THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  The following day, at approximately 8:30 AM, two local New Liberty policemen – Sergeant Jim Crowley and Officer Alvin Cox – drove out to the McNally farm. They were there to serve McNally a warrant for assault but Mary McNally refused to let them in the farmhouse. Her husband and brother were not in, she claimed. They were in Moline, at a meeting. They wouldn’t be home until late. Rather than force the issue, the local policemen decided to wait.

  Eventually, about forty minutes later, McNally and Sampson were spotted driving along the country road back toward the farmhouse in McNally’s battered gold Ford pickup. They slowed down when they saw the police cruiser outside the farm’s main gate. But instead of pulling over when Sergeant Crowley tried to flag them down, they picked up speed and swung around a tractor lane, entering the property from the side. Then they jumped out and ran into the farmhouse, carrying what were later described as “suspicious-looking objects under their arms, possibly automatic weapons, wrapped loosely in plaid blankets.”

  Once again, the police approached the house, this time with their guns drawn. When they had come to within a hundred feet of the front porch, McNally appeared at the door with a shotgun in his arms. He asked them what they wanted, and they told him they were there to serve him with a warrant for his assault on Aaron Turner. McNally laughed. The police told him to put the shotgun down and, without a fuss, McNally complied. Then, as they drew closer to the house, a shot rang out from the window of the bedroom on the second floor. Sergeant Crowley went down, a bullet through his forehead. He was dead before he even hit the ground.

  The second policeman, Officer Alvin Cox, retreated in a shower of bullets and barely made it back behind his car. He immediately put in a call for reinforcements. Within twenty minutes, another New Liberty police car, two state police cruisers, three local Eldridge and four Bettendorf police cars – including the Bettendorf Chief of Police, Paul “Popeye” Landry, and Sergeant Pat Higgins – had converged onto the scene. Two hours later, an FBI SWAT team had completely surrounded the farmhouse.

  After three hours of fruitless negotiations, during which the police had begged McNally to send his children out from the farmhouse, they intercepted a call from McNally to a man named Jordan Fletcher, the Grand Master of the White Apocalypse, based in a small town twenty miles southwest of Sioux City. Fletcher had immediately reprimanded McNally for calling him, especially on a landline. He told him to call back on his cell phone and to use “the book.” Then he hung up. The head of the FBI SWAT team, Don Morgan, had immediately called his office in Chicago and requested a device to pick up cell phone transmissions and a cryptanalyst. Within two hours, at approximately 4:20 PM, as the sun was beginning to set, John Decker Jr. left I-80 and drove up Rural Route 30 toward the McNally farm in New Liberty.

  It was a strange kind of homecoming for Decker. The son of a local policeman, Decker had joined the Bettendorf Police Force himself soon after college in Chicago. But after only two years on the force, he applied to join the FBI and was accepted by the Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Following sixteen weeks of intensive training, and a stint with the Racketeering Records Analysis Unit in Washington, D.C., he had been transferred to the Bureau’s office in Chicago where he worked within the Cryptanalysis Subunit, mostly on white collar crimes involving credit card fraud, money laundering, illegal gambling and a few drug cases. His superiors felt he didn’t have the qualities required for a Special Agent. And besides, his abilities seemed better suited to a desk job.

  As Decker approached the farmhouse, driving past the TV crews and news reporters crowded around the outer gate, Chief Landry ambled slowly down the muddy, snow-flecked road to greet him. Decker got out and they shook hands.

  Just shy of six feet tall, a trifle thin but wiry, Decker had thick coal black hair, pale gray eyes dotted with blue and green specks, and the gentle features of a poet. Only a long white scar, barely visible below the hairline and sweeping along one eye, and a slight lopsidedness to his face, marred his demeanor. He had just turned thirty last December.

  “It’s good to see you again, John Junior,” Landry said. “Happy new year.”

  “Happy new year, Popeye,” he responded. “Sorry to hear about Crowley. He was a good cop.” Popeye simply nodded. A minute later, Decker was surrounded by Alvin Cox, a dozen local New Liberty, Bettendorf, Davenport and Eldridge policemen, plus a handful of troopers from the Iowa State Patrol. Despite the somber mood, they joked with him about returning to the Quad Cities. “Look what the cat dragged in,” said Sgt. Higgins. “Is this all the Bureau could spare?” Even two local state troopers, Dick and Harry Sloane – identical twins, like mirror images in their brown and light tan uniforms – swung by to say hello. It was clear they remembered Decker with fondness. Higgins handed him a steaming cup of coffee. Then Special Agent Don Morgan of the SWAT team briefed him on the situation. Within minutes, Decker was back in the surveillance van, listening to the conversation between McNally and Jordan Fletcher.

  He fell into the cipher. It was always the same process, like one of those 3-D puzzles that looked like some kind of Impressionistic painting until you relaxed your eyes, stared beyond the image, and it suddenly shifted into place. His old sensei, Master Yamaguchi, had called it “Reclining in Chaos.” There was no other way to describe it. Decker had possessed this skill for as long as he could remember. It was like a good ear for music, or the ability to run fast. He simply had a way with numbers and symbols, a gift for finding patterns in seemingly random data.

  He took a deep breath and began, as always, with a substitution cipher, replacing true letters or numbers – plain text – with alternate characters – cipher text. He looked for patterns, series and common combinations. Nothing. Since the cipher McNally used was numeric, Decker dismissed traditional Caesar and keyword number ciphers off the bat. On the other hand, he thought, it might have been a telephone keypad cipher. But since McNally was using two-digit numbers – some of which were greater than twenty-six – he set aside this protocol as well.

  It took him only a few seconds to flick through each of these contenders. After his training, and based on his innate skills, he was able to dismiss unlikely ciphers and codes virtually immediately. Also, having been brought up by his Aunt Betsy, a devout Catholic, and her husband Tom, an equally devout Episcopalian, and after his briefing on the White Apocalypse earlier, Decker believed “the book” which Fletcher had referred to in his phone call was the Bible.

  In the end, Decker broke McNally’s cipher in less than sixty seconds. It turned out to be a simple book code: chapter and verse, followed by a third number specifying the word in the verse McNally wanted to use in the construction of his sentences. And he discovered it just in time; the suspects were planning to make a break for it from the farmhouse through some kind of tunnel.

  Decker jumped out of the van and started to make his way back toward the farmhouse, completely surrounded now by local and state police, plus the FBI SWAT team that had taken up positions with snipers around the property. As he approached, he noticed Troopers Dick and Harry Sloane – the identical twins – standing outside the main fence of the property, drinking coffee, breath steaming from their mouths. It had grown even colder in the last few minutes. The setting sun lingered in the trees across the vacant snow-flecked corn fields. A raised eyebrow of geese sliced the sky. That’s when he saw the head of Peter Sampson poke out from the drainage ditch that ran along the fence line of the property, behind that clump of holly bushes, their berries livid crimson, buckshot of blood, frozen in time. He could barely make Sampson out in the blaze of spotlights the police had set up facing the house. He was only a dozen yards away from the two state troopers.

  Decker ran forward. He was about to call out to the Sloane brothers when he noticed Sampson was carrying a hunting rifle. Mary McNally was right behind him, followed by the three children. He watched as Sampson crawled up out of the ditch and aimed his gun at Harry Sloane.

  Without even thinking, Decker leap
t into the ditch. He wrestled the rifle from Sampson’s hands. Sampson was a large man, well over six feet tall, and built like a defensive guard. He swung at Decker, who danced out of the way at the last moment. Then Sampson reached for another weapon, a .357 magnum stuffed behind his belt. He drew the gun but Decker was much too fast. He jabbed his left palm up under the large man’s nose, sending his head back, and shot a spear thrust deep into the jugular notch beneath his exposed chin. Sampson went down. His windpipe had collapsed, sending shards of cartilage into his throat. Within seconds he had choked to death and lay still. Mary McNally screamed and the Sloane brothers finally turned and noticed the struggle in the ditch. They ran over, their weapons drawn. Minutes later, Ed McNally crawled out of the tunnel – smoking now with tear gas – directly into the arms of the police. The stand-off was over. McNally was handcuffed and led away.

  Decker was called out as a hero for saving the lives of the two Sloane brothers. But he felt badly shaken by the incident. As his old friends patted him on the back, he tried to pull away, and finally told them with a crippled smile, “Thanks but . . . too much coffee. I have to take a leak.” He walked back toward the van, stepped behind it nonchalantly, bent over and threw up.

  He had never killed anyone before. He hadn’t been in a fight in years. He spat, wiped his mouth, and straightened up. The feeling was overwhelming. He didn’t know where to put it.

  Three hours later, Decker pulled up to the house of his Aunt Betsy and her husband, Tom Llewellyn, who ran a local hardware store in Davenport. They were expecting him; Betsy had been following the story of the McNally stand-off on the TV all day.

  Tom ran out to greet Decker on the porch. Short and stocky, with thin gray hair combed adroitly across his shiny head, Tom wore a scarlet apron over his yellow sweater and polyester mud-brown pants. They entered the house and were immediately assaulted by the smell of home-made biscuits and roast chicken wafting from the kitchen. It was Decker’s favorite meal. Tom always made it for him whenever he came home for a visit. His Aunt Betsy got up from her easy chair, dragging herself from CNN.

  Thin and tall, with a handsome wrinkled face set off by snow-white hair, Aunt Betsy had the ice-blue eyes of all the Carricks. They exchanged a polite hello. “It’s good to see you,” she said flatly. “Happy new year, John.” Despite herself, his aunt seemed genuinely relieved. They had never gotten along. Aunt Betsy had always been jealous of her sister, Decker’s mother, and when both his parents had been killed, she had only reluctantly agreed to take her nephew in. Indeed, it had been Tom, her husband, who had finally pushed her to “do the Christian thing.” Tom told Decker to wash up. They were going to be eating right away. The capon had been ready for an hour.

  Decker went upstairs. The bathroom was at the head of the landing. He washed his hands and face, studying himself in the mirror as he dried himself off. Nothing seemed to have changed. He looked exactly like he had that morning. As he replaced the light blue hand towel and stepped out into the hall, he noticed that his old bedroom door was open, slightly ajar. He walked over and looked in.

  His room hadn’t changed either: the same pictures of airplanes from World War II; the same poster of Flags from Around the World; the same long distance running and martial arts trophies; the same photographs even. He stepped cautiously within. On his old desk, next to his books on Secret Codes and Differential Calculus and Hieroglyphics and The Mystery of The Labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, there was a photograph of his parents in a walnut frame. He picked it up.

  His mother, Louise Carrick, and father, John Decker Sr., were standing on the porch of their old house in Bettendorf. His father was in his uniform, one arm wrapped casually around his mother’s waist. He was a small man but solidly built, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair; not unlike his own father who had once worked in the factories of north England before coming to America and settling in the farm country of eastern Iowa. His mother was almost as tall, thin and pale-skinned. She had light brown hair, tinged with red, revealing her own Irish roots. Decker could just make out the freckles on her nose. There were seventeen of them. He had scored them countless times as a child as he’d reclined against her, his head tucked safely in her lap. Before the accident. Before that drunken driver had come crashing through the night, into the other lane, and hit their old Chevy Biscayne head on as they were driving back from picking up John Jr. at a track meet in Moline. Both of his parents had died on the side of the road that night, next to that other driver. Somehow, miraculously, Decker had survived. And, after almost two months in a coma, and a year and a half in physical therapy, despite all the doctors’ predictions, he had not only walked again, but run, become a Black Belt in Kung Fu at seventeen. He had thrived. At least physically.

  “John?” he heard Tom call up from the first floor. “John Junior, the chicken’s getting dry. Aren’t you hungry?”

  Decker returned the photograph to his desk. He took a final look around the room. “I’m starving,” he shouted back, ducking through the door. And, strangely enough, he was.

  Chapter 2

  Friday, January 28 – 2:33 AM

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  The man stood on the balcony overlooking the tranquil sea. He held something in his arms, wrapped loosely in a carpet. Then, with a quick twist, he dropped the object from the balcony. The carpet unrolled and a woman’s naked body unfurled and tumbled downward. The body landed on top of a parked car, a light blue Fiat, crushing the roof with a mighty crash, exploding the windshield. The car alarm began to wail.

  Only a few feet distant, an old man walking his dog jumped back, looked up and spotted the figure on the balcony above. He immediately reached into his coat pocket, whipped out his cell phone, and punched 100 for the police.

  * * *

  Benjamin Seiden slept like a child. Even in repose, it was obvious he was incredibly fit, a testament to his daily workouts and ascetic diet. A handsome man, just turned forty-four, he had a wide uncompromising chin, full lips, a regal if unbalanced nose, and hair of the deepest chocolate, only recently beginning to gray along the temples.

  The alarm clock rang and Seiden found himself sitting up in bed. It was 5:30 AM. Beside him, his wife Dara stirred and, with a sigh, rolled over.

  Seiden slipped from the bed and padded like a cat into the bathroom. He took a cold shower, as he did each morning, letting the frigid pinpricks rinse the slumber from his skin. Within twenty minutes, he was fully dressed, wearing a pair of cotton khakis, hand-ironed the night before; a pressed white shirt; a tan Egyptian cotton tie; a pair of sturdy English walking shoes, light brown; and a brushed suede cinnamon-colored yarmulke.

  Seiden made his way along the hallway. As he passed the first door on his left, he paused and poked his head in, and stared at his two daughters, Rachael and Ruth, in their beds. Ruth, the eldest at six, lay lengthways across the width of the mattress, one hand dangling down, pointing at the floor. And Rachael, his four-year-old, slept in her standard kneeling position, bottom in the air, and her little arms curled underneath her chest. Seiden wondered how she could possible find the position comfortable. She looked like a contortionist.

  He stepped into the room and shook his children gently. “Time to get up, sleepyheads,” he said. They moaned and came to life. “And I want you dressed and ready in ten minutes. No dilly-dallying in the bathroom.” He looked pointedly at Rachael.

  Seiden marched them both into the bathroom, grumbling and dragging stuffed animals. “Ten minutes,” he repeated. “Ruth, help your sister with her pajamas.” He hesitated for a moment longer, and then made his way back through the hallway to the kitchen.

  It looked like it was going to be another beautiful day. From the kitchen, across the breakfast bar and tidy living room, he could see the open, turquoise waters of the Mediterranean shimmering beyond the sea walls. Seiden slipped an apron on and started making breakfast. The girls liked their scrambled eggs made with real milk, slightly overdone. Seiden favored yogurt and fre
sh honey. And Dara – she couldn’t move without her Turkish coffee. A family of individualists. The New Israel. He fussed about the tiny kitchen, working efficiently, when his wife appeared at the head of the hallway wearing a light pink cotton T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. “Good morning,” he said. “How’d you sleep?”

  Dara didn’t actually respond. She uttered a kind of anthropoid grunt, scratched her head, and shuffled slowly into the room. Then she yawned, and he could see her teeth flash for a moment before her thick hair fell about her face, dark as a widow’s veil. “M’n’in’,” she finally ushered up, squeezing a yawn.

  Just then the phone rang. Dara straightened reflexively and looked up at her husband. “Don’t forget you’re taking the girls to school today,” she said. “I have a conference at the Women’s Center. You promised.”

  Seiden didn’t respond. He simply stared at the bright red wall phone as it continued to ring, again and again.

  “Aren’t you going to get it?” Dara asked.

  A phone call at this hour was never pleasant news. With a sigh, he picked up the receiver. “Seiden,” he said.

  It was Captain Hymie Rubenstein of the Tel Aviv Police. “Sorry to disturb you at this hour,” he said. “Sir, I’ve tripped a flare.”

  Seiden scratched at his chin. Hymie was seldom nervous. “It’s alright, Captain. Where are you?”