Out of Range

by Hank Steinberg

  She gripped the camera tightly, could see Byko’s men converging toward him.

  “Charlie! Look out! They’re coming. From every angle!”

  She heard him click off and he disappeared from view.

  “Charlie! Charlie!”

  She whipped the viewfinder left and right. They were coming for him. And they were close.

  “Charlie!” she screamed. “Charlie!”

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Hopkins sat outside the farmhouse as the SAS men packed their gear in preparation for evac. They were still holding Byko’s double and the guards who had come along with him. But it was pointless. Byko had outfoxed them.

  Hopkins blew out a long breath. Unless Charlie Davis was able to somehow get to Byko, the mayhem and destruction was coming and there was nothing anybody could do about it. He grabbed his phone for what must have been the hundredth time in the last half hour, checking to see if he’d somehow missed a call from the American.

  Much to his surprise, the phone vibrated and chirped in his hand.

  It was Charlie Davis.

  Hopkins hit the answer button and spoke into the phone. “Please tell me something good.”

  “He’s hitting the commodities markets!”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Why Hanover and not Berlin? Why—” Davis’s voice cut out for a moment “Vienna and not Paris? Why Minneapolis and not D.C. or L.A.? Every single one of the target cities has a commodities market. A big building with thousands of people in it that also has great symbolic value.”

  As Charlie shouted into the phone, Byko’s thugs were pushing inexorably closer to him. He couldn’t see them all, but he could feel their presence, the anxious people in the crowd making way for the armed men.

  “What?” Hopkins said. “I can’t hear—”

  “Commodities! He’s hitting the commodities markets. Trust me. Just trust me. He wants to hit us in the pocketbook. And the symbolism. He’s—”

  Sensing he was getting no response, Charlie checked his screen to see if he was still connected. But the phone had gone entirely dead.

  Had Hopkins heard him? Had he believed him?

  Charlie dropped the useless phone, clasped the Makarov, and pressed forward, trying to find a seam in the crowd.

  On the pedestal Byko refused to stop. “Tomorrow the news will say that we are terrorists, lunatics, fanatics. What they will not say is what really happens in this country.”

  Byko held out his hands toward the crowd, beseeching them to understand his vision. “How we live!” he shouted. “What we suffer! This they will never say . . . but we will know.”

  Salim tried once again to rack the bolt on the old Mosin Nagant. It had always been a little sticky, but not like this. Now it wouldn’t even rotate.

  Of all the times for his rifle to jam.

  Salim could hear the cadence in Byko’s voice, the rhythms in his speech, and could tell that the man was winding down, that he had precious few moments left.

  He had to get the bolt free, but if he simply jammed it onto the paved ledge, he would most certainly distort the viewfinder. At this distance, Salim couldn’t afford to be anything but precise. So he pulled off his shoe and hammered the bolt with the heel. At first, it didn’t seem to have any effect. But on the fourth strike, he felt some movement. On the seventh, the bolt began to rotate. On the ninth, it came free.

  He yanked back the bolt and ejected the jammed round. It fell to the floor next to Salim’s injured foot as he looked into the breach of the gun. The next round looked okay and he slammed the bolt home.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Charlie pushed himself through a soft spot in the crowd. But then he saw guns in front of him, AK-47s held aloft in both directions, the guns forcing the terrified crowd to fall back.

  When he wheeled around and saw two more, he was cut off. Surrounded.

  After everything he’d been through, after all of this time . . . perhaps it was written. Perhaps it was his destiny to die in this Square. He gazed across the ancient space and spotted Julie standing on the roof of the truck, shouting into the phone.

  He wanted so badly to reach out to her, to touch her one last time. But he realized that he’d done what he came here to do. She was going to make it home. And maybe, just maybe, he’d managed to complete her mission.

  Byko’s men were closing in now, weapons at the ready, apparently unconcerned with opening fire right here in the middle of the crowd.

  This was it. Charlie’s final moment. Nothing to do now but wait for it . . .

  A single shot rang out, echoing from one side of Babur Square and back.

  For a moment, all Julie heard was silence.

  Had they gotten to Charlie? She could see Byko’s men, but they were looking around in confusion. None of them seemed to know the source of the shot.

  Instinctively, she swung the camera toward the focus of the crowd’s attention: Byko himself.

  His face was fixed in an expression of puzzlement. Then he moved his head as though trying to work a crick out of his neck. She thought Byko was craning to see where the gunfire had come from or perhaps who had been shot.

  But then the red spot blossomed on his chest. Blood. Blood forming an oblong splotch on the front of his white shirt. A moment later, Byko fell, clutching at his chest.

  And the screaming began.

  The crowd had to assume the shooter was one of Karimov’s. And where there was one, there would always be more.

  As the people started to stampede, Julie saw one of Byko’s bodyguards fall. Whether he was intentionally knocked down by someone who assumed he was one of Karimov’s internal security thugs, or whether he just lost his footing was impossible to know. Then somebody shouted something and another bodyguard succumbed to the fury of the crowd.

  But where was Charlie?

  Through the camera, Julie watched the tumult of the mob. People pushing and shouting, trying not to trample each other. It was chaos.

  “Hey!” she heard a man shout. “We going!”

  It was the driver of the truck.

  “No!” she said. “I need to stay here.”

  She looked back through the camera, searching for Charlie.

  And then, she thought she saw something. A glimpse of dirty blond hair.

  She racked focus on the camera, trying to hone in on the man stumbling in her direction. As he neared her, forcing his way through the crowd, she finally found his face. His eyes. It was Charlie.

  “Jules!”

  She lowered the camera and saw his broad smile as he arrived at the truck.

  “Jules, jump!” He extended his arms toward her. “Jump!”

  It was a long way. But she didn’t hesitate.

  For a moment she was weightless, airborne, the sound of the screaming and yelling filling her ears. Then, with a hard thump, her feet slammed into the ground and Charlie’s arms closed around her.

  “Hold on!” Charlie screamed at her.

  “I’m not letting go of you!” she yelled. And she knew that she would never let go of him again.

  A disconnected part of Alisher Byko’s brain told him that he was hit. He was hugging the base of the statue, blood streaming down the granite. But he couldn’t feel anything below his navel—nothing but a sort of shifting darkness, groping its way up his spine.

  As he rested against the stone, the surging crowd visible out of the corner of his eye, it occurred to him that maybe this was what he had been searching for all this time. Not just relief from his pain, not just a dimunition of the fury and horror that tugged at him every waking moment of every day—but this, this dark force he felt taking over his body . . .

  Extinction.

  He could see his son’s beautiful face, as clear as if he were here with Byko still—his silky soft skin, his angelic bro
wn eyes. And Daniella was here, too. Cradling the boy, nursing him from her supple breast. Smiling at Alisher almost sheepishly.

  As he peered up at the aching gray sky, he realized that everything he had set in motion was merely the final futile gesture of an overmatched, defeated man. He would see Daniella soon, and his boy. His sister and his father. His mother and his cousins. All of the Bykos who had come before him.

  Around him, the people in the Square were shouting and running for their lives, though he was quite certain none of them were in danger. He felt sorry for them. And he began to see that he was no different from them—the nameless, faceless people in this Square. In fact, he was no different from the nameless, faceless victims of the attacks he had put in motion. Because, in fact, they all had faces, just like his little boy.

  And now he began to see those faces: the boys and girls in Vienna and Copenhagen, the sons and daughters in London and New York, the brothers and sisters in Tokyo and Sydney.

  What have I done? Byko thought. What have I . . .

  The surging crowd began to diffuse as Charlie and Julie spilled out of the Square and there was finally room to breathe. After a few more blocks, the crowd thinned out and the screaming abated. There were no more gunshots, no sound of bullhorns or tanks or helicopters.

  “Where did the shot come from?” she asked Charlie.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, looking around.

  They paused in a doorway and watched the crowd stream past.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” he said, searching her face to make sure she felt the same way.

  “Yeah,” she said softly and allowed herself to lean against him.

  Now that they were safe, Charlie’s mind turned to the larger issue. Had Hopkins understood him? Did he believe him? Had his phone died before Hopkins could hear what he’d said?

  If he’d gotten through to Hopkins—and Hopkins had believed him—the information would skate around the globe within minutes. Aircraft would leap into the skies, satellites would vector in on targets, rooms would fill with anxious people watching video monitors . . . and at the tip of the spear, vans full of hard men wearing black helmets and carrying submachine guns would plow into the streets.

  Charlie could only hope those hard men would reach the targets in time.

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Rasul Erekat ran his hand nervously through his short beard and fought the urge to pound on the horn. What was the holdup?

  He had left the safe house garage in the London suburb of Slough at six this morning—seemingly in plenty of time to make it to the target. But there had been construction on the M4 and then a major wreck on the bridge over the Thames had resulted in the entire southbound lane being shut down. So he had cut through the East End—only to find that everybody in London had apparently tried the same trick, clogging up every major artery in the city.

  And now, just blocks short of the target, traffic had completely locked up, nothing moving as far down the street as he could see. He wasn’t even the one assigned to perform this mission. His two assistants, Masun and Sa’ir, were supposed to have delivered the van to the target.

  But they had turned out to be cowards. They were both English Muslims of Pakistani extraction, soft and weak from their Western upbringing. For the past two days they had been whispering and carping and making sarcastic remarks at everything Rasul had said. In the end it had become clear to him that either their nerves would fail in the breach or they would simply slip away and disappear.

  He had taken Sa’ir, the smaller of the two, into the back room of the flat and garroted him with a piece of twenty-two-gauge speaker wire. Then he had walked into the living room where Masun was watching Doctor Who on the tellie.

  Rasul had shot him in the back of the head with a suppressed Glock 17 and it had made quite a mess on the television.

  Rasul had never killed anyone before and he was surprised that it had been as easy as it was, the whole business over in less than two minutes.

  But with both of them dead, the entire mission had fallen on Rasul’s shoulders.

  It was simple enough. In theory. Drive to the target, park the van, press the big red button in the back, and walk away. The problem was, this was supposed to be a two-man operation. The detonator switch was hidden in the rear of the van in case the van got pulled over and searched. That was why Sa’ir was supposed to drive, while Masun was to sit hidden in the back.

  But still . . . Rasul would find a way. Park, throw open the rear door, crawl over the oil-soaked fertilizer, press the red switch, walk briskly away into the gentle southwesterly wind. He’d have two minutes and fifteen seconds, just enough time to escape the blast radius without breaking into a run.

  He hadn’t admitted it to Masun and Sa’ir, but the raid by British tactical police early that morning on the bomb-making warehouse had unnerved him, too. And now MI6, MI5, Special Operations and every cop on the street was probably looking for him.

  He took a deep breath.

  Well, whatever was going to happen, it would be over soon.

  He was almost there. Two blocks ahead on Cannon Street, he could see the large silver letters spelling out liffe. The London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was a market where commodities such as cotton, oil and metals were bought and sold. Byko had repeatedly made the point—and it was a good one—that money was the lifeblood of the West. Stab her here and her blood would flow into the streets in torrents.

  The back of Rasul’s white Volvo van contained over a ton of fertilizer and fuel oil, making a bomb big enough to bring the entire building down. But that was not the real purpose of the attack. The small glass jar of nuclear material sitting on top of the fertilizer—that was what would make the mission a success. The cloud of dust would rise hundreds of feet in the air and then drift for blocks and blocks, rendering a three-square-mile area of central London uninhabitable for a century.

  Traffic again came to a standstill. And Rasul’s sense of foreboding grew. For a moment an idea flitted into his mind: what if he simply climbed out of the van and set off the bomb here? With the traffic stopped, he might have time to run around and flip the switch before he caught anyone’s attention. And if the bomb blew two blocks short of the target, who would know?

  Byko and Quinn would know, that’s who.

  It had been made clear, once he had committed to the mission, that there was no margin for error. Everything was to go according to blueprint or it wasn’t to go at all. Quinn had not so subtly indicated to Rasul that he knew exactly where Rasul’s father and mother and sister were—that deviation from the plan would not simply result in Rasul being hunted down and killed, but that his entire family would go to the grave with him.

  Rasul gripped the wheel, hands shaking. On the sidewalk, he saw a young woman walking toward the Exchange. She was holding hands with a little boy. The boy was dawdling, pulling his mother’s hand, wanting to stop and pet a dog that was being held by a tattooed girl with her belly showing in the immodest, whorish fashion of the West.

  The traffic started to move in front of him. Almost there.

  Still, Rasul hesitated, not pressing the accelerator. Instead he continued to watch the mother and child in their silent tug-of-war as the boy fought to pet the dog.

  Rasul suddenly felt a wave of emotion as he looked at the pair. If the boy continued to distract his mother, they would probably reach the Exchange at almost the exact moment that the bomb detonated. His own son had been the same age when he was killed by the American bomb, burned to death in the arms of Rasul’s wife—a bomb aimed at an Al Qaeda operative who was briefly visiting Rasul’s hometown in Yemen.

  Rasul smiled as he looked out at the people on the sidewalk. They would die—the mother, the boy, the tattooed girl with the dog—all of these heedless people. They would pay for what h
ad happened to Rasul’s family.

  A horn tooted behind him.

  Rasul released the brake and drove slowly forward. He continued to watch the mother and son in his mirror, barely paying attention to the road in front of him. As he nosed toward his destination, he realized that his hands weren’t shaking anymore. In fact, he felt terribly calm, a sense of utter peace. Nothing could go wrong. A thousand MI6 agents couldn’t stop him now!

  Suddenly the truck in front of him braked hard. He glanced away from the mirror, nearly slamming into the trunk of the larger vehicle. Something was going on up in front of the LIFFE building. But his vision was blocked by the truck and he couldn’t quite make it out.

  Why was nothing moving? Rasul slammed his fist on the horn.

  Again the cars moved, crawling forward. After a moment he saw the source of the problem . . .

  Men in blue uniforms, blocking the street. Security guards? Police?

  Surely they couldn’t know about—

  And then, seemingly without warning, there were armed men surrounding his van. Black helmets, bulletproof vests, machine guns.

  They knew! They knew and they were here to stop him.

  Well, no matter. He could still arm the bomb. He would simply have to crawl to the back of the van, dive over the fertilizer and—

  He reached under his seat, took hold of his Glock and fired wildly through the window, hoping to drive the helmeted men back.

  Instead there was a loud bang in reply. Then another. Something hit the side of the van. Another bang. Another. It sounded as though hammers were being thrown at the doors. He wasn’t hit yet—but he would be soon. As he began crawling toward the back and over the soaked fertilizer, he heard a huge blast and suddenly the back doors flew open.

  Six submachine guns were aimed directly at him.

  “Hands in the air! Hands in the air now!”

  But his hands were only three feet from the detonation switch.

  He was overwhelmed by a blinding sense of panic and horror. For all his anger, for all his need to avenge the wrong inflicted on him, he had not signed up for a suicide mission. On the other hand, he wasn’t interested in spending the rest of his life in a Western prison. And if he gave himself up, what Byko and Quinn would do to his family . . .