Brooks tried to think it through. That which he could not win over must be punished. It must be destroyed.
“Yes,” he said, the sibilants at the end of the word stretching out. “But he’s not stupid, and he has help. He must be dealt with aggressively. Can you do it?”
“Of course.”
“Good, good.”
Brooks took another slug from his glass. He felt his mind seemingly cycling back toward the desperation he felt trying to convince Hatfield. The drive was contagious, spilling over its boundaries, infusing everything. He wanted to win. He intended to win. He looked down into his glass as if he couldn’t recognize something so simple. He felt a pain in his stomach again, only this time it also radiated into his head.
“Would you like another drink?” he heard. He looked up, almost in surprise, to see Andrews leaning over him.
“Yes, yes,” he said, struggling for normalcy. “But only if you’re having one.”
Andrews took the general’s glass and walked to the bar. “It is against my religion to drink alcohol,” he said.
Brooks shook his head. What was that about religion? He looked up again as Andrews chuckled, and approached, holding out the glass.
“I know, I know,” Andrews soothed. “You are getting close to the moment you have always dreamed of, but you don’t know how to deal with that.”
Was that it? Had he piled all his drive on conquering Hatfield, now that the end of the race was here, victory in sight. Old soldiers never die, they just look for a new war, he thought. But what if there wasn’t one?
Andrews looked off to the windows and the doors, making sure all was in readiness. “I saw this sort of thing in Chechnya once, when a commander I respected was about to lead an attack on a Russian police station. The commander had planned and planned and planned. Yet as the time got closer, he became so excited that he couldn’t actually get dressed to carry out the assault.”
Andrews made sure the general had a firm grip on the glass before he finished his story. “So I shot him in the head. It was an act of mercy. I pray to Allah, the one true God and creator of all things, that I will not be like that when my cherished moment comes.”
Brooks frowned. Andrews’s words had finally trickled through his own self-absorption.
“Wait—w-what are you saying?” stammered Brooks. He thought back to the comment about drinking. He looked up with an uneasy blend of confusion and concern. “You’re—Muslim?”
Andrews’s reply was a slow, proud nod.
“But you’re Russian,” insisted Brooks. “You come from Moscow.”
Andrews stepped to the side of the couch. He slipped his left hand inside his sport coat and ran his finger along the lining, finding the handle of the syringe.
“You are Russian,” repeated Brooks. The reality dawned an instant before Andrews spoke it.
“Actually, I am from Chechnya,” said Pyotr Ansky. He saw his moment but waited. He wanted to enjoy this.
“No.”
“Enjoy your drink, General.” Pyotr slipped his finger into the lining, breaking the loose thread and taking the hypodermic in his hand. The needle was made of carbon, but was as sharp as the finest surgical steel. “I imagine it’s going a long way toward settling your stomach.”
“But I checked you and your people out.” Brooks squinted, as if trying to visualize whatever piece of paper or computer screen he had seen declaring the rebel mercenary group Pyotr headed as bona fide and anti-Muslim.
“It’s really funny to hear you say that,” Pyotr said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I believe that, which is tragic,” the Russian said. “You, who have relied so much on your gut, so much on instinct, bet everything on data. That which is so easily, so commonly falsified, is what you rested the entirety of your undertaking on. Did your heart say nothing about me?”
“It warned me,” he admitted.
“Not just your ordinary caution, no?”
Brooks shook his head. His mind was racing now, trying to figure out his next move. “No. You were—too violent.”
“Not violent,” Pyotr said, his mood darkening. “Thorough. Unsentimental.”
Brooks started to rise and Pyotr swung his fist into the general’s face, catching him off balance and sending him backward over the couch. This was inconvenient; not only did it make noise but it put the general out of easy reach. But Pyotr was too focused on his mission to worry about any danger, or even to pause. He moved over quickly and plunged the hypodermic into Brooks’s neck.
Then he reached down and pulled the general back around to the couch. Just under eight milligrams of Tetrodotoxin were now finding its way into Brooks’s bloodstream, added to the sedative he had laced the coffee with.
“Yes, Hatfield’s a journalist,” Pyotr hissed, checking Brooks’s eyes. “And who thought an American journalist wouldn’t want coffee? I thought all Americans were hooked on caffeine!”
Brooks looked wonderingly at the man he had depended upon, the man who had killed whoever he had ordered him to, and tried to comprehend his mistake. His eyes widened and his mouth gaped.
“No matter,” Pyotr decided. “I was hoping you’d all be unconscious by now, but no matter. It’s too late.” He watched Brooks closely. “You seem to be having trouble, General,” said Pyotr. He slipped the now empty syringe back into his jacket. “Don’t you care to continue our conversation?”
“Somma bitch,” slurred the general.
“Interesting. I’ve never seen the mouth react so fast. The neurotoxin I placed in your system, synthesized in this case from an octopus, is an extremely potent neuro-poison that acts on the voltage-gated sodium channels, blocking the muscles and not allowing them to contract. This has numerous effects very quickly, the first of which was paralysis of the voluntary muscles—those in the legs and arms, but also the diaphragm and those needed for breathing.”
All General Thomas Brooks could do was stare, bug-eyed.
“Little wonder,” said Pyotr. “The dosage is, in fact, some sixteen times what is needed to kill a human. I have done that for two reasons.” He held up his fingers. “One, because I thought I might have to pour it into a drink, in which case the poison would not be as effective, and, two, the volume necessary was so small.”
When he was sure the general was all but paralyzed, Pyotr put his hands on the back of the couch and shoved his face into Brooks’s. “So General, the great war you’re looking for? It’s already begun. It’s been going on now for forty years. It will take several more. But you know what the outcome will be. Despite your ludicrous behavior, you are not a stupid man.”
Pyotr smiled at the irony. “As for your Mr. Hatfield, yes, he found our diversion. But it wasn’t for him. It was for you. And yes, he killed my men there, but I can always get more.” Pyotr sneered directly in Brooks’s face. “There’s never a shortage of people who love to kill Americans.”
Brooks began to gasp. The poison could take up to twenty minutes to actually kill a man, though as a rule victims were comatose much sooner. Pyotr actually would have preferred waiting around to see him die—he never grew tired of admiring his artistic work—but there were many things to do. But there was no doubt that he would die: the poison had no known cure.
“Do you have any last words, General?” Pyotr hissed in his ear. “No? Then I have some for you. Some you can take with you to whatever hell will have you. You’ll be pleased to know that your one and only bomb will still be put to good use … just not in the place you were planning. No, it will be used in the place you should have wanted all along.…” Pyotr stepped back as the general’s hands moved sloppily to his throat. He would be in cardiac arrest in another minute. Pyotr took a look around the room, then went to the door and opened it.
“I think the general is having a heart attack!” he shouted.
As the others rushed in to help, Pyotr took a tentative step into the hall, the sort of step one might take when he didn’t know what
to do or where to go. He took another, glancing at the security man at the far end of the hall. The man was eyeing him. Pyotr threw out his hands in an expression of confusion, and coaxed him forward.
The man ran forward. Pyotr thought of knocking him across the back of his head, but he had so much to do today, and that would potentially be counterproductive.
“A heart attack! Get a doctor!”
The man rushed into the suite. Pyotr took a step back, then, after making sure he was out of eyesight of the suite interior, he turned and headed quickly for the elevator.
“Hey, wait a minute!” yelled someone.
The elevator door closed as two of the security people ran out of the suite, guns drawn. Pyotr pressed the lobby button, then threw himself to the floor as a precaution, but there were no gunshots.
A lucky break. He could not count on another one. But he wouldn’t need one. He punched the button for floor 11. As the elevator slowed, he hit every other button on the panel.
The doors opened. Moving quickly, Pyotr walked down the corridor to the emergency stairs. He trotted down to the landing on the tenth floor, and walked to the door. He opened it, saw the hallway was clear, then stepped across and grabbed the fire extinguisher. Back in the stairwell, he began to descend quickly, opening the extinguisher as he went.
The extinguisher had been emptied of its fire-killing contents; it was now a mankiller. Instead of powder, an MPG-84 submachine gun sat inside. A descendant of the famous MAC-10, the submachine gun was used by a number of forces, most notably the Peruvian military, often in security details. Its main value to Pyotr was its size and easy breakdown, which had made it possible for it to be hidden and quick to reassemble.
He had it together by the time he reached the fifth floor. Now free to concentrate on where he was going, Pyotr took the steps two at a time, his right hand against the wall and his left holding the gun. He went out on the third floor, which was just above the two-story lobby and main reception desk. Pyotr held the gun down at his side—if you walked quickly enough, he had learned years ago, most people didn’t notice. Few of those who did would attempt to stop you.
He’d reached the escalator and was already eyeing the door when two black-suited members of the general’s security detail crossed toward the main entrance below him. They’d obviously been stationed downstairs. Unsure of how many others there might be, Pyotr hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. He raised the gun and quickly put a half-dozen 9mm bullets apiece into the men’s bodies.
The magazine boxes Pyotr had for the gun contained thirty-two rounds. Pyotr disliked carrying guns that were only half-full, and so he emptied the rest of the box, spraying indiscriminately across the large hall. With glass falling and women shrieking, he dashed for the door, reloading as he went.
A hotel security guard made the mistake of stepping out from his post at the side. The man was reaching for his gun when Pyotr shot him in the face with three bullets, a quick squeeze of the trigger. He was out of practice with the weapon. There was a time when he could have controlled it so carefully that he would have used only one.
Pyotr swung around, back to the door, and scanned to make sure no one else had gotten a clean view of him or was following him. Sure that everyone had taken cover, he pushed outside, then trotted to the white Toyota approaching from the far end of the street.
“Move quickly,” he told the driver as he got in. “Our schedule today is tight.”
Pyotr frowned at the phone’s screen. It was inconvenient, but he had to answer. “Yes,” he snapped, holding it to his ear.
“The men are en route,” said Stefan in Russian. Stefan was reliable in many ways, but he suffered from deafness, a result of a car bomb that exploded prematurely in the Balkans some years before, and so he spoke far too loudly. At times Pyotr thought he didn’t need a phone at all.
“Good.”
“You realize they will be there and—”
“That’s none of your business,” said Pyotr curtly. “Everything else is arranged.”
“I thought you needed the heads-up.”
“Yes. Good job.”
He hung up and turned to the driver. “How long will it take us?”
“Two hours to get there, an hour to load it.” The driver shrugged. “We’ll move as quickly as possible.”
“We’d better,” said Pyotr. “We have a bomb to deliver.”
47
The chauffeur drove relentlessly back to the prince’s office. “It is imperative we get there,” he said. “There we will find a powerful Wi-Fi source that is less likely to be compromised.”
Jack nodded, knowing that no air-based communication system was hijack-proof. But both he and Doc were in agreement that the need for haste was absolute. The sooner they get Brooks’s confession to Dover, the better. They sat on the edges of the limo seats. The men were so tense, in fact, that they had been sparring from the moment they sat down.
“I can’t even imagine the devastation an attack on Mecca would wreak,” Jack was saying.
“Best not to try,” Doc advised.
“I can’t be that complacent.”
“It isn’t complacency,” Doc protested. “It’s insulating the mind from overload.”
Jack shot him an angry glance. “How can anyone insulate his mind from this?” he said accusingly.
“By not thinking about it,” Doc said.
“No,” Jack said. “That’s not possible. Or maybe it’s just the difference between a soldier and a journalist.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Doc said. “To me, the difference is that your heart bleeds in empathy while my heart bleeds for real!”
“Come on, Doc. You know me better than that,” Jack said.
“And you know me better,” Doc shot back. “It’s like the first responders in 9/11. We can’t afford to let the magnitude of this in or we won’t be able to move.”
“It’s more than that,” Jack said. “It’s been that way since we started this—‘documentary,’” he said, in deference to the Arab driving the car. “You conquer by force, I attack with reason. I believe in fighting ideas with better ideas, not with bullets.”
“Balls,” Doc disagreed. “I always give someone a chance to talk before I shoot ’em.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “‘Raise your hands or I’ll put a slug in you.’”
“I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Jack agreed. “But I’ve carried a weapon in the field, too, Doc. I know the military drill. I like my way better.”
“Right. Don’t you see, though—you’re doing exactly what I’m warning against. You’re letting the scope of this thing get to you and it’s clouding your reaction. The ‘drill’ as you called it is no different than if you’re running to stop a bus or disco from being bombed. Focus on the steps, not the outcome.”
Doc had a point. That’s how Jack was able to get through the last two crises he faced. Not knowing the potential horror that would be unleashed if he failed, he was able to stay keyed on the target.
“Words,” Doc muttered. “Weren’t those the weapons your guests used against you when you posited something like this scenario on the air? Didn’t they beat you down with ideas? Sorry, brother. My way is better. Shoot first—an object lesson—and persuade the survivors. That’s the price of going to war.”
Jack didn’t see the point of continuing the discussion. They were not just splitting hairs they were grinding them to powder. They were on the same team. That was all that mattered.
“All of which is beside the point,” Jack said. “What’s the game plan going forward?”
“I don’t know,” Doc said. “I’d say it’s fluid.”
Jack thought aloud. “Mecca holds a population of roughly two million people, though it routinely holds as many times that number of religious pilgrims. Every Muslim is, at least in theory, expected to visit the city at least once in his life. But no non-Muslim is ever permitted to go there. Christians, including
you and me, would be shot on sight if we dared enter.”
“Even to warn of the bombing?”
“Even to warn of the bombing.”
“That’s nuts,” Doc decided. “With that kind of stupidity, maybe they deserve to get their clocks cleaned.”
“Doc—don’t,” he said, flashing his eyes toward the driver. “Not now.”
Doc shut up. Jack exhaled to stay calm.
“Gentlemen, if I may be permitted?” the chauffeur said. He did not wait for permission to speak. “The city is the holiest of all Muslim centers because it holds the Kaaba, the sacred granite cube that every Muslim faces when he prays. According to the Quran, the Kaaba was built by Ibrahim—Abraham to the other people of the book—and was the first house where Allah was praised. Before the time of Muhammad, the Kaaba and the surrounding area were designated as a place of peace and sanctuary; no one could fight within the area.”
“Well, this will change that!” Doc exclaimed, his knee shaking up and down.
“But it was Muhammad who declared the site sacred only to Allah,” the chauffeur continued, “evicting the other gods and their worshippers who had gathered in the city. Mecca, an important trading center even before becoming enshrined as the first city of Islam, expanded until it was one of the largest urban centers in the Muslim world.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “Though history was its essence, it has spread and modernized itself over the centuries, pushing up against the valley it’s located in. That same valley would concentrate the effect of a blast. The shock waves would surely devastate the city center. They might also help to contain the lethal agent.”
“That’s a double-edged sword,” Doc mused. “It might lessen damage outside the city, but it will make any cleanup a bitch and a half.”
“What did your countryman hope the effects on Islam be, I wonder?” the chauffeur said.
“First, I want to be clear about this,” Jack said. “We’re countrymen like you and Osama bin Laden were countrymen. I don’t approve of his methods. At all.”
“Thank you for that, Mr. Hatfield.”
Countdown to Mecca Page 28
