Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Ted bellowed above the chaos, “FBI! Everyone freeze!”

  “No one’s in the van!” Sami glared at the traffic cop who’d helped the medical crew park the brown van at the curb. “Was there another guy?”

  “They had a patient pickup! With a wheelchair.” The cop pointed to the terminal.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like a guy! White guy. Blond hair. White uniform. EMT vest.”

  Ghosts whispered to Sami, “Diverting the enemy ... let us attack. Timing.”

  “Harry!” Sami yelled to the man cuffing the unconscious Ameer. “It’s Maher!”

  “Go!” Harry guarded a brown van with a neutralized EMGF near an airport control tower and people-packed jetliners flying through a snowstorm.

  “Ted—you know Maher’s face—work down from the other end!”

  The FBI agent leaped into the tan sedan. Siren wailing, red light spinning, Ted raced back the way they’d come—straight into oncoming one-way traffic.

  Sami ran toward the terminal, told the uniformed cop, “Stay away from me!”

  Don’t blow my cover. I’m a spy. I’m a spy.

  Plunging into a sea of shuffling humanity. Shoulder to shoulder. Move! Suitcases rolled like roadblocks. Crowd hubbub. Scents of Christmas pine, lemony floor cleaner, sweat, petroleum luggage fabric. Through the bedlam cut ringing phones.

  Sami shoved his way toward the other end of the terminal.

  Where is he? White uniform. Blond guy. Vest. Pushing an empty wheelchair.

  Sami didn’t exactly know how his brothers packed the wheelchair’s tubular frame with gunpowder and particles they thought were radioactive. Wired an IV bag of liquid to the same detonation device Zlatko engineered for the gunpowder. But Sami knew.

  A digital clock on the wall told him T minus 1.

  The diversion bomb timed to cover the EMGF transmission. First responders might mistake the brown medical van for one of their own. Let it run as jetliners tumbled through the snowflakes.

  Where are you? Move, out of my way! Sami jumped for a glimpse over the teeming crowd. “Watch it!” Somebody bumped him. There’s the terminal wall, the end, the last/first street exit, there’s—

  An IV-bagged wheelchair sat by the wall of windows.

  Sami leaped onto a planter—There! Fifty feet from the wheelchair. Nearing the exit: blond, EMT vest over a stolen white uniform. Get to him! Con him! Neutralize!

  “Maher!” bellowed Sami.

  Quiet filled the moment as if in slow-motion. Maher turned. Saw his brother waving at him above the airport crowd. A quizzical look filled the California blond’s face. He reached his right hand inside the vest.

  Forty-four feet away, known murderer and terrorist Maher’s textbook gesture equaled gun! FBI Special Agent Ted Harris drew his service weapon, pushed an old man out of the way, acquired his target—fired three booming shots.

  Panic exploded. Screaming. People tried to run. Dive. Hide.

  “FBI!” yelled Ted. “FBI!”

  Shots one and two blasted Maher off his feet.

  His third bullet crashed into a metal heating grate above an exit.

  Sami fought through the scared, silent mob toward where Maher sprawled on his back as combat-shuffling toward him came Ted, his eyes on what the suspect had pulled from his vest, still held in his right hand: only a cell phone.

  Maher rose on his elbows, vaguely heard “Don’t move!” Saw his white shirt reddening. Felt phone in his right hand. Saw brother Sami scrambling through the huddled crowd to save him. Maher smiled blood. Saw Sami stumble, crawl closer. Maher’s right thumb hit speed dial as he raised a weakening left thumbs-up.

  Sami screamed, “No!”

  In the city, Zlatko stood outside a green door, left hand pushing a buzzer while his right hand held a pistol tied to four other murders as he terminated a loose end who ran downstairs to the peephole he’d blurred with street slush.

  In Ronald Reagan National Airport, soldier John Heme huddled with blondish, black leather-coated Cari Jones. Beside them was redheaded, blue-uniformed, airline service rep Lorna Dumas pulling Amy Lewis and teddy bear closer to the shelter of an empty wheelchair rigged with a cell phone programmed to block every call. Except one.

  They all heard ring!

  <>

  * * * *

  NEIGHBORS

  Joseph Finder

  “I can’t shake the feeling that they’re up to something,” Matt Parker said. He didn’t need to say: the new neighbors. He was peering out their bedroom window through a gap between the slats of the Venetian blinds.

  Kate Parker looked up from her book, groaned. “Not this again. Come to bed. It’s after eleven.”

  “I’m serious,” Matt said.

  “So am I. Plus, they can probably see you staring at them.”

  “Not from this angle.” But just to be safe he dropped the slat. He turned around, arms folded. “I don’t like them,” he said.

  “You haven’t even met them.”

  “I saw you talking to them yesterday. I don’t think they’re a real couple. She’s, like, twenty years younger than him.”

  “Laura’s eight years younger than Jimmy.”

  “He’s got to be an Arab.”

  “I think Laura said his parents are Persian.”

  “Persian,” Matt scoffed. “That’s just a fancy word for Iranian. Like an Iraqi saying he’s Mesopotamian or something.”

  Kate shook her head and went back to her book. Some girl novel: an Oprah Book Club selection with a cover that looked like an Amish quilt. At the foot of their bed, the big flat-screen TV flickered a blue light across her delicate features. She had the sound muted: Matt didn’t get how she could concentrate on a book with the TV on.

  “Also, does he look like a Norwood to you?” Matt said when he came back from brushing his teeth, a few stray white flecks of Colgate on his chin. “Jimmy Norwood? What kind of name is Norwood for an Arab guy? That can t be his real name.”

  Kate gave a small, tight sigh, folded down the corner of a page and closed her book. “It’s Nourwood, actually.” She spelled it.

  “That’s not a real name.” He climbed into bed. “And where’s their furniture? They didn’t even have a moving van. They just showed up one day with all their stuff in that stupid little Toyota hybrid sardine can.”

  “Boy, you really have been stalking them.”

  Matt jutted his jaw. “I notice stuff. Like foreign-made cars.”

  “Yeah, well, I hate to burst your bubble, but they’re renting the house furnished from the Gormans. Ruth and Chuck didn’t want to sell their house, given the market these days, and there’s no room in their condo in Boca for—”

  “What kind of people would rent a furnished house?”

  “Look at us,” Kate pointed out. “We move, like, every two years.”

  “You knew when you married me that was how it would be. That’s just part of the life. I’m telling you, there’s something not quite right about them. Remember the Olsens in Pittsburgh?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Did I or did I not tell you their marriage was in trouble? You insisted Daphne had postpartum depression. Then they got divorced.”

  “Yeah, like five years after we moved,” Kate said. “Half of all marriages end in divorce. Anyway, the Nourwoods are a perfectly nice couple.”

  Something on TV caught Matt’s eye. He fumbled for the remote, found it under the down comforter next to Kate’s pillow, touched a button to bring up the sound.

  “—officials tell WXBS NightCast that FBI intelligence reports indicate an increased level of terrorist chatter—”

  “I love that word, chatter,” Kate said. “Makes it sound like they bugged Perez Hilton’s tea set or something.”

  “Shh.” Matt raised the volume.

  The anchorman of the local news, who wore a cheap pin-striped suit and looked as if he was about sixteen, went on, “. . . heightened concerns about a possible terrori
st strike in downtown Boston just two days from now.” The chyron next to him was a crude rendering of a crosshair and the words “Boston Terror Target?”

  Now the picture cut to a reporter standing in the dark outside one of the big new skyscrapers in the financial district, the wind whipping his hair. “Ken, a spokesman for the Boston police told me just a few minutes ago that the mayor has ordered heightened security for all Boston landmarks, including the State House, Government Center, and all major office buildings.”

  “Isn’t it a little loud?” Kate said.

  But Matt continued to stare at the screen.

  “—speculates that the terrorists might be locally based. The police spokesman told me that their pattern seems to be to establish residence in or near a major city and assimilate themselves into the fabric of a neighborhood while they make their long-range plans, just as law enforcement authorities believe happened in the bombing in Chicago last year, also on April nineteenth, which, though never solved, is believed to be—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kate said.

  “Shh!”

  “—FBI undercover operatives throughout the Boston area in an attempt to infiltrate this suspected terrorist ring,” the reporter said.

  “I love that,” Kate said. “It’s always a ‘ring.’ Why not a terrorist bracelet? Or a necklace.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Matt said.

  * * * *

  Matt couldn’t sleep.

  After tossing and turning for half an hour, he slipped quietly out of bed and padded down the hall to the tiny guest room that served as their home office. It was furnished with little more than a couple of filing cabinets, for household bills and owner’s manuals and the like, and an old Dell PC atop an Ikea desk.

  He opened a browser on the computer and entered “James Nourwood” in Google. It came back:

  Did you mean: James Norwood

  No, dammit, he thought. I meant what I typed.

  All Google pulled up was a scattering of useless citations that happened to contain “James” and “wood” and words that ended in “-nour.” Useless. He tried typing just “Nourwood.”

  Nothing. Some import-export firm based in Syria called Nour Wood, a high-pressure-laminate company founded by a man named Nour. But if Google was right, and it usually was, there was nobody named Nourwood in the entire world.

  Which meant that either their new neighbor was really flying under the radar, or that wasn’t his real name.

  So Matt tried a powerful search engine called ZabaSearch, which could give you the home addresses of just about everybody, even celebrities. He entered “Nourwood” and then selected “Massachusetts” in the pull-down menu of states.

  The answer came back instantly in big, red, mocking letters:

  No Results Match NOURWOOD

  Check Your Spelling and Try Your Search Again

  Well, he thought, they’ve just moved here. Probably too recent to show up yet. Anyway, they were renters, not owners, so maybe that explained why they didn’t show up on the database yet in Massachusetts. He went back to the ZabaSearch home page and this time left the default “All 50 States” selected.

  Same thing.

  No Results Match NOURWOOD

  What did that mean, they didn’t show up anywhere in the country? That was impossible.

  No, he told himself. Maybe not. If Nourwood, as he’d suspected, wasn’t a real name.

  This strange couple was living right next door under an assumed name. Matt’s Spidey Sense was starting to tingle.

  He remembered how once, as a kid, he’d entered the tool-shed in back of the house in Bellingham and suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, thick as cleats. He had no idea why. A few seconds later, he realized that the coil of rope in the corner of the dimly lit shed was actually a snake. He stood frozen in place, fascinated and terrified by its shiny skin, its bold orange and white and black stripes. True, it was only a king snake, but what if it had been one of the venomous pit vipers sometimes found in western Washington State, like a prairie rattlesnake? Since that day he’d learned to trust his instincts. The unconscious often senses danger long before the conscious mind.

  “What are you doing?”

  He started at Kate’s voice. The wall-to-wall carpet had muffled her approach.

  “Why are you awake, babe?” he said.

  “Matt, it’s like two in the morning,” Kate said, her voice sleep-husky. “What the hell are you doing?”

  He quickly closed the browser, but she’d already seen it.

  “You’re Googling the neighbors now?”

  “They don’t even exist, Kate. I told you, there’s something wrong with them.”

  “Believe me, they exist,” Kate said. “They’re very real. She even teaches Pilates.”

  “You sure you have the right spelling?”

  “It’s on their mailbox,” she said. “Look for yourself.”

  “Oh, right, that’s real hard proof,” he said, a little too heavy on the sarcasm. “Did they give you a phone number? A cell phone, maybe?”

  “Jesus Christ. Look, you have any questions for them, why don’t you ask them yourself, tomorrow night? Or I guess it’s tonight by now.”

  “Tonight?”

  “The Kramers’ cocktail party. I told you about it like five times. They’re having the neighbors over to show off their new renovation.”

  Matt groaned.

  “We’ve turned down their last two invitations. We have to go.” She rubbed her eyes. “You know, you’re really being ridiculous.”

  “Better safe than sorry. When I think about my brother, Donny—I mean he was a great soldier. A true patriot. And look what happened to him.”

  “Don’t think about your brother,” she said softly.

  “I can’t stop thinking about him. You know that.”

  “Come back to bed,” Kate said.

  * * * *

  For the rest of the night, Matt found himself listening to Kate’s soft breathing and watching the numbers change on the digital clock. At 4:58 a.m. he finally gave up trying to sleep. Slipping quietly out of bed, he threw on yesterday’s clothes and went downstairs to pee, so he wouldn’t wake Kate. As he stood at the toilet, he found himself looking idly out the window, over the café curtains, at the side of the Gormans’ house, not twenty feet away. The windows were dark: the Nourwoods were asleep. He saw their car parked in the driveway, which gave him an idea.

  Grabbing a pen from the kitchen counter and the only scrap of paper he could find quickly—a supermarket register receipt— he opened the back door and stepped out into the darkness, catching the screen door before it could slam, pushing it gently closed until the pneumatic hiss stopped and the latch clicked.

  The night—really, the morning—was moonless and starless, with just the faintest pale glow on the horizon. He could barely see five feet in front of him. He crossed the narrow grassy rectangle that separated the two houses, and stood at the verge of Nourwood’s driveway, the little car a hulking silhouette. But gradually his eyes adjusted to the dark, and there was a little ambient light from a distant streetlamp. Nourwood’s car, a Toyota Yaris, was one of those ridiculous foreign-made econobox hybrids. It looked as if you could lift it up with one hand. The license plate was completely in shadow, so he came closer for a better look.

  Suddenly his eyes were dazzled by the harsh light from a set of halogen floods mounted above the garage. For a sickening moment he thought that maybe Nourwood had seen someone prowling around and flicked a switch. But no: Matt had apparently tripped a motion sensor.

  What if they kept their bedroom curtains open and one of them wasn’t a sound sleeper? He’d have to move quickly now, just to be safe.

  Now, at least, he could make out the license plate clearly. He wrote the numbers on the register receipt, then turned to go back, when he collided with someone.

  Startled, Matt gave an involuntary shout, a sort of uhhhl sound at exactly the same time as someone said,
“Jesus!”

  James Nourwood.

  He was a good six inches taller than Matt, with a broad, athletic build, and wore a striped bathrobe, unruly tufts of black chest hair sprouting over the top. “Can I help you?” Nourwood said with an imperious scowl.