by Dale Wiley
Britt fell for Caitlin, and that led him to believe she didn’t know about his plans. He was glad she showed herself by reacting; otherwise, he planned on taking her with him as part of the spoils of battle, and he would have assumed that after the explosion that tore through his building, coupled with the mass chaos that was enveloping the nation, she would have never linked the events with her lover. Love, lust, or infatuation, whatever it was could turn even the hardest and smartest dumb and slow. He would file that away.
His limo impressed anyone who saw it, six screens tuned to the major news networks. He rarely watched them. Today, he wanted to see. They were filled with scenes of tragedy, tears and tumult, and with solemn-faced white people using their best worry-speak. No one knew what was next. No one dared to guess. Fire. Blood. Rubble. Tragedy. The disruptions were not massive in the sense of September 11, but the cumulative effect of so many, spread out over different geographical locations, felt much greater than other recent “tragedies.” September 11 affected first-hand only those in the largest of cities. Britt, in the five years of meticulous planning for this attack, specifically chose all types of targets: cities, towns, and countryside. He chose ethnic groups and the whitest of the white bread. Some of the attacks had symbolic meaning to him; some were supposed to convey red herrings to those who would pursue; some were completely random just to add to that sense this was an overarching attack, but the plan itself was fully obscured.
Gianny came. He could smell the smoke from the fire his man set, which, along with the acid he poured on the bodies, would make positive identification a negative. Using the belt-and-suspenders approach, he would now add the final touch.
“Is this one 10 or 12?” he asked Gianny.
“12.”
He dialed the number as they drove away and let it sit in the phone. As they pulled out, he waited until they were halfway down the block and then pushed send. Five seconds later, while he fully turned around to watch, the building took flight. It looked like it lifted from the ground. Gianny picked up the pace, knowing what came next: those whistling nails. He couldn’t hear them in this instance, but he knew exactly what they did. He could see it all over the news.
“Let’s go find my dear Caitlin and then head somewhere tropical.” Britt said it as if he were planning a family vacation.
Sixteen
Grant made his way into the office building down the block, showed his badge, and barricaded himself in a conference room. He recoiled from what the man on the other line asked. Killing was a minuscule part of a federal agent’s job. He was forced to do it once and sought counseling afterwards. Some hero he was. Most agents never had to kill. It was different than the tough-guy antics people saw on TV, but that mattered little. It just wasn’t a major part of the job, and it certainly wasn’t done on request.
“I didn’t think that would be much of a problem,” said Naseem, sensing Grant’s hesitation. “If it is, I assure you that you will save many more lives. We can do this in the next thirty minutes or so.”
“I will promise to abide by your stipulations,” Grant said, feeling the bile settle in his stomach. Oh, how his superiors would crow if they heard him agree to this. He would worry about that later. “What do we need to do?”
“I’ve been listening to the radio, and I’m trying to piece all of this together. Many of the targets that were hit I knew about or planned. I know of some more that are planned for the next several hours. But some of the spots I was unaware of. I didn’t know about Orlando or Nashville. This plan was bigger than what even I believed.”
“What can we do now?” Grant put his head in his hands.
“I think the attacks will come on the hour. This is for psychological effect as much as anything.”
“Is this a religious attack?”
“No. That’s what I believed. That’s what I signed up for. But this is all about him.”
“Who’s ‘him’?”
“I doubt that I had his real name.”
“What did he call himself?”
“He just called himself Yankee.”
“Did he …”
“Let’s talk attacks. We can profile him later.”
Naseem was right.
“Write this down.”
“I’m ready.”
“He hasn’t hit Charleston, South Carolina, and he hasn’t hit Denver. In Charleston, the target is Fort Sumter. In Denver, it’s the restaurant district just outside of Coors Field.
“Here’s the tough part: the attacks need to seem like they’ve still gone on. I think you need to get major players—like network journalists—on Twitter to cooperate with you. You’re going to have to pull people out of those areas, but let the explosions happen and have people talk about them.”
“Why don’t we want to show him we’re stopping him?”
“Because he’ll know something major’s wrong.”
“How do I know you’re not just playing me?”
“You don’t. But you’re alive, so you’ve got that going for you.”
Grant couldn’t find a reply.
“I’m an hour away. We can meet wherever you want to, and I’ll tell you what I know. I thought this was a holy war until a few hours ago. I was losing my taste for it then. But now, I don’t know anything …” He caught himself; he did know one thing, “except that I want Yankee, more than I want anything else in this world.”
All of the words seemed hollow to Grant. An hour ago, this kook had been ready to die. The motive seemed very unimportant and lame to Grant at this point. He wanted to end the conversation. “I need to jump on this info. We’ve got half an hour until the next cycle. Call me ten minutes after that, and I’ll see if I want to meet.”
“You’ll want to,” Naseem said, now a forlorn and shaken prophet.
Seventeen
Caitlin summed the situation up in a matter of seconds. Tony held the gun. She knew him through Britt. He was the real deal, not a garden-variety Vegas lightweight like Paolo. She stood far enough away that it wasn’t an automatic kill shot like she was sure he hoped for. Professional killers like to control everything. Until she was square to him and closer, he would probably try to bluff her into thinking he would shoot. In fact, she knew he would shoot as soon as he got the chance.
She faced death or something seriously worse if she didn’t take some action. She imagined stupid, greedy, horny Paolo was going to die too, though he was probably too numb and dumb to see it. Or maybe he would die, and she would go for a ride. She preferred death to that. She could play it safe, but that got her nowhere. It was time for psycho. Not much of a jump at this moment.
“You motherfucker,” she screamed, like a coked-out demon, jumping hard on his instep with her high heel and smashing her large Coach purse against his head. She grabbed his head by the hair and started pulling, scraping, hitting, and kicking and put the bag in a position where she could grab her pepper spray.
Tony ran toward the pair, trying to break up the fight instead of shooting them both multiple times, probably what he should have done. Paolo didn’t know what hit him, and he remained off-balance, trying to avoid bruising her. That would likely be Britt’s job. She shoved his sorry ass toward Tony, and he lowered his gun. This unexpected move gave her a chance to get what she wanted. She gripped the spray in her hand. She turned to find the front door, not the garage door, and looked to see what stood between her and the door. She would have to make one corner, but that was it. She hit Tony with the bag, took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and sprayed those sonsofbitches with her pepper spray. She sprayed them and kept spraying until there was enough to subdue dozens of men. They coughed, yelped, and gasped as they both fell to their knees, or so it sounded. Then she turned and ran for the door. She slowed just before she hit it, grabbed for the lock, turned the deadbolt, and shut it behind her.
Caitlin opened her eyes and blew the air out of her mouth. She took off her heels and sprinted. She figured she had two minutes tops, maybe l
ess. She could make the end of the block in thirty seconds, go deeper into the subdivision, and then try to find a house or something. She hit that corner and saw what she wanted to see. A young husband and wife were out in their yard, probably home for lunch.
“Help me! Help me!” She screamed.
This was Vegas. You could see their skepticism.
“Please let me inside. He’s going to try it again.”
Their eyes darted. This looked serious. The woman looked ten shades of wary, but the man took over. He grabbed her by the arm, and the three headed inside. He locked the door behind them.
“He … tried … to rape me …” she said, tears from the spray pouring down her cheeks.
“Why didn’t you …?” the woman began, mad that her husband had brought some shoeless slut in off the street.
“He’s a cop. I can’t.”
“What do you need?”
She took a deep breath. “All I need is for your wife to take me to Harrah’s.”
This seemed to mollify the woman somewhat.
“Please.” She opened her bag to show that there were no weapons. “I’m going to be dead if I don’t get out of here. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“Let’s all go,” the husband said. His wife glared at him. He looked down the block again and then turned, resolute.
They went in their garage, put Caitlin in the floorboards, for the second time that day, and backed out of their driveway. Caitlin heard the wife loudly sighing all the way, but she didn’t care at all. They were headed to Harrah’s, and she was still alive.
Eighteen
Naseem closed in on St. Louis, coming from the west and about to cross an antiquated bridge over the Missouri River. The sun sunk lower in the sky, mixing with the harmless clouds that lingered near the horizon. Because he headed downtown instead of heading away into the never-ending suburbs, he was making good time. He would be there shortly. He had traveled this route the other direction, on the way to what he had believed was his certain death. He had Ashlee and her friends with him. They rode in a rented limousine; all part of the cover he began to like. They bumped music by Lil Wayne, The Game, and the now-dead Pal Joey, another of his targets. These people were the antithesis of his religious training, of jihad. They liked different music, different than the muscle music he liked growing up in the US like Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses. But their music was sometimes smart and alive and defiant in a way that his former life found treacherous and deceitful. He delivered those girls to their death. They were tried and convicted by him, and though he tried to save them at the very last minute, little good that did. They were too far gone, and he had been deceived by the greatest of deceivers.
Or was he? Maybe there was something in Naseem that wanted to take the anger in him and release it almost anywhere. Maybe he was an easy mark.
He expected to hear back from Grant but hadn’t yet. He knew he would at some point, but, right now, Grant was probably still baiting the hook. Naseem understood this. He played this game on both sides: the fisherman and the fish. Right now, driving through Middle America, he felt like the bait. He cringed every time a car passed him. He stood out in this land of white and black, not as conspicuous as he would have been twenty years earlier but still far from blending in. He was too dark to be Hispanic and too tall to be Indian. He was well-built, and that too added attention in this land of flabby and shabby. Ashlee called him the new exotic while running her hands along his smooth chest, swaying and bobbing to an MIA song. Ashlee, who because of listening to him, no longer existed and was blown in a thousand directions. She was one more soul on his soul. He winced and looked at the phone again, wanting not to remember.
As he did, the phone lit up. It was Grant.
“What took you so long?” he said gruffly.
“Just trying to clean up this mess you said you created.” He hissed at the phone and then caught his breath and his temper and waited for any reaction from Naseem. He got none. “We got Denver evacuated just before it blew.”
“You heard me. Charleston will be soon.”
“I heard you. We’ve got people on it”
“I am in the Chesterfield valley. Where are you?”
“Okay, look, here’s some ground rules. I am the agent. I am willing to meet with you, but I call the shots, not you. I will get you out of the way of scrutiny for the time being, but this is my show.”
Grant felt he needed to say all these things, although the pace of the last few hours did nothing but show that anyone having any information that would do what Grant did in Denver was clearly in the stronger position. Grant used his intel to call a well-positioned source in Boulder, who relayed to the non-ass-kissing agents in Denver. They weren’t injury-free, but the death toll was much less than in any of the other attacks of the day. The police liaisons in each city were led to spin the story that authorities evacuated high-impact targets. Whether it would work was anyone’s guess. Grant thought it was marginally better than not mentioning the attacks at all.
“Okay.” Naseem said. The adrenaline that coursed through his veins and carried him over half the state evaporated. He needed to rest. “Tell me what to do.”
“If you’re in Chesterfield, go in the mall there. It’s right off Highway 40. If you’re coming east, you’ll see it on your right. Exit 19. There’s a massage place inside. Bottom floor. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes or half an hour. Tell the man there that you are meeting me, and he will put you in a back room.”
Naseem didn’t like it as a meeting place and thought about asking Grant how he knew this man, but he thought better of it. It would give him his first opportunity to begin cataloging his thoughts. If Grant turned out to no longer be the greatest of agents, he could always use that to his advantage as well.
Nineteen
President Alexander Morgan had no idea what to do. There were not many times in his long and story-filled life this was the case. No one to name and blame, which was almost never true, and, apparently, there was no end in sight. Seventeen attacks, and the only lead whatsoever was from a disgraced agent more famous than some of his cabinet members. An agent supposedly getting tips from one of the terrorists sounded like the worst Trojan Horse scenario since, well, the first Trojan Horse.
It was dry throat, sweats, and heart pains—all-or-nothing—time. It was a Cuban Missile Crisis, a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11. The time never really came in his first seven years in office, and now it was the time that would define him.
There was no historical precedent for this and no presidential model he could turn to. Information changed the presidency more than anything else. It crippled Clinton. It befuddled Bush. Now, he had the first truly post-modern presidency in which the terrorist owned the same press opportunities as the president. Morgan was scheduled to speak to the nation in twenty minutes, and he had absolutely nothing to say. He bankrolled speechwriters who normally allowed him to say nothing very well, but, today, in his opinion, nothing seemed good enough.
The master of the political game, now toward the end of his second term, quit being quite so divisive, always his suit in trade. He wanted to strike a different tone in this situation in particular, being very careful now to craft a certain image for history to remember him by. He wanted to be bold and presidential and well aware of how these strikes, if they continued, would spur terror into the hearts of his people. The strikes were everywhere, and they were not limited to the coasts. They seemed, at this point, to be limitless, and they didn’t seem to be a political statement, unless the statement was of coercing utter anarchy.
They were in the situation room, a sleek and modern room that was in direct opposition to the staid nature of most of the White House. The vice president had been shuffled off to parts unknown, and Morgan was left with his core staff, version 2.0. He still missed the grizzled veterans he put out of their misery after the first term. He wished they were here now. He really wished for their counsel.
“What do we do with
Miller?” the press secretary, a handsome dolt named Steve Sanders, asked.
Dear God, who invited him? What a stupid question. The man was talking to the terrorists and was the only one to have a nibble. He was saving lives. The president knew every PR angle known to man and knew how to spin a story, but there was clearly nothing that they could “do with Miller.” He would have to be watched closely, but, unless he unveiled a dynamite vest, they weren’t about to do a damn thing.
“We don’t have to do anything right now. He’s supposed to make contact in a short time,” he clipped his words dismissively, hoping this piss-ant would get the hint.
Sanders didn’t. “You know how this is going to look if it gets out that he’s the lead.”
The president started to open his mouth, but Vanessa stepped in, like she always did.
“I really don’t think you can worry about that right now, Steve,” said Chief of Staff Vanessa Jones, who always said what the president wanted to say, only with less volume and fewer curse words. “He saved lives in those places. I don’t know what you can do but trust it for now. Hundreds of people were saved.”
“And we can’t even tell people about it, tell them he was a hero again,” said the president. “I think that’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“We need to keep this guy around. Maybe he’ll talk to Miller. Even if it’s a hoax, we can point to the lives that were saved.”
Damn, time was short. Where was that speech? The president looked down at the computer in front of him and saw the latest carnage. He felt like he’d done nothing to stop it.
“Check your screens,” said the press secretary, trying to rally. “Howell is sending over a draft.” The aides looked at the screen. The president, who was not technologically gifted, was given an old-fashioned printed copy.
