The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  “I don’t know what kind of time frame we’re looking at here,” I said, “but I don’t like how quickly everything is happening here, so fast-track this.”

  “I’ll make that clear.”

  “And could you do me one more favor?”

  Angela looked at me somewhat suspiciously. “What’s that?”

  “I can’t seem to get ahold of Margaret and she was supposed to send me the schematics to the ELF station. Can you look them up?”

  “That station has been closed down for years.”

  “Wait till I send you the files.”

  A pause. “If the schematics are on the Federal Digital Database, I can get them for you.”

  “It might only be on the JWICS. And you’re probably going to need above top secret security clearance.”

  A long thin silence. I could tell that she was evaluating my request in lieu of the conversation we’d just finished regarding the hacking scenarios. “I think Director Wellington is still in the building. I’ll track her down, ask her.”

  “And if you can’t find her?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I’d worked with Angela enough to know that pressuring her any more right now was not going to help. “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “If you’re right about any of this, you don’t owe me anything.” She signed off.

  I closed the chat window, forwarded all of my notes to her and to USCYBERCOM, then, as I was finishing up, I thought about the GPS location Angela had uncovered and that I’d relayed to Tait. It wasn’t far from from the Schoenberg Inn. Earlier in the day I’d had my team search the Moonbeam because of the possibility that Alexei was keeping Kayla there.

  So the Schoenberg? Just get a room, knock Kayla out, lock her in there? It would keep her safe, warm, out of the picture.

  I called Tait back and told him to have his men search every room of the Schoenberg while they were in the area after they’d inspected the cabin.

  Then I ran down where things were at: Angela was pursuing raising the threat level and looking for Margaret, USCYBERCOM had all the data I did, Tait was having officers search the most likely locations for Kayla, and Alexei Chekov was behind bars. I had the sense that right now just about everything I could put into play on this case was in play.

  Dealing with more than one investigation at a time isn’t easy, but more often than not, it’s the default setting for my life. So now, as I reviewed the objectives I’d noted earlier, I realized it was time to review the videos Torres had sent me, the ones found in Reiser’s trailer.

  Still at my computer, I braced myself and then pulled up the footage that the ERT had digitized from the VHS cassette documenting Lana Gerriksen’s murder more than a decade ago.

  And I pressed play.

  71

  CIA Detainment Facility 17

  Cairo, Egypt

  2:29 a.m. Eastern European Time

  2 hours 31 minutes until the transmission

  After wheeling into the bathroom, Terry used the cell phone to contact Abdul Razzaq Muhammad.

  “Two and a half hours,” Terry said. “Your team will be here?”

  “They are already in the area. Have the numbers changed?”

  “No. They keep a steady rotation here. There’ll be eight to ten agents present.”

  “We’ll wait until we have confirmation that the event has occurred, then we will-”

  “No. Simultaneous,” Terry said. “That was our agreement. Don’t forget, I can still call this off.”

  No reply.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Terry pressed him. “It all happens at 03:00 GMT.”

  “My men will move in when the missile hits, not when it is fired. Sub-launched missiles are slower than ICBMs, not as accurate. It might miss the target, or it might be disarmed prior to impact.”

  “It won’t miss, and once a Trident missile is in the air, it can’t be disarmed, redirected, or recalled.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Some of the newer missiles, maybe, yes. But not the older ones. Not the ones on the USS Louisiana.”

  Abdul was unyielding. “We move on impact. Not before.”

  After a short internal debate, Terry decided that at this point it wasn’t worth fighting about; a few more minutes wouldn’t matter in the end, not after all these months of captivity. “All right. It’ll be in the air eleven minutes. So, exactly 03:11 GMT.”

  “I do not deal well with betrayal. If you don’t deliver, we will kill you, find your female friend, and she will join you in eternity, but only after my men and I have taken our turns with her.”

  Spoken like a true religious fanatic.

  Terry wasn’t intimidated. “I would expect nothing less.” From you, he thought. “And the money?”

  “It will be transferred at 03:11 GMT. Exactly.”

  The road to this moment had all begun the day Terry acquired the phone.

  China’s growing weapons and economic ties to Pakistan had given him the perfect in. After he’d stolen the phone, he’d contacted his old handler from China to find out who to be in touch with in Pakistan. He bypassed the Taliban and went directly to Al Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani government and made Abdul Razzaq Muhammad the offer: “I will acquire a nuclear weapon from one of the United States’s Ohio Class Submarines. I will fire it at the target of your choice if you will provide two things for me in return.”

  “What are those?”

  “Free me from a CIA detainment facility in Egypt and wire $100,000,000 to the bank account number I provide you.”

  Yes, the dollar figure was significant, but so were Abdul Razzaq Muhammad’s contacts.

  Terry calculated that some of the money would come from oil, but, considering the people he was working with, he knew that most of it would come from the United States government itself, siphoned from the $2.4 billion of annual aid that the US gives to Pakistan, officially “to help the citizens of the country democratically grow their economy,” unofficially, to combat the rampant anti-American sentiment: “A core component in the worldwide fight against global terrorism.”

  In other words, spend billions of American taxpayer dollars to help grow the economy of a country where nearly 70 percent of the people still think the US is their enemy, while American unemployment hovers at 10 percent.

  A plan like that could only come from Capitol Hill.

  After making the offer, Terry had given Abdul the information he would need to confirm his identity and qualifications, and it took the Al Qaeda operative less than a day to verify that Terry Manoji, a man who’d worked undetected as a spy for two years while employed at the NSA, was the person he claimed to be and could deliver what he said he could.

  So Abdul took the proposal to his people.

  Terry thought they would come back to him with an American target, perhaps one of the usual suspects: Washington DC, New York City, LA, or maybe an American embassy or military installation abroad.

  But Abdul’s associates chose someplace else.

  The city of Jerusalem.

  “We will bring down the Zionists,” Abdul told him, “while also putting the Great Satan in its proper place of humiliation in the eyes of the world.”

  Orchestrating it so that the US rather than an Islamic nation wiped out Jerusalem was brilliant in a twisted sort of way. As far as Terry could see, in one fell swoop it accomplished nearly every goal Al Qaeda ever had-humiliating America, killing millions of Jews, devastating the US economy, and effecting all of this by turning the weapons of the world’s greatest superpower against one of its closest allies.

  “What about the Muslims who live there?” Terry asked. “The Palestinians in East Jerusalem?”

  “Allah will welcome any of the faithful who are martyred in his name.”

  Martyred.

  That was an interesting way to put it.

  “And the Dome of the Rock?”

  “Unwavering devotion to Allah is more importa
nt than the veneration of a shrine.”

  Truthfully, Terry didn’t care about either Al Qaeda’s target or their reasons for choosing it. He cared about only two things-his freedom and his reunion with Cassandra. But he needed to know how committed Abdul would be to fulfilling his part of the bargain, so he asked him, “Your own clerics have called Islam a peaceful religion. Are you sure you’re ready to go through with something like this?”

  “Anyone who calls my religion one of peace mocks it,” Abdul stated firmly. “Just as anyone who claims it is about war. Islam is not about peace or about war; it is about surrender. The name Muslim means ‘submission to God.’ Our religion is one of total submission to Allah-it is not about tolerance, it is not about appeasing others or compromising to make sinners happy. It is about devotion. We celebrate all that is in submission to the Creator, we fight all that is in opposition to Islam. You misunderstand if you think Muslims are for peace or for war. We are instead wholeheartedly surrendered to the spread of Islam because it is the will of Allah.”

  “And your target threatens that?”

  “Rejects it.” Now Abdul Razzaq Muhammad’s tone had turned cold and spiteful, and Terry could hear the man’s venomous hatred for Jews coming through loud and clear. “There is no greater calling than spreading the will of God to those who would scorn it or mock it or fight against it! Allahu Akbar!”

  The rhetoric didn’t impress Terry, nor did the reasoning persuade him. As far as he was concerned, Islam was a religion of violence and totalitarianism. How else could you explain the deafening silence of the majority of its adherents to the daily suicide bomb attacks against civilians that their fellow Muslims carried out? How else could you make sense of the international outrage, protests, and deadly riots when someone drew a caricature of Muhammad or threatened to burn a Qur’an?

  Even to Terry Manoji, for a religious person to place books and cartoons above human life was unfathomable. Sharia law? That wasn’t surrender to God; that was fascism.

  But as long as he got his money, as long as he got his freedom, Terry didn’t care about their warped reasoning or their sophomoric and fustian ways of justifying violence in the name of religion.

  And then, there was the matter of Israel’s response. Over the last few years, Israel had not been at all shy about their right to preemptively attack Iran if they thought Iran had nuclear weapons.

  And of course, if there was a nuclear missile heading straight for the heart of Jerusalem, Israeli leaders would not hold cabinet meetings and forums, they would assume it was fired from the country that had repeatedly threatened their very existence.

  Iran.

  Even if the US claimed the missile had been fired by hackers or terrorists, Israel would presume who was responsible.

  And they would retaliate.

  Terry could only imagine how much damage they would do to that country in the eleven minutes between the time the Louisiana ’s missile was fired and when it actually struck the heart of their capital.

  It would certainly be a memorable day, that much was for sure.

  “It’s a deal,” Terry had said simply.

  Now, with less than 150 minutes left before the ignition sequence would begin, Terry said to Abdul, “All right. You told me the consequences if I don’t deliver what I promised, now I’m going to tell you the consequences if you don’t.”

  “And what are those, my friend?” Abdul’s voice did not sound friendly.

  “Jerusalem will not be the only city lying in ruins. Mecca will become one giant crater and Allah will welcome 1.7 million more ‘martyrs’ home. Do we have a clear understanding here?”

  “Yes, Mr. Manoji. It is quite clear indeed.”

  Solstice was pleased.

  The hydraulic lines that powered the lift in the concrete shaft had been disabled. All was set. The base was secure. No one would be coming down to interrupt them.

  Although Equator had identified increasing chatter on JWICS about US nuclear subs, nothing specifically related to her mission or the ELF station had come up, which, given the obvious FBI interest in the site, did surprise Solstice a bit.

  Since taking over the base, her team had carefully and strategically placed nearly half of the TATP ordnance, leaving, of course, one of the tunnels free of explosives so that no one would be trapped down here when they detonated.

  Well, that’s what they thought, but in reality only one person was going to be leaving this base. Solstice had decided it would just be too inconvenient leaving any survivors to tell the story or to point the finger in her direction.

  “Finish with the TATP,” she said into her handheld radio. “And then I want Cane, Gale, and Squall back down here so we can film that video.”

  72

  7:24 p.m.

  1 hour 36 minutes until the transmission

  The murder videos were viscerally disturbing.

  When you watch things like this, knowing that they really happened, that the images weren’t created by computer graphics or by using special effects, it’s terrifying and unnerving.

  I’d been at it for over an hour, but I knew that tonight I wouldn’t have time to watch all the videos in their entirety, so I played some parts but fast-forwarded through others. I recognized each of the victims’ faces from the cases I’d worked over the years as I’d tracked Basque-either while I was a detective in Milwaukee or during the last six months when he reemerged and started right where he’d left off, torturing, slaughtering, eating.

  Basque was visible in all of the videos, doing his work on the women. Occasionally, I could hear slight laughter from the person filming the crimes, but interestingly enough, Basque’s partner never appeared on screen. The only indication that it might have been Reiser was the fact that we’d found the videos in his trailer home.

  But that, of course, was merely circumstantial.

  Reiser’s lungs were gone when they found him this week.

  Gone.

  Basque only abducted women.

  Careful, Pat. As far as you know, Basque only abducted women.

  My ringing phone interrupted my thoughts, and I received word from Angela that the Defense Department had approved raising the threat level on our fleet of nuclear subs. “I can’t find Director Wellington,” she told me. “She must have left for the day and she’s not answering her cell. But I sent an official expedited request through to the Pentagon for the schematics.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “They assured me you would have them as soon as possible.”

  I cursed under my breath, hiding my frustration from Angela. I wanted a time frame-like maybe five minutes ago.

  “I know, Pat,” she said, reading my silence. “Believe me, I made sure they know how urgent it is.”

  “All right. Keep me posted.”

  Shortly after I hung up, Tait updated me that his officers had found nothing at the cabin, the Schoenberg Inn, or any of the residences or buildings in the area I’d suggested they focus their search; neither had Alexei shared any information or made his one phone call. To make matters worse, when I contacted Anton Torres for an update, he told me his SWAT team had gotten caught behind a truck accident on Highway 8 that shut down the road. Anton figured they were still at least two hours out.

  I went back to the Reiser case. Bypassing the videos for now, I spent some time studying his residential history and comparing it to the locations of the crimes. I realized that, while he could have traveled to commit the murders and follow the news stories, the locations didn’t overlap like I would have expected.

  Reiser was killed Tuesday night…

  DNA from two missing people was found on his knife-a man from Milwaukee, a woman from DC…

  Clippings were found from the Rockford Register Star newspaper…

  The facts revolved, spiraled through my mind, but I was mentally exhausted and couldn’t seem to sort them out. I rubbed my head, stood, and stretched my back.

  I hadn’t noticed before,
but now I overheard Lien-hua and Amber talking in the living room, and I found myself being thankful, since the more understanding there was between those two women, the better off everything between me and Lien-hua was going to be-at least that’s what I hoped.

  Sean was outside, shoveling the driveway so that we’d have our vehicles available in case we needed to get out of here. Earlier when he was getting his boots, I’d suggested he snowblow it, but he told me he didn’t own a snowblower, and then added in no uncertain terms, “Three things real men don’t do: they don’t tweet, they don’t wear Velcro shoes, and they don’t snowblow their driveways.”

  Nope. No arguing with that.

  As far as I knew, Tessa was still downstairs reading.

  I tapped my spacebar and saw the frozen image of Basque, scalpel in hand, leaning over a dying woman in Monona, Wisconsin, and decided I needed a break from this, even if just for a few minutes.

  It occurred to me that with so many things in play all day long, I hadn’t really had much of a chance to talk with Tessa, and, to put it mildly, our short conversation at the motel before I went to meet Chekov hadn’t ended especially well. I had a feeling things were only going to get more complicated from here on out tonight, and I might not even be around the house, especially if we located Kayla, so if I were going to get any chance to connect with my stepdaughter, now was the time to do it.

  Besides, I still had the pills Amber had given me to pass along to her. I hadn’t yet come up with a good way of broaching the topic of Tessa’s undisclosed prescription-honestly, I hadn’t thought about it at all in the last hour-but regardless, it was something I needed to at least address.

  Going downstairs, I found her lounging on the couch, rereading Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn, a book she’d described to me once as “an underground, anti-establishment creative nonfiction classic.” She looked like she was really into it.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked up. “Hey.”

  “How’s the book?”

  “Sick.”

  “Sick.”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that supposed to mean gross?”