by Brad Taylor
“Yeah, but something the roommate said caught my eye. She said the boyfriend was in a ‘Muslim cult.’ Why would she say that?”
“Let me see it again.”
The report was fresh, mainly because the police wouldn’t file a missing person request for forty-eight hours, which meant she’d been gone for close to four days. The roommate was hysterical in the report, claiming she knew the boyfriend was bad because he’d never allow himself to be seen. She believed something was strange about him, and when she’d confronted her roommate, she’d been rebuffed. The missing girl’s last act was to go to her boyfriend’s home and surprise him. The roommate was sure the boyfriend had killed her friend for some sort of cult purposes, and she had subsequently preserved the missing girl’s room for forensic evidence, which the police had obviously done nothing with, given the number of missing person reports they received on a daily basis. She’d screamed about the case for damn near four days straight, with little forward progress.
On the surface, the document showed nothing. Just another report like all of the other ones in front of me. Snagged in the secret cell’s search engine because of a tangential relationship to anything with the term Muslim. But Jennifer had caught something. The roommate’s statement about a “Muslim cult” was a distinct turn of a phrase. And the man’s actions clearly showed he had something to hide. Something that was worth looking into.
65
I knocked on the door of the ranch-style house, shielding myself from the light drizzle that had begun to fall. Nobody came to answer. It was now two in the afternoon, and I had only about three hours to work with before the girl in the police report came home. I looked back at Jennifer in our rental car and smiled, wondering if I had lost my mind. I was preparing to knock again when it was opened by a middle-aged woman wearing what looked like a Snuggie blanket-robe.
“Hi. I’m looking for Adam. I’m with J3 Special Operations at the Pentagon.”
She looked at me like I was an alien from another planet, then turned and hollered, “Pinky! It’s for you!”
I prayed the man who came to the door would recognize me. If he didn’t, I was dead in the water. I might be anyway, given what I was trying to convince him to do. Adam was on a biometric team. He was the closest thing the Taskforce had to the CSI element from television, only his whole purpose was to catalog biometric data, not solve crimes. I’d worked with him a couple of times, but each one was under duress during the middle of an operation, so we didn’t do a lot of talking. I hoped he remembered me because he was the only one I could find who was on military leave, and thus probably at home instead of overseas or at Taskforce headquarters.
The man who came to the door was about five foot four, pudgy and round. He pushed his glasses back onto his face and said, “Pike? What are you doing here?”
Whew.
“Hey, Adam. I’ve got a little problem and I need your help.”
Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I was picking the lock of the door from the police report, feeling the press of time. From what she’d said in her interview, the roommate worked until five each day at a gift shop, and we were closing in on that hour. It had taken me way longer than I’d liked to convince Adam to come with me, and then he’d needed to go to Taskforce headquarters to get his equipment, followed by the drive to Baltimore.
I’d prayed he wouldn’t encounter anyone from the team or Kurt while he was inside the Taskforce, knowing he’d come running back out with the security force to arrest me. Luckily, that hadn’t happened, but Adam was decidedly antsy, clearly wondering if my bullshit story was true—which, of course, it wasn’t. Getting to the apartment, I had given Jennifer a dual mission of early warning and Adam control, then had gone to work on the lock.
It popped easily, making me think of Bull for a split second, then we were inside. I went into the bedroom first, using an old Polaroid camera to get a plethora of pictures, taping each one at the position it was taken so Adam could replace everything exactly like it was before we had entered. We were probably the only organization on the planet that used the dated technology, having to get our film from a nostalgia site on the Web. When I was done, I let Adam go to work, scrubbing everything for any biometric elements he could find.
We were out in thirty minutes, with a bunch of fingerprints and bags of several different hair samples for DNA. Nothing more, but enough. I dropped Adam off at Taskforce headquarters, saying, “Process that stuff and get it to Holly. Have her run it. I need an answer by tomorrow morning.”
His face scrunched in confusion, because he thought I was going to drop him back at his house and his warm little Snuggie blanket. Probably wondering how his decision to take two weeks of leave at home instead of Disneyland had gone so badly for him. I held our handshake a little longer than was comfortable for him.
“Don’t fuck me on this. Get it done, and I’ll buy you a beer. Or a milk shake. Whatever you want.”
He nodded and walked into the building in what looked like a daze. I called Holly.
“Hey, Adam’s coming up. Look for him. He’s got some biometric stuff he’s going to process, then I need you to run it against everything you’ve got.”
“What the hell are you talking about? From where?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just do it as a favor to me. Please. There’s a chance the stuff will ping in our database or some police one. You can access the imam’s fingerprints, right? Didn’t he get arrested in Canada?”
“Pike, it’s close to six o’clock right now. It’ll take him at least four hours to process before I get it, and that’s just the fingerprints. You’re talking about an all-nighter.”
“Holly, it’s important. You get a hit and you’ll finally get that twelve-pack I owe you. One more thing: Don’t tell Kurt you’re doing it.”
“Dammit, Pike… you’re going to owe me more than a twelve-pack.”
Rafik watched Keshawn test the circuit on the M57, then simulate initiating the explosively formed penetrator. He was impressed with Keshawn’s attention to detail, and mulled over the decision he had to make. Since the loss of Adnan in Budapest, he had been debating the makeup of the teams, feeling the need to wait for Kamil to arrive before initiating the attack so that each prison recruit would have at least one trusted Arab with him, but both Keshawn’s and Carl’s actions had begun to convince him that they could travel alone. That they could be trusted to accomplish the mission, with Farouk and the imam going with the other two men.
Keshawn rolled up the wire to the M57 and walked to Rafik, the faltering sunlight streaming through the garage windows becoming overshadowed by the flicker of the harsh fluorescent bulbs overhead.
“How many more men still need to train?”
Rafik considered lying, but told the truth. “None. We finished today.”
Keshawn’s face flashed surprise. “You’ve given the men their targets? Like you did me? And they have their explosives?”
“Yes.”
“So when do we strike?”
“If everyone makes it back home okay and goes to work tomorrow as a normal day, then perhaps tomorrow. If we have any issues with returning to work, we wait a day. The key is to conduct the attacks simultaneously. That is imperative.”
“Why are you so fired up about returning to work? We have the targets. Shit, in most cases, I’m hitting the same substations you had me sketch, so it’s not like I can’t find them. I can’t speak for the other teams or their companies, but in my case, BGE will have a GPS on my truck. Seems like a stupid risk.”
The Americans always want to question. To fight decisions. Perhaps I’m wrong about letting him go as an individual.
“After the first few attacks, the authorities will react. I cannot predict how, but they will try to stop us. Your company truck, along with the trucks maintained by the companies the other teams work for, will be the subterfuge that allows success. It may be the only edge we get.”
“That’s bullshit. If they figure
out what’s going on, it’ll be no effort at all to track us down. Shit, we’ll be helping them.”
“Keshawn, you have proven to be dedicated, but listen to me, please. If not because you trust me, then at least based on my experience. The chances of them penetrating our cell are much less than them extrapolating what we’re after. They can’t possibly protect every substation, but we might be unlucky enough to run into one that is protected after we start. Your truck will allow you to bypass.”
Keshawn said nothing. Rafik considered his next words, toying with confirming that he himself would be Keshawn’s partner, and that the attack would have to wait until Kamil arrived to be Carl’s partner. But he was afraid that the time delay would cause discovery of the Trojan horse virus that Keshawn and the others had embedded in the power company systems.
After obtaining the explosives, he’d ordered it activated, and now it was only a matter of time before it was found. Without it, they would fail, since the grid would be able to automatically detect fluctuations and reallocate power at the speed of a computer. The virus would take that out of the equation, leaving the process manually done, at the speed of a human trying to blindly assess how to staunch the bleeding.
He broached the subject gently. “I’m thinking of sending Carl by himself. Do you think he could do that? Without any guidance from my men?”
Keshawn considered for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. He’s ready. With his military background, he won’t have any problems.”
“What about his commitment?”
“You mean because of what happened at A.P. Hill? I wouldn’t worry about that. He was in jail for robbing a liquor store. They only got him on the robbery, because of some sort of screwup with the prosecution, but he killed three people in cold blood in the getaway. He developed a sense of justice based on your own chaplain’s teachings, but it won’t interfere. He’ll do what needs to be done.”
Rafik nodded. “And what about you? Can you get it done as well?”
Keshawn stared at him, the implication sinking in. “I thought you were my partner on this. I’m going alone?”
“If you think you can. Tell me if that’s not the case.”
Keshawn grinned, the thought of doing something to justify Beth’s sacrifice hitting him at his core. “I can do it. In fact, I work better alone.”
“Go home and get a good night’s rest. If I’m contacted by all teams tonight, tomorrow will be a glorious day.”
Gazing out the window, thinking of Beth, Keshawn whispered, “Judgment Day.”
66
I awoke groggy, unsure what the ringing was, but sure of one thing: It was annoying the hell out of me. The clock told me it was six thirty in the morning. Way too early to be awake now that I was no longer in the military. I sat up in time to see Jennifer snatch my cell phone off of the table between our double beds.
“Yeah, yeah, he’s right here.”
She handed it to me with a quizzical look, saying, “Some woman named Holly.”
I grabbed the phone. “You got a hit? The prints ended up being the imam?”
“No, Pike, they didn’t, which is why I’m calling to wake you up to share some of the pain. The prints came up in AFIS database in New York as belonging to an ex-con. Thanks for keeping me up all night.”
Shit. Nothing.
“Well… why did he spike as a Muslim?”
“No idea. Probably because the roommate’s crazy. The ex-con’s been out on parole for three years. He was in for gang violence. Accessory to murder for a couple of thugs that deserved to die anyway. He’s a black guy, not Arabic. Did his time in Attica and has apparently done okay, because his rap sheet’s clean since his release. Sorry.”
Attica? Something about the prison gave me pause, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Hey, don’t we have some terrorists in prison up at Attica? Why does that jail ring a bell with me?”
“Yeah, we’ve got some terrorists up there all right, but the Christian kind. It’s where that asshole Cyrus Mace is being held. The guy who allegedly masterminded the theft of C-4 at A.P. Hill.”
I bolted upright. Way too much of a coincidence.
“Holly, I need you to stay there. I’m on my way.”
“Pike, screw that. I’ve wasted enough time on your wild goose chases. I’m going home and going to bed. It’ll be hard enough explaining my absence today without telling everyone I was freelancing for you.”
“Holly, please. Give me an hour. One hour. After that, you can go. I’ll buy you a case of that local brew you like so much. The expensive shit.”
I heard nothing for a moment, then, “One hour. And it’s starting right fucking now.”
I hung up and immediately dialed Retro at his hotel, waking him up as well.
“HELLO.”
He was definitely annoyed. He was supposed to be on downtime after the deployment, and itching to get back home to his family in North Carolina, only waiting on final debriefings and other paperwork before he was released. Oh well. Dive right in.
“It’s Pike. I need a favor.”
“Shit. What now? It’s not even seven in the damn morning.”
“I need to get into the Force headquarters again. Right now.”
Fifty-eight minutes later, I was sitting inside the secret cell with everyone but Jennifer oozing venom. Retro had to pull in Buckshot to get me access, and neither was very happy at the loss of rack time. For her part, Holly was packing her bags, getting ready to leave.
“Holly, come on. Ten more minutes. We can’t talk to anyone at the prison until eight. You leave now, and the whole thing is wasted. I need your undercover-brother cop connections.”
“An hour’s an hour. Sorry. I’m out of here.”
Retro spoke up. “Holly, I’m the last guy who would defend Pike’s stupid antics, but he did get us out of bed this morning. Make it worth our while. When it ends up being nothing, we can all beat him to death.”
Holly, eyes red and hair greasy, looked at him, then at me. She threw her hands up.
“All right. One phone call.” She pointed her finger at me. “But you now owe me dinner at the restaurant of my choice.”
“You got it,” I said.
We waited until the clock struck eight, then she dialed. Before anyone answered, I said, “We need to get a handle on this guy. Find out what he was doing at the prison. See if anything’s strange. Anything at all—”
She held up her hand. “Shut up.”
“Put it on speaker?”
She did.
She spent a couple of minutes verifying her credentials, going through the cop-talk lingo until the man on the other end was comfortable with the conversation. Eventually, she worked her way around to the ex-con, but the guy had no idea about him. He pulled the convict’s records, which didn’t tell us anything at all except that he’d been a troublemaker when he arrived but settled down into a rhythm where he became a model inmate, earning parole.
I whispered, “We need someone who worked with him. Someone who knows him personally.”
Holly glared, but made the request. The man on the phone said, “If he was released three years ago, I’m not sure anyone will remember. We do have quite a few inmates, you know.”
I heard him shuffling papers on his desk, then he said, “Well, Bobby was on his block during that time, and he’s still here. Want to talk to him?”
Holly stared daggers at me, letting me know that we were now wasting the time of people in a different state. “Please. If you don’t mind.”
A few minutes later, a deep baritone came on. “This is Bobby; how can I help you?”
Holly went through her descriptions again, and waited to be told this was a waste of time.
Bobby said, “Oh yeah, I remember him. A real badass when he showed up, but calmed right down. He ended up being a pretty good guy. I know everyone wants to bitch about Muslims nowadays, but we got a chaplain here who calmed down a whole crew of killers like him. I’ll tell y
a, I’m all for that religion if it keeps the peace in here. Unlike that fucker Cyrus, spouting all his hate and stirring things up.”
I felt an electric jolt. So did everyone else in the room. Holly continued, no longer pissed.
“What do you mean? He was in a prayer group?”
“Yeah, him and about twenty others. A group of them, four or five, really took it seriously. We had to get special permission for the chaplain to come more than he was scheduled for those guys. It was a no-brainer, since racial violence was subsiding no matter how much Cyrus tried to stir it up.”
“Who’s the chaplain? Is he still there? Can we talk to him?”
“Unfortunately, no. He was a volunteer and quit coming about a month ago. Too bad, really. Violence is back up now.”
This is it.
I cut in. “Bobby, how many of that small group are still in prison?”
“Just one. The rest were paroled because of good behavior. Last one about a year ago.”
I wrote down on a piece of paper, Get the records of the parolees. All four.
Holly nodded, getting switched back over to the administrator. In fifteen minutes, we split up the list, calling each parole officer in four separate states. All four ex-cons were now model citizens, with each parole officer gushing the praises of their wards.
All four worked for the main power company in the state where they resided.
They’re going to hit the grid.
I said, “Collate that information into a single sheet. Names, addresses, supervisors, and anything else we can use to pin them down.”
Holly went to work. Retro said, “What are you going to do?”
“Find Kurt. Get this out, right now. We may already be too late.”
“Kurt’s at the Oversight Council, trying to get Omega authority for an asshole in Oman.”
Dammit. Another place I wasn’t allowed anymore. More bureaucracy to fight through. The good news was that everyone who was anyone in the U.S. government would be there.
