by By Jon Land
Danielle gestured toward the boy huddled next to Fisher. “And him?”
“Long story.” Del Fisher struggled to sit more upright. “Who the hell are you anyway, and how did you know I was here?”
“The term Prometheus mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“How about a strike to be launched against targets in all fifty states tomorrow?”
Delbert Fisher and Jake Fleming looked at each other before Fisher spoke. “All too well.”
“That’s good,” said Danielle, “because we know how to stop it.”
“There could be more of them coming,” Danielle said from the doorway, holding the submachine gun now. “We’ve got to hurry.”
Jake sat down behind the computer he’d been using for a week now, cracked his knuckles to get ready. “It’ll just take me a minute to bring up the site,” he said, as Ben and Delbert Fisher looked on from behind him. Danielle had managed to snap Fisher’s arm back into its socket, but had been able to do nothing for his badly swollen ankle besides support him as he moved down the hallway.
“What time is it?” Fisher asked, grimacing, obviously still in agony.
“Almost three a.m.,” Ben told him.
“Okay,” Jake said, “here we go. First one on the list, you say. . . . Yup, here it is. Good news. It’s in New England. Not too far from us. . . . Uh-oh. Bad news.”
“What?” from Danielle this time.
Jake swung his chair around to look at them. “It’s the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in Connecticut.”
* * * *
* * * *
Chapter 92
A
call to Major Tom Spears at the Pentagon resulted in the immediate closing of the airspace within fifty square miles of the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant just outside of New London, Connecticut. Spears reported that an all-out defensive perimeter would be enacted, all but assuring the plot’s triggering event would be aborted.
“Stay clear of the area,” he had warned Danielle.
“Your people will never even know we’re there.”
“I’m flying up myself, and I don’t want to see you or your Palestinian friend. Remember,” Spears cautioned, “you’re still fugitives.”
“We’re e-mailing you the remaining forty-nine target sites,” Danielle explained. “Be warned, though; not all the locations are exact.”
“We’ll do our best to shut them down, get perimeters enacted. But stop the Millstone attack and we stop them all. That’s what you’re saying, right?”
“Let’s hope so, Tom. Have you picked up the prisoners we left for you in Nashua?”
“Being interrogated as we speak.”
“My guess is they’re hired guns who won’t know a damn thing that can help us.”
“In that case,” said Spears, “let’s hope we don’t need them.”
“So what do we do with him?” Ben asked as soon as Danielle was off the phone with Spears, indicating Jake in the backseat. They had already dropped Delbert Fisher off at a hospital, the condition of his shoulder and, especially, his ankle making it impossible for him to travel.
“You’re heading south,” Jake said, before Danielle had a chance to respond. “I can figure that much out for myself. Get me back to New London and I can catch a bus or train to Providence.”
“In time for midterms?”
“What’s the difference?” Jake shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly going to ace them anyway.”
The access road for the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant had been blocked off by a pair of Connecticut State Police cars parked nose to nose and backed up by a full complement of National Guard troops. Ben pulled the car they had rented in Boston over to the shoulder near the congestion of media vehicles and bystanders wondering what was afoot.
“I think we can get him to that train station now,” he said to Danielle, looking at Jake Fleming in the backseat.
But she wasn’t listening, her mind clearly elsewhere.
“Danielle?” Ben prodded.
“I was just thinking about that prophecy, what might have happened if the 121st hadn’t found it all those years ago.”
“You saying you believe in Nostradamus now?”
“Nostradamus?” Jake Fleming leaned forward until he was almost even with the front seat. “What’s he have to do with all this?”
“Nothing,” Danielle said, before Ben had a chance to respond.
“Because I had a course on him.”
“There’s a course at Brown on Nostradamus?” Ben wondered.
“Actually, I made it up. An independent study. You’re allowed to do that at Brown. Anyway, he predicted the attacks on 9/11, you know.”
“A hoax,” Danielle corrected.
“No, one of those poem things of his.”
“Quatrains.”
“Yeah. There’s one that goes, At forty-five degrees latitude, the sky will burn. Fire approaches the great new city. Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up, when they want verification from the Normans.’ That’s the French now.”
“I know,” said Danielle. “New York City doesn’t lie at forty-five degrees latitude, though.”
“No,” agreed Jake. “But the approaching fire could be those two jetliners and the huge flame leaping up, well, I don’t have to tell you what that is. And there was a warning issued by French intelligence the day before the attack.” He watched Ben and Danielle exchange a skeptical frown. “Hey, I’m just the messenger.”
“How’d you do in the ‘class’?” Ben asked him.
“Incomplete. Haven’t been able to get past that forty-five-degree latitude thing yet,” Jake quipped, gazing at the GPS system the car had come equipped with, currently displaying the Millstone Nuclear Plant’s exact location. “Uh-oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
Jake pointed at the digital readout, suddenly serious. “That’s not right.” He started fishing through his pockets. “The latitude and longitude coordinates aren’t right, I’m sure of it. Last number looks wrong.” Jake uncrinkled a set of pages listing the coordinates of the fifty targets they had e-mailed to Tom Spears. “Yup, I knew it. A zero instead of an eight.”
“A zero instead of an eight?” Danielle repeated.
“Here, see for yourself,” Jake said, handing the rumpled pages forward. He held his finger to the entry in question. “Right here. The squiggly line means it’s a zero. That’s what I typed in, not an—”
The boy stopped in midsentence. His mouth dropped, eyes tearing up, blinking rapidly. Suddenly he threw himself forward over the console, reaching for the GPS computer that had come with the rental.
“You mind telling us what you’re talking about?” Danielle said, as he worked the GPS’s controls.
“I fucked up. It is an eight, but I typed a zero. That’s what happens when I go without ganja for too long.”
Ben and Danielle could only look at each other, as the computer calculated the new input Jake had fed into it.
“You’re saying this plant isn’t the real target?” Ben asked incredulously.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Then what is?” Danielle demanded.
“This,” Jake told her, moving away from the tiny screen so they both could see.
* * * *
Chapter 93
T
he Benny Dover Jackson Middle School was located in the center of New London, fifteen minutes away from the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant. Ben drove there furiously while Danielle tried in vain to reach Major Tom Spears.
“Stay down,” she told Jake Fleming, as they pulled into the visitor’s parking lot located alongside the school’s main entrance.
A pair of New London police cars were parked nose to nose in the bus loading zone set before a long, narrow waiting area sprinkled with benches.
“At least our anonymous call accomplished something,” Ben shrugged.
“Maybe,” Danielle said, sizing up the situation emotionlessly.
She reached beneath the seat and handed Ben one of the two nine-millimeter pistols they’d taken off the gunmen in New Hampshire the night before. He wedged the gun into his belt, made sure it was covered by his jacket.
“Excuse me, guys,” Jake Fleming said from the backseat, “but what happens if you and the cops can’t pull this off?”
Ben and Danielle looked at each other.
“What I mean is, what if I could shut this whole thing down?” Jake continued.
“How?” Ben asked him.
“School’s bound to have lots of computers, probably a lab full of them. I’ve been doing some thinking. You get me inside the building, I got something I’d like to try out.”
“Are you sure it’ll work?” Danielle challenged.
“Well, not totally.”
“Then stay here and stay out of sight.”
Danielle climbed out of the car and waited for Ben before heading toward a set of glass doors at the entrance to the school. Signs instructing all visitors to proceed immediately to the office, accompanied by directional arrows, greeted them inside. A bit farther down the hall, off to the left, they heard the boisterous sounds of students eating lunch in a cafeteria.
Hands edging closer to their pistols, Ben and Danielle entered the main office. Behind a chest-high counter directly before them, a trio of receptionist desks sat unoccupied, the phones atop them in all likelihood disabled.
Danielle signaled Ben to take the left wall, while she took the right, creeping toward a door labeled assistant principal.
“Empty,” she called, after twirling into the doorway.
“Here, too,” Ben said from the door to the principal’s office.
They moved back toward the reception area, passing a copy room where they noticed stacks from a finished print job sitting uncollected in the output slot.
“We pull the fire alarm, we empty the building,” Ben suggested.
“Think machine guns in the second-floor windows or on the roof.” Danielle shook her head. “No, we can’t take the chance, not until we know how many we’re dealing with.”
She stopped when she saw a half dozen walkie-talkies charging in separate bays. She yanked two free and handed one to Ben.
“In case we have to separate,” she explained.
He clipped it to his belt as they moved back out of the office, nearly colliding with a teacher dragging along a student with spaghetti sauce painting his hair. The teacher seemed not to notice them.
“Seven, maybe eight hundred students,” Ben said. “That’s what I’m figuring.”
“I counted four exits on the side of the building we parked on,” Danielle added. “Double that to eight, ten at the most.”
“The windows open only at the top. Means breaking the glass would be the only other way out of the school.”
“Makes this the perfect place to take hostages. Textbook.”
“What about the cops from the cars outside?”
“We find them, the odds get a little better. But if the terrorists find them first...”
“I still say we pull the fire alarm,” Ben suggested again, moving toward a pull station eye level on the wall. “Throw something into the mix the terrorists weren’t expecting.”
“We’ll have to pick them off as we see them. Hope for clear shots.”
Ben nodded, grasped the red lever and yanked. Felt it depress under the force.
Nothing happened. No shrill sound or flashing lights.
The fire alarms had been deactivated.
* * * *
Chapter 94
W
hat’s that?” Danielle wondered, as three short beeps sounded over the school PA system, followed by two longer ones. Instantly, across the hall in the cafeteria the teachers working lunch duty began instructing students to leave their tables and form a pair of lines, one for each side of the room.
“The beeps we heard must be some sort of emergency code,” Ben said. “A lockdown.”
Danielle shook her head. “No, a lockdown means hold in place. This is something else. They’re being taken to a central location.”
As if on cue, classrooms at the far end of the corridor began to empty in an orderly fashion, throngs of students spilling out into the hallway and heading toward the far end of the school.
“The signal had to come from the office,” Danielle noted.
“Something we missed?”
“Let’s go take a look.”
They headed back to the main office, found the door locked this time. Ben ducked down and extracted a pen from a pocket of a backpack lying amidst a dozen others against the wall. He twisted the top off and worked the thin cartridge into the single tumbler mechanism. Danielle hovered over him, offering cover for the fifteen seconds it took for Ben to spring the lock.
He eased the door open slowly and led the way in. There was no sign of the teacher or the unruly student he had escorted inside. Danielle grabbed Ben’s shoulder and pointed to an alcove located beyond the reception desks. She drew her pistol and led the way through a waist-high swinging door.
Ben saw the body of the teacher they had glimpsed earlier lying behind one of the receptionist’s desk, a bullet hole carved in his forehead. The bodies of the two cops from the cars outside had been stuffed beneath the front counter, pools of blood widening beneath them. The boy with spaghetti sauce coating his hair sat in the corner, hands wrapped around his knees, shaking horribly. There was a doorway on the right, leading into a tiny closet-sized room housing the PA system. A man in a dark suit, the principal probably, sat in a chair in front of the controls, a figure looming behind him holding a gun to his head, his position obstructing his view of Ben and Danielle.
Ben yanked his gun out now too. But Danielle held his hand down before he could raise it, something else on her mind as she gestured for him to move to the side of the PA room’s door.
Danielle moved to one of the desks and nodded toward Ben. Then she picked up the phone and pretended to press out a number.
“Yes, this is Ms. Barnea at Jackson Middle School—”
The gunman stormed out of the PA room, angling his gun on her before Danielle could say any more. Ben slammed him in the back of the head with the butt of his pistol. The man wobbled, legs gone to jelly, but didn’t go down. Ben hit him again twice, watched his knees buckle an instant before he crumpled.
Danielle surged into the PA room and faced the terrified principal, blood running down from a nasty gash on his forehead. “The students, where are they going?”
“The gymnasium,” the principal said, swallowing hard. “At the other end of the building.”
“How many terrorists?” she asked, as she tore a phone cord free of the wall, prepared to use it to bind the unconscious terrorist’s arms and legs.
“I—I—I don’t know. I saw two, no three. I saw three.” He swallowed hard, looked at Ben for the first time. “Are you the police?”
He had barely finished the question when two more New London patrol cars and three from the State Police tore into the visitor’s parking lot with sirens screaming.
“No,” Ben said, “but it looks like they’re here.”
“Tariq’s going to wait until the media arrives,” Danielle told him, knotting the phone cord twice around the unconscious terrorist’s wrists.
“Tragedy covered coast-to-coast.”
“Meant to set off the other forty-nine strikes, remember?”
“Which gives us time to stop it. I’ll take the gymnasium,” Ben said, and helped Danielle drag the now bound and gagged terrorist into the closet-sized PA room. “But the terrorists down there won’t be the only ones in the building.”
“Leave the rest to me,” she assured him.
Jake Fleming watched the silent line of students filing down the hallway through a glass slab built into a set of double exit doors. The design of the building, and the doors, was pretty standard. Not much different than the kind he’d mastered jimmying open way back in hig
h school, when sneaking back into the building was as much an art as sneaking out.
Jake waited until the parade of students was gone before he worked the doors opened and entered the building. Nice suburban school like this probably had a computer in every room, and all he needed was one.
