, why are we here?”
Nate turned to look at her. “How far are you willing to go to find that device?”
“I’m willing to pursue all legal angles to get the information we need,” Tracy said.
“What if there isn’t time for that?”
“Get to the goddamn point already, would you, please?”
Instead of erupting at her outburst, Nate smiled. “All right. During the course of my investigation, I have learned that a person in that house has material information relat-ing to our case. However, to go through the usual channels will mean a delay of a couple of hours, maybe even a few days. If you and I are both right—and I think we are—
Aim and Fire
205 every hour we waste is one more hour they have to do whatever it is they’re planning. So, if we were to break a law or two regarding entry, search and seizure and interrogating a suspect without a warrant, how would you feel about that, knowing that to not act may be putting the lives of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people at risk?”
Tracy had blanched during Nate’s speech, and grew even paler as he laid out the scenario. “So you want to break the law to go in, get this guy and get him to talk about what he knows? Just throw due process, innocent until proved guilty, Miranda rights, all that out the window?”
“If we want to catch a break in this case, yes. Look, we could haul him downtown for unpaid parking tickets or some other bullshit charge, but he ain’t gonna break in the interrogation room. Besides, we can’t even follow an evidence chain, because we don’t have one, so any questions or answers we might get will probably not even be admissible.”
“Nate, you know there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. We can’t afford to screw up on this case. You know the press is just waiting to jump on any mistakes we make.”
“Yeah, I guess I’d much rather see the headline, Border Agent Loses Job Over Violation of Suspect’s Rights than Mushroom Cloud Blows Over Dallas, Texas. Never mind, I should have known a data cruncher wouldn’t have the stones for the real job.”
“Jesus Christ, you can be a real asshole. You must be divorced—I don’t know any sane woman who would put up with you for longer than a day,” Tracy snapped.
Nate recoiled, and for a second, Tracy feared she had gone too far. He pointed a rock-steady finger at her. “My personal life and my professional one are completely separate. You remember that or we’re done, right here, right now, and I’ll get that bastard myself.”
Tracy took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Nate, that was uncalled-for.”
She looked away and regarded the house. Two men had stumbled out and were wrestling on the barren front lawn.
There were lights on in several neighboring houses, but no people on the porches and no children playing in the street.
She saw evidence of kids in the neighborhood, a small tricycle in one driveway, and a leaning swing set visible in the yard next to it. She imagined those toys, that house, the entire neighborhood suddenly vaporized in a white-hot flash of light, followed by the devastating shock wave that came right after, flattening anything in its path. If not here, where? Fort Worth, Dallas, like Nate said, Washington D.C.—?
Jennifer. Tracy banished the vision of that angelic face melting in the blast.
“Speaking purely hypothetically, what did you have in mind?” she asked quietly.
Nate told her what he knew about the gang and their leader, then outlined his plan. By th
e time he was done, Tracy found herself nodding in agreement. It was simple and practically guaranteed to flush out whoever was associated with al-Kharzi and the nuke—assuming they were still in town. It also involved breaking at least a half-dozen laws and bending several others.
“You think you can convince your nurse friend to go along with this? It could mean her job along with yours,”
Tracy said.
“You let me worry about that. What I need to know is, are you in or out?”
“Give me a little time to think about it, will you?”
“The clock’s ticking, Tracy.”
“I know…I know.”
“We have to do this tonight, if we’re going to at all.”
“But not immediately, right?”
“No, we need to give them some time to get good and hammered first. It’s always easier to get in and out when they’re sleeping it off,” Nate said.
“All right, then I want to go back to my room, take a long shower and think about this. Whatever I decide, even if I turn you down, I won’t tell anyone else.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that. Let’s get you cleaned up, and I got a mountain of paperwork to take care of after this afternoon.”
Tracy frowned as they pulled away from the house.
“How are you going to explain the shotgun?”
He smiled. “I’ll come up with something. Folks owe me a favor or two here and there. You just think about what might happen in the next few hours, and let me know what you decide.”
“Fair enough.”
The ride back was as quiet as the ride over, but for a very different reason.
TWO HOURS LATER, THE sun sank below the horizon, letting the south Texas night steal across the landscape. In her hotel room, washed, changed and fed, Tracy paced back and forth and tried to decide which way to go.
After her shower, she had called Paul. While hearing his voice was a welcome link to normalcy, she didn’t want to tell him what she had gotten mixed up in down in Texas.
She told him everything was fine, that it was a complex but safe job that required on-site analysis, which was true from a certain point of view. She complained good-naturedly about the dry heat and said she missed him and Jennifer, which was very, very true.
Paul had put Jennifer on and Tracy kept her tone light and upbeat. She promised the girl that when she came back they would all go to the beach for an entire week.
Even though she had no idea how she would manage that much time off, it was worth it to hear Jennifer’s squeal of delight.
When the call was over, her problems still remained.
The plan made sense to her—go in, get the bad guys and get the information they needed, instead of crunching reams of information to create a report that could be squashed by any one of a number of bosses for whatever reason he thought best.
Nate’s words to her out in the desert echoed through her head. Am I too analytical? Am I not cut out for the field?
She thought she had acquitted herself well enough in the debacle at the barn, but at the same time, she had also lacked Nate’s reflexes and instincts to seize that moment and use the element of surprise to get the drop on their adversaries. In fact, she had almost blown it, and then covered for her mistake—and it was a mistake, she realized—by taking it out on Nate in front of his team. Not the smartest thing to do to a partner you just met. But that doesn’t mean I owe him anything, and I’m damn sure not going to jump into this out of any sense of obligation, or to prove myself—
I’ll do it only because I think it’s the right thing to do.
She considered the issue staring her in the face—the loose nuke. It was simple enough on the surface. Break several laws, circumvent the rules and save hundreds of thousands of people, or do it by the book and take the chance that they could catch the terrorists—whom they still hadn’t identified—before they could detonate the nuclear device that had been smuggled into the U.S.
Nate, even after she had scolded him like an errant child, apparently still thought enough of her to include her in his plan. Of course, you could also be a convenient scapegoat if it all goes wrong, she thought. But that didn’t seem to be Nate’s style. He was direct, abrasive and perhaps working on a hair-trigger, but she hadn’t sensed any sort of machinations when he had made the offer, just an honest desire for her help. From what she’d seen in the short time they had been working together, he truly thought this would be the best way to move the case forward.
That was one factor. The other was her own instinct in terms of analyzing the data she had and reaching a conclusion. She sat down on the bed and quickly ran through everything she knew so far, from when she had first received this case to what they had discovered at the barn. Everything she knew pointed to one very real fact—there was a nuclear device loose in America, and it was going to be used soon.
The longer the terrorists had it, the more likely they would be caught, so they would only bring it in when their plan was nearing its final stages. If it was still in El Paso, then they had a chance of stopping it. If it wasn’t, they had to find out where it had gone as soon as possible. And if it was headed east, toward the White House…
Tracy shook her head, reaching for the phone, then actively restraining herself from calling Paul and telling him to take Jennifer and leave the city. She had no way of knowing that was their final target. Instead, she dialed another number.
“Customs and Border Protection, Agent Spencer speaking.”
“It’s Tracy. I’m in,” she said.
“Good. Everything’s arranged at the hospital, so all we need to do it pick up our source.”
“You set this up already? You knew I was going to agree?”
“Let’s just say I played a strong hunch. You’re smart, aggressive, and I can tell you don’t like to lose. And if we go through the normal channels on this, we are going to lose—I guarantee it.”
“Pick me up as soon as possible,” she said.
“I’m already on my way.”
Tracy snapped her cell phone shut and sat on the edge of her bed, hoping she wasn’t about to flush her career down the toilet.
Nate’s stomach twisted into knots as he drove though El Paso’s south side, working his way toward the Barrio Aztecas hangout. For a wild moment, he considered calling the whole operation off, but knew that was impossible.
They had one shot at a solid lead on whoever had the nuke, and he was going to take it, even if it meant risking everything.
As he headed south on Kansas Street, deeper into the heart of the Segundo Barrio, his gaze passed over Tracy, who was dressed in black sweatpants, a black, long-sleeved T-shirt and black running shoes. His outfit was the same, except he wore steel-toed combat boots. Neither of them had any identification, no badges, not even wallets. If it went wrong, they didn’t want the gangbangers to know who they were.
“You all right? Last chance to back out,” he said as they approached their destination.
Tracy mustered a game smile. “What, and leave you to go in and get shot by yourself? You know the stakes are too high to risk all on this one person. You go—I go.”
“All right, then.” He turned off the ignition and held out the keys. “Take these. If you leave and I don’t, there’ll be a damn good reason for it. And no last-minute heroics, either—if I tell you to get out, you better go like your ass is on fire and your hair’s catching. Get to the truck, get the hell out of here, turn left at the intersection, turn right at the next one, and that road will take you to the highway. That should get you clear. Say it back to me.”
Tracy repeated his directions in a clear, steady voice, then said, “Let’s get on with it.”
Nate nodded. There was nothing left to do but finish their prep and go. He got out, checked his pistol and made sure it was accessible in its holster on his hip. He casually scanned the area, which he had chosen for its lack of nearby housing.
On the other side, Tracy was making her final preparatio
ns, including pulling a black knit mask over her face, then securing a strap around her head. Nate did the same, then took a small night-vision monocular from his pocket.
Standing on the running board of the Silverado, he put it to his eye and studied the route they would take to the house. The streetlights in the area worked intermittently at best, which was good, since there were no trees for cover, only the sides of houses. Nate checked the windows for signs of observers, a moving curtain on this breezeless night, a shadow passing in front of a living-room or bedroom window or anything else that tripped his stakeout senses. He saw nothing. So far, so good, he told himself.
With Nate leading the way, they crossed a small median, then entered the block containing the gang house. On one side, one of the single-story homes had suffered a fire and looked abandoned, with empty, gaping window frames yawning wide in smoke-blackened walls. The other house was either deserted, or the occupants were asleep.
Nate crept down the narrow space between the two homes, trying to look everywhere at once, expecting a gangbanger to pop out from the shadow. He reached the end of the space, and peeked out at the gang house, only a few yards away. Putting the monocular to his eye, he scanned the back of the house carefully, finding what he was looking for on the flat roof. A guard had nodded off, apparently exhausted from keeping watch over all the partiers during the evening.
Nate pointed at Tracy, held up his hand to indicate she should stay put, pointed at himself, then at the back door.
After her nod of understanding, and steeling himself for the impact of a bullet out of nowhere, he walked slowly toward the door, every sense alert for the slightest indication they’d been made. When he reached the door, he took up a position beside it, then waved Tracy forward.
When she reached the side of the house, he removed night-vision goggles from a hard-shell container on his left hip and clicked them into place on the hands-free mount on his forehead. After checking to see that Tracy had done the same, he turned them on, and the world around him flared into sharp, brilliant, green-and-black life. They were too powerful to use on the street, where the light from the lamps would have blinded him, but in the dark backyard, they were perfect. Every detail of the squalid area around him was visible as if it were high noon. With the goggles in place over her eyes, as well, Tracy flashed him a thumbs-up, indicating she was ready to go.
