by Gary Ponzo
The bunker had an unusual brightness to it, as if the windowless basement was trying to make up for its absence of sunlight. Overhead fluorescent lights flooded stark white walls and tan Berber carpet. Covering over five thousand square feet, the bunker consisted of three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a full kitchen, and a large multipurpose room that included five pullout sofas. The ventilation system assured that the inhabitants received the purest of oxygen, and the kitchen was stocked with enough dry goods and distilled water to support a dozen people for almost a year. Longer if rationed.
The bunker was initially constructed during the Cold War. Its initial purpose was to protect a sitting president, his family and a few choice aides throughout a nuclear attack. Other than a monthly maintenance check, the bunker had never been occupied, and rarely discussed.
Merrick’s wife and two kids were away with his mother-in-law surrounded by secret service agents. If he was going to be a target, there was no reason to put his family in harms way also.
Merrick sat on the sofa next to Bill Hatfield, who was hunched over a lap top computer with the presidential seal displayed on the back. The computer sat on a coffee table that competed for space with ten different newspapers layered between manila files marked ‘Confidential’, ‘Secret’ and ‘Top Secret.’ Bob Dylan’s voice twanged sarcastically from the built-in speakers. Merrick had been stressed for so long that he was beginning to feel a bit numb.
Samuel Fisk sat in a leather chair across the coffee table from Merrick and Hatfield with folded arms. He listened while Bill Hatfield attempted to gain the President’s attention for a briefing. The three of them were temporarily alone while the remainder of Merrick’s staff noisily discovered the challenges of cooking powdered eggs and potatoes in the kitchen.
“They know where he is, John. Doesn’t that bother you?” Hatfield bristled.
Merrick dug through files of the latest arrests stacked on the table in front of him. “Listen, Bill, I trust Marty to make the right moves. He’s no dummy. If he thinks that surprising them is better than tipping them off, I’ll buy it.”
Hatfield looked at his watch. “We’ve barely more than thirteen hours to go. Why are we being coy here?”
Merrick understood Hatfield’s tendency to panic, but he was tired and wanted to be certain of his judgment, so he glanced at Fisk for reassurance.
“He’s right, Bill,” Fisk said. “We’ve got to give Marty and Louis and Walt their opportunity to clean up this mess.”
Hatfield looked back and forth between Merrick and Fisk. “I can’t believe you two are taking this so calmly. Don’t either of you understand the ramifications of the White House going up in flames? Even if it’s abandoned it will symbolize the extent of our vulnerability and encourage all kinds of terrorist attacks. Anyone with a slingshot will try picking off government employees going to their cars.”
While Merrick reviewed his latest E-mail from the FBI War Room, he said. “I’m not real eager to make a mistake here, Bill. Let these guys do their job. I just spent the past three hours with that damn phone stuck to my ear and I’m getting briefed every thirty minutes. I believe Walt knows what’s at stake.”
Hatfield grimaced but said nothing.
Merrick read from his E-mail. “Walt’s got a task force on its way to Payson already. Apparently, the Gila County Sheriff’s Department has set up roadblocks disguised as sobriety checkpoints so they don’t raise any suspicions, but they’ll scrutinize everything they see. He feels confident that we’re closing in.”
“John, you’re making a mistake,” Hatfield said, with a restrained voice. “This is a golden opportunity to—”
Merrick reached behind the sofa to a button on the wall. He turned the button to the right and Bob Dylan’s nasally voice boomed over the ceiling speakers. Dylan was pining about some cryptic burden that Merrick was sure even the CIA couldn’t decipher. It did, however, drown out Hatfield’s ineffectual argument and that’s all that mattered.
Hatfield stood, pointed to Merrick, and yelled over the dirge of harmonicas and steel guitars. “This is a flagrant miscalculation!”
Merrick held his hand to his ear and shrugged. A few aides poked their head into the doorway to see what the commotion was all about. They got there soon enough to see Hatfield throw up his arms and storm out of the room.
Fisk hopped up and took a seat on the sofa next to Merrick. He centered the laptop in front of him and continued opening E-mail messages in Hatfield’s absence.
“Do you think I’m being too hard on him, Sam?” Merrick asked.
“You know how I feel about him. I plead the fifth.”
Fisk checked the final E-mail. It was forwarded from FBI Headquarters where Kharrazi had been sending his demands. “Look at this,” Fisk elbowed Merrick.
The message was preceded with a note from the Assistant Special Agent in Charge. It read, “This seems legitimate. The trace came back with a dead end. A pre-paid server with a P.O. Box address, never been used before, like the others.”
Merrick scrolled down to the body of the E-mail:
President Merrick,
We both know that your time is running out. You don’t have the support of the American people any longer. I realize that you are hiding in your bunker like the coward you are. Tonight, when the White House explodes into a beautiful fireball, the United States will no longer be under your command. The media will disembowel you publicly and there will be nothing to prevent the impeachment process. Congress will not allow America to be destroyed over the tepid support for a country that means little to its citizens. It’s only your ego that precludes you from doing the right thing and saving your presidency and the nation you swore to defend. Order your troops out of Turkey before midnight, and you will be safe. It is the only logical thing to do.
By now, you must be receiving intelligence suggesting that they cannot find the missiles that will destroy your home. They won’t, Mr. President. And even if they do there is nothing they can do to prevent its launch. They can only expedite it.
I look forward to your press conference.
KK
Fisk shook his head. “Good old fashioned Georgetown education. The asshole knows his politics.”
Merrick looked at him. “He’s right about one thing.” He pointed up. “If this baby takes a hit tonight, I might not be impeached, but I could start packing my bags. It’s six weeks until the election and I haven’t left this damn building in three days. I could count on one hand the amount of votes I’d be certain of, and I’m including me and my wife.”
Fisk scratched his ear. “If you withdraw troops from Turkey, you’re fucked. You would forever be the President that cowered to terrorist demands.”
Merrick nodded, still staring at the E-mail. The reward was nowhere near the risks, reputation or not. Didn’t he have a responsibility to protect U.S. citizens?
“On the other hand,” Fisk added, “if we’re able to find these guys and put this issue to bed, you’d be the President who caught Kemel Kharrazi—the world’s most notorious terrorist.”
Merrick sat back in his chair and folded his arms, still regarding Kharrazi’s words on the screen in front of him. “Missiles.”
“What’s that?”
Merrick pointed to the screen. “He said missiles. As in more than one.”
Fisk patted his friend’s back. “Don’t worry, John, we’ll get him.”
Merrick turned toward him. “You know something that I don’t?”
Fisk picked up a file and began reading, as if the question was never asked.
Merrick pulled a half-unrolled package of Tums from his pocket and with practiced agility popped one into his mouth and crunched down hard on the chalky tablet. “Boy, Sam, this better be good.”
***
Nihad Tansu had taken a lab coat from the supply room and hid a couple of scalpels in his outside coat pocket for easy access. As he approached Julie Bracco’s hospital room he walked directly toward the stocky offic
er guarding the door. He made no pretense to avoid a confrontation. The man stared at him as he smiled a greeting. “Hello, Officer, I’m Dr. Marshall. I believe Marie called you about my visit.”
Tansu had his hand in his coat pocket, ready for a quick nick of the carotid artery. To his credit, the man did not appear comfortable with the last minute addition. He kept a stoic expression, as if he was waiting for Tansu to crack; but Tansu stood his ground, a cheap forgery of a smile planted on his face.
The officer said, “Can I see some I.D.?”
Tansu pulled his fake identification from his pocket and handed it to the man. The officer looked at the photo, then Tansu. Finally, he handed the card back to Tansu and nodded toward the door. “Go ahead.”
Tansu had altered his appearance slightly, dying his hair blonde and adding blue contact lenses. He knew that would be all he needed to get close enough to Julie Bracco to slit her throat.
Tansu abruptly entered the room, hoping that a quick confident entrance would seem more routine. He smiled at the woman sitting up in the bed, but the woman’s head was slumped to the side. Was she dead already? He was actually disappointed that he hadn’t had the chance to be the instrument of her death. Especially after she had the nerve to survive one of his best shots at a moving target.
“She’s been asleep for almost an hour, Doc,” a voice came from corner of the room behind him. A man dressed in a white robe sat cross-legged in a shiny, padded chair scrutinizing the inside of a newspaper. The man had gauze dressing covering half of his face and a long cast on his left leg. A wooden cane leaned against the wall beside him. The man never took his attention away from the newspaper.
“I’m Dr. Marshall,” Tansu said.
The man grunted something that sounded like, “‘Nice seeing ya.’”
The newspaper had a full-length picture of a horse on the cover. The horse posed for the picture with a bouquet of flowers across his back where the saddle normally went. Next to the horse was a tiny midget of a man with a pink shirt.
“Nasty break you got there,” Tansu said, looking at the man’s leg, trying to decide who he should kill first.
“Snapped my metacarpal,” the man said from behind the newspaper.
Tansu shook his head. The man was far too preoccupied to care what he was doing. He turned toward Julie Bracco and made sure the man’s view was blocked. He removed the scalpel from his pocket and palmed it as he leaned over her limp frame. Her face was turned away from him leaving her neck exposed. Tansu felt like a vampire in an old black and white movie, approaching his victim with much the same passion for blood. He quickly glanced back at the man who was still buried deep behind the newspaper. He raised his right hand with the scalpel while his left hand held her head in place. “Mirdin, Mrs. Bracco,” he whispered in her ear.
Suddenly, Tansu found himself lunging for the floor. His head bounced hard on the linoleum. He quickly turned to his side to see what happened. The man in the robe was wagging a finger at him. The straight part of his cane was in the palm of his hand. He had yanked the curved end around Tansu’s ankles and pulled his feet from under him.
“What are you doing?” Tansu said.
“The metacarpal bone is in my hand,” the man said, standing over him, holding up his free hand. “The metatarsal is in my foot. Capisce?”
Tansu saw the man favoring his good leg and realized that he could easily overtake him. The man reached down and picked up the scalpel from the floor. He looked at it with amusement. “Doing a little emergency surgery, Doc?”
Tansu slowly got his legs under him and remained in a crouch position, ready to strike. He was about to jump when he noticed that the man was now holding a gun. A gun with a silencer attached. Tansu was beginning to understand that this man was no ordinary patient. The man held a finger to his mouth. “Shhh, be real still. I’m not going to turn you in.”
Tansu was listening. He knew the man wasn’t a police officer, so maybe he could make a deal with him. In reality, all Tansu wanted was an opening. Just one little mishap or lax moment. He felt the outside of his pocket to make sure the other scalpel was still there. It was.
The man motioned Tansu to get to his feet. “You and I have a lot in common, Mohammed, or whatever your name is. By the way, if you’re from Turkey, does that make you an Arab?”
Tansu didn’t answer.
“Oh, fuck it, you turds are all the same—talk, talk, talk. Can’t shut you guys up.”
Tansu had his hand in his coat pocket now and was removing the plastic sheath from the tip of the scalpel blade.
“Anyway,” the man said, “all I want is a few answers to some simple questions and I’ll have you back on the street in no time.” The man smiled at Tansu. He smiled like a fool without any knowledge of Tansu’s physical abilities. Still, Tansu wished he knew who the man was.
Marie Clarendon sat at her reception desk facing the front door of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was going back and forth between typing an admittance form for a new patient and sneaking glances at her pocket mirror. She kept pulling her skin back on the side of her face the way Dr. Marshall had done. She was imagining how many years her face could have back, when a man in a green sweatshirt walked through the automatic sliding glass door.
Marie snapped her compact shut and immediately returned to her paperwork. The man walked with a slight limp and went directly to the receptionist’s desk.
“Marie?” the man said.
Marie was told by the hospital’s attorneys not to engage the man in conversation. He had filed a lawsuit against one of their doctors for negligence and was using discreet interviews with hospital personnel to incriminate the young internist. He’d already pilfered information from a couple of unsuspecting nurses while pretending to be waiting for a family member in the emergency room. He was a farmer from the south somewhere and his good-old-boy accent lured them into believing he was harmless.
“Marie,” the man said urgently.
Without looking up, Marie said, “I’m not talking to you, Charlie. You already got me in too much trouble.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to use you like that, it’s just that—”
“Go away, Charlie. I’m not listening to you.”
“You don’t understand, one of your doctors is in real trouble.”
Marie tapped away at her keyboard.
“It’s not what you think,” he explained.
Marie stopped and pointed at the man. “I’m telling you for the last time, if you have a complaint, take it up with the administrator. I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“I don’t have any complaint. I’m talking about one of your employees being in trouble. Don’t you care about him?”
“Who?”
“The doctor—that’s who I’m talking about.”
“Which doctor?”
“I don’t know his name exactly.”
“Then how do you know he’s in trouble?”
“Because,” he said, pointing toward the parking lot, “I just saw him jump out of one of your windows.”
Chapter 28
At 35,000 feet the 747 ate up the sky in large chunks. Nick could hear the urgency in the four engines as clouds whipped passed by the windows.
“How fast you think we’re going?” Nick asked Matt, who was scrolling through a Globe, Arizona phone directory on his laptop.
“Huh?”
“How fast do you think we’re going?” Nick repeated.
“Uh, six hundred miles an hour,” Matt said, pointing at the screen with his finger.
“Hmm,” Nick said, already forgetting the question. He was also on a laptop navigating through the FBI’s private website. He’d just receive a new level of security clearance and was now viewing information that had previously been unavailable to him. The most intriguing was the data pertaining to Kemel Kharrazi’s renegade childhood. As he read the gruesome details of Kharrazi’s upbringing, he actually found himself feeling sympathy for the man.
> “I’ve got the Gila County Recorders office,” Matt said, scribbling down a phone number on a legal pad.
“Good. Get a listing of all houses bought in the Payson area over, say, the past twelve months. Have them fax it to the Sheriff’s Office in Payson.”
Matt pressed buttons on his cell phone and Nick could hear him getting right down to business. The seats in the 747 resembled a steakhouse restaurant; there were crescent-shaped leather booths surrounding a round freshly-polished mahogany table. The booths and the tables were all fastened to the floor. In the center of the table was the emblem of the Secretary of Defense—a bald eagle with its wings spread, proudly exposing red, white and blue stripes on it’s chest.
Sitting at a similar setting behind them were agents Ed Tolliver, Carl Rutherford, Mel Downing and Dave Tanner. All four agents began the flight shuffling through files and writing notes. Now, they each seemed to be staring at the ceiling of the jet, until you noticed that their eyes were shut. They looked as if they had been the victims of chemical warfare instead of a simple deterioration of their sleep schedule over the past week. Behind them, sipping on a bottle of Diet Coke by himself, sat Silk. He was reading Forbes magazine with his feet propped up on the table.
Silk looked up and gave Nick a mock salute. Nick shook his head and smiled. He could use an army of Silks right about now.
Nick’s phone rang and saw that it was Johns Hopkins Hospital. He pushed a button. “Julie?”
“No, it’s me.”
