Ground Truth

by Rob Sangster

  “Maybe he was in Denver, but he was aboard Air Force One at Travis Air Force Base in California when he got your e-mail. That’s Pacific time.”

  Montana’s face registered disbelief, then fury, as he processed what he’d just heard.

  “You know about my e-mail to Gorton?” Montana’s voice was deadly. “And my deadline? Then you’ve talked with Gorton and you know about the bombs.”

  Maybe that’s all he’ll figure out.

  “You bastard!” Montana shouted. He’d obviously figured out the rest of it. “You told him about me.” Then he gave Jack a sly look. “But he didn’t believe you, or the Marines would have surrounded this place. So now you’re really fucked.”

  “I told Gorton who you are and that you would carry out your threat,” Jack said. “If I hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have gotten a penny. Contact Gorton again. I have his direct phone number. Give the location of one bomb so he’ll know you can do what you say.”

  And maybe, he desperately hoped, hearing that will change Gorton’s mind.

  “He’ll know where the first bomb is at any moment. Right after I talked to The Ape a minute ago, I sent Gorton my Albuquerque e-mail. By God, he’ll pay now.” He looked back down at the computer screen.

  If Montana had threatened to detonate a bomb in Albuquerque, Gorton might panic and wire the money. Looking at Montana’s grim expression, Jack was no longer sure that would make any difference. Montana was so angry he didn’t care about the time zone screwup. He might blow the bombs just to punish Gorton.

  Jack had to make a move. He couldn’t get to Montana; the desk was between them. Could he throw something? He glanced around. Nothing within reach except . . . he cut a quick look back at the Aztec antiquities in the open box behind him. Pieces of pottery and clay sculptures rested on top. Worthless as weapons, but priceless to Montana. He glanced at Debra. Her eyes were fixed on him. He had to signal her without getting caught. He glanced back to Montana.

  “Casa Lupo,” he said loudly.

  Montana looked at him. “What?”

  “Casa Lupo,” he said again, louder.

  “Shut up,” Montana snapped and looked down again.

  Jack reached back slowly, not daring to look, and lifted a pottery double-cup out of the box. He said “Casa Lupo” for the third time. Debra looked puzzled but alert.

  When Montana looked up from the computer, Jack tossed the cup onto the floor where it shattered.

  “Hey!” Montana shouted. “That’s a 15th century—”

  Jack snatched a ceramic sculpture of an eagle and held it in front of him at shoulder height. “Shoot me and it drops.”

  Montana sprang to his feet, grabbed his gun, and rushed from behind the desk to save his treasure.

  As Montana passed in front of Debra, she jackknifed her knees to her chest and drove both shoes into Montana’s back with all the strength she had left. Propelled forward, Montana landed hard, screaming as his bandaged hand hit the floor. His gun slid across the room and under a couch.

  As Montana scrambled to his feet, Jack rammed into him with his shoulder. Both of them went down. Jack rolled and came to his feet to the right of the stairs.

  Montana tried to reach the gun and couldn’t, so he jerked a curved, double-edged sword out of a tall box. It looked lethal.

  Jack spotted a ceremonial sword hanging on the wall whose wooden shaft had shards of black obsidian imbedded in it like rows of shark’s teeth. He seized it.

  Montana glanced at Debra, who was yelling muffled words into the packing tape. “You’re next, bitch,” he said, then advanced on Jack. “That’s an Aztec sword. Too bad for you, they never got out of the Stone Age. One swing with this,” he whirled his blade around his head making a sound like a wind turbine, “could cut an Aztec in half.”

  Jack doubted his own sword could cut a pineapple in half. For God’s sake, where was Gano?

  Jack barely got the wooden shaft vertical to block Montana’s first slashing blow. It sent splinters of wood flying. Montana’s immediate backhanded swing hacked into the shaft, cutting a deep notch. Montana pressed forward, poking short jabs at Jack’s midsection. Jack countered, but the weight of the stone chips made his weapon top-heavy and clumsy. He back-pedaled as Montana’s next swing chopped another gash in the wood shaft. He blocked Montana’s assault, but the shaft had cracked, was about to fail. Another slash at Jack’s leg missed, and the steel blade knocked over a light stand.

  Jack could tell Montana was toying with him, probably showing off in front of Debra. But he also noticed that Montana was awkward, gripping his sword with both hands, which meant his bandaged right hand was too painful to swing it alone. Jack swung his sword like a club in a horizontal arc and landed the blow on the bandaged hand as hard as he could.

  Montana howled in agony.

  Jack ducked inside and ripped a row of his sword’s razor-edge obsidian spikes into Montana’s left thigh. They penetrated his trousers and stuck into flesh. Montana screamed and jumped away. The stone points stuck in the fabric and jerked the wood shaft out of Jack’s grasp.

  Montana, maddened by pain and anger, moved in, limping, carving the air with the sword blade. Afraid to look away, Jack stumbled backward and tripped over a low table. He crashed down on his side.

  Montana straddled him, dripping sweat. He raised the steel sword to deliver the single blow that cut Aztecs in half.

  Chapter 52

  July 12

  6:45 p.m.

  JUSTIN SINCLAIR felt Air Force One level out as it reached cruising altitude after its emergency departure from Travis. It was bound for Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C.

  He’d paid no attention to the names of the men who had boarded just before takeoff, but he remembered their jobs: a senior NSA rep, a deputy assistant Secretary of State for Counter-Terrorism who happened to be at Travis, and a Marine Lt. Colonel with special weapons training. They had been hastily assembled in case they could be useful, but they were bit players, unlikely to voice an opinion, much less disagree with anyone senior to them. Locked in a pressure cooker, they weren’t used to this kind of heat.

  Corte, in a corner tapping away at his communications device, was different. He was both a trained technician and a warrior eager to engage an enemy.

  Sinclair glanced at Gorton sitting at the end of the table signing documents, ignoring him. In just minutes, Gorton had lost his usual tanned, robust persona. Now he looked gray and fatigued. He was in deep denial, hiding in routine paperwork instead of dealing with looming danger.

  The terrorist threat had given Strider a reprieve, and if he actually found Montana in Juarez, Montana would take him out. If that didn’t happen, Justin would make sure Strider never got another shot at Gorton again. Damn, how had he misjudged Strider so badly?

  He slid back into the chair next to Gorton. “You realize that everything Strider said was a lie,” he said in a confidential tone. “Every time you pressed him for proof, he changed the subject. He has a screw loose. Paranoid for sure.”

  Gorton didn’t contradict him so he continued. “It was about revenge. He’s obsessed with the idea that Arthur Palmer had it in for him. That probably led to his hatred for that man, Montana. On top of that, Strider’s father did those terrible things and Strider got the shaft big time. So he has a hard on for me, you, the whole damn world.”

  Gorton glanced at him. “I’m not so sure. The details he gave about what Montana is doing were pretty damned persuasive.”

  “That’s because he’s convinced himself it’s true. I’ll assign a dozen of my best lawyers to look into his claims. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  Gorton set down his pen. “You’re the one who pressed me to meet with the guy in the first place. And don’t tell me you were being nice to him. ‘Nice’ isn’t your style.”<
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  “Strider showed up in my office yesterday and threw out a bunch of wild accusations. Then he demanded I set up a meeting with you. I refused. He threatened to go to the media and, unfortunately, he has some good contacts. He threatened you the same way a little while ago. He’d claim you refused to talk with him about threats to national security. Thinking about what would be best for you, I agreed to set up the meeting.”

  Gorton looked at him as though appraising him at a first meeting before saying, “I’m the one who decides what’s best for me. Now I have to make some calls.”

  He turned away and gave instructions to the Director of Homeland Security to have all agencies get the word out around the country to be vigilant for anything out of the ordinary, especially in major central business districts.

  Anything out of the ordinary? Justin thought derisively, and imagined the Director trying to make sense out of something that vague. The Director would know the President had a reason for being imprecise so she wouldn’t press him. Instead, she’d put the whole country on alert to play blindman’s bluff. Gorton was walking a tightrope. He wanted to be able to claim, if he ever had to, that he’d put out sufficient warning, but he didn’t want to start a panic.

  Gorton was ten parts politician and no parts soldier.

  When Gorton slumped in his chair and closed his eyes, everyone quieted immediately. Brigadier General Spinner, the senior NSA rep, lowered his coffee cup to the table without making a sound.

  Sunlight paled as Air Force One sped east with the jet stream. Justin felt the occasional shudder as the fuselage encountered turbulence. He checked his pocket watch, a Patek Philippe, a gift from a now deceased member of the Forbes family. The timepiece showed there was almost an hour before the deadline. Whatever it took, he’d keep Gorton from caving in and paying the $100 million.

  Suddenly, Gorton sat up straight. As he had several times already, he pushed the “Communications Officer” button on the speaker phone. “Lieutenant, have your guys picked up reports of anything unusual?”

  “No sir. We’ve been scanning the country, like you told us, listening in on 911 and major city fire department frequencies. We’ve also tapped three TV network satellites, and we’re working the major Internet service providers. If anything big happens, we’ll know about it.”

  “You’re doing a heck of a job, Lieutenant. Keep it up. That’s all.” He clicked off, looked at his watch, and announced to the room, “Well, guys, this will be over in an hour.” Everyone murmured agreement.

  Justin studied his old friend and wondered what Gorton, in his gut, really expected to happen. Did he believe it was all a fraud? Or did he expect one or more dirty bombs to explode in major cities? Did he think payment would make any difference?

  Gorton leaned toward him and said in a low voice, “I hate to admit it, but I’m still sweating.”

  “You made the right call.” Yeah, except that Gorton would already have paid off like a broken slot machine if he and Corte hadn’t talked him out of it.

  Someone knocked at the door hard, insistently. Everyone stopped talking. Corte opened the door and took an envelope from the Chief. For a moment he seemed about to open it himself. Then he handed it to the President.

  Gorton took the envelope and stared at it. Justin knew he didn’t want to open it, didn’t want to have to deal with anything new. His resilience was gone, like a boxer who wishes the ref would stop the fight. Seconds ticked away as Gorton did nothing.

  “Mr. President?” Justin prodded.

  Gorton started, carefully opened the sealed envelope, as though he planned to reuse it, and pulled out the single sheet. It was another e-mail. He turned away from the others to read it.

  “It’s the terrorists.” He sounded annoyed, as though someone had stepped on a toe of his newly-shined Sorrell Custom cowboy boots. “They give me fifteen minutes to pay the $100 million, or they’ll detonate the rest of the bombs. What do they mean, ‘the rest of the bombs?’ That sounds like they’ve set off one already.”

  “That can’t be right,” Corte boomed. “We have almost an hour before their damn deadline.”

  “Shut up, Corte,” Gorton snapped. “I have to—”

  “Mr. President,” General Spinner said softly, as if he didn’t want to be heard.

  “Not now, Spinner.”

  “Sir, we may have miscalculated,” Spinner persisted, rising and moving toward the door.

  “Who’s this ‘we,’ General? Do you mean your gang that can’t shoot straight has fucked up again?”

  Sinclair saw the shock in Spinner’s face at being addressed that way by his Commander-in-Chief.

  Spinner swallowed hard and said, “The first e-mail set the deadline at seven p.m. Since we were in California, we assumed that meant Pacific Time, but what if the deadline referred to seven p.m. in some other time zone? In all other U.S. time zones, seven p.m. has already passed.”

  Around the room, faces of the newcomers showed stunned disbelief that such a kindergarten mistake had been made. Their silence proved that they realized the consequences of the blunder.

  “Mr. President,” Corte said, “there have been no reports of any explosion. These people are demanding payment within fifteen minutes to keep us from checking it out. It’s a bluff.”

  “Their new deadline is only a few minutes from now,” Gorton croaked. He swiped his forehead with his fingers. “I’ve already had Treasury set up the transfer mechanics. The money could be in Switzerland in a few seconds.”

  Before the President could collapse completely, Justin walked behind him to read the e-mail over his shoulder. Could be a real terrorist, or it could be a bluff. But if the senders were on the East Coast, they would have thought their deadline had passed hours ago. The sender of this e-mail seemed to think it had just passed. That meant they were probably in the Mountain Time Zone, a one hour difference. He realized that he knew something very important. Juarez and El Paso were in that Mountain Time Zone. If this was from Montana, he might think his deadline had passed minutes ago. He looked up. Corte, watching him, shook his head, clearly expecting him to keep Gorton from giving in to a terrorist.

  What should he do? His mind raced through the maze. What if it was Montana and he wasn’t bluffing? If a dirty bomb detonated anywhere, Strider would insist the perpetrator was Tom Montana, and Justin Sinclair had put him in position to do it. Initially, he’d steered Gorton away from the blackmail explanation because it could too easily have pointed to Montana—and to him. Now the greater danger to him was that a bomb would actually devastate some city, and he’d be implicated in that. Time to change horses fast. Time to shut down Corte and talk Gorton into making that payment.

  Before he could say anything, Corte spoke. “Mr. President, please listen to this language in the original e-mail. ‘Transfer $100 million to us before seven p.m. today or we will detonate all of these bombs.’ Now they’re claiming just one. You called their bluff. Now they’re trying to spook you with another fake. There’s a saying that a dog with no teeth barks loudest.”

  “Mr. Corte is being simplistic,” Justin said. “In the first e-mail, the claim they could detonate multiple dirty bombs was for shock value. Referring to a single bomb in this e-mail doesn’t mean they’re backing off or bluffing. It means they know that even one explosion will ensure payment in full. If a bomb has exploded, you’ll be blamed for not making the payment to stop others.” He paused, then lowered the tone of his voice for greater impact. “Send the money now.”

  Corte’s mouth opened like a fish at Justin’s one hundred and eighty degree reversal. He stood even taller, frowned, and said in his deep bass, “Mr. President. You can’t deal with terrorists. You have to be strong and stay the course.”

  “Stay the course,” Gorton said in a mechanical voice.

  The man from Counter-Terrorism at State
said, “Mr. President, from a political point of view, I agree with Mr. Corte. At a Senate Hearing they’d say, ‘The President took $100 million from taxpayers and gave it to someone whose only demonstrated capability was sending e-mails. Suppose this turns out to be a fraternity prank? Or it’s from some radical in Yemen who will use the money to sink U.S. ships? They’d call you, forgive me sir, gullible. With the election coming up . . .” He didn’t need to finish.

  Gorton’s face told Justin that the discussion was over. Two clever nobodies had just outmaneuvered him and pushed the right buttons to manipulate the vacillating President. All he could do now was hope the e-mail wasn’t from Montana.

  “Our entire intelligence apparatus is on alert,” Gorton said. “If a bomb had gone off, we’d know about it by now. We’ll stand pat and this will be the last we hear from these people.”

  The banging at the door and the ring of the red phone were simultaneous.

  Chapter 53

  July 12

  7:20 p.m. MST

  JACK COCKED both legs, ready to lash up at the blade when it chopped down. Suddenly, the air filled with a thunder clap. Splinters of glass rained down. He rolled away as the sword hanging over him crashed to the floor.

  Montana stood with both hands pressed to his chest, eyes wide, staring at Jack with a fixed gaze. Gurgling, he stumbled across the room to a side door, struggled to unlock it, and walked slowly outside, hands now dangling at his sides.

  “You kiddies okay?” Gano asked from outside. He was looking through the shattered window, the muzzle of the Mossberg 935 now pointing at the ceiling. “Sorry about the delay. This place is like a vault and all the drapes are drawn. I knew Montana would have a gun on you, but I couldn’t see him to take a shot until you got him moving around in front of the slit in the drapes.”

  “He’s getting away,” Jack called as he scrambled to his feet and ran to Debra. “Stop him.”