by Wally Duff
“I don’t know.”
But writing this story will put me on the front page of every paper in the country.
“If you attempt to stop the nine planes from flying and are completely wrong about this, you’ll be laughed out of the newspaper industry forever,” she said.
She’s right. What should I do?
Part 6
117
When Kerry and I returned home from Linda’s, I put her down for a nap.
If Tony wouldn’t stop the strippers from flying, I would. I couldn’t take the risk that the breast implants were C4 bombs, and thousands of people might be blown up in the worst airline disaster in history. If I was wrong, so be it. I would have to take the heat.
I took out my knitting and began another row. I had to figure it out. It took thirty rows this time.
I don’t have an option.
No one had believed me about the bomber five years ago in Arlington, but as I went into the kitchen to call the TSA at O’Hare, I prayed this time the trained employees at the airport would.
The front doorbell rang. I hoped it was Tony. Face-to-face, I might be able to convince him to stop those planes. I put my knitting on the kitchen counter and went into the entry hall.
When I opened the door, it was a man I recognized — but it wasn’t Tony.
Slam the door in his face!
Anticipating my move, the man jammed his foot against the door before I could react.
“Mr. al-Turk,” I said.
“Mrs. Thomas.” His voice was raspy from too many cigarettes. “May I call you Tina?”
“No, you may not.”
I’m not giving you a damn thing.
“As you wish.”
His right hand held an object in his black warm-up jacket pocket. I was certain it wasn’t a cell phone. He motioned with that hand. “I think it might be better if we have this conversation inside, don’t you think? It would be much easier to hear your daughter if she cries.”
Having no option, I let him come in. As he stepped next to me, I suppressed a gag from the harsh stench of tobacco drifting off of his clothes.
He glanced around. “Tastefully decorated.”
I remained silent. My throat was too dry to even swallow. The only other time I’d been this scared was when the bomber dialed his cell phone to detonate the bomb in the Arlington clinic.
But this time, the killer was in my home and my daughter slept upstairs.
Al-Turk nudged me into the kitchen.
“Sit down,” he demanded.
I was determined not to show how terrified I was, but my legs trembled, giving me no option but to follow his instructions. I sat down at the kitchen nook table.
He sat down next to me. “You are probably wondering why I am here.”
I glared at him but kept my mouth shut. He slid a handgun out of the right-hand pocket of his warm-up and placed it on the table. It was a Glock 19, a weapon I was familiar with.
“I intend to sit here with you until our plans today are completed,” he declared.
No! Not today! It’s supposed to happen tomorrow!
“Why would I let that happen?” I tried not to show any emotion.
“There are many reasons.” He spun the gun around on the table. The end of the barrel now pointed directly at me. “But I can think of one that presently supersedes the rest.”
Why is he talking so much? There has to be a reason.
The FBI agent at the library had to have seen him come into my home. She could activate her listening devices and hear him talking and then swoop in to rescue Kerry and me.
Keep him talking.
“Micah’s an Israeli,” I said. “Why is he helping you? He should be your enemy.”
“We keep track of Jews like Mittelman, who we can force to help us.”
“Force?”
“Indeed. After his family moved into his condo in April, I met with him at his lab and told him to do our bidding or we would torture, and eventually kill, his precious family.”
“Why would he believe that?”
“Two of my associates visited his condo under the pretext that they were his friends visiting from Israel. Hannah let them in, and all it took to convince him to cooperate was for me to show him a real time cell phone photo of them with his wife and children. In effect, we abducted them in their own condo.”
“Have you done this before?”
“Many times.” He fingered the gun to validate his point. “It is an extremely effective technique.”
118
He’s doing the same thing to Kerry and me.
“I had one of my men move in with them on a full-time basis,” al-Turk continued.
“Farhad,” I said.
He nodded.
Keep him talking. The FBI has to be on the way.
“And he doubled as Hannah’s driver,” I continued.
Al-Turk shifted in his chair. “We added security cameras at his home to further monitor them.”
“And you told Micah about them.”
“Of course we did.”
“Did you have them inside too?”
“Yes. Those cameras caught your friend Linda inserting the flash drive into Micah’s hard drive and you retrieving it. We realized you would figure out our end-game, and we had to accelerate our plan.”
He sat back and crossed his legs, shifting in his seat again, moving a little further away from his gun. “I am amazed you did not deduce why we moved into your neighborhood.”
“Obviously, I wondered about it.”
“The practical truth is we needed the proximity to their house. The video cameras in their home have a fairly long range, but the audio transmitters will not work beyond a few hundred yards. To overcome this, we moved here, two streets away.”
I should have figured this out.
“When Lorenz and, after him, two other FBI agents, began spying on us, we could no longer have Farhad live in their house. Except for when you were there, we have not had any physical contact with them.”
“But you still monitored them.”
He smiled, his teeth a disgusting yellow-brown color.
“How did you discover I was interested in you?”
“You are the reporter. You tell me.”
I pictured Micah’s computer. “You installed a keystroke logger on his computer and read the section he typed in about me.”
“Micah did all the research for us. He discovered that you are a reporter. We realized you might be a problem and focused on you.”
My aggressive pursuit of his story got me into this.
Use that aggression to save you and Kerry. But I need a weapon!
“Who are the Hamlin Park Irregulars?” I asked.
“Micah gave your group a code name. When he discussed you and your group with Hannah, he assumed we would not know who he was talking about. Of course, he did not know about the keystroke logger. But we had another way to follow what you and your friends were doing.”
I remembered Molly flirting with the hunk at the gym who was the driver for Corky, Sammy, and Donna.
“Jamie?”
“Very good. Molly and Jamie became great friends and she provided him with all the other details we might have missed.”
Can this get any worse?
His eyes narrowed. “Is it safe?” he asked.
“What?”
“I am disappointed that you do not recognize the question. After all, it is from one of your favorite films.”
He was wrong. I knew it well; it was the chilling line from Marathon Man, one of our favorite classic movies.
“How do you know about that?” I asked.
“Turn on your little black box,” he said.
A shiver went down my spine.
“What box?”
“The one that alerts you when the listening devices in your home are active.”
The box sat on the counter next to me. I did as he requested. The red light came on. He took out his cell ph
one and hit speed dial. He spoke in Arabic. He smiled as the light turned green.
No!
The bugs didn’t belong to the FBI. They were his.
119
“How did you get in our home to plant them?” I asked.
Al-Turk smirked, and I had the answer before he said another word.
“It’s when I run and forget to set the alarm,” I continued. “But how could you or Farhad walk up our front steps without being seen by Mrs. Newens?”
“Jamie did more for us than talk to Molly and drive the girls around.”
The Cox Cable man!
“And Jamie didn’t only install listening devices, did he?”
“No, he is an expert with computers. The keystroke logger on your home computer is ours, not the FBI’s.”
“You listened to Tony and me talking about you being drug dealers, and you planted the heroin residue around your garage for me to discover.”
“We did, but we were fearful you would think discovering the heroin residue was too easy. But you did not.”
Damn!
“You had Farhad sell the heroin to low-level street distributors.”
“It was one of my other men, but we wanted to throw off your focus to give us more time to continue with our mission.” He smiled. “A nice touch, don’t you think?”
I didn’t respond.
“When we initiate a scheme like this, we assume the FBI will become involved at some point,” he continued. “Lorenz moved in next door to you. We thought he might be an undercover agent put in place because of the C4 on our trash. We were sure of it when he immediately began coming to the Twenties and questioning the girls.”
“Weren’t you afraid killing him would bring the U.S. government crashing down on you?”
“You live in a democracy and the wheels of justice turn slowly. Your court system and your laws protect us. In our country, we would have immediately been arrested and put in jail. But here they need irrefutable evidence to even obtain a search warrant for our home.”
Which I didn’t have.
“Why not just leave?”
“The competition between your federal agencies works in our favor to slow their communications down, allowing us sufficient time to initiate our plan.” He cleared his throat. “Although we did have to speed our timeline up a bit — thanks to you.”
I kept my mouth shut, refusing to respond to the insinuation I was responsible for the upcoming carnage he was orchestrating.
“You knew I tracked you because I downloaded the GPS software on my computer.”
“We did, and we temporarily removed the devices any time we needed to drive to locations we did not want you to know about.”
“What about the trip to O’Hare?”
“A regrettable mistake; Farah drove Jamie to work in the Mercedes, and he forgot about the GPS transponder.”
Jamie works at O’Hare.
“And you listened to us watching movies.”
“Not just any movies — classics. I assumed you would recognize the line since you recently watched that film.”
“Okay, I’ll play. Is what safe?”
“Our plan.”
“Why should I tell you?”
He tapped the handle of the gun. “You tell me what I need to know, or...”
“...or you’ll kill me.”
“Au contraire. This is the last thing I want to do. As for your daughter, this depends on what you tell me.”
His meaning was clear. He might not kill me, but my daughter was another matter. I had to do whatever it took to make sure that didn’t happen.
You’re keeping me talking? Why?
“I will make my question more specific. Did you use your recently acquired burner phone to call the rest of the Hamlin Park Irregulars? How much do your friends know?”
“My friends?” I croaked.
There’s the answer.
He’d been working on me, getting me to relax for this moment. All he wanted from me was how many people he had to kill.
“How much have you told them about Dr. Mittelman and the breast implants?”
“Nothing,” I lied, even though Linda already knew about the breast bombs. “Not a damn thing.”
He stared into my eyes. “Are you telling me the truth?”
I stared back. “I am. You arrived before I could call any of them.”
“Fortunately for your friends, I believe you.”
“What happens next?”
“We sit here and chat until the last plane takes off. We have nine girls ready to go. Tonight, nine planes will be blown out of the sky. You and Micah will know how it happened, but you will never tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
“Let me put it to you this way: If you had to choose between saving the life of your daughter or the lives of the hundreds of strangers flying on those nine planes, which would you choose?”
120
“I would save my daughter,” I said without hesitation.
“In April, when I asked Micah that question, he made the identical choice about his wife and children,” al-Turk said. “But Micah is not the ‘White Knight’ you think he is.”
“You forced him to do what you wanted, but he obtained human eggs which were vital to his research.”
“He did, and thanks to his surgical expertise, here is what will happen. After the planes and all the passengers are destroyed, we will continue with more girls until the FBI finally catches on, and then we will disappear.”
No!
“You will tell the FBI nothing, or we will torture and kill your daughter, as we will with Micah’s family. We might also kill your husband, but I would prefer to keep him alive. He can then grieve over the horrendous and tragic death of little Kerry.”
I pictured my daughter’s angelic face and wanted to smash his face in.
“I don’t suppose you have a spot of English tea? It is a taste I acquired while residing in London.”
This asshole was going to make me brew tea for him. I used the kitchen counter to push myself up. My right hand grazed the knitting needles.
Yes!
I had a weapon, and he didn’t notice.
Unexpectedly, Kerry woke up and began to talk to Elmo and Ralph.
Al-Turk turned his head toward the voice coming from the baby monitor sitting on the kitchen counter behind him.
Do it!
Grabbing one steel knitting needle, I rammed it into the top of his right hand. I used all my strength to shove the metal tip through the dark skin.
I pushed down with every ounce of my strength and twisted the handle of the needle. The full length of the needle crunched through the small bones and jabbed into the muscles and tendons.
It took only a few seconds for the metal tip to jam into the wood kitchen tabletop.
He screamed and clawed at the needle in his hand.
The gun!
I grabbed the barrel.
He swung his left hand backward toward my face.
I ducked.
Air whooshed past my face.
I bashed him in the face with the butt of the Glock. There was a loud thump, and blood squirted out of a gash on his forehead.
He grunted as he yanked his right hand free from the tabletop and ripped out the knitting needle.
I turned the Glock around and grabbed the butt in both hands. He lunged at me, knocking me backward.
We hit the kitchen floor with a thud.
The force of his weight landing on top of me drove the air out of my lungs. I gasped for oxygen.
He grabbed my hair and pounded the back of my head into the floor. I saw stars with each blow. He wrapped his bloody hands around my neck and choked me.
Do it! Save Kerry!
I wedged the Glock against his chest and pulled the trigger.
121
The bullet struck al-Turk’s center mass. His chest muffled the blast of the gunshot. His fingers were still around my throat, but his grip no longer had any
strength.
I shook my head free from his hands and gasped for air.
Blood began to ooze out of his chest wound. As it did, the copper smell of fresh blood enveloped me.
The sticky fluid flowed onto the floor from both sides of our entwined bodies and then slowed to a trickle.
I struggled to push his dead weight off of me. As I did, his head dropped down and I found myself face-to-face with him. His black eyes were open, the pupils already beginning to dilate.
You wanted to kill my daughter!
Enraged, I found the strength to shove him to the side and rolled out from under his lifeless body. And then I did what any mother would do in the same situation: I put the Glock to the back of his head. I was going to make sure he was dead.
But I couldn’t pull the trigger. I wasn’t a killer. I was trying to save my baby, and the gun had discharged during my struggle to survive.
I nudged his body with my toe. He didn’t move.
He’s dead.
Staring at his body, I was overwhelmed by dizziness and threw up in the sink.
Call Tony!
But I had a big problem with that. To prove to me the listening devices were his, al-Turk had speed-dialed one of his men to turn them off.
That man is across the street.
I grabbed the black box off the counter and switched it on. The green light came on and didn’t turn red; the listening devices were still off.
I rinsed my mouth out with tap water and attempted to call Tony on my burner cell phone. But my hands and fingers shook, and I misdialed his number three times before I got it right.