There was a lot of talking going on and Frank had to call them to order again. “Okay guys, let’s get our shit together and catch these two before they can get organized. We know they’ve been in this country for twenty eight hours so they have a head start. They landed in San Francisco and we’ve already got two agents from our field office over there checking the airport, and hopefully we can find out where they are staying and nip this in the bud. MI6 have already told us that Malek and Hadj Haddad used their proper names to get passports, so that could tell us one of two things. Either they’ve used their proper names because they want to be known as martyrs back home or they’ve got friends here that can get them false identities when they arrive. If the latter is true, then they could well be in hiding already.”
One of the agents put his hand up and said he would double check the passports.
Frank nodded and went on. “Who have we got in Algeria that can find this Ali Haddad and his mother? We need to find out the background of these two terrorists and what makes them tick.”
Another hand shot up. “I’ll see to that, sir.”
“If they’ve got friends here helping them, then I want all known terrorist cells to be watched more closely. Ask if there’s talk out there of two new boys. Someone will talk for the right money; spread the word that there will be a reward for their capture or any information leading to their capture.”
Quietly they were all given tasks to do, and Frank went back to his office.
Fifteen minutes later, one of his agents knocked on his door and walked in.
“What is it?” Frank asked, without looking up.
“Good news sir, the agents at the airport have got clear video clips of them going through the airport, booking a taxi outside and handing the driver a slip of paper with an address. It seems they speak a little English. They also spoke French at Customs where they said they’re here for a two-week holiday to visit friends.”
“Let’s find out who their friends are then,” Frank said.
“Our agents are tracking down the taxi driver presently, sir.”
“Good, keep me informed.”
An hour went by before Frank received any additional report. Two of his agents walked in and one of them said, “Not-so-good news sir; our agents found the taxi driver and he gave out the address of where he had dropped the brothers off. It’s a Thailand restaurant and the owner told them they had booked a room above the shop for two weeks, that they had booked it a month ago, and that a young Pakistani man had come in to pay the deposit. The thing is, a car came early this morning and picked them up. The same Pakistani that paid the deposit was the driver. The owner couldn’t give a proper description of the car, other than it was black and big with blacked out windows. He said he thinks they are going to New Orleans; they told him they had friends down there.”
Frank Brubaker shook his head. In his experience, terrorists didn’t leave clues, they were a tight-lipped lot. “If our two terrorists can hardly speak English, and yet they managed to tell the owner they were going to New Orleans, then I think they’re leaving a false trail. But follow it up anyway, and find out if the First Lady or her daughters have got any engagements in or near New Orleans in the next few weeks. And get a sketch artist to that restaurant; I want to see what that Pakistani looks like.”
“On it, sir. Do you think they’ll drive all the way to New Orleans? It’s a pretty long drive.”
“I’m not sure they’re going to New Orleans, and that restaurant was just a stop point.”
Looking at a map of the USA, Frank shook his head and said, “I think they’ve been moved to a safe house by a terrorist cell. But check all bus depots, railways and the goddamn airport. Again!”
One of the agents volunteered, “I’ll check the traffic cameras on all the roads out of Cisco for black cars with blacked out windows... but that’s just as bad as looking for a white van.”
Frank nodded in agreement. “Still, you may get lucky. Keep me informed.”
By 6:15pm, there had been no new development and Frank knew it in his gut that the two terrorists were under the wing of a terrorist cell. It was imperative that he found out which cell it was quickly. He hoped a strong lead came in soon and decided he’d just go home and start fresh, bright and early in the morning.
He had gotten up, grabbed his coat and was just about to leave when one of his agents handed him a report that had just came through from the CIA. It was a report that had been sent to them, in turn by MI6. Frank sat back down to read it and when he was done, said to himself, “Well, well, well, our British friends seem to be busy over in Algeria.”
Frank walked over to the control room, the number of staff had dropped but there was still a sizeable amount of manpower.
“Listen up guys, when our terrorists said they were going to kill the President’s bitches, they didn’t mean the First Lady and her daughters. They were referring to our congresswomen. The father of these boys had an intense hatred towards women who spoke out or in public. He hated the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Maderlin Albright and Condoleezza Rice who spoke on TV. When their father was still alive, he swore he would kill any Western woman like them, if they ever came to his country.”
At the mention of congresswomen, one of the agents went on his computer. After a quick scan, he said, “Sir, there are 98 women members of congress.”
“Then I want you to find out what all their agendas are for the next few months or so!” Frank declared. “Every one of them! Find out if any of them are going to speak publicly, even if it’s just going to give some kids at school a pep talk, or open a new shop, or present awards somewhere.”
Frank saw the disappointed look on his agents’ faces, and realized they had already done more than a ten-hour shift. “You’ll need a lot of help with this so don’t be shy to ask for it. I’m going to put these congresswomen on our red alert list until we find out more. The British Secret Service has informed us that Ali Haddad specifically said his brothers are going to kill American women who talks politics.” Frank glanced at the MI6 report. “The two brothers have said their last farewells to their mother and family; they are going to give their lives in honor of their father.”
“Sounds like your typical suicide bombers to me, willing to die for the cause,” a particularly tired-looking agent remarked.
“Not necessarily bombers,” Frank said, consulting his report once more. “It says here that Ali is proud of his brothers because they’ve been trained to strip down AK-47s and other guns that he hadn’t even heard of. It seems they’ve learnt to tactically drive a car, make bombs and speak a little English, all of which Ali was proud of. He said his brothers did twenty weeks in Afghanistan, and that they were there when Thatcher died – it was a huge, freaking celebration.”
“How did the British agent find all this out?” one of the agents asked. “Did he have the house bugged?”
“Who knows, maybe they sent 007 over there to charm it out of them.”
There were a few giggles and Frank said in the middle of it all, “Right, let’s make these congresswomen a priority without scaring the shit out of them. Try and get their work schedule off their secretaries, without letting on that they are in danger. And I want to see all that on my desk when I come in tomorrow morning so get busy.”
With that, Frank went back to his office, put on his coat and left.
Thursday, October 3
0600hrs.
The next morning, Frank Brubaker was the first of his dayshift to arrive at the office. He hadn’t slept much through the night, and no one had phoned him with an update on the terrorists, so he wasn’t expecting much.
“I need an update somebody,” he said to no one in particular, as he walked through the main office.
One of his agents fell in step with him and walked with him to his office. “We’ve managed to get the agendas of the entire congresswomen sir; they are on your desk.”
; Frank was a little taken aback and he raised an eyebrow to express his surprise. He wasn’t expecting that particular result overnight.
He could have put forward a commending remark but instead, he asked, “What’s the latest on the terrorists?”
“Nothing yet, sir. We’ve looked at all the traffic around that time and we got nothing.”
“They’ve ‘gone to ground’, as they say. So how are we going to dig them out?”
The agent knew he had done well by the latest report he had dropped on Frank’s desk but he knew that whatever brownie points he earned could easily be retracted so he said slowly, nervously, “We’ve got agents checking all gas stations on the roads from Cisco to New Orleans with photographs of the two suspects, along with the artist’s sketch of the driver but at the moment, we’ve had no luck yet, sir.”
“And where’s the artist sketch?”
The agent fumbled through a file in his hand, clumsily going through a mass of documents he had previously arranged neatly. Arriving at the artist sketch, he pulled it out and handed it to Frank.
After studying it briefly, he said, “If they are in a car travelling with blacked out windows, then they’ll be kept out of sight, and as for that sketch of the driver it could bloody well be any youngster.”
Walking into the anti-terrorist section of the main office, he stood in the doorway and said sarcastically, “We’re looking for extra activity associated with these cell groups. We need this information maybe tomorrow, next year...”
One agent stood up to say, “There’s no report yet sir, but I’m sure our people in the field will spot them soon. They are two suspects that can’t speak English so hopefully, that will be their down fall.”
Frank seemed irritated by that line of logic. “They can speak Arabic and French. Do you know how many people speak Arabic and French in America?”
“No sir,” the agent answered tentatively.
“Then google it!” he said impatiently, “or better yet, use our database. I believe we have one.”
The agent groped for words and then said limply, “What I meant, sir, was that we’ll find them.”
Frank turned away. He had a feeling the terrorists had no intention of being found until they had carried out their mission: the murder of the President’s congress-bitches.
The al-Qaeda affiliates in America were always quick to come out when there was a protest against the government but most of those protesters wouldn’t put their lives in danger by strapping a bomb on or driving a car bomb into a building full of people. But they’d be more than willing to help if two brothers came forward as suicide bombers and said they would do it.
The Boston bombers at the marathon were still fresh in Frank’s mind and he didn’t want anything like that to happen again if he could stop it. He had to do everything to make sure that these two brothers were found.
He wondered if he should have Joe the Magic Man in on this case to see if Joe could work some of his magic for him. Maybe the owner of the Thailand restaurant knew more than he claimed. Maybe Joe could get into the restaurant owner’s dreams and find out; maybes were always worth a try when it came to the Magic Man. It was ironic because it had only been a few weeks since Frank had given his men orders to find and eliminate the Magic Man. Now he was thinking of asking for his help again.
He sighed inwardly thinking, How pathetic.
Frank didn’t think the fact that the FBI might need the Magic Man on this case to be the only pathetic thing; the whole affair with him was pathetic for the FBI, as highly-equipped and highly-trained as they were, couldn’t find one man on US soil.
The FBI had been trying to catch the Magic Man for over six years, with no luck. They had a profiler from the BAU department at Quantico, Special Agent Rosemary Burrows do a profile on the Magic Man. She said it was like doing a profile on an invisible man; no one ever saw him. The Magic Man was a high value asset because of the unusual gift he possessed: the infiltration of a subject’s very mind through their dreams.
The Magic Man could get into people’s dreams and control their dreams; he could hypnotize them while they were asleep and control their minds, leaving them with a memory of only what he saw fit while erasing everything else. The nature of his gift was considered a threat by the government for they didn’t like someone with such invasive powers. The list of potential damage he could cause if he so wanted was virtually endless: he could spy on anyone successfully; he could even ruin the banks and the economy of the country. Frank had written in one of his reports on the Magic Man that it was safe to assume that he could plant thoughts and ideas in the mind of a subject.
The malevolent possibilities of his powers notwithstanding, Joe the Magic Man was often guilty of using them for very mundane and perverse actions. He particularly favored an act where he’d get into a couple’s dreams and have them play out his fantasies in their bed for him. Joe was capable of orchestrating the dream from his bed hundreds of miles away while seeing, feeling, thinking and experiencing what they were experiencing in their dreams.
In those dreams, the Magic Man could take on the appearance of anyone. He could be the woman’s husband, her lover or just an admirer. This was part of the reason Special Agent Burrows found it difficult to put a profile on someone who had never been at the scene of the crime; his only crime was the invasion of the mind.
Frank thought back to one occasion when the FBI thought they had come across a breakthrough. They thought that Joe the Magic Man had made his first mistake when he entered the dreams of John and Alice Timberlake. The Magic Man had taken on the appearance of a prison officer and had called himself Joe in Alice’s dream.
Joe had used John and Alice to fulfill his sexual fantasies, just like hundreds of other couples before them but he didn’t move on readily; he simply kept coming back. This was because Alice Timberlake was different, somehow she knew Joe was in her dreams and she had fought back. She had lashed out at him in one of her dreams, telling him to get out of her dreams and leave her and her husband alone.
This awareness had intrigued Joe the Magic Man, for none of his previous victims ever had a clue what was happening to them; he had complete control over them in their dreams.
The struggle for the control of Alice’s mind continued and in one of those dreams, she told Joe that she had been to the police, that the FBI had him on their most wanted list, and that Special Agent Rosemary Burrows was doing a profile on him. So Joe the Magic Man decided to visit Alice every night in her dreams to find out what the FBI was up too.
Eventually, Joe the Magic Man decided to talk to Agent Burrows through Alice’s dreams. He told Alice in one of her dreams to plead his innocence for him, to tell the FBI that he had never committed a crime. Burrows wasn’t too sure about Joe’s story and when Agent Burrows told her boss at the FBI that the Magic Man was able to have a serious conversation with Alice when he was in her dreams, and that Alice would remember it all in the morning as if they had been sitting down at the table and having a chat, they laughed it off as a serious joke.
On hearing the latest turn of events, the Defense Secretary decided the Magic Man was too much of a risk to be left loose on the streets and he put Frank Brubaker in charge of finding him and eliminating him. Frank had tried to be cunning, by offering the Magic Man a pardon, an indemnification of all crimes if he turned himself in.
The plan was rather simple. If Joe swallowed the bait, he would actually be given a pardon. Shortly after though, since his identity would have been revealed, Joe would be made to meet with an unfortunate, fatal accident.
The plan had failed.
That particular line of action was only one out of several others devised to make Joe go away but they had all failed.
Frank thought hard, wondering whether it was a good idea to use the Magic Man in tracking down the two terrorists. There wouldn’t be too much approval from above – that much was clear, for there were still a lot of the big brass in
the Pentagon that wanted the Magic Man dead. But the more Frank thought about Joe, the more he could see how a proper harnessing would be beneficial to the country. Besides, Joe had helped them to solve two cases before. It was with Joe’s help that they found the four students that were going around snatching girls off the street and gang raping them. Joe had gotten into one of the boys’ dreams and the boy, unable to control himself, had told Joe how they did it, and where they had hidden the mattress and the blanket. The FBI had retrieved the items and found forensic evidence linking the boys to the kidnappings and rape of the four girls.
The way the Magic Man had helped to bust a drug ring in California had been even more impressive. The Magic Man had gotten into the dreams of a young drug pusher, and found out what he knew about his boss. By jumping from one mind to the other, he got into the boss’s dreams and worked his way up the chain of command, until the Magic Man had the names of all the dealers right up to the drug lord. A new school of thought sprung up immediately in Law Enforcement; they felt the Magic Man would be a great asset to be called upon to assist the FBI, the DEA and even the CIA.
After those two cases, Frank had put a new task force together to use Joe’s powers, and the only way he was able do that was to have Agent Burrows continue working with Alice Timberlake, as Alice was the only one who could contact Joe in her dreams and remember it clearly in the morning. He laughed aloud at how bizarre that sounded: two civilians helping the FBI through their dreams.
Then Frank remembered his little encounter with the Magic Man, and the laugh turned to a growl. Frank had had his men lay a trap to catch the Magic Man a few times, only to have him slip through the net. Then one morning, when Frank got up from his bed, he found a note on his kitchen table addressed to him, in his own handwriting. That was enough to freak anyone, including him, out. The Magic Man had been in his dreams and hypnotized him to get up in his sleep and write a letter to himself on behalf of the Magic Man. A cold shiver went through Frank as he remembered that day.
Kill The President's Women (Joe The Magic Man Series Book 2) Page 2
