by Jack Hardin
“This makes me want to call my mother,” Hailey sighed, “and I don’t ever talk to my mother.”
“Yeah,” Ellie said, wishing she had a mother to call. She had already spoken with her sister on the drive here to the office. Tyler, too. Major, her uncle, beat her to the punch, calling her to see if she had heard the news and checking to make sure she was doing okay. Just hearing Major’s voice served to calm her somehow and made her realize that the news of a terrorist attack in a neighboring metropolis kicked her stress level up far more than she’d realized. Major was a stabilizing presence in her life, ever constant, and it was times like these when she understood just how much he meant to her.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re here. Let’s get to work.”
Sparks popped into the air like tiny passengers jumping ship and died as they hit the ground. The torch hissed with flame as the young man everyone knew simply as Nico slowly ran it down the steel joint. Finished, he turned the torch off and flipped back his welder’s helmet, then used the top of his forearm to rub the sweat from his brow. He stood up from his crouch and walked over to the welding machine. He turned it off and spun the valve on the gas tank to stop the flow. After peeling off his gloves and removing his helmet, he returned to his creation. It was nearly the size of two standard-sized sedans stacked on top of each other. It was the most ambitious project he had taken on yet. Somehow he’d made it work. It was strictly due to the money he had been offered for the design and the labor. The client had paid for all the materials, and Nico couldn’t begin to conceive how much that had cost.
His shirt was soaking wet, and he felt a thin rivulet of sweat run down the small of his back. His commercial floor fan had finally died on him three days ago and now, with no air conditioning, the metal building was like the inside of a preheating oven. The temperature climbed slowly in the late morning and then dialed all the way up by mid-afternoon. He could open the bay door, but if anyone found out what he was doing in here, he would be a dead man. Outside, he could hear children playing soccer in a dirt parking lot and a forklift beep as it backed up somewhere out in the junkyard.
Nico set the flat of his hand against the curved wall of steel. It was beautiful. Well, he thought it was anyway. To anyone else, it would look like a huge belly of scarred steel.
There was still a great deal of work to do, and that knowledge alone made him nervous enough to nearly start everything up again. But he didn’t. He needed a break. Mistakes started to happen when you were as tired as he was, and Nico couldn’t afford even the slightest mistake. Not when two lives hung in the balance, his being one of them. One poor weld, one weak seam, and that would be it: lights out.
He needed some food and a couple of liters of water, and that was the impulse that carried him across the floor toward the door.
He had four days to finish. And Nico knew it would be his life if he didn’t.
Chapter Three
Hailey Fiske lived in a third-story studio apartment in the Fort Myers River District that looked out onto the dark blue waters of the Caloosahatchee River. The River District was the gem of Fort Myers. Old buildings that had been erected during a building boom in the 1920s had fallen into urban decay until a full-scale renovation and rejuvenation project commenced in the 1980s. Now it boasted an expanded marina, brick-paved roads, and sidewalks lined with royal palms and trendy iron lamp posts. Locally owned art galleries provided a charming ambiance set against the backdrop of buildings rich in architecture in an old-meets-new kind of way. At night, hip restaurants hummed with hundreds of locals, tourists, and snowbirds looking to have a good time with the aid of live music, free-flowing liquor, and an easy breeze blowing off the water.
It was not yet seven in the morning when Ellie drove down First Street and pulled her truck into an empty parking space along the curb. The streets that had been humming just hours before were quiet now as the rising sun tinted the eastern sky and the city began to wake up.
Hailey emerged from a coffee shop with her oversized purse on a shoulder and a cup of coffee in each hand. Ellie leaned over and opened the passenger door.
“Thanks,” Hailey said and handed a cup across the console. “Here’s yours. Straight up.”
Ellie took it and slipped it into the cup holder. “Thanks.”
Hailey got in, shut the door, and placed her purse on the floorboard before sliding the seat belt across her chest and clicking it in. Ellie checked her side mirror and pulled back out into the street. She navigated around Carson Park and merged with the on-ramp that brought them onto Cleveland Avenue and onto the Caloosahatchee Bridge. From their temporary vantage point fifty feet above the water, they could see the vast river laid out on either side with North Cape Coral ahead and the flanks of palm trees that stood sturdy like faithful guardians. Why anyone would want to live apart from the water was an indecipherable mystery to Ellie. She punched the radio on, settling in for the extended drive, and twisted the volume up as Bon Iver’s signature falsetto came through.
“If you’re good with it,” she said, “I’d like to stop by downtown first and have a look at the blast site. Unless we hit traffic, we should have some time to spare before we’re due at the office.”
“Sure.” Hailey took a sip of her coffee and shook her head. “I’ve been with the FBI for almost ten years now, but these kinds of events, they never stop feeling surreal. They sent me to Boston after the marathon bombing to assist their local office. But this one…” She didn’t need to finish. As horrendous as the Boston attack had been, the initial death count of this explosion was far worse, and on a purely human level, there was something about proximity that rattled the nerves. Tampa wasn’t two thousand miles away; it was a hundred and twenty miles and four counties north of Lee County, Fort Myers, and Pine Island. Most people can watch the news and read in the paper about citywide break-ins and robberies, but it isn’t until their next-door neighbor’s house is broken into that they really get the jitters.
“The news channels keep replaying that cell phone coverage we saw in the conference room yesterday,” Hailey said. “I can’t imagine being such a proximate witness to something like that.”
Ellie easily recalled two such times during her tenure with TEAM 99. The first was when the U.S. intelligence community had located Nasir Haqqani—The Apostate—in southern Syria. At the time, Nasir was the most wanted terrorist in the world, claiming responsibility for the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Jordan—which resulted in dozens of casualties—and the attempted assassination of John Eisenberg, the United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The CIA had sent TEAM 99 to take The Apostate out. After a raid on his compound, Ellie had been the first one to catch up to Nasir, who had already been incapacitated by a sniper round from Voltaire, her team leader. She took a photo of the terrorist for confirmation purposes and then, after calling in a drone strike, jogged a safe distance away. Less than a minute later, an explosion rocked the air around her, leaving the truck he had been sitting in nothing more than a burnt-out shell of smoke and flame.
The second such explosion she had witnessed was while she was undercover in Benghazi, a year after Gaddafi had been dispossessed. She was in her third-story room at the Tibesti Hotel, stepping out of the shower, when a suicide bomber walked into the restaurant across the street and detonated his vest. The blast had blown out the windows in Ellie’s room and one of her eardrums. It also left a crater in the foyer of the restaurant nearly ten feet in diameter. There was something deeply unsettling about feeling a concussive wave ripple inside your chest and your organs and inside your bones. It was unnatural and served as a harsh reminder that nature’s elements, when combined with the intents of evil men, could unleash hell on the innocent and unsuspecting.
Two hours after leaving Fort Myers, Ellie passed into Tampa and merged onto Selmon Expressway. As the downtown skyline grew taller before them, the atmosphere in the truck became heavier, as though they were drawing nearer to hallowed, but not holy, ground. Ellie t
urned the radio off.
She took the exit ramp for Kennedy Boulevard, which she followed until a police blockade forced them to head north onto Morgan Street, four blocks from the site of the explosion. Ellie turned into a public parking lot across the street from St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. They got out and headed southwest down Madison, passing up the Tampa Police Museum before arriving at a strip of crime scene tape.
The city was eerily quiet, as though holding its breath. Most of its shocked populace had either taken the day off or hadn’t ventured down this way out of raw fear. The few pedestrians and drivers on this side of downtown appeared to be in a hushed daze or frightened shock; it was like walking into the side parlor of a funeral home.
It had been over fifteen hours since the explosion, and no one had yet claimed responsibility for it. That wasn’t unusual; terrorists had been known to wait as long as two or three weeks before finally raising their hands and admitting their culpability. But often they did not. Timothy McVeigh, after parking a Ryder truck at the drop-off zone beneath a federal building in Oklahoma City, walked several blocks away to his getaway vehicle, arriving just before the Ryder truck, filled with 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane, and diesel fuel mixture, detonated successfully. McVeigh was arrested ninety minutes after the explosion, as he was driving north on I-35. He was pulled over because his Mercury Grand Marquis was missing a license plate and was arrested at the time for carrying an illegal firearm; the authorities had no idea that he was the one behind the explosion in the state's capital city. It wasn’t until three days later that the feds pinned him as the one who carried out the attacks. McVeigh had manifested no urgency to admit to the world what he had done, or why.
The Tsarnaev brothers, after successfully detonating two pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, stayed in the general area so they could witness the chaos. Like McVeigh, they felt no urgency to express their motivations to the world.
As it stood, the identity of the Tampa attacker was still unknown. No concrete leads had popped up overnight. The greatest concern at this point was a repeat. Did they plan on doing it again? And if so, when and where?
The entire block around the blast site was cordoned off with yellow tape, and Tampa’s finest held watch around it to keep curious onlookers out. A police officer reviewed the federal agents’ credentials and then lifted the tape so they could pass under. Reaching the corner of Franklin and Monroe, Ellie and Hailey drew up and took in the scene before them.
The bus lay twenty yards down the street, a temporary concrete blockade erected around it. Teams of federal forensics and crime scene investigators were gathered beneath pop-up canopy tents and around the bus, taking samples and pictures that would soon be taken to their labs and analyzed. Ellie and Hailey stood at the foot of the Fifth Third Bank skyscraper. Nearly all the windows on its first two floors were blown out with shards of glass still scattered along the sidewalk and sparkling in the road. The front end of a Toyota Corolla was buried into the base of a traffic light pole, its driver apparently having lost all sense of clarity when the bomb went off. The Corolla’s windows were missing, too, as were those of a dozen other cars that lay haphazardly along the street, abandoned as injured and fearful passengers had fled on foot.
Ellie crossed the street to Lykes Gaslight Park. Hailey followed. A trail of dried blood streaked across the asphalt and onto the sidewalk, ending in the grass where the dark red stained an area of lush green grass the size of a basketball, the colors contrasting in a preternatural manner that made Ellie’s stomach turn.
They passed the two leaning palm trees they had seen on the news last night. Ellie looked across the park where another line of barricade tape ran along the perimeter of N. Tampa Street, beneath which hundreds of bouquets of flowers, candles, and pictures lay—the generous outpourings of grieving Floridians who had held a vigil all through the previous night.
Ellie turned and looked back to the bus. She was unprepared for the onslaught of emotions that suddenly grabbed at her heart and commenced a slow, unrelenting squeeze. Her breath caught, and she turned away.
She saw his eyes—kind, but sad and questioning, seeking answers that would never come.
“Ellie?” Hailey asked from beside her. “You okay?”
She nodded quickly and looked away. “I just need a minute.” She walked off, skirting a hedge of fern and settling on a bench beneath a canopy of youthful elm trees that crisscrossed the park.
Being here now, seeing the burnt-out skeleton that was the front half of the bus, viewing the streak in the road that the bomb had scarred into the pavement, had brought up a flurry of memories that Ellie had successfully buried deep in an underground vault. Walking this street, seeing all this, had suddenly excavated it and resurrected all the guilt and remorse brought on by that macabre afternoon.
Assam Murad was one of the finest men she had ever met. A highly respected dentist in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital city, Assam was the reason the CIA had inserted Ellie into the country, establishing her cover as a journalist with Reuters. Assam’s cousin was Fahad Sarkaui, a top-level leader in ISIS and a target highly desired by the United States. After nearly a year of patient massaging, Ellie had turned Assam into one of the CIA’s most important and trusted assets in the region. But not before she fell in love with his family.
Assam’s wife, Vida, his ten-year-old son, Ibrahim, and six-year-old Khalida had quickly gained Ellie’s affections. They were gracious people, kind and trusting. Ellie would often visit their home for dinner, sitting with them until late in the evenings as they discussed the war, their culture, and their collective hopes for the future of their country.
After Assam finally gave up his cousin and the airstrikes against Sarkaui’s hideout were declared successful, Ellie’s next task was to help Assam and his family flee the city and exfiltrate them safely to America.
Everything had gone as planned: Assam, Vida, Ibrahim, and Khalida had quietly transitioned to his mother’s flat on the outskirts of the city. A few hours later, when everything was prepared, Assam placed a yellow cloth in a window to let his U.S. handlers know that they were ready to leave.
Ellie hopped into the lead Humvee that would take her from Camp Phoenix and into the city. She remembered it all like it was yesterday:
The Humvee’s two passengers bounced up and down on the uneven road as it dodged potholes and torn asphalt. Ellie reached into her sack, pulled out a black hijab, and wrapped it loosely around her head. She looked into her side view mirror and saw their escort pull in behind them, another Humvee carrying four armed soldiers.
“Arrived,” her earpiece chirped.
They pulled up hard at the corner, and Ellie stared out her window at the rusty metal door nestled on the side of the old, five-story, plastered building. “Come on,” she muttered. Nothing. The driver looked at his watch and lowered his head as he swung his eyes around and surveyed the windows and roofs of the buildings around them. “Come on,” she said again to the door, as if the words had magical powers to accomplish her bidding.
Ellie’s earpiece came to life. “Zero tango,” a man’s voice whispered. “Negative thirty seconds.”
Her eyes were glued to the door. “Eagle, how’s it looking up there?” she asked firmly.
“Clear,” a deep voice crackled. Two armed CIA snipers were on surrounding rooftops, keeping watch for unwelcome activity.
Suddenly, the metal door flung open, and Ellie shot out of the Humvee. Three doors belonging to the vehicle behind opened, and as many men in desert fatigues and helmets poured out with their HK416 automatic rifles drawn. They stepped onto the sidewalk and scanned the landscape. A tall, bearded man wearing a grey perahan tunban emerged from the doorway carrying a little girl across his body. Her arms and legs were wrapped tightly around her father. Ellie wanted to smile and tell the girl it was going to be all right, but there was no time. Her father was trailed by a middle-aged lady with her hand restin
g protectively on the head of her young son. Like his parents, Ibrahim’s pupils were dilated wide with fear and urgency. The foursome moved quickly, their heads held low. “This way,” Ellie said. “Quickly.” Her eyes darted from the family to the buildings surrounding them. It was only fifteen feet from the metal door to the escort.
Suddenly, two loud “pops” filled the air. Vida’s hand came off the head of her son as her body lifted violently off the ground and was flung into the side of the building she had just exited.
“Vida!” Assam screamed and turned toward his wife.
“Assam, no!” Ellie yelled. “We have to go!”
“Mama!” Ibrahim screamed. Another “pop” and Ibrahim’s body crumpled to the ground. His father turned to him in horror. “No!”