Never Back Down

by William Casey Moreton

  The blonde deferred to her friend.

  “That’s him,” the brunette said. “I’m sure.”

  “For sure,” the blonde agreed.

  Eva DuPont left the cash on the bar and put the photo away. She believed the girls - enough, anyway. She made a call on her BlackBerry and filed her first status report.

  “Ripley is alive,” she said.

  36

  A limousine turned off the highway onto the one-lane strip. The narrow drive disappeared in the black trees like a ribbon of asphalt vanishing behind a curtain. Even in the morning light the woods were dark. The car was sleek and black with mirrored glass. The driver knew where to turn because he worked for Mr. Armstrong.

  The security fence was set several hundred feet into the woods so it would not draw attention. The limo wound through the black timber until an imposing iron gate suddenly appeared. A camera mounted in the trees identified the car and the gate parted for it to enter.

  A few deer watched from the safety of the forest. They were not afraid. It was not the first car they had seen pass through the gate that morning, and it would not be the last.

  The guests arrived one by one. Each limousine pulled around the circle drive and a member of Mr. Armstrong’s staff welcomed the guest to his home. Of course, where the car was depositing them there was no house, only a boat moored at a pier. The guests then boarded the boat and waited patiently for the other guests to arrive. They were impatient and did not appreciate the inconvenience, but no one complained.

  When the last of the cars emerged from the black forest into the clearing, the final two guests walked the length of the pier and were helped aboard by a man dressed in uniform. Then a man inside the cabin started the inboard motor and the prop churned the water. He pushed the throttle and the boat eased away from the shore.

  Fog drifted in and pressed around the boat and soon the forest and shoreline were lost to sight. The guests were below deck, seated comfortably. They made the journey in silence. The group numbered twenty. Over the past ten years they had become somewhat familiar with each other, but mostly they were strangers drawn together by tragedy. Each of them had lost loved ones in a single act of terrorism.

  The oldest among them was a ninety-year-old man named Lucas Krauss. The youngest was a young boy named McCain who had been only a baby when the event that linked the members of this group together had actually happened.

  McCain stayed close to his mother’s side as they exited the boat and made their way along the dock to a meandering flight of steps cut into the stone of the shoreline. He carried his iPod in one hand, ear bud wires trailing from both ears. His mother had never gotten over the loss of his father and wasn’t shy about expressing her bitterness at having to raise McCain as a single parent. Her name was Gale Roth and she carried her bitterness like a heavy chain around her neck.

  Lucas’s caregiver helped him up the serpentine path of steps to a landing where Mr. Armstrong’s estate spread out before them. The caregiver was a heavy woman with a fake smile. Lucas was foul and loud and wielded his cane like a weapon. He was there because of his sister, who had been cut in half by the tail of the plane when the aircraft crashed to earth.

  Members of Mr. Armstrong’s staff greeted the guests as they arrived. The view from the patio was magnificent. Most of the morning fog had burned off the water and gulls danced above the waves. A fishing trawler was visible on the distant horizon.

  “Where the hell is Armstrong?” Lucas hissed to a member of the security team.

  “Mr. Armstrong will be along shortly, sir,” came the reply.

  The old man curled his lip.

  They were offered wine and when everyone was inside they were led down a corridor to a plush seating area. Their footsteps echoed off the slate floor. Wispy golden rays fell from the skylight.

  Kyle Taubman sat in a high-backed chair in a corner at the back of the room He was forty-seven, six-foot-five and bald with a gleaming, flawless scalp. He’d been a Marine. Now he had a vineyard in Napa Valley. If he had a sense of humor, no one had ever found it. He was gay and had lost his lover in the attack. He was not a forgiving man, and he had a memory like a vault. Kyle, more than anyone else in the room, wanted vengeance. He wanted someone to pay. He wanted someone to feel pain. He demanded blood for blood.

  The staff members made sure everyone was comfortable, made another pass with wine, then left the guests alone.

  The group of twenty waited in silence.

  Mr. Armstrong was dressed all in white - white slacks, white button-up long-sleeved shirt, white loafers. He stood at the front of the room and made eye contact with each of them before speaking.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

  Lucas cleared his throat and scooted forward in his seat. He was nearly blind, but he refused to wear glasses. His scowl was partially a squint. He held the cane across his lap. The caregiver sat beside him, totally indifferent to anything being discussed.

  Armstrong had sent out a cryptic email. It alerted them that he would be presenting an update, and yes, the gathering was on short notice, but he didn’t want to wait. If not everyone could make it, fine, but he had good news, and insisted on delivering it in person. All twenty had made the trip, one of them was from as far away as Belfast. Armstrong had sent a car to JFK to pick him up.

  The group looked tired and jet-legged, but anxious.

  Armstrong scanned the room. He had assembled the group personally. This was his project. Initially it had been about support, but as the need for vengeance rose to the surface and intensified, the group of twenty became a group of investors. They had pooled their money in an effort to get results. The United States government had failed them - failed them in a big way. A government infrastructure with the greatest manpower and armed with the most powerful military on earth had totally dropped the ball.

  The dogs had followed him into the room and they bedded down at his feet. Lucas craned his neck and scowled at the dogs.

  “I apologize for the short notice,” Armstrong said. “But in the last twenty-four hours we have taken an enormous leap forward in accomplishing our ultimate goal.”

  The ultimate goal was to locate and kill a Muslim extremist named Sheik Mohammad Al-Islam. Al-Islam was a forty-year-old Saudi who had grown disillusioned with his wealthy upbringing. His family had billions, and their business interests spread around the globe. They owned diamond and oil fields, shipping ports and bottling companies. If there was money to be made anywhere in the world, they were involved. He was born Joseph Gordon Naddar. He had dropped out of Princeton at age twenty-one and changed his name to Mohammad Al-Islam. He grew a beard and denounced the material world. He had found God. By age twenty-five, he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

  Al-Islam developed a network of efficient, cold-blooded killers. They planned attacks years in advance and were wildly successful. They were patient and cunning. They were smart and dedicated and perfectly willing to die for their faith. They were servants of Allah, and Allah called them to kill.

  Al-Islam was only thirty when he sent three zealous young recruits onto an airliner filled with four hundred people. The three were clean-shaven and polite and dressed like Midwestern businessmen. Their passports and tickets were perfect forgeries. They checked their bags and boarded the plane and found their seats. Front, middle, and rear. The plane exploded in the sky far above the farmlands of Iowa.

  Within six hours a DVD had been delivered to NBC News in New York. Al-Islam stared into the camera and claimed full responsibility for all four hundred deaths. There was glee in his eyes and the slightest hint of a smile.

  Suddenly, Mohammad Al-Islam was the most famous and feared Islamic terrorist in the world.

  Mr. Armstrong’s daughter was on that flight. As was Gale Roth’s husband. And McCain Roth’s father. And Lucas Krauss’s sister. And Kyle Taubman’s lover.

  Al-Islam had killed them all without mercy.

  A support
group quickly formed, but sharing memories of their loved ones soon grew tiresome and was simply too painful. They wanted closure. They wanted vengeance.

  It was an impossible task. Trying to find Al-Islam was like trying to finding a ghost. He had disappeared off the face of the earth. The last known photo of him had been taken at the age of twenty during his studies at Princeton. He was an embarrassment to his family. They had disowned him. Their primary interest was money, not religion. A few photos from his early life had circulated. In them, he was clean-shaven and smiling, kicking a soccer ball with friends or riding horses during family holidays. However, most of whatever was known of the young Joseph Gordon Naddar had been eclipsed by the mythology surrounding Mohammad Al-Islam.

  There had been a few clandestine meetings over the years, beginning with Armstrong, Taubman, and Krauss. Armstrong and Krauss had the money, and Taubman was the brilliant strategist. Taubman had been convinced there was a way to locate Al-Islam, no matter how deeply hidden the man might be. If they were patient and smart and spread money around in the right places, they would eventually find him. The hunt, however, proved far more difficult than they could have ever imagined.

  It was like throwing money into the wind. They had wasted hundred of thousands of dollars and gained nothing in return. It was maddening. Armstrong and Krauss grew impatient but Kyle Taubman encouraged them to stay the course. Not even a ghost can hide forever, he insisted.

  It was on a day in late April when the email arrived. It came from a generic Yahoo! account and stated simply : I can give you Mohammad Al-Islam.

  It wasn’t the first anonymous tip they had received. There had been hundreds, but there was something different here. They could feel it. The correspondence with unitedf185@yahoo.com intensified over a period of weeks. The contact provided them with a few extremely intriguing nuggets of information, mainly in the form of random bank account statements showing vast sums of money being moved around the world. It soon became clear that this was Al-Islam’s money, and showed how his network quietly and efficiently managed to transfer funds from one account to another, continent to continent, never allowing it to stay in one place too long.

  Mostly there were computer screenshots sent by email. Then a white cardboard mailer arrived at Armstrong’s home. There was no return address on the mailer. It had been postmarked in Pittsburg. The mailer contained a sheaf of photocopies folded in half. The pages were photocopies of additional financial records, of more money ricocheting all around Europe and South America. Hundreds of millions of dollars. The account numbers had been blacked-out with ink and tape.

  Armstrong and his partners took the cardboard mailer and the pages to a lab where technicians looked for fingerprints, hair fibers, and DNA of any kind. The pages were clean, as if they’d never been touched by human hands. The cardboard mailer was covered with multiple sets of prints. It had been handled dozens of times within the U.S. Postal Service. The lab results were useless.

  After the upsurge in excitement over the cardboard mailer, there were ten full days of silence. No emails at all. No contact of any kind. Nothing. The silence was terrifying.

  Next came the demand for money. Lots of it.

  And thus began the long months of negotiations.

  The initial price was ten million dollars. Armstrong and the others balked at the ridiculous demand. They countered with an offer of fifty thousand. There were days of cold silence.

  Very shortly an email arrived, cool and blunt: You clearly do not take me seriously. Goodbye.

  Within the hour an offer of a quarter of a million dollars was in place. Still not good enough. They upped their offer to a million, and talks resumed.

  The negotiator was offering the name and exact location of one of Mohammad Al-Islam’s most trusted confidants, a person who was both his business associate and his friend - a friend who could deliver Al-Islam to them with a single phone call.

  Armstrong and his associates could not afford to turn down the offer. They had learned firsthand how impossible it was to uncover even the tiniest detail about Al-Islam. He was indeed a ghost, a phantom, a myth, a legend. Al-Islam was a trail of vapor on a foggy day, lost to sight in the blink of an eye.

  It could be their only chance. It was now or never. Gamble big or give up. But they would not be scammed.

  Armstrong hired a man named Folston who had an office near Bethesda, Maryland and leased heavy equipment to various industries. Folston also had a side business. He had developed a reputation for finding people. Folston’s background was unclear, but he named his fee and they were more than willing to pay. Folston was average in every way, or at least he attempted to be. He was in his late forties with blonde hair giving way to gray. He was slim, but going thick around the middle and was partial to wearing suits - cheap gray suits that hung loosely on his thin frame. He was a lifelong smoker, and was rarely seen without a filter plugged between his lips.

  It was important to keep the government out of it. They couldn’t risk interference of any kind. Finding and dealing with Al-Islam would require working outside the law. Folston had a reputation for operating under the radar, and that’s why they had chosen him.

  “Most of you are aware that we’ve brought in an outside consultant,” Armstrong said. “His name is Christopher Folston, and Mr. Folston is here with us this morning. I’ve asked him to come and personally give an update on his team’s progress. I’m pleased with their performance thus far. He and his team have proven to be an invaluable investment.”

  There was no outward reaction from the gathering. The years of living through the pain of loss had beaten most of the optimism and enthusiasm from them.

  Folston stood at the front of the room with his hands in his pockets. Mr. Armstrong stepped aside and turned to listen. Folston had brought no notes. He didn’t want anything on him that was written down. Armstrong’s private jet had picked him up in D.C. that morning and delivered him to Armstrong’s estate. Armstrong could be an intimidating man.

  It had been twenty-four hours since they had found Caspian’s apartment, but Smith had been slow with updates, slow in feeding new information to Folston. The group of twenty would want details. Folston would have to spin the facts. They were paying him a small fortune and his fee would increase exponentially if they found Al-Islam and got their hands on him.

  Folston had a lot to say, so he started with the girl.

  37

  Coburn was standing in a used record shop north of Washington Square Park. There were racks of classic vinyl. He believed music had more depth and soul before it was digitally encoded and reduced to a 5 megabyte file. He missed the record sleeves and the artwork. The girl behind the counter looked like half of Greenwich Village. She wore a baggy shirt and baggy cargo pants and probably had a fabulous body under there somewhere.

  Coburn browsed the aisles but kept his eyes on the glass at the front. He was watching for cops. The NYU campus sprawled for blocks. Coburn followed a meandering route toward the park. He walked north, then cut east. His pace was casual. He drifted inside some kind of administration building and emerged from the opposite side a few minutes later.

  He found a restroom with a sink and a mirror. The restroom was downstairs, shoved in a corner and barely as large as a broom closet. The sink was chipped and the water ran at a trickle. The toilet brought many questions to mind. He made an effort to clean himself up. He wet his hands and pushed them through his hair. He wet them again and washed his face, his biggest problem. His nose was a mess and there were still dark pools under his eyes. He was the very definition of a suspicious-looking character. The tape over his nose had lost most of its stick. He peeled it away and left it in the sink.

  He followed the stairs up to a hallway where he looked left and right. Earlier, he had entered from the left. The right would take him past a phalanx of offices.

  The building apparently was part of the university. There was a directory on the wall with names and room numbers. Coburn scann
ed it and noted there were classrooms on four floors. Maybe there were additional floors but they weren’t listed. The stairs were near the door where he had come in. His footsteps echoed all the way up.

  There was no one else in the stairwell and there were few students or faculty in the hallways. It was a quarter after the hour so classes were likely in session. He went up as far as the stairs would take him. He came out on the fourth and followed a dogleg to the right. He walked past three empty classrooms filled with desks and chairs and with mounted dry-erase boards with letters scrawled in colored markers and half erased. Milky sunlight streamed in through a pair of windows in each room. All the doors were open.

  The last door on the left at the end of the hall was open as well, but a lecture was in progress. The professor’s voice carried midway down the hall. The floors were tiled so voices echoed and traveled.

  Coburn eased past the open door.

  There were no more than ten students, half asleep and bored to tears, in the room. The professor looked equally bored. Her dry-erase marker squeaked as she wrote with her back to her pupils. The semester surely would feel like an eternity to everyone involved.

  Coburn headed to the window at the end of the hall. The light coming through was pale. The glass was reinforced and smudged. A spider’s web clung to one corner. The view was to the east and Coburn could see Washington Square Park. He looked out at the arch and the fountain. Traffic moved slowly in the streets below. It seemed like a lazy morning. He looked for cops but he didn’t see any.

  Coburn leaned in close to the glass and watched for another long ten minutes. Cars moved. Shadows shifted. Coburn looked for cops watching the park, but there was no evidence of an NYPD presence.

  The second floor of the building had the same floor plan and he went to the window at the end of the hall and looked out at the same scene with a slightly altered perspective. There was still no sign of cops or any of Smith’s men.