by Alex Kava
“It’s looking like these guys didn’t do this on their own.”
Nick was just about to tell Ceimo they already knew about the potential fourth bomber in the parking lot.
“They may not have even known they’d volunteered to be shrapnel.”
“What do you mean?” Yarden asked.
“You’ve located the detonators,” Nick said. That would be the first step.
“Need the fire inspector to verify, but my bomb expert seems convinced.”
Nick couldn’t help noticing Ceimo said, “my” bomb expert and wondered why the hell he was telling them any of this? They were simply security. On the totem pole of jurisdiction they came pretty close to the bottom of the stack.
“What exactly is your bomb expert convinced about?” Nick asked, only because it looked like Ceimo was waiting to be asked. He seemed to be enjoying doling out the information slowly.
“Understand only a handful of us know about this, okay?”
“We got that loud and clear.” Nick was tired. They all were. Patience wearing thin.
“Bombs were detonated from off-site.”
“Off-site?” Yarden didn’t understand. Nick thought he might have heard wrong.
“The bombers didn’t detonate their own packs?”
Ceimo nodded. “Someone else did it from outside the immediate perimeter.”
“Somebody else? How could they do that?” Yarden still seemed confused.
But Nick wasn’t. He knew exactly what Ceimo was suggesting. They’d spent hours viewing miles of tape and the whole time, all three of them—Maggie, Nick and Yarden—kept saying the same thing, “These kids don’t look like homicide bombers.”
There was a good reason they didn’t look the part. They weren’t bombers. Poor bastards, probably didn’t even know what was in store for them.
CHAPTER
33
The wind stung Maggie’s face with tiny ice pellets. It was bitter cold and yet she could feel sweat trickle down the middle of her back. Wurth and one of the SWAT members led her along a breaker wall that separated the parking lot from the hum of interstate traffic.
Deputy Director Wurth walked hunched over, probably from the cold. He had joked earlier that, at least, he didn’t have to worry about freezing his ass off in New Orleans, but Maggie couldn’t help thinking his trained, hunched-over stride may have been a precaution against getting his ass shot off. Maybe she had been wrong about him being a novice to a Kevlar vest.
An area in the back corner of the parking lot had been cordoned off. Despite what had happened, people still had to be pushed back. Looked like mainly media—cameras and microphones, trails of breath from reporters doing live feeds.
Maggie could see slivers of the scene over the hoods and roofs of cars and SUVs. They had the suspect pinned down between the lanes of parked vehicles though she couldn’t see him. Back here, yellowed light streaked with glittering snow pellets was all they had to break up the darkness.
It looked like two different groups of law enforcement. A guess from the different colors of jackets and hats. Most likely county and state. Rifles leveled on bumpers or hoods. Every officer would have his or her service piece drawn. She wasn’t sure who had jurisdiction. It didn’t matter to her as long as they played by her rules.
She glanced back at Wurth. He wasn’t even armed. How could she trust him to keep these guys from firing? They didn’t even know him. Most of them were locals and it would be tough to keep the emotion out of this. On the day after Thanksgiving, every single one of them probably knew someone in that mall today: a mother or wife, sister, brother, best friend, neighbor. They thought they had a live one. Adrenaline would be pumping. And the cold would only add to the rush.
“Ready when you are.” A voice startled her, crackling over static and coming from her shoulder. She’d forgotten about the two-way radio the SWAT team had strapped to her upper arm. At first it had felt too tight; now she couldn’t feel anything.
“No one fires unless they see red,” she shouted into her shoulder, the stream of breath tracking to the radio like visible sound waves.
“Roger that.”
“Any weapons?” she asked, this time keeping her voice lower.
“Haven’t seen any. Only the backpack.”
“I’m gonna let him see me, hands out to my sides.”
“Roger.”
Maggie stood up straight as she came around a set of officers crouched behind an SUV. They acknowledged her presence with only a nod. One of them pointed, indicating the young man was just on the other side.
She saw a piece of camouflage move and realized it was the suspect, right there. He was only five feet away. He glanced at her, did a double take and scooted back but was trapped between two vehicles. He had the backpack clutched to his chest like he knew it was the only thing keeping them from firing.
“It’s okay,” she yelled to him, holding her hands out from her side to show him she wasn’t armed.
His eyes darted around. He was tall and rail-thin. She could see him shivering. God, he was young. And scared.
“I just want to talk to you,” she told him. It was hard to keep her voice soothing with the cold air sucking her breath away. His eyes met hers and she recognized something in them.
“Hold your fire,” she shouted. “He’s not one of them,” she yelled to the officers just as the boy pounced at her.
He shoved her back and bolted past her. She hit hard into a car grill. “Don’t shoot,” she managed to scream, scrambling to regain her balance.
She took off after him, expecting to hear gunfire at her back.
CHAPTER
34
Patrick didn’t think the man in uniform was a cop. There had been plenty of cops in the mall. From what he remembered, all of them had their guns drawn and their badges displayed prominently, strapped to a thigh, tacked to a vest. One even had his fastened to the side of his knit stocking cap. This guy didn’t have a badge. Just a uniform and an embroidered name tag that read FRANK. Patrick guessed security. Was he with the fake paramedic guy? How hard was it to get a uniform? He wondered if his name was really even Frank.
One thing for certain, the guy was big, burly, solid. One side of his jaw looked crooked. He looked like the type of guy you could hit and he’d never even feel it. He reminded Patrick of a bully who picked on him in junior high. He’d gotten plenty of blackened eyes and bloodied lips. This guy towered over Patrick, too. But maybe he wasn’t so fast. And if he didn’t have a gun…
“Just think it’s odd,” Frank said. He had an accent, but not a Minnesota accent. More like Brooklyn which only increased Patrick’s paranoia. “Why you coming out the side door like you’re sneaking off?”
“It was the first door I came to.”
“You get hurt?” He pointed to the blood on Patrick’s sleeve. He hadn’t realized it was there.
He glanced up at Frank, gauging what direction to go with this guy.
“Yeah, but they patched me up.”
“You look a little bit woozy, yet. Might not wanna be slipping out the back until you have all your wits about you.”
Okay, maybe Frank was a good guy. That was the down-side of not trusting people. Sometimes good guys slipped through the cracks and you didn’t recognize them.
“Actually, I was looking for my girlfriend,” Patrick confessed. “She got hurt, too. I’m hoping she didn’t go wandering out into the cold. Did you see anybody else come out this door?”
Frank stared at him hard. Had Patrick been wrong about him? He glanced around the parking lot and shook his head.
“Some commotion going on around front. Nobody back here.” Then he grinned at Patrick, coffee-stained teeth, a gap between the front two. “Just you.” Despite the grin he was still examining Patrick. “They found another bomber.” His eyes stayed firmly planted on Patrick, watching for his reaction.
“Another—?” Patrick asked.
“Out in the parking lot,” he con
tinued, warming his gloved hands together in front of him, as if to show Patrick how huge his hands were. “Asked us to keep a lookout for any others.”
“Oh man, I can’t believe there’re more.” Patrick grabbed at his arm as if it suddenly hurt. “Haven’t they done enough damage?” Then he rubbed at his eyes as if they were starting to blur. “You know, you’re right. I probably should go back in. I don’t feel so good.”
“What about your girlfriend?” Frank wasn’t convinced.
Patrick shrugged and continued to hold his arm right over the stain of Rebecca’s blood. “Maybe she didn’t come this way. You said you didn’t see anybody else. She’s probably still inside looking for me.”
He turned to go back into the hotel.
“Hey, kid,” Frank said and Patrick winced.
He stopped. The door was so close, about five steps away. Maybe he should just make a run for it. But what if the door was locked from the outside?
When he glanced back, Frank had a long nightstick in his huge gloved hand, slapping it against his other hand. Where the hell did that come from?
“Don’t go sneaking out any back doors anymore, okay?” Frank told him. “Everyone’s a little on edge right now. You know what I mean?”
He flipped a switch. The nightstick was actually a long-handled flashlight. And then Frank turned, shined a tunnel of light in front of him and left into the dark.
Patrick took a couple of gulps of cold air. Paranoid. He was too damned paranoid. He went back into the hotel. Rebecca had to be inside somewhere.
CHAPTER
35
Maggie ignored the ache in her back. Something pinched where she had slammed against the front of the car. At first she had tried to unzip her jacket to get at her Smith & Wesson. It slowed her down too much. The kid wasn’t armed. She’d do without it. Besides, she was the only one who could catch him now. They’d all listened to her. Stood down.
Behind her she could hear footsteps crunching but they were too far back. Her radio crackled from her shoulder, “Subject headed south, southeast.”
The kid had slipped a couple of times, little traction in his sneakers. Each time she closed the distance between them, two paces, three. Only a car length between them now, but he was wiry, flexible, spinning around bumpers and twisting to avoid rearview mirrors. He was scared. Didn’t matter that he wasn’t one of the bombers. He didn’t understand what had caused all the attention. Maggie wondered if he even understood much English.
As soon as she had gotten a good look at him she knew immediately he wasn’t a part of the group of young men she had spent the afternoon watching. He was too young. And he was black. Tall, skinny—almost anorexic thin. But it was that look in his eyes that gave him away, that terrified panic of someone who’s been accused and hunted before. She’d seen that look. It wasn’t fear from guilt. It was fear of persecution. She was guessing about his lack of English.
There were drifts between the cars and one of them had swallowed Maggie’s boot, sucking it right off her foot. Cheap slip-ons. She didn’t let it slow her down. Her daily exercise regimen included a three, sometimes four-mile run.
From the radio, more static then, “Don’t let him leave the lot.”
She heard the clicks of metal behind her. Closer. Damn it! Was that the sound of rifles getting set? Is that what she was hearing? Someone bracing a weapon against the metal of a vehicle? Taking aim?
“Hold your fire,” she yelled into her shoulder, only it came out in gasps, hardly coherent.
“Suspect fleeing. Considered dangerous.”
“Hold all fire,” she tried again. He’s scared, not dangerous. Could they shoot him with her trailing this close?
She heard more movement coming fast behind her. Heavy boots crunching snow, the slap of leather, the clack of metal, shouts garbled by the wind.
The boy slipped again, wiping out and thumping his knee against a bumper. Another two paces lost. Then he glanced over his shoulder. Big mistake. Slowed you down every time. He thought he’d regain momentum by taking a sharp left, and running parallel back in her direction, only with a lane of cars between them. Maggie spun around.
He was right there. Right alongside her. She could see slices of him between the parked vehicles. The cars were all that separated them. She pushed herself. A little faster. Her lungs were already burning from the cold air she’d sucked in. But the wind was at their backs now. Just a little more. She needed to get a step or two in front of him. She’d still lose him if she had to twist between the vehicles. She decided on a shortcut.
Maggie glanced ahead at the long uninterrupted row of vehicles. She chose wisely. Then she jumped on the hood of a compact and let the slide of snow-caked rubber soles on metal propel her right on top of the boy. It knocked him completely off his feet. His elbow jabbed into Maggie’s side, catching her right under her vest. It knocked the air out of her. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain, but still held on.
He was shoving and kicking until she grabbed his arm. One twist and his body went rigid. She pulled his arm back behind him and almost automatically he went down, face down. Her knee was in his back, his legs sprawled.
“You may not feel like it now,” she told the boy in machine-gun bursts of breath. Each intake of cold air stabbed her lungs. “But you’ll thank me for this later.”
Better a knee in the back than a bullet.
When she finally looked up she was surrounded by men in helmets and scoped rifles. One of them held the red backpack that had gotten discarded somewhere along the chase. Another held the boot she had lost.
Charlie Wurth squeezed through the group, a head shorter than the rest of them, looking small and out of place. But he had a huge smile on his face as he offered a gloved hand to help Maggie up.
“Son of a bitch, O’Dell. You are something else.”
CHAPTER
36
“It’s bigger than we thought,” David Ceimo was telling Nick and Jerry Yarden. “Not just three kids getting together and thinking it’d be cool to blow up a shopping mall.”
Nick pulled the paper shoe covers on but kept his face mask dangling at his neck. Jerry had geared up completely, reminding Nick of an orange bug. The elastic band that held up the mask made his ears stick out further. And he’d mussed his hair, leaving tuffs sticking straight up. Nick resisted the urge to nudge him, and do a swipe at his own hair like he’d do with his nephew, Timmy, to tell him his hair was all tousled. Instead Nick pulled on a pair of purple latex gloves and followed behind Ceimo and Yarden, staring at Jerry’s tufts of orange hair rather than looking down at the trails of blood. Bodies were covered where they lay but he swore he saw what looked like a leg—gnarled fabric and flesh with a loafer—underneath what may have once been a food court table, now twisted metal.
Ceimo was leading them to the first and closest crater. No one paid any attention to them. They continued their slow, painstaking tasks. The buzz and hum and swish of equipment took the place of conversation. Walking amongst the techs in their Tyvek overalls, masks and goggles reminded Nick of walking through a scene of Star Wars, a different planet covered in soot and ash with a distinctive smell of burnt dinner. That’s how he tried to think about it. Especially the burnt dinner part. Anything to keep his mind from focusing on it really being burnt flesh and singed hair.
A tech noticed their approach. She shoved her goggles up on top of her short blond hair then picked up the tray of debris she was sifting through.
“Jamie’s lead on the crater dig. She’s our bomb expert,” Ceimo told them.
Nick thought she looked like a college kid. On closer inspection he could see small crinkle lines at the corners of her eyes that revealed she was older.
“Go ahead and tell them what you told me,” Ceimo told Jamie.
She pointed with a gloved finger to a pile of debris in the center of her tray.
“When you think of an explosion most people automatically think everything is incinerated. Bu
t fire is only one portion of an explosion. The other, of course, is blowing things apart. We end up with fragments. Some actually are decipherable.” She poked around the debris and now Nick could see what looked like fibers, obviously scorched but some of the ends were still red.
“The backpack,” Yarden said.
“Yes, and this metal piece was part of the detonating mechanism.”
“Doesn’t look like much of anything,” Nick couldn’t help saying.
“There’re several other smaller fragments here.” She gently pushed them out of the ash. “I’ll piece them together back at the lab, but I recognize it already. You guys remember the Pan Am flight that went down over Lockerbie, Scotland?”
Everyone nodded. It was a long time ago. Nick figured twenty years at least, but anyone in law enforcement recognized the case. A huge passenger jet blowing up in the air.
“That was a mess,” Jamie said like she’d been there. The crinkles weren’t that deep. “The debris was scattered over miles and yet investigators were able to determine the exact cause. They found a tiny piece of circuit board from an electronic digital timer. It’d been placed inside a radio-cassette player along with Semtex then placed inside a brown Samsonite suitcase.” She paused, noting Yarden’s dropped jaw. “Yeah, amazing, huh?”
“Are you saying this piece of metal might be some sort of circuit board?” Nick asked.
“No, it’s not. It’s a bit different. But what I am saying is that we can determine a lot from fragments. Sometimes they’re very definable. The devices used to detonate a bomb are sort of like a black box in an airplane. It can tell us a great deal of things. That circuit board found in the Lockerbie bombing was identified as a particular digital timer manufactured by a company in Zurich. Only twenty of the devices had been made. Special ordered and custom made for the Libyan government.”
“Wow!”
Nick glanced at Jerry Yarden. Maggie might have some competition. Looked like Yarden had transferred his awestruck attention and affection to Jamie. Nick thought he saw the beginning of a smile at the corner of her mouth but otherwise she seemed unfazed. Instead, she continued.