Act of Terror jq-2

by Marc Cameron

  Bodington breathed in quickly through his nose, mouth clenched in a tight line, as if disgusted at having to discuss such things with anyone outside his own realm of control.

  “Interrogation site?” Thibodaux whispered, swaying like a giant tree as he took in the gruesome sight in front of them. “Is that what we’re calling this now?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The nude body of a dead man hung upside down in the center of the ten-by-twenty-foot unfinished basement room. His swollen feet were tied together by rough cords draped over a fearsome metal hook in an exposed rafter. Bare copper wires looped around each big toe, then ran to a small, gas-powered welding generator on a folding table a few feet away. The dead man’s fingertips were raw and bloody from clawing at the rough concrete floor. His head-down position had caused his belly to distend horribly. His face was puffed and unrecognizable. Pooling fluids leaked from his nose and gaping mouth to the bare concrete below. A closer inspection revealed circular electric burns to his groin and wrists as well as his ankles. The wires around each big toe sunk deeply into charred, blackened flesh.

  Quinn had seen this sort of thing before. A colonel in the Afghan KHED had suspected a teenage goatherd of involvement with the Taliban. The evidence against the kid had been overwhelming, but many Afghans like him had been pressed into service. Few possessed the zeal of their Saudi and Chechen compatriots and gave up information easily.

  Quinn had arrived too late to stop the interrogation. The colonel had hung the nude boy from a rafter by his feet, run copper wires to his big toes and increased the voltage until he twitched like a marionette. “The Dance of Death,” the colonel had called it.

  The colonel had been from Hazara-a tribe particularly mistreated by the primarily Pashtun Taliban. The boy was Pashtun-and that had been enough to kill him, no matter what he’d known or hadn’t known.

  Quinn studied the man hanging from the hook in front of him. Like the KHED colonel, whoever had done this had had an agenda beyond interrogation. The depth of human cruelty never ceased to amaze him, even though he himself had caused the death of more than a few enemies of his country-and even a certain amount of pain.

  This was not an interrogation. This was someone’s entertainment.

  Quinn stepped closer to the hanging body, studying the scorched flesh behind the dead man’s knees. There came a point in any “enhanced” interrogation when the subject would say anything to stop the pain. That point had come and gone with this one long before the torture had stopped. Anyone trained by an American intelligence agency would know that-if they even cared.

  “We know who he was?” Quinn said.

  “One of ours,” Virginia Ross said, eyes darting nervously around the room. She took a tentative step closer to the body. Her eyes suddenly locked on the congealing pool of fluids under the dead man’s yawning mouth, she seemed not to know where to put her feet. Her words came in short spurts with a hard swallow in between each phrase. “Tom Haddad… he was an analyst… assigned to the Middle East desk.”

  “Is his name on Congressman Drake’s list?” Quinn asked, knowing the answer before it came.

  “It is,” Ross said, swallowing again. “He transferred back to Langley from Cairo three months ago.”

  Quinn turned to look at Bodington, but said nothing.

  The FBI director returned his glare for a long moment before shaking his head. “We weren’t looking at him for anything, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  Quinn didn’t know whether to believe either director. It wasn’t unheard of for the Bureau to watch Agency assets without informing their bosses-or vice versa, though the CIA wasn’t supposed to conduct operations on American soil. Quinn did a lot of things he wasn’t “supposed” to do, so he naturally assumed the CIA did what was necessary to get the job done.

  “If he’s not on anyone’s radar, how’d he get on the list?” Thibodaux asked. “Maybe he really was a mole.”

  “We’ve yet to figure that one out,” Palmer said grimly, nodding toward an empty chair with shreds of duct tape at the arms and legs. “There’s one more.”

  Someone had been tied there, likely made to watch.

  “Worse than this?” Thibodaux moaned. He turned to Quinn. “I’m gonna need one of my grandmama’s good-luck gris-gris bags to protect me. This place is chockablock full of evil, beb.”

  “It’s a woman.” Palmer held open the door to a small unfinished storeroom. “This is… was her house.”

  Quinn stepped through the narrow doorway to find a small room awash with blood.

  As a younger man, just starting out in the business, he’d been amazed at the amount of fluid inside a human body. There was a reason they called it “wet work.”

  The pallid corpse of an amber-haired female was thrown back over a collapsed stack of cardboard boxes. She looked to be in her late thirties-maybe Quinn’s age. Her throat had been cut, all the way to the bone-Quinn guessed with some sort of wire. She was naked but for the beige bra that was bunched up cruelly under her armpits. A high-school yearbook and a small wooden music box-presumably things precious to the woman-had fallen out of the boxes and lay below the ashen white of the woman’s trailing wrist. Droplets of coagulating blood pooled below the tips of curled fingers. High cheekbones and the steep angle of her jaw made Quinn guess she might have a hint of Asian blood. Her storm-gray eyes were thrown wide in a silent scream of terror.

  Quinn turned away after he’d taken in as much as he thought he needed. Each time he saw a woman who’d been hurt or killed-and he’d seen far too many-he couldn’t help but think of Kim. “Anything I can learn from this one?”

  “FBI techs say she was raped,” Palmer said.

  Bodington leaned a hand against the door frame. “Too early to tell if there’ll be any DNA. Son of a bitch bit a chunk out of her shoulder though-probably trying to subdue her. My guys can get a good cast of his teeth from the wound. Looks like the old girl put up a fight.” He nodded to the tip of a female finger, complete with oddly untouched pink nail polish, lying on the concrete floor. “Killer probably used a garrote. Old girl must have gotten a finger inside the piano wire before he yanked it tight-”

  “The old girl’s name was Nadia,” Veronica Garcia interjected from the doorway, behind Director Ross. She was icy, detached. “Nadia Arbakova. She worked for the Secret Service in their Protective Intelligence Division.”

  “Was she on Drake’s list?” Thibodaux asked.

  “No,” Palmer mused, almost to himself. “Oddly enough, she was not.”

  “She’s on my list,” Garcia offered.

  “Oh.” Bodington gave a sarcastic smirk. “You’ve been in the field a half a day and you already have your own list?”

  To her credit, Garcia ignored the pompous attempt to keep her in her place.

  “She has a relationship with an agent on the vice presidential detail. He’s one of the priorities you gave me.” She looked at Palmer, who gave her a reassuring nod. “I’d planned to review her background information with her this morning.”

  “So,” Bodington mused, “you just happened to drop by at exactly the right time to find two dead bodies in the basement?”

  “I decided to stop off and chat with her this morning,” Garcia said. “Her house is on the way in from mine. Thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”

  “Damn appropriate metaphor.” The FBI director smirked, nodding at Haddad’s body. “Maybe that’s exactly what you did.”

  Quinn had had enough. “You need to shut your mouth,” he hissed, suddenly losing patience.

  The FBI boss blustered, rising up on the balls of his feet as if he might actually get physical.

  “Calm down, Kurt.” Palmer held up a hand. “He’d kill you before you could make a fist.” He turned to a grinning Garcia. “Please continue, Agent Garcia. What’s the boyfriend’s name?”

  “James Doyle,” Veronica said. “He’s working day-shift at the Observatory today. I have an appo
intment at three-thirty to talk to the agent in charge of his detail.”

  “Very well,” Palmer muttered. “One victim on the list and one not

  …” He walked back toward the stairwell door as he thought, ignoring the grotesque, bag-like figure of Tom Haddad’s bloated body. When he reached the base of the stairs, he turned to face the rest of the group. “It goes without saying we have a cold-blooded son of a bitch at work here, maybe more than one. This idiot congressman has crossed the line by going public with the existence of his list.”

  “Has he released the names?” Thibodaux asked. “I thought he said it was a secret.”

  “Drake has his own version of WikiLeaks. The entire list blasted out over the Internet last night right after his show.” Palmer reached in his shirt pocket and removed a folded sheet of white paper, looking directly at Quinn. “Take a good look.”

  “Think I’ll recognize some of the names?” Quinn took the paper.

  “I’m sure you will, son.” Palmer sighed. “You’re one of them.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Some men killed for pleasure. Some, like Mujaheed Beg, were blessed with a righteous cause. To hold another’s life in one’s hands was enjoyable enough, but to kill an American-that was such a pleasure as to be sinful, unless the cause was a holy one.

  The Mervi ran an olive hand through his hair, combed back like a wood duck. He squinted at the sun. It was nearly noon. His target would arrive at any moment.

  A cloud of insects hovered like pepper tossed into the air a few feet off the paved jogging trail. Cicadas buzzed in the thick foliage along the shore of a small lake, ticking out their last few calls of the season. A swimming beaver cut a long V in the brown surface, disappearing under a raft of lily pads.

  A creature of the desert, Mujaheed had been unaccustomed to such an abundance of life. He swatted a mosquito that landed on his cheek. A striped lizard scuttled along the paved asphalt trail before darting into a tuft of brown grass.

  A car door slammed on the far side of the lake, echoing off the water.

  Beg looked at his watch. So predictable.

  Lake Artemesia Park was a stone’s throw from the Beltway and adjacent to the College Park Metro station. Though it was in the city, the little gem of a park was tucked in among the trees and connected to miles of wooded trail. A peaceful lake beckoned University of Maryland students like Grace Smallwood who liked to run in the woods.

  Mujaheed leaned against the cedar post of a small gazebo off the trail, pretending to stretch his calf muscles. He was dressed in a pair of gray running shorts and a black T-shirt. Apart from a small cardboard box in his right hand, he looked like any other jogger.

  Most visitors preferred the cool of the evening and the park was nearly empty. One other runner-a young Asian man with a South Korean flag on his T-shirt-and a gaggle of young black women pushing baby strollers had passed him a few moments before. Beg gauged his timing so he’d meet Grace Smallwood coming from the opposite side of the lake, well away from the mothers’ gossip group and the other jogger. The sight of so many women out in the open with their heads uncovered disgusted him. They deserved the rewards they reaped.

  Mujaheed counted to twenty, then fell into an easy trot along the trail. He went counterclockwise around the lake trail to meet Grace Smallwood as far away from the others as possible.

  Mujaheed had found the Russian woman the night before bland as a wet cloth. She’d fought, but not as well as he had hoped, considering she was supposed to be trained in such things.

  He’d changed his shirt after he’d finished with her, and then taken some time to look through her bedroom. When there was an opportunity, he liked to get a feel for the life he’d just ended. He’d found little but a few photo albums and an inordinate amount of sewing crafts. A small framed photo of Arbakova beside a Native American man sat on a bedside stand. They both wore Secret Service T-shirts. It was the only evidence that she had any sort of a social life.

  Mujaheed had lain back for a time on the soft sheets of her bed, watching a news program with a volatile U.S. congressman named Drake. The politician spoke in inflammatory sound bites about the evils of the Islamic world and the dangers of the U.S. weakening its ties with Israel. Mujaheed pointed his finger at the screen as if it were a pistol. He turned the channel to Jeopardy! before drifting off, the scent of the woman he’d just killed lulling him into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  The doorbell had awakened him with a start.

  It took a few precious moments to get his bearings and remember where he was. There’d been no time to chide himself for his stupidity. He’d barely had time to slip quietly out the back door as a dark, intensely beautiful woman came down the hallway. She’d called for Arbakova by name, as if they were friends.

  He’d paused to peer back in through the kitchen window, cursing that he couldn’t stay and spend more time with this one. The slight bulge at the ankle of her tan slacks told him she carried a pistol. The danger of the weapon had aroused his appetite all the more. The sure way she moved, the hard gaze in her eyes, told him she possessed all the fighting spirit Nadia Arbakova had lacked.

  He’d resolved to get to know this woman someday soon. But before he could do that, there was the matter of Grace Smallwood from Lincoln, Nebraska. He’d been watching her too, getting to know her and the little secrets that made her vulnerable. Smallwood’s death had to be an accident, and though Mujaheed Beg preferred the more intimate work of the garrote, his specialty-the skill the doctor paid him for-was accidents.

  The diminutive Nebraska native was a picture of intelligent perkiness. She’d graduated with honors from the University of Maryland and then stayed on as a Terrapin to work on her graduate degree in public policy. One of her professors had introduced her to a particular senator, who had, in turn made introductions to a particularly well-placed family within the government. It didn’t hurt that she was as cute as she was smart and that the senator who’d introduced her had a thing for brunettes with pixie haircuts. She had the pizzazz and brains to write her own ticket in Washington.

  It was up to Beg to see that Smallwood never got the job. Another student, one more friendly to the jihad, would be hired after her untimely death.

  She was listening to music on her iPod when she rounded the corner, head bobbing to the decadent beat of her song. She wore red shorts and a loose U of M basketball jersey that showed far too much of her skin for Beg’s moral sensibilities. A small black fanny pack hung around her waist.

  Beg approached from an intersecting side trail, timing his entry onto the main path so he crashed directly into the startled girl. As they collided, he opened the tiny cardboard box in his right hand and dumped the contents down the loose neck of her jersey.

  “I’m so sorry,” he sputtered. “How clumsy of me.”

  He offered a hand as they pushed away from their awkward clench.

  “I’m okay…” She crawled to one knee before launching into a series of short screams, swatting feverishly at her chest.

  “Bees!” she gasped. “I’m allergic to bees!”

  She clawed at her waist for the EpiPen that would stop her attack.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” Mujaheed smiled, still playing the innocent. He unzipped the fanny pack and retrieved the yellow plastic tube containing her epinephrine.

  Smallwood fell back against the pavement. Clutching at her throat, she gasped for air. She nodded emphatically, groping blindly for the pen. “Hurry… Can’t… breathe…”

  Mujaheed looked up and down the path. When he was certain there were no witnesses, he pressed the pen into the trail, activating the automatic injector and emptying the medication onto the path. He dropped the pen on the ground beside the stricken girl. It would be found later by authorities, who would believe she had panicked and wasted the drug that could have saved her life.

  The girl looked on in horror. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. Horrific red blotches blossomed on
her face and neck. Eyes that had shone brightly moments before grew bloodshot and vague. Flecks of spittle frothed from swelling lips. Her head slammed against the pavement with a violent crack. She began to writhe, kicking so hard at the edge of the trail, she lost a shoe.

  The black women walking with their children would find her in a few moments. By then Grace Smallwood would be past the point of rescue-and Mujaheed Beg would be gone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Mervi hardly made it out of earshot from the gurgles of the dying girl when the cell phone in the pocket of his running shorts began to buzz. He hadn’t even had time to take out his comb and see to his hair. It had to be Dr. Badeeb. No one else had his number. He let it ring, wanting to put more distance between himself and Smallwood before she was discovered.

  The very picture of impatience, Badeeb called again in a matter of seconds. Beg slowed to a walk in the shadowed, tunnel-like forest clearing along the heavily wooded Paint Branch trail. A gray squirrel chattered from the high limbs of an elm tree. Wiping sweat from his forehead with the tail of his shirt, he took a deep breath and answered curtly.

  “ Al-salamu, Doctor.” He waved a mosquito away as he spoke.

  “ Wa alaikum assalam,” Badeeb whined like the mosquito. “You are healthy, praise be to God…”

  “I am,” Beg sighed, suddenly more fatigued than he should be. Nazeer Badeeb was his employer, but the Mervi found himself too weary for the customarily endless rounds of telephone politeness. “Why do you call?”

  “I trust all is well in Maryland?” Badeeb sounded like a Pakistani version of the film actor Peter Lorre. The wheezing brought on by his ever-present cigarette was audible over the phone.

  “It is,” Beg said, walking faster to outpace the mosquitoes that flung themselves from the surrounding foliage to swarm his face. “Our trouble in Rockville has been taken care of and that obstacle at the university has been cleared away. Your friend should have no trouble getting the job she wants.”