Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1)

by Jack Mars

  He watched Ezatullah and Momo. Ezatullah peeled off one of the large magnetic decals that said Dun-Rite Laundry Services, carried it to the water’s edge, and hurled it over the side. Then he came back and peeled off the other side. It never occurred to Eldrick that the signs came off. Meanwhile, Momo kneeled at the front of the van with a screwdriver, removing the license plate and replacing it with a different one. A moment later, he had moved to the back, doing the same with the rear plate.

  Ezatullah made a gesture toward the van. “Voilà!” he said. “Totally different vehicle. Catch me now, Uncle Sam.” Ezatullah’s face was bright red and sweaty. He seemed to be wheezing. His eyes were bloodshot.

  Eldrick glanced at their surroundings. Ezatullah’s physical state had given him an idea. The idea flashed in his mind like lightning, here and gone in an instant. It was the safest way to think. People could read thoughts in your eyes.

  “Where are we?” he said.

  “Baltimore,” Ezatullah said. “Another of your great American cities. And a pleasant place to live, I imagine. Low crime, natural beauty, and the citizens are all healthy and wealthy, the envy of people everywhere.”

  In the night, Eldrick had been delirious. He had passed out more than once. He had lost track of time, and of where they were. But he had no idea they had come this far.

  “Baltimore? Why are we here?”

  Ezatullah shrugged. “We are on our way to our new destination.”

  “The target is here?”

  Now Ezatullah smiled. The smile seemed out of place on his radiation-poisoned face. He looked like death itself. He reached out with a trembling hand and gave Eldrick a friendly pat on the shoulder.

  “I’m sorry I was angry with you, my brother. You’ve done a good job. You delivered everything you promised. If Allah wills it, I hope you are in paradise this very day. But not by my hand.”

  Eldrick just stared at him.

  Ezatullah shook his head. “No. Not Baltimore. We are traveling south to strike a blow that will give joy to the suffering masses throughout the world. We are going to enter the lair of the Devil himself and cut off the beast’s head with our own hands.”

  Eldrick felt a chill all over his upper body. His arms broke out in goose bumps. He noticed that his own shirt was soaked in sweat. He didn’t like the sound of this. If they were headed south and they were in Baltimore, then the next city was…

  “Washington,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Ezatullah smiled again. Now the smile was glorious, that of a saint standing at the gates of heaven, ready to be granted entrance.

  “Kill the head and the body will die.”

  Eldrick could see it in Ezatullah’s eyes. The man had lost his mind. Maybe it was the sickness, or maybe it was something else, but it was obvious he wasn’t thinking clearly. All along, the plan had been to steal the materials and drop off the van in the South Bronx. It was a dangerous job, very difficult to pull off, and they had done it. But whoever was in charge had changed the plan, or had lied about it since the beginning. Now they were traveling to Washington in a radioactive van.

  To do what?

  Ezatullah was a seasoned jihadi. He must know that what he was hinting was impossible. Whatever he thought they were going to do, Eldrick knew they weren’t even going to come close. He pictured the van, riddled with bullet holes, three hundred yards from the White House or Pentagon or Capitol Building fence.

  This wasn’t a suicide mission. It wasn’t a mission at all. It was a political statement.

  “Don’t worry,” Ezatullah said. “Be happy. You’ve been chosen for the greatest honor. We will make it, even though you cannot imagine how. The method will become clear to you in time.” He turned and slid open the side door of the van.

  Eldrick glanced at Momo. He was finishing up the rear license plate. Momo hadn’t spoken in a while. He probably wasn’t feeling too well himself.

  Eldrick took a step backwards. Then he took another. Ezatullah busied himself with something inside the van. His back was turned. The funny thing about this moment was another one like it might never come. Eldrick was just standing there in a vast open lot, and no one was looking at him.

  Eldrick had run track in high school. He was good at it. He remembered the crowds inside the 168th Street Armory in Manhattan, the standings on the big board, the buzzer going off. He remembered that knotted up feeling in his stomach right before a race, and the crazy speed on the new track, skinny black gazelles jockeying, pushing off, elbows high, moving so fast that it seemed like a dream.

  In all the years since, Eldrick had never run as fast as he did back then. But maybe, with one focused burst of energy and everything riding on it, he could match that speed right now. No sense in hesitating, or even thinking much more about it.

  He turned and took off.

  A second later, Momo’s voice behind him:

  “EZA!”

  Then something in Farsi.

  The abandoned building was ahead. The sickness came roaring back. He wretched, blood spurting down his shirt, but he kept going. He was already out of breath.

  He heard a clack like a stapler. It echoed faintly against the walls of the building. Ezatullah was shooting, of course he was. His gun had a silencer.

  A sharp sting went through Eldrick’s back. He fell to the pavement, skinning his arms on the broken asphalt. A split second later, another shot echoed. Eldrick got up and kept running. The fence was right here. He turned and went for the hole.

  Another sting went through him. He fell forward and clung to the fence. All the strength seemed to flow out of his legs. He hung there, supporting himself with the death grip of his fingers through the chain links.

  “Move,” he croaked. “Move.”

  He dropped to his knees, forced the ripped fence aside and crawled through the hole. He was in deep grass. He stood, stumbled along for a few steps, tripped over something he couldn’t see, and rolled down an embankment. He didn’t try to stop rolling. He let his momentum carry him to the bottom.

  He came to rest, breathing heavily. The pain in his back was unreal. His face was in the dirt. It was wet here, muddy, and he was right along the riverbank. He could tumble into the dark water if he wanted to. Instead, he crawled deeper into the underbrush. The sun hadn’t come up yet. If he stayed here, didn’t move, and didn’t make a sound, it was just barely possible…

  He touched a hand to his chest. His fingers came away wet with blood.

  *

  Ezatullah stood at the hole in the fence. The world spun around him. He had become dizzy just trying to run after Eldrick.

  His hand held the chain link of the fence, helping him stand. He thought he might vomit. It was dark back in those bushes. They could spend an hour looking for him in there. If he made it into the big abandoned building, they might never find him.

  Moahmmar stood nearby. He was bent over, hands on his knees, breathing deeply. His body was shaking. “Should we go in?” he said.

  Ezatullah shook his head. “We don’t have time. I shot him twice. If the sickness doesn’t finish him, the bullets will. Let him die here alone. Perhaps Allah will take pity on his cowardice. I hope so. Either way, we must continue without him.”

  He turned and started back toward the van. It seemed like the van was parked far away. He was tired, and he was sick, but he kept putting one foot after the other. Each step brought him closer to the gates of Paradise.

  Chapter 9

  6:05 a.m.

  Joint Counter-Terrorism Command Center - Midtown Manhattan

  “Luke, the best thing to do is get your people together and go back to Washington,” the man in the suit said.

  Luke stood inside the swirling chaos of the command center’s main room. It was already daytime, and weak light filtered in from windows two stories above the working floor. Time was passing too quickly, and the command center was a clusterfuck in progress.

  Two hundred people filled the space. There were at
least forty workstations, some of them with two or three people sitting at five computer screens. On the big board up front, there were twenty different television and computer screens. Screens showed digital maps of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, live video streams of the entrances to the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, mug shots of Arab terrorists known to be in the country.

  Three of the screens currently showed Mayor DeAngelo, at six-foot-three dwarfing the aides that flanked him, standing at the microphone and telling the brave people of New York to stay home and hug their kids. He was reading from prepared remarks.

  “In a worst-case scenario,” the mayor said, his voice coming from speakers located around the room, “the initial explosion would kill many people and create mass panic in the immediate area. Radiation exposure would cause widespread terror throughout the region and probably the country. Many people exposed in the initial attack would become sick, and some would die. The clean-up costs would be enormous, but they would be dwarfed by the psychological and economic costs. A dirty bomb attack on a major train station in New York City would cripple transportation along the Eastern seaboard for the foreseeable future.”

  “Pleasant,” Luke said. “I wonder who writes his material.”

  He scanned the room. Everyone was represented here, everyone jockeying for position. It was alphabet soup. NYPD, FBI, NSA, ATF, DEP, even CIA. Hell, the DEA was here. Luke wasn’t sure how stealing radioactive waste constituted a drug crime.

  Ed Newsam had gone to track down the SRT staff among the crowd.

  “Luke, did you hear me?”

  Luke turned back to the matter at hand. He was standing with Ron Begley of Homeland Security. Ron was a balding man in his late 50s. He had a large round gut and pudgy little fingers. Luke knew his story. He was a desk jockey, a man who had come up through the government bureaucracy. On September 11, he was at Treasury running a team analyzing tax evasion and Ponzi schemes. He slid over to counter-terrorism when Homeland Security was created. He had never made an arrest, or fired a gun in anger, in his life.

  “You said you want me to go home.”

  “You’re stepping on toes here, Luke. Kurt Myerson called his boss at NYPD and told him you were at the hospital treating people like your personal servants. And that you commandeered a SWAT team. Really? A SWAT team? Listen, this is their turf. You’re supposed to follow their lead. That’s how the game is played.”

  “Ron, the NYPD called us in. I assume that’s because they felt they needed us. People know how we work.”

  “Cowboys,” Begley said. “You work like rodeo cowboys.”

  “Don Morris got me out of bed to come up here. You can talk to Don…”

  Begley shrugged. A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “Don’s been recalled. He caught a chopper out twenty minutes ago. I suggest you do the same.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. He’s been kicked upstairs on this one. They called him back to do a situation briefing at the Pentagon. Real high-level stuff. I guess they couldn’t get an intern to do it, so they’re bringing in Don.”

  Begley lowered his voice, though Luke could still easily hear him. “A word of advice. What does Don have, three more years before retirement? Don’s a dying breed. He’s a dinosaur, and so is SRT. You know it and I know it. All of these little secret agencies within an agency, they’re going by the wayside. We’re consolidating and centralizing, Luke. What we need now is data-driven analysis. That’s how we’re going to solve the crimes of the future. That’s how we’re going to catch these terrorists today. We don’t need macho super-spies and aging former commandos rappelling down the sides of buildings anymore. We just don’t. Playing hero ball is over. It’s actually a little ridiculous, if you think about it.”

  “Great,” Luke said. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  “I thought you were teaching college,” Begley said. “History, political science, that kind of thing.”

  Luke nodded. “I am.”

  Begley put a meaty hand on Luke’s arm. “You should stick with that.”

  Luke shook the hand off and plunged into the crowd, looking for his people.

  *

  “What do we got?” Luke said.

  His team had set up camp in an outlying office. They had grabbed some empty desks and built their own little command station with laptops and satellite uplinks. Trudy and Ed Newsam were there, along with a few of the others. Swann was off in a corner by himself with three laptops.

  “They called Don back,” Trudy said.

  “I know. Have you talked to him?”

  She nodded. “Twenty minutes ago. He was just about to take off. He said keep working this case until he personally calls it off. Politely ignore anyone else.”

  “Sounds good. So where are we?”

  Her face was serious. “We’re moving fast. We’ve narrowed it down to six high-priority vehicles. All of them passed within a block of the hospital last night, and have details that are funky or don’t match up.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Okay. One is a food vendor truck registered to a former Russian paratrooper. We were able to follow him on surveillance cameras, and as near as we can tell, he’s been cruising around Manhattan all night, selling hot dogs and Pepsi to sex workers, pimps, and johns.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s parked on 11th Ave, south of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. He hasn’t moved in a while. We’re thinking he might be asleep.”

  “Okay, sounds like he just became low priority. Pass him on to NYPD, just in case. They can roust him and toss his truck, find out what else he’s selling in there. Next.”

  Trudy ran down her list. A minivan operated as an Uber car by a disgraced former nuclear physicist. A forty-ton tractor trailer with an insurance claim that it was demolished in an accident and scrapped. A delivery van for a commercial laundry service, with license plates registered to an unrelated flooring business in Long Island. An ambulance reported stolen three years ago.

  “A stolen ambulance?” Luke said. “That sounds like something.”

  Trudy shrugged. “Usually it’s the illegal organ trade. They harvest from newly deceased patients within minutes of death. They have to harvest the organs, pack them, and get them out of the hospital quickly. No one looks twice at an ambulance waiting around in a hospital parking lot.”

  “But tonight, maybe they weren’t waiting for organs. Do we know where they are?”

  She shook her head. “No. The only location we have is the Russian. This is still more of an art than a science. Surveillance cameras aren’t everywhere yet, especially once you get out of Manhattan. You see a truck pass a camera, then you might not see it again. Or you might pick it up on another camera ten blocks away, or five miles away. The tractor trailer crossed the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey before we lost it. The laundry van went over the 138th Street Bridge into the South Bronx and disappeared. Right now, we’re tracking them all down using other means. We’ve contacted the trucking company, Uber, the flooring company, and the laundry service. We should know something on those soon. And I’ve got eight people at headquarters sifting through hours of video feeds, looking for the ambulance.”

  “Good. Keep me posted. What’s going on with the bank stuff?”

  Trudy’s face was stone. “You should ask Swann about that.”

  “Okay.” He took a step toward Swann’s little fiefdom in the corner.

  “Luke?”

  He stopped. “Yeah.”

  Her eyes darted around the room. “Can we talk? In private?”

  *

  “You’re going to fire me because I won’t break the law for you?”

  “Trudy, I’m not going to fire you. Why would you even think that?”

  “It’s what you said, Luke.”

  They were standing in a tiny utility room. There were two empty desks in here and one small window. The carpeting was new. The walls were white with nothing on them. T
here was a small video camera mounted in one corner, near the ceiling.

  It looked like the room had never been used. The command center itself had been open for less than a year.

  Trudy’s big eyes stared at him intently.

  Luke sighed. “I was giving you an out. I thought you would understand that. If trouble comes down, you can blame it on me. All you did was what I told you to do. You were afraid you’d lose your job if you didn’t follow my orders.”

  She took a step closer to him. In the confines of the room, he could smell her shampoo, and the understated cologne she often wore. The combination of scents did something to his knees. He felt them tremble the slightest amount.

  “You can’t even give me a direct order, Luke. You don’t work at SRT anymore.”

  “I’m on a leave of absence.”

  She took another small step toward him. Her eyes were focused on him like twin lasers. There was intelligence in those eyes, and heat.

  “And you left… why? Because of me?”

  He shook his head. “No. I had my reasons. You weren’t one of them.”

  “The Marshall brothers?”

  He shrugged. “When you kill two men in one night, it’s a good time to take a pause. Maybe reassess what you’re doing.”

  “Are you saying you never had any feelings for me?” she asked.

  He looked at her, stunned by the question. He had always sensed Trudy flirting with him, and he had never taken the bait. There had been a few times, drunk at cocktail parties, after bad fights with his wife, when he had come close. But thoughts of his wife and son had always pulled him back from the brink of doing something stupid.

  “Trudy, we work together,” he said firmly. “And I’m married.”

  She came even closer.

  “I’m not looking for a marriage, Luke,” she said softly, leaning in, inches away.