The Bid

by Adrian Magson

  He stared at her in confusion. “What? Me? How can you think that? I did some chemistry at NYU, sure—that was part of the course. But I’m not a chemist! I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff!”

  Ruth sat back, giving him the time and space to calm down. His voice carried a worrying ring of truth, and she decided that if Donny was playing them as Wright had claimed, he was a world-class actor.

  “All right,” she said. “Tell me about Freedom. What does that refer to?” She deliberately didn’t tell him where she’d seen the word; she was hoping that if he knew it he’d work it out for himself.

  He frowned and scrubbed at his cheeks. “Freedom? I don’t know. Malak never said exactly. He used the word all the time but in different ways, like it was some kind of mantra. But he said lots of things without going into detail … like he was talking to himself. I think there were times when … it was like he wasn’t even aware of me.”

  “Because he didn’t think you were important enough?”

  “I guess. I never thought about it before.” He looked miserable and refused to meet her eye, and Ruth figured Donny was trying to come to grips with the knowledge that he’d only ever been a small cog in the machine, unimportant and no doubt easily expendable.

  “Okay. Let’s assume he wasn’t talking about freedom as a concept, like freedom from repression, freedom of speech, or stuff like that. Did he use the word like … I don’t know—a place or a code, for example?”

  “Field. Freedom Field.” He looked up and blinked, like a small light had gone on. “He said that the day before I … left. I asked him where we were going and he said Freedom Field. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “So it’s a place. Where?”

  “I don’t know. He said the name … only not to me or Bilal; it was just something he mentioned sometimes.”

  “What was the context?”

  “Huh?”

  “What else was he saying at the time? Did he say, ‘We must go to Freedom Field,’ or ‘How do we get to Freedom Field?’ Words like that. The context.”

  “Oh, right.” He bit his lip and said, “I recall at the time he was, like, angry, but it wasn’t at me for crashing the drones.”

  “Like angry?”

  “Intense. He did that occasionally, going into some other place, like he was reminding himself about what he had to do.” Donny snapped his fingers a couple of times, then said, “I’ve got it: he said Freedom Field, then something I can’t remember and ‘the fools will regret honouring the fallen because it’s going to come back and bite them.’ That was it—I don’t remember the rest.”

  Ruth thought it over. Honouring the fallen? That sounded like a garden of remembrance. But there were hundreds, thousands of those scattered across the country, with one in most towns and cities. “Fine. One last point, Donny, then you can get something to eat. Would you like that?”

  “Yes, please. I think I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. My point is, this entire plan is bigger than it seems. Bigger than one man’s idea for inflicting a blow on the United States; bigger than merely leaving a car bomb in a crowded place timed to explode, which is much easier. This is about chemicals—a dirty bomb. And a unique form of delivery. You don’t exactly pick up dangerous chemicals or drones at B&Q, do you?”

  “Huh?” He looked puzzled and Ruth realised he’d never heard of the British DIY chain.

  “Like Home Depot.”

  “Oh.”

  “Instead, Malak would have needed financing and resources and manpower to get it going. And that’s a lot more than a single man could do. You agree?”

  “Yes. I guess. But I never saw anybody else except for him and Bilal.”

  “Ah, yes. Bilal Ammar. We know he’s no organiser. He’s a lump of muscle.”

  Donny scowled. “He’s a pig. I hate him!”

  “I’m not surprised. He’s hardly in the same league as you, is he?” She decided to throw in a change of direction. “Was it Bilal who killed the construction crew?”

  His mouth dropped open again and he went pale. “I had nothing to do with that … it was all them, I promise you.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It was before Chadwick arrived. I was sent out to the far end of the runway because Malak wanted me to test one of the drones, to see that it worked and to try out a few simple manoeuvres. I did as he ordered and made sure it was assembled and functioning properly, then made some very simple manoeuvres.” He hesitated and looked away. “I went even farther than he told me because I didn’t want him to see me if I made a mistake. While I was running the motors I thought I heard some noises, but I was concentrating on not crashing the drone, so I never gave it another thought.”

  “What sort of noises?”

  “Popping noises … very fast, but not loud.”

  “You mean gunshots.”

  “Yes—but I didn’t know that at the time, I swear!”

  “Go on.”

  “When I got back Bilal was walking around outside the hangar waving an assault rifle. He was grinning like he always did and I could see and smell the gunsmoke in the air. He was also excited, which made me feel sick.” When Ruth looked blank he explained, “He was clutching his groin and showing off his arousal to me as if I’d be impressed!”

  “What had he done?”

  “He showed me the hole in the floor where the dead men were lying. I couldn’t believe it. He said Malak had ordered him to kill them all because they had demanded more money for finishing early. Malak had refused and one of the men had threatened to tell the police. Malak ordered them into the pit and … Bilal shot them.” He shook his head. “You have to believe me, I had nothing to do with it.”

  Ruth breathed out slowly. It was most likely that Malak had never intended letting the men go in the first place. Once paid off, all it would have taken was for one of them to talk about what they’d been told to do, and his whole plan would have been thrown into disarray. “Very well. Let’s get back to Malak. Where does he get his money? How does he have a call on the men he needed to watch Chadwick and his family in England and here in the States; to watch me … even to follow me halfway across America?”

  There was a long pause while Donny digested and processed the question. Then he said, “He talks to people all the time—pretty much every day.”

  “By phone?”

  “Yes. He has many. He keeps them in a box. He uses them once and throws them away.”

  “So how do these people contact him in return?”

  “They don’t. He calls them—although sometimes he allows them to text him, but only once. Then he disposes of the cell. He says it’s a fool-proof system so the CIA and NSA can’t find him.”

  “Do you know who these people are?”

  He lifted his shoulders. “No idea. And I never heard what he said to them. I’ve never seen him with anybody, but he kept disappearing during the day while Bilal and I slept, and he never seemed to stay in the same motel as us. I assumed he was meeting up with people to discuss his plan. But about a week ago I saw him checking his laptop and he was furious about the lack of a signal because he couldn’t contact anybody. He said a meeting would have to be postponed and the bid would fail.”

  “A bid for what?”

  “I don’t know. A bid—that’s all I heard.”

  Ruth’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen. It was Brasher. She was tempted to ignore it but figured it must be important. She excused herself and said, “Yes?”

  “I think I know what he means by that,” Brasher murmured softly. “Get out here. We need to talk.”

  “I have one more question,” she insisted. “The main one. It’s critical.”

  Brasher didn’t reply immediately, but she heard Special Agent Wright talking angrily in the background. Eventu
ally Brasher said, “Go ahead but make it quick.”

  Ruth disconnected and turned back to Donny. “Let’s go back to the plan. Malak’s going to use the drone to spray a chemical agent over the target, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know what that is. Presumably it will be a toxic substance.”

  “Yes. He says he had another chemist put it together. But I don’t know what it is.”

  “How does he plan to do that—to release it, I mean?”

  “There are set coordinates fed into the flight controls. Once there, a signal will activate the trigger and … and the spray begins to operate.”

  “Tell me about the delivery system. How will the drone get to the target? Is that what Chadwick is there for, now you’re no longer around?”

  “I suppose. I think he decided to use Chadwick in the end anyway, because of the complexity of flying the drones. I wasn’t able to keep even one in the air, let alone four.”

  Ruth felt a chill down her back. After knowing what had happened to the construction crew it was easy to guess what Chadwick’s fate would be once the deed was done. Then something else hit her. “Four? What do you mean?”

  Donny shrugged. “Malak had me show him how to feed the numbers into the controller for all four drones. Thirty-four degrees seventy north,” he recited automatically, “ninety-nine-twenty-five west.”

  She didn’t need to ask what the numbers referred to; instinct told her they were the map coordinates for the Altus Air Force base.

  “Four drones.”

  “Yes. It should have been six, but I crashed two and that really made him pissed.” He flushed. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “They start off in different places, but they’ll converge as they get closer to the target area. That way Malak said there will be a better chance of at least one of them getting through. He said it was for a military target, not civilian.”

  “And you believed him?”

  He nodded. “That’s all I know.”

  Ruth didn’t want to ask, but had to. She knew from what Vaslik had said earlier when looking at the possible target bases that Altus had anything from upwards of four thousand personnel there at any one time. And that wasn’t counting families, visitors, and the surrounding population. Her lips were dry, but she didn’t dare lick them.

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “Death. He said many people would die. Hundreds, possibly more.”

  forty

  Ruth left Donny in the care of a guard and stepped out into the corridor. She found the atmosphere electric, with Special Agent Wright stalking away towards the front of the building and Tom Brasher calling her back.

  Wright ignored him and slammed through the door, her shoulders stiff with anger.

  Vaslik was standing inside the adjacent room looking nonplussed. Ruth said to him, “What’s going on?”

  “She’s going over Brasher’s head to her supervisor to get him to alert Homeland Security and the Department of Defence. She heard what you got out of Donny and told Brasher he had to call it in now and launch a general alert and a major search of the area. Brasher said not yet and she flipped.”

  “What set it off ?”

  He winced. “Brasher told her those were the questions she should have been asking.”

  “He’s right; she totally missed the point. And we’d be crazy to sound a general alert—we have to find these people first. If the authorities flood the area with personnel, they’ll go underground and try again somewhere else.”

  “I agree.”

  Brasher turned back towards them and sighed in resignation. “I’ll have to let her go. I can’t stop her without locking her in a cell. She might come to her senses once she calms down. I guess I could have handled it better.”

  Ruth wasn’t so certain. Under the clean-cut exterior, Karina Wright struck her as one angry and ambitious lady who had already made up her mind and wasn’t about to back down. Maybe being the first to break the news was her way of enhancing a career agenda.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me about bids?” she reminded him.

  “Well, first off, that was a classy approach in there; you were right on point and got him talking about what he thought he didn’t know. I guess I have to own up to missing that, too.” He composed his thoughts for a moment, then continued. “About six months ago the National Security Agency picked up some chatter about planned operations against Coalition force members. The sources were in the Middle East, but some of the servers being used were in the US and Europe. Some of it was the usual high-minded guff about hitting us where it hurt and teaching us a lesson, but there were some other exchanges that sounded different—kind of off the wall. For that reason they were noted but set to one side because the subject matter made no real sense.”

  “Like what?”

  “The exchanges were talking about bids, just like Donny said. The difference was, they talked about bidding for ‘strikes.’ It was thought they were using code words but we couldn’t figure out what they meant. The word strikes is clear enough in plain language, but we were thrown by bids. It didn’t fit, no matter which way we threw it in the air.”

  “Couldn’t they have been groups bidding to take on a job?” Vaslik suggested.

  “That was our initial thought. There’s certainly no shortage of them out there wanting to do something radical. It’s long been known that most of the extremist groups are in competition with each other to hit the headlines and gain a name for themselves. But they appear to be subservient to some of the more powerful groups if something high-concept is being planned, and they back off fast when told to avoid conflicting operations. What threw us—and still does—was that the so-called bids had financial figures attached to them.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “Well, I think Donny just gave us a possible answer. What if the words he overheard alluded to the fact that this Asim Malak has come up with a uniquely modern method of funding his operation?”

  “Go on.”

  “He sets up the idea to make a major hit on the US, to the point where it looks viable. Then he hawks it around to a number of the wealthier extremist groups and their backers to see who wants a share of the action—in exchange for finance.”

  “Like crowd-funding,” said Vaslik.

  “Exactly.”

  They stood and considered the idea. It sounded crazy and unlikely … yet in the modern world, almost to be expected. If, like Malak, a group lacked the funds to complete an operation, why not go out and sell shares to interested bidders? That way everybody was happy, the attacking group and any others with parallel interests.

  “It’s not so stupid,” Ruth said into the silence. “The highest bidder gets to claim the credit for the strike while Malak and his men do the work and remain unknown. It’s insane … but clever.”

  “Of course it is,” Brasher agreed. “It’s a win-win for the bidders, too; they don’t have to risk their own people carrying out the operation, but if Malak needs some expendable muscle, they can send in anybody they choose at minimum cost.”

  Vaslik nodded. “It makes sense to—” He stopped as a popping sound came from the front of the building, followed by a lot of shouting and the sound of breaking glass.

  “Jesus, that’s gunfire!” Brasher cried and turned towards the door just as a whooshing noise came closer, overriding the sound of the gunshots.

  A split second later the whole building shook with the force of an explosion, and ceiling tiles rained down on their heads. All the lights went out, and a loud groaning sound came from the walls around them as part of the structure began to give way.

  In the distance, somebody began screaming.

  forty-one

  “Open fire!” Salem screamed and tossed the used rocket launcher out through t
he open side door. They were single-use weapons, and he was going to need the other one if they stayed here much longer. The scene not eighty yards away was now one of carnage, with a gaping hole in the front of the jail where the entrance had been. Part of the roof structure was caving in with the groaning sounds of a dying animal.

  He had waited until the passenger had slapped the dash and shouted, “It’s her!” before throwing back the sliding side doors on both sides to reduce pressure damage inside the van and bringing the launcher up to his shoulder. He caught a glimpse through the sights of a woman with dark hair standing just inside the front entrance of the building with a cell phone clamped to her ear. He had just enough time to think how angry she looked, and actually not that much like her photo, before he calmly squeezed the trigger.

  The woman had disappeared in the explosion.

  He coughed and spat out the taste of propellant which now filled the van, and reached for the second launcher. On the face of it he’d used one rocket to take out one person, but he was experienced enough to know that there would be other casualties inside the structure. Those that had survived would be stunned and blinded by concussion and dust, and mounting any kind of pursuit would take a long time.

  Especially if he fired the second rocket in through the hole.

  As he took hold of the launcher, something bounced off the inside of the roof and struck him on the cheek. It was an ejected carbine case. The front seat passenger was spraying the area around the jail through his side window, screaming unintelligibly over the clatter of casings hitting the metalwork and windows like maddened insects, their bright brassy colour flickering in the light.

  The driver went to push past the passenger to join him in hosing down the crippled building, but the Salem saw him and shouted, “What, are you crazy? Get us out of here now, you idiot!” He reached up and slapped the back of the driver’s head to gain his attention, then spun round as the bodywork close by his head blew apart under the impact of a heavy bullet. He swore and turned. An officer in police uniform was kneeling off to one side aiming shots at the van with a sidearm. He had blood on his face and his shirt was torn and covered in brick dust, but he was standing steady. Salem knew he was the main target and had only seconds left before the gun zeroed in on him.