The Rule of Nine

by Steve Martini

  The Mexican was standing three feet away from him, fury in his eyes.

  Herman’s head settled back onto the concrete as his vision went dark and what shallow breath was left abandoned his body.

  With his right arm hanging limp at his side, Liquida kicked the knife out of Herman’s hand. It skidded across the concrete and under one of the cars.

  Liquida was breathing heavily as he heard the pounding of feet on the pavement coming this way. He turned and looked and saw the form of a man running into the dark parking structure from the sunlit outside. He looked down at the dying form at his feet, reached around and felt the warm blood oozing down his own back, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

  I get only a fleeting glimpse of a running form in the distance as I walk and then run down between the lane of parked cars. I see the spreading pool of blood from under Herman’s body as I jump and curse and pound my hands on my thighs.

  “HELP!” I yell at the top of my lungs. “Anybody! I need help now!”

  I am down on both knees hovering over Herman, the man who has saved me so many times. There is blood on his chest but I see no wounds, yet the pool on the concrete beneath him is spreading. “Call an ambulance! I need help!”

  Herman is trying to say something, but he’s unable to speak. He mouths the word “Liquida” and points with a trembling finger toward the bloody stiletto lying on the concrete. He tries to say something else: “Ssss…Sa…” and loses consciousness.

  I roll him over onto his stomach. It takes all my strength. As he goes over I see the wound in his back still oozing blood, then a spurt and bubbles of air.

  “That’s good,” I tell him. I get down in Herman’s ear. “Stay with me,” I tell him. I tear off my shirt, pulling it over my head. “Damn it! Can you hear me?” I scream at the guy in the kiosk out front. “There’s a man dying, I need HELP NOW!”

  I press my shirt against the open wound to seal it, using my knees to apply as much pressure as I can, then grapple for my phone with a bloody finger. I hit the button and look for a signal. Nothing. The concrete of the garage has my phone sealed off. I drop it onto the concrete and yell for help.

  “What’s happened?”

  I turn my head. It’s the guy from the kiosk.

  “Call 911. Get an ambulance. He’s been stabbed.”

  He runs for the door.

  I press down on Herman’s back, trying to clear the blood from his lungs while pressing the shirt against the wound with my knee.

  I am wondering where the police and the FBI are as I try to stanch the bleeding and get him to breathe. I still see bubbles from the wound as I press down on his back.

  “They’re on their way.” The parking attendant from the kiosk is behind me. Then suddenly two or three more people. One of them is a nurse. She grabs her large handbag, reaches inside it, and finds a sandwich in a plastic bag. She opens up the bag, tosses the sandwich, flattens the bag out, and says: “Move that!” She’s talking about my bloody shirt.

  She lifts Herman’s blood-soaked shirt, pulling it out of the way, and places the plastic sandwich bag directly over the open wound. “Here, help me get his belt off.”

  I roll him up onto his side, reach underneath, and unbuckle it.

  She grabs the buckle end and yanks it several times until it comes free from his pants. She puts the belt under his chest, tells me to lay him down flat on his stomach, and fastens the belt directly over the plastic bag and the wound. She runs the open end of the belt through the buckle and pulls it as tight as she can. She puts her knee against the center of his back and pulls harder. “I know this looks bad, but it’s a sucking chest wound and I have to seal it off or else he’ll drown in his own blood.”

  I notice that the bubbles stop.

  She opens Herman’s mouth, reaches between his teeth with two fingers, and scoops out blood. She does this two or three times, each time reaching back farther toward his throat to clear his airway.

  We roll him onto his back and she starts doing heavy compressions on his chest as I open his mouth, move his tongue out of the way, and try to blow air into his lungs.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Zeb Thorpe had been in the command center at FBI headquarters since shortly after six that morning. He was called in early on an emergency in New York and was busy watching live images on a screen as transit authorities, police in New York, and construction workers tried to stabilize a cement truck and pull it away from an open cavern over the Fulton Street subway station.

  Transit police had managed to stop the truck, but four of the eight rear wheels on the dual doubles were already over the edge of the hole.

  Thorpe believed he already knew what was on board the truck, and it wasn’t cement. Victor Soyev, the Russian arms merchant, had given them leads, all of them pointing to New York as the target. Thorpe’s people had turned over every rock until they found the garage in upstate New York where the work had been done. From there they were within hours of running the thing down when the cement truck turned up at the building site.

  The bomb squad had already confirmed that the mixing drum on the back of the truck was welded into position so that it couldn’t turn. And there were wires leading from the drum through holes in the cab to a metal box that appeared to be a triggering device. Transit police had shot the driver dead before his hands could reach the trigger.

  But if the rear wheels slid a few more inches, the front end of the truck would lift up and the entire vehicle would tumble into the open cavern below. The bomb squad was concerned that a trembler switch might be connected to the detonator. If so, any sudden jarring would set it off.

  Authorities were desperately trying to clear the subway below, to get everyone out, as workers used a heavy cable from one of the construction cranes and a D9 Caterpillar bulldozer to try to stabilize the truck and pull it back from the opening. The question was whether the bulldozer was heavy enough, or if the weight of the truck and the mammoth air-fuel bomb might pull the entire truck down into the hole.

  “Mr. Thorpe, telephone call for you on line one.” It was Thorpe’s secretary, her head through the door. “Caller says it’s urgent.”

  “Not now,” said Thorpe. “Who is it?”

  “Mr. Madriani.”

  “Take a message,” said Thorpe. “Tell him to turn on his television, cable news. Tell him I’ll call him back.”

  “He says his investigator has just been stabbed. It happened right here in the city, near a hotel downtown just a few minutes ago. He says a man named Liquida did it.”

  “Tell him to call the police,” said Thorpe.

  “He already has. He says paramedics are working on the man who was stabbed, but that it doesn’t look good. He wants to know why our agents weren’t there.”

  “What’s he talking about? The last I heard, Madriani was headed out of the States somewhere. Puerto Rico, as I recall. Are we supposed to be everywhere?” said Thorpe.

  “He says somebody by the name of Thorn got away. And that he’s up to something near the Capitol.”

  “Tell him not now. I’ll have to call him back. Get a number.”

  Joselyn finished getting dressed, then checked her watch. It was almost ten o’clock. She was wondering how Herman could be so sure that the police and the FBI had fallen down on the job and that Thorn was running free. After all, Joselyn had had assurances direct from the lips of god that the authorities were on top of it.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to check, but she didn’t want to insult him. After all, he was the one who’d fed her the highly secretive information on the loose nuke in Coronado involved in the attack on the navy base. He was her compatriot in crime when it came to insider stuff whenever the government was trying to hide things under the nutshell of national security.

  The man knew where all the bodies were buried because of his status, his position and unique access to information. And for that reason Joselyn had to protect him. Portions of what he had told her over the ye
ars were sufficiently sensitive that he could go to jail if the facts were known.

  Because of the risks he took in a worthwhile cause, she considered him a true patriot. It was too early to reach him in the office, but Joselyn had his private cell number.

  She had to tell him that Thorn was on the move, roaming near the Capitol. He would want to know, even if the FBI had everything under control. She called up the contact list on her iPhone and thumbed in the first three letters. She hadn’t even gotten to the h when the words “Joshua Root, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” popped up on the phone’s screen.

  As soon as the paramedics arrived, the nurse and I moved back and allowed them to take over. There was no FBI, and the only police on the scene were the first responders who had come in just ahead of the ambulance.

  Nobody other than Herman was watching Thorn. According to Thorpe’s secretary, he had no agents on the ground tracking Thorn. What was worse, he didn’t have a clue as to what Thorn was up to in Washington. What had happened to all of Joselyn’s phone calls and the assurances from her contact?

  Herman lies on the ground surrounded by a growing throng of gawkers as the paramedics work furiously trying to keep him alive. Swallowed up in the emerging crowd, I have never felt so alone in my life.

  My blood-soaked shirt lies balled up on the concrete next to Herman’s body. One of the firemen from the pumper truck that accompanied the ambulance hands me a yellow fire jacket from the back of the truck. I put it on to cover my bare, blood-streaked upper body.

  The ambulance and fire truck block the garage entrance and exit as police cordon off the entire area around the building with yellow tape. The paramedics have now been at it for more than ten minutes. You can read it in their eyes, see it on their faces as they work feverishly; Herman isn’t going to make it.

  He lies unconscious on his back on a flat body board as they work on him. His head is back, Adam’s apple protruding, eyes half open in that glazed look of death. They are having trouble finding a pulse. They started an IV but his blood pressure keeps dropping until the monitor finally flatlines.

  One of the paramedics rips Herman’s shirt down the middle with a pair of scissors. He reaches over, grabs the portable paddles from the defibrillator, and then flips the dial. “Clear!” Everybody backs away. He places the paddles diagonally across Herman’s chest and pulls the trigger. Herman’s upper body heaves as his back arches up off the body board.

  The monitor beeps and a weak pulse jots across the screen and then goes flat.

  “Again.” The paramedic lifts the paddles and hits the switch on the defibrillator. The machine makes a whining sound as it re-charges the coil. “Clear!” They back away once more. Herman’s body arches up again and the monitor picks up the blip as his heart muscle convulses with the electrical shock.

  “Sir, please step back. Let them do their work.” One of the cops in uniform starts to push me back.

  I can see the ragged edge of a weak pulse as it blips across the screen, like a car on a cold morning trying to start.

  “Is he going to make it?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” said the paramedic. “Internal bleeding, sucking chest wound. Got his heart going but we gotta get him to the ER now. Let’s move. Check that belt across his chest. Make sure it’s tight. Who put it on?”

  “I did,” said the female nurse. “With help from the man standing behind you.”

  “You guys did a good job,” he says.

  Four of the firemen lift the body board with Herman on it as one of the paramedics holds the bag with the IV in the air so that gravity can continue to feed fluid into Herman’s body. “Keep pressure on that wound.”

  “Sir!” One of the uniformed cops is standing behind me. “Did you see what happened? The nurse over here says you were the first one on the scene.”

  “He was already down when I got here,” I tell him. “But I know who did it.”

  “Who?”

  “A man named Liquida,” I tell him. “A Mexican contract killer who works with the drug cartels.”

  “Can you spell the name for me?” he says.

  “It’s not his real name. It’s what he goes by, an alias,” I tell him. I spell it for him.

  “How do you know this man did it?”

  “Because Herman told me.”

  “So you knew the victim?” he says.

  “He works for me. Scratch that,” I tell him. “Herman Diggs is my friend.”

  “I’m going to need a detailed statement from you, and some identification,” says the cop.

  “I don’t have time right now,” I tell him.

  “You’re gonna have to make time,” he says.

  I try to tell him about Thorn, the fact that Herman was following him, that he apparently escaped from the garage, about the jet down in Puerto Rico. And that unless I’m mistaken, something major is about to happen here in Washington. “There is no time to talk,” I tell him. “We need to move and move quickly to find Thorn.”

  The cop looks at me like I’m crazy. He tells me to calm down, to give him my name and address, or perhaps better yet, we should go downtown where they can get a more detailed statement. He asks for my driver’s license, some ID.

  There is no time for this. Thorn is on the loose. So is Liquida, and Joselyn is back in the room, alone.

  I tell the cop to give me a minute, that I have to make a phone call and to get a signal I’m going to have to go over by the door.

  He says fine, tells me not to leave, and turns his back for a moment.

  I walk over toward the kiosk at the entrance and take out my cell phone. It is spotted with blood and scratched where I tossed it on the concrete. I call Joselyn’s cell number to tell her what’s happened. The call goes directly through to her voice mail. Either her phone is turned off, or it’s busy, or else …

  FORTY-SIX

  Two hours after the fiery wreckage splashed into the Atlantic, and eleven hundred miles to the northwest, the phantom FedEx 727 passed over the outer continental shelf just a few miles north of Cape Hatteras.

  Ten minutes later Ahmed and Masud saw the coastline as it passed beneath them somewhere near Virginia Beach. They could see the mouth of the Chesapeake yawning directly in front of them.

  Suddenly the onboard VHF radio came to life. “Squawk 1423, this is Potomac air traffic control. Please identify yourself.”

  “Take over.” Ahmed turned over the flight controls to Masud, reached over, and flipped the switch on the radio. “Potomac, this is FedEx flight 9303, on route from Rafael Hernández Airport in Puerto Rico bound for Newark Liberty Airport. We’re showing a serious hydraulic problem, requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

  “Flight 9303, this is Potomac air control, say again? Are you reporting an in-flight emergency?”

  “Affirmative,” said Ahmed. “We have shut down starboard engine overheating and show loss of hydraulic controls. Requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

  Ahmed looked at Masud, who glanced over at him.

  “Flight 9303, this is Potomac. Descend to eighteen thousand feet and await further instructions.”

  Ahmed reached over and pushed the throttle controls all the way forward. He goosed their speed to just over six hundred miles an hour and told Masud to maintain their present heading and altitude. They were on a beeline flying directly toward downtown Washington, D.C.

  Ahmed knew that air traffic control would never clear them to land at Reagan National Airport. The tactic now was to stall for time. The plane was nothing more than an aerial platform for the fuel-air thermobaric bomb tucked away in the ramp of the airstairs in the rear. In order to deliver it to the target, speed and elevation were everything.

  Ahmed did some quick calculations in his head. They were roughly a hundred and twenty miles out; at six hundred miles an hour, ten miles a minute, they only had to stall for twelve minutes to reach the target, and not even that if they could maintain altitude. At
their current altitude with its front-end canard controls and big rear fins, the bomb had a glide range of almost thirteen miles.

  “Potomac air control to flight 9303, you are instructed to descend to eighteen thousand feet, do you read?”

  “Potomac, this is flight 9303. We are having problems with flight surfaces due to hydraulic failure. Trying to descend at this time,” said Ahmed.

  “This is Potomac air control. How serious is the emergency?”

  Ahmed looked at Masud, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled.

  “Potomac, we’re not sure at this time. We are having some difficulty with flight controls.”

  He muted the radio for a second. “Descend. We’ll give them two thousand feet and then report more problems,” he told Masud.

  It was as if the bottom fell out of the plane. They dropped quickly down to twenty-three thousand feet.

  “This is Potomac air control. One moment.”

  The air defensive zone around Washington had been beefed up and expanded following the attacks on 9/11. The no-fly zone had been extended out to a radius of between fifteen to seventeen statute miles from the Capitol and the White House. But politicians had already compromised the system, and the military had tipped their hand concerning their willingness to use dire tactics in the event of aircraft violating the zone.

  At one point the governor of Kentucky had accidentally wandered into the defensive zone in a private plane, which had caused the entire Capitol to be evacuated.

  It was the problem with Washington. Wherever there were people of wealth and power, you could expect that rules would be broken. It was one thing to shoot down a commercial jetliner with a few hundred tax-paying drones on board, all strapped into their seats so they couldn’t even pee for the last hour of the flight. It was another to fire on a jet-powered ego container taking members of Congress to some lobbyist-paid junket. And around Washington, odds were that if you shot down a plane, there was more than a fair chance it might have somebody important on board.