by Tim Tigner
“You’re all set, Mr. Dunwoodie,” the beautiful deputy said. “Thanks for cooperating. Drive safely.”
Russ liked the sound of that, despite the disorientation. Cooperating with what? He didn’t remember. Best to get out of there before the officer sensed that all wasn’t right. “Thank you, officer.”
He watched her and her fellow deputy return to their car, then checked his GPS. Looked like he’d only lost fifteen minutes. Ironically, the safety stop would force him to drive faster than usual. Still, he wouldn’t be late with his delivery—or miss out on a rendezvous with his sweet little señorita. Although today it wouldn’t be her face he pictured in his head.
Pulling back onto the empty rural road that connected the farm with the highway, he noted that another of their trucks had also been snared. Did law enforcement really have nothing better to do?
As he upshifted, Russ smiled to himself. At least the sheriff was putting his best face forward.
93
Tricks and Trades
Florida
AS THE SECOND of the trucks pulled back onto the road, its driver oblivious to the cargo swap, Oz dropped to his knees and raised his arms toward the rising sun. It wasn’t a religious move, although he was just about ready to believe.
He’d struggled for months, attempting to figure out how to make that undetected switch happen. He’d looked into making the swap in the warehouse, but the eggs and potatoes were packed just in time. Farm fresh. He had considered bribing the truck drivers, but that tactic was way too unpredictable. And it would leave a trail. Outsiders would have knowledge of a step the police could trace.
One of the ingenious elements of his plan—one which the anesthetic headsets enabled—was cloaking the cause of the explosions. The government would not know what had exploded or how the bombs were put in place. That information gap would make his masterpiece all the more terrifying and the federal efforts to prevent a repeat that much more crippling.
“You’ve done it, my lion of god,” Sabrina said, as if to emphasize the point.
Oz rose and embraced his wife. “We’ve done it, my virtuous princess.”
In fact, both were well aware that they had not done it yet. But the success or failure of the plan was now out of their hands. Their soon-to-be clean hands.
“Now we just need to get away with it,” Oz added.
Sabrina’s face darkened a shade. “She knows very little. You’ve done a good job keeping things from her.”
“She knows enough.”
“But she has no proof. It will just be conjecture. There will be tons of conjecture. Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of tips. Most of them conflicting.”
Oz understood his wife. She knew why it needed to be done. Attempting to convince her of that would be pointless. What she needed was justification. Something to alleviate the guilt. “You’re right. I tell you what. If Achilles shows up at the meeting as instructed and hands over my father’s medal without fuss, we’ll let them both walk away. But if he deceives us or tries to harm us, then—”
“They get what’s coming,” Sabrina said. She kissed him.
“Let’s get the sheriff’s cars out of sight,” Oz said, breaking the embrace. “Follow me.”
He walked back to the car where Katya was waiting, recovering, contemplating. Oh, the swirl of thoughts and emotions that must be bouncing off the walls of her pretty head!
“That was the third task. Am I done?” she asked, as he slid behind the wheel.
Oz didn’t turn toward her, but put levity in his tone. “You are. Thank you. You did great.”
“So let’s call Achilles.”
“We’ll do that in just a few minutes. Meanwhile, put this on and lean your seat all the way back.” He pulled the black bag from his side door pocket and passed it over.
Oz could tell that Katya was both nervous and brimming with questions. To her credit, she held her tongue and complied.
He pulled onto the road and headed toward dawn as Sabrina followed a few car lengths behind. A couple of miles later he turned left on a similar stretch of paved rural grid square, then left again five miles north.
Oz had initially intended to dig a big pit on a remote and unused piece of land. Some place with easy but rarely used access. A fire road or the like. Then he saw a news story and got a much better idea. He went online and confirmed that you could in fact ask Google to find just about anything. In this case, that thing was a map of Florida sinkholes.
The one the semitrailers were backed up to had formed when the covering land collapsed into a large underground cavern whose roof was some thirty feet down. Given the circularity of the hole up top, and the sheerness of the drop, it almost looked man-made.
Oz smiled when he saw that Omar and Shakira were already hard at work with the manual forklifts they’d dropped off in advance. Between the two trucks, they had sixty pallets to dump.
Omar had cleverly devised piers for dumping the pallets into the holes. He’d simply trapped the ends of car loading ramps under the rear tires of the trucks, securing the proximal end.
The dumping would go faster if Oz and Sabrina helped, so he turned to Katya. “Stay in the car with the bag covering your eyes. Don’t give me a reason to renege on my promise.”
He started to exit but then thought better of the decision. He grabbed a headset from beneath his seat and placed it over Katya’s bagged ears. When she went limp instead of flinching, he knew that it worked despite the intervening cloth.
The intercepted trailers were full. Loaded with thirty pallets each. Their replacements had been full too, although only forty-eight of the pallets now en route to their scheduled destinations held the genuine article. Twelve were packed with Oz’s secret recipe.
It took ninety minutes of coordinated effort to unload the two swapped trailers. The women positioned pallets at the edge of the trucks for the men, who then transported them to the edge of the pier and set them down at the tipping point before quickly withdrawing the forks.
The experience was fun in a novel sort of way, given that each participant only had to do it thirty times. As teenagers, the brothers would have had a blast playing with the forklifts and watching the cargo topple and crash. Oz wasn’t so sure about the sisters, although neither complained. In any case, the exercise was a much-needed tension release.
They still had a long day ahead.
Once the last pallets had toppled and crashed, they backed the trucks off the ramps and used them for their proper purpose, first to load the forklifts, then to load the sheriff’s cars. It would be safer to transport them to the drop-off point that way.
The cars were real. Somehow borrowed for a day by industrious Russian brokers in exchange for a five-figure fee. The uniforms were similarly acquired out the back door of a uniform supply store. You had to love the Land of Opportunity.
The car drop-off should be a non-event, and the truck return certainly would be. The only real work that remained before the disgraced Saudi Arabian sons and daughters boarded planes in Orlando was retrieving the Order of Abdulaziz Al Saud.
That wouldn’t be a problem either.
Not with his hostage wearing an explosive belt—and the clever trick Oz had planned.
94
Anticipation
Florida
KATYA FELT the world coming back into focus. Her head was bagged, her wrists bound, her body reclined on a cot. Her ears, however, were not muffled or plugged.
She almost wished they were.
Katya realized that she’d never again hear Arabic without cringing.
All four familiar voices were active. Oz, Sabrina, Omar and Shakira all sounded excited. Not panicked but celebratory!
She’d pieced together what they were celebrating—just not exactly why.
They had switched out the trailers on two of the farm’s delivery trucks. Because of the headsets, the drivers were completely unaware. And because the substituted trailers were the real ones, stolen from the loadin
g bays the night before beneath the nose of a similarly oblivious guard, there would be no lasting physical evidence of the exchange.
The intent was clear. To make an investigative trail go cold. But her captors’ overall objective remained a mystery. Beyond giving the recipients some really bad produce.
As she listened to the irksome banter, a fifth voice chimed in. A new voice. One she hadn’t heard before. She pictured a mature man but couldn’t be sure. It was such a different language that Katya doubted her ability to decipher age cues.
Glasses clinked a second later, tea mugs she guessed, and then the new voice spoke two English words she’d heard before. Tranquility and serenity.
Why say them in English?
Surely there were Arabic words for those sentiments?
Perhaps they were Americanizing an Islamic prayer? Or custom? Or curse? Could that be what you said at a Muslim funeral?
She heard the mugs go down and the party rise. A moment later, the bag was pulled off her head.
Oz was standing over her, an open laptop in his hand. They were right outside her chicken barn, which she now saw was one of four on the farm. A few feet off to the side was the teapot-and-folding-chair arrangement that had earlier been inside. The implication was clear. All evidence of Oz’s operation and her captivity had already been obliterated—by tens of thousands of chickens.
Except her scratch mark.
“Are you ready to call Achilles?” he asked.
She sat up and pivoted her feet to the ground. “Yes. Of course.”
“Good.” Oz pulled a phone from his back pocket and sat next to her on the cot. “Just watch what you say. It’s definitely not too late for you to blow it. Or me to blow it, if you know what I mean.”
She’d have grasped a much more subtle hint than that. It was difficult to think about much else when you had a bomb strapped to your back. “I understand.”
Oz hit DIAL and handed her the phone as it started to ring.
“Kyle Achilles.”
“It’s so good to hear your voice. I’m fine. I can’t wait to see you. I keep thinking about that question you almost asked me.”
“Me too. I was a fool to wait so long.”
“That’s enough!” Oz said, taking the phone as Omar stepped up and put a gun to her head. “I trust that satisfies your need to know that she’s all right. Now, if you want her to remain that way, you’ll do exactly as I say. Take I-95 to 714 and head inland. Should take you about twenty minutes. Then—”
“No!”
“What did you say?”
“We’re going to do the exchange on a beach. A public beach. In our bathing suits. Just the four of us.”
“If you want to see—”
Achilles cut Oz off again. “If you’re sincerely interested in exchanging the detonator box for the medal, then you’ll have no problem with this plan. Not if you get to pick the beach. Which you do.”
Katya desperately wanted to warn Achilles about Omar and Shakira, but she literally had a gun to her head.
As Oz contemplated the offer, she found herself praying that Achilles had anticipated additional team members. The possibility that after the exchange a third party would simply gun the two of them down. But even if he had, how could he stop that? Were they going to dive into the ocean?
“We don’t have bathing suits,” Oz said, delaying while he consulted his laptop screen. It showed a map with a blinking red dot. The location of Achilles’ phone, no doubt.
Oz panned the map out.
“They sell bathing suits on every street corner around here,” Achilles said. “Just be sure to grab the spandex kind. No pockets.”
“If you alert law enforcement, it’s over. We’ll be watching and listening. I want to be very clear about that. I want to be absolutely certain that you don’t underestimate my abilities in those regards.”
“I’m coming alone.”
“I’ll call you shortly with the name of the beach. Be ready to leave.” Oz hung up.
At first, Katya was encouraged that Oz agreed. It indicated that he was sincere about the trade. But then she factored in what she’d learned about him. The way he thought things through thoroughly enough to create a seamless cascade. One planned outcome following the other as if compelled by gravity. The detonator buy. The midnight truck exchange. The roadside swap. All completely undetected. And those were just the three operations she knew about.
This was a guy who had used a chicken coop for his base of operations knowing nobody would think to look there, and he’d leave no trace behind. This was a man creative enough to control his hostage with an explosive belt.
And yet he’d only spent a few seconds analyzing Achilles’ offer. An offer which altered a critical element of a crucial exchange. There was just one explanation for that. He’d considered various geographies in advance and was prepared to adapt accordingly.
Her only hope was that Achilles had done the same—and then calculated one step further ahead.
95
Second Guessing
Florida
EVEN THOUGH I KNEW that second-guessing an operation after committing to it could be deadly, I found myself questioning one earlier decision. Declining Vic’s offer to meet. It would have been very nice to have a wingman while heading to the beach.
I was pretty sure that I’d won Vic over. But I’d declined his offer because I was equally sure that he’d arrest me nonetheless. Bottom line: I simply couldn’t risk getting locked up before Katya was safe and secure.
Still, at that moment, I’d have welcomed some backup.
As it stood, I was betting everything on my ability to outthink the competition. That wasn’t purely a question of IQ, of course. It was more a combination of experience and logic. Very much like chess. Was it arrogant? Yes. Dangerous? Definitely. But I’d come closer to catching Oz and Sabrina than the FBI.
Part of the reason was that I knew my opponent. Not deeply, but intimately. We’d survived a very traumatic time together. I had a feel for how his mind worked. I knew Oz to be brave, calculating and rational, if misguided.
On that note, I still didn’t know exactly what he was up to or why. I didn’t believe that he and Sabrina were radicalized Islamic extremists. They just weren’t religious enough. They hadn’t performed salah once while we were locked away in the bunker. Although it was possible that Trey’s accusations had deterred them, I didn’t get the sense that either Oz or Sabrina felt repressed in that regard. And I wouldn’t expect an extremist to cower in any case.
With religion out of contention, I was left with more traditional motives for Oz’s crimes. I felt good about my ability to take logical account of those—and prepare accordingly.
My phone rang.
“Yes?”
“Stuart Beach. Got that? Stuart Beach. Should take you twenty minutes. See that it doesn’t take twenty-one.” Oz hung up.
I had the map ready, so I knew in an instant which way to head. And I wasn’t in my room. I was poised near a set of freeway on-ramps in my now metallic-blue car. This was a risky move. Oz might continue to watch ‘me’ on the map and ‘I’ wouldn’t be moving. But I figured he’d be otherwise occupied, and besides, there would be reasonable doubt that in my excitement I’d forgotten my phone.
The upside of the head start and ‘forgetting my phone’ was that it gave me a few minutes for reconnaissance. To get the layout, I zoomed in the satellite image while driving. The beach named after Stuart was miles long with a single, large public parking lot that was separated from the water and sand by a dense band of palm-trees and other tropical vegetation. Expensive houses rested to the north of the park proper. Hotels and condos to the south. None above five stories in height.
That was very good news. No obvious place to put a sniper or easy place to be one. I say obvious, bearing in mind that Oz was scrambling too. And easy meaning beaches were tough places for distance shots, given the shifting air currents. You needed time to study the patterns and d
ial them in.
Nonetheless, I prayed that a stiff but unsteady breeze would be blowing.
Driving slowly along the back row of the beach’s parking lot, fifty yards from the few cars there at that off hour, I spotted a suspicious character standing in the doorway of a sun-faded BMW 5-series. His hands were hidden and he was looking toward the beach.
As I slowed, the beachgoer bounced a bit, or more accurately shook. My spirits sunk as I recognized a move I’d seen a million times.
Once his hands freed up from his fly, the driver then used his left to shut the door and his right to lock the car. He stashed the key atop the rear tire and walked casually toward the shore.
Disappointed, I continued cruising the parking lot disguised only by sunglasses and a baseball hat, looking for a black Dodge Charger and people who didn’t appear interested in improving their suntans. I spotted neither.
That surprised me a bit.
It concerned me a bit more.
This was one of those circumstances when predictability meant the difference between life and death.
Either Oz and company had switched cars or they’d parked and walked or they’d been dropped off by a driver who was waiting nearby.
My guess was the last.
To spot a driver waiting on either of the adjacent properties, I’d have to go back out onto A1A, as the park had its own exit. I didn’t have time for that.
Frustrated, but not defeated, I parked for a quick exit—in case I had to race to the nearest hospital emergency room. Those, I’d already mapped out.
I hid the key between the back seat cushions, and tested to be sure that the ignition wouldn’t start. Satisfied, I removed my hat and shirt, fiddled with my phone, and got out of the car.
In one hand, I held my cell phone. In the other, my replica medal. It had turned out quite nicely. All those hours spent painting model planes and soldiers as a child had finally paid off. Oz would realize my handiwork was fake once he got ahold of it, but not before.