by J K Ellem
“What does he want to do?” Sam asked, watching her closely, studying her carefully as he had done countless times before.
“He wants to go to technical college in Cedar City to study business. His grades weren’t that good and he didn’t finish either but he’s hoping to get into there.”
Sam lifted his cup. “Well, I hope he gets in, Sally. If he’s anything like you, he’ll be all right.”
Sally pulled out a hankie and dabbed her eyes, slightly embarrassed. “Well, I better get back to work, Sam. Thank you.” Sally left the check on the table.
Sam watched her go then turned his attention back to the man and woman on the far side. Another waitress assigned to their section was clearing their plates away. Like all young people, the two were absorbed with a cell phone the man was holding. He hadn’t put it down the entire time Sam had been watching. Typical of younger people these days, Sam thought. He finished his food, drained his coffee cup, pulled out his wallet, and left cash on the check. He dug out a twenty dollar bill and placed it under the coffee cup for Sally.
Talking to Sally had put him in a good mood. He walked past the table where the couple was and stole a sideways glance at the woman. The man was still engrossed in the phone and hadn’t noticed him.
Sam stepped outside, took a deep breath, and refocused as he walked to his truck that was amongst the rows of other long haul trucks.
Sam Pritchard was happy. Not because he had eaten his fill in the diner. Not because it was a bright new day, filled with all sorts of exciting possibilities for him. Not because he had just been paid for the haul he had delivered into Vegas and was slowly heading north again.
No, he was happy because he had made up his mind. He was going to take Freddy Monk, take him from this world, take him from his loving, obsessed, and driveling mother. It was the least he could do. He was going to take him, break him, then bury him like the rest in the wildness. He felt obligated. It was his mission in life to bring as much pain, suffering, and uncertainty to others as he could. Thinking about what he was going to do to Freddy Monk was the only thing that kept him from throwing up his breakfast all over Freddie’s pathetic mother. He wanted Sally Monk to experience a lifetime of excruciating pain over not knowing what happened to her son.
But before he could do that, he contemplated the true source of his sudden happiness. Not that ripping Freddy Monk from the loving arms of his mother then slowly killing him didn’t bring Pritchard an immense feeling of happiness.
But it was nothing compared to what he was going to do, and the pure ecstasy he would feel, after taking the young black woman he had just seen in the diner. Black was the missing color in his palette, a color he wanted so desperately to add to his collection.
His long gleaming truck came into view, the high morning sun glinting off the mirrored tanker. Pritchard fished out his keys then stopped and stood still a few feet from the truck, solid boots on the warm asphalt. A strange sensation clawed along the back of his neck the across his scalp at the back of his head, like tiny prickles.
Pritchard turned around and stared into the distance, back at the diner he had just come from. Everyone was busy, head down drinking or eating.
All but one.
A man was looking at him through the window, straight at Pritchard. There was no mistake. The man's eye locked onto his across thirty yards of open ground. The man was sitting in a booth next to the window. The same man who was with the black woman. He was still cradling the cell phone in his hand, but he had turned his head and was looking right at Pritchard.
21
Shaw turned away from the window.
“What’s up?” Jessie asked.
Shaw looked at her. “Nothing, just someone I was looking at.”
“So what do we do now?” Jessie asked.
At an adjacent table Shaw noticed a man drinking coffee. He was holding the newspaper open reading it. Rasul’s face was plastered on the front. It was the same picture he had seen on the television last night. Almost everywhere he looked, the dark eyes of Abasi Rasul stared back at Shaw. He could almost hear the pleading words of the dead man haunting him. “You should have untied me, let me go. Now I am dead, my throat slit, and it’s all your fault.”
But Shaw didn’t care. Rasul had taken part in an act of terrorism that had resulted in hundreds of innocent men, women, and children being killed. He hoped the man rotted in hell for the role he had played. Shaw was more interested in the people who had trained and supported Rasul.
Shaw turned the phone over in his hand. “There must be something else in this phone, something of importance.” In his past life Shaw had an army of tech support staff at his disposal who could tear apart the phone both physically and digitally, get deep into it, and extract any hidden or erased information and data on it. But now it was just Jessie and him with no backup or support in the field and without a clue. Shaw wasn’t the most tech-savvy person around. He had relied on others.
Jessie took the phone from his hand. “While you were driving I went through the whole thing. Like I said, there was just a bunch of texts from yesterday and nothing else.
“What about anything that was deleted?” Shaw asked.
“I guess we could find it if the data was on some type of cloud backup. But then we would need the ID and password, and we have neither. The browsing history had been wiped clean too. This guy was really cautious. He left no traces.”
Shaw thought for a moment, drinking his coffee. There must be something else on the phone, something like an address or cell phone number or contact.
Shaw finally spoke. “I think the plan has changed.”
Jessie looked at him questioningly. “What plan? Our plan? I didn’t even know we had a plan.”
Against one wall of the diner was a large flat panel television screen Shaw was watching. On it was a constant news cycle about the plane crash. They were showing faces of the dead. A woman smiling with her husband at the beach. A high school yearbook photo of a young girl. A man standing on a jetty, holding up a fish on a line. A married couple on their wedding day. A photo of a female airline pilot sitting in her pilot’s seat, turning back and smiling at the camera.
“Their plan. There’s been a change in their plan.”
“What do you mean?” Jessie asked.
“Think about it.” Shaw turned back to her. “Rasul’s face is plastered everywhere. In the newspapers and on television. That was something they were not counting on. He made a mistake, something he shouldn’t have done when he was leaving the airport. Maybe he took the wrong exit, went out the wrong door. Maybe he was supposed to wait longer. But he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It made the airport authorities suspicious. They have his photo and now there is a nationwide manhunt for him. It wasn’t part of the plan. He was supposed to just slip out of the airport without raising suspicion. And now they are angry.”
“As in the people who are really behind this? They are the ones angry?”
Shaw nodded, suddenly feeling very conspicuous. He looked around the diner, but no one was watching them. “So now the plan has changed. They want to locate Rasul, but not to pat him on the back and say ‘job well done’.”
Jessie eyes went wide. “They now want to get rid of him.”
“That’s right. Find him and kill him. He’s become a liability. He could lead the authorities right to them.”
Jessie stared at the phone.
“It takes a lot of resources and ingenuity to build the kind of bomb they built and get it onboard a commercial jetliner.” Shaw looked at the phone. “These people are smart, well-funded, well-resourced.”
“And?” Jessie said.
“Jessie, I’ve got this back to front. We don’t have to find them at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because they are going to be finding us. They will come to us.”
“How? How can they find us?”
Shaw held up the phone in his hand. “It was here all along,
the means for them to find Rasul, if there was a change of plan. Rasul was going to meet with them, at a prearranged location. Now they won’t allow that to happen, especially since he has been identified.”
A look of fear spread across Jessie’s face. She finally understood what Shaw was meaning.
Shaw smiled. “It’s in the phone, this is how they are going to find us. Placing some sort of tracking device in the phone would be a cinch for them. It was their fail safe.”
“Shit,” Jessie breathed.
“They’re coming straight for us.”
“What do you want to do?” Jessie felt the panic in her voice.
Shaw smiled. “Nothing. We’re just going to wait for them to arrive.”
22
Three men stood inside the dilapidated remains of the old gas station building across from the truck stop. One man had a pair of binoculars trained on the truck stop. Another man held a device in his hand that resembled a handheld barcode scanner. It was a solid lump of plastic with a bright screen. The function keys on the device were raised, like little cubes, thick and chunky with symbols in orange and blue embossed on the key faces as well as above them.
The third man stood back in the partial shadows, content just to watch the other two men whose job it was to find the target. The man standing in the shadows would then take over and kill the target. Slashes in the tin roof above cast thin slices of sunlight into the broken interior of the room and partially across the man’s folded arms, his forearms rippling like corded steel rope under the skin. He wore a simple dark-green T-shirt that stretched tight across his powerful frame. He had a thick neck, a head shaved down to bristles, and a smudge of growth across his jaw. Some people said he looked like Jason Statham, except meaner, bigger, more threatening.
The man held nothing in his hand, but tucked into his waistband under his shirt was a custom-made handgun that was a reflection of himself: stealthy, powerful, well-practiced, and deadly over any distance. He was the man they sent when they needed the job done right the first time, no tolerance for failure, no collateral damage, no excuses.
"So where is he?" the first man spoke as he scanned the plaza and outer buildings. "He wasn't supposed to go inside. His face is plastered all over the news, the dumb shit."
The man with the device played with the keys. "It said he drove in there, about twenty minutes ago."
"More than fifty cars have gone in and out of the damn place in the last twenty minutes,” the man holding the binoculars grumbled. "Is that thing still working?"
The man with the device nodded. "Sure is. The signal is stationary so he hasn't left." They had inserted a tracking device into the cell phone that was given to Abasi Rasul three days ago. Just as a precaution. After the assignment, the young Egyptian never knew he would not see his next birthday.
"One of us will need to go in there, find him, and pull him out," the first man said. He lowered the binoculars and turned to the large silhouette lurking in the shadows. "Hoost, it's your call."
The dark outline didn't move for a moment, the only sound came from the flutter of wings of a few birds nesting in the skeleton of the rafters above. Then the big Dutchman, Pieter Hoost, pushed off the thick timber post he was leaning against and stepped forward, his body stippled in the light from the holes in the roof.
"We wait here," he said with a calming menace. "There's too many people in that truck stop to extract him in front of everyone."
"We don't have all day," the man with the binoculars retorted. "We have tracked him to here, now we grab him before someone identifies him."
"It's not him," Hoost replied.
"What do you mean it's not him? Who the hell else would it be?"
"It's not him," Hoost repeated. "Think about it. Unless Rasul is a total idiot, which he isn't, he knows his face is on the front page of every newspaper from New York to LA. He's not going to walk into such a public place and show his face. He will go underground."
"Wait up," the man with the device said. "He's on the move again."
The man with the binoculars turned back and brought the binoculars up again. "Which direction?"
"Southwest, toward us, slowly, walking speed, diagonally."
Some people were walking into the large diner, others were walking out. There were people at the pumps filling up their vehicles while some sat outside on benches eating food. "I can't tell." Then he saw a man walking with a woman beside him. The man was holding a cell phone, not talking into it but looking intently at the screen.
The man stopped and spoke to the woman.
"He's stopped again," the man with the device said.
"It can't be," the man with the binoculars muttered. He adjusted the depth of the field dial, making the image of the man and woman clearer.
The man and woman were talking, calmly not animated, like he was telling her something. Then he held up the cell phone for her to see. She seemed to squint at the screen then nodded her head. They resumed walking.
"He's on the move again," the man with the device said.
"Who the hell are you?" the man with the binoculars wondered as he watched the couple get into a small white hatchback.
Hoost moved to the edge of the window frame and stared out. "What's wrong?"
"I'll tell you what's wrong," the man said as he watched the white hatchback reverse out of a parking space. "It's not Rasul. It's some guy and a woman, and the guy has Rasul's cell phone."
"Picking up speed now," the man with the device said. "Moving away, back onto the highway, heading south again."
Hoost tore the binoculars away from the other man's hands. "Where?" he growled.
"White hatchback, on the left just past the last row of gas pumps, moving along the service road toward the exit."
The view through the binoculars shunted sideways as Hoost scanned left, overcompensated, backed up, and spotted the white car. The man was driving and there was a woman in the passenger seat. They pulled up, put on their turn signal, then turned onto the highway and accelerated away.
"Twenty, thirty, forty miles per hour now." The man with the device looked up.
The three men burst through the back door of the building to where a dusty silver SUV was parked. They climbed in, Hoost behind the wheel, the man with the device in the passenger seat, and the third man in the back.
23
Hoost made the call. He had the number on speed dial on his cell phone that sat in its cradle in the center console of his SUV. The phone had military-spec encryption software installed.
If he didn’t check in at the allotted time he knew questions would be asked and he would be getting a call. That was just like his employer, not paranoid, just disciplined, regimented, and obsessed with operational details.
That’s what attracted Hoost to the offer when he was approached three years ago. Hoost’s military contract had come to an end and he had made a lot of money out of it. Enough to buy his own ranch in Montana with tax-free cash from Uncle Sam. He was a free agent when he returned. He was still keen to put his lethal skills to good use but wanted to stay stateside. He’d spent enough time in the Middle East and the like, had enough of chaperoning high-ranking officials and delegates in and out of military zones. He’d had enough of the sand, dust, and heat.
So when the approach had been made and the offer was on the table, better than what he got in Iraq, he took it. His employer had some anal and strict ground rules, but Hoost had some of his own rules, too. One was not being pestered all the time. Hoost had a job to do and he got the job done—hadn’t failed yet. He just wanted to be left alone to get on with his work. But his employer had insisted on hourly updates ever since they got the last text from Rasul’s phone saying he was sick and had to stop for the night. No one believed it. They knew from that moment onward something was wrong, the task was compromised, and that had made Hoost’s employer extra cautious.
The call was placed on speaker phone inside the cabin of the SUV and was answered even befor
e the first ring, like the person on the other end was sitting next to the phone, waiting for it to ring.
“Where’s Rasul,” the voice asked, calm but impatient. No phone etiquette, just straight into it.
“If I were a gambling man, I’d say he’s dead.”
There was a pause on the other end. “So where is his cell phone?”
“I’m following it right now.”
Hoost checked his speedometer. He was tailing the white hatchback nicely, not too close, not too far. He was tucked in third in line, behind a pickup truck and two sedans, spread out so he could easily see the white car two hundred yards ahead on the highway. The road was straight with only a few side roads ahead. Hoost would easily see well in advance if the white hatchback turned off somewhere.
“A man and a women have it,” Hoost explained. A police scanner chirped and he reached and twisted its volume down slightly.
Hoost didn’t tell his employer about the incident this morning at a motel five miles north of there. Shots fired, multiple dead. It may be something or it may be nothing, just a drug deal gone wrong with some bikers. Hoost was expecting a full report and he preferred to wait until then before jumping to conclusions.
“Don’t let them out of sight,” the man on the line replied.
Hoost felt a tinge of annoyance that someone was questioning his competency. He had tailed Taliban informants through the teeming choked streets of Islamabad. He was sure a white, late-model car on a wide open American interstate wasn’t going to present a problem.
