Twenty

by James Grippando

  Jack watched, and Amir seemed to be getting comfortable again, more confident.

  “Food and electricity aren’t going to cut it.”

  “Then put something else on the table,” said Andie.

  Amir stopped pacing and gripped the phone a little tighter. “I want a car with a driver to the airport. I want a plane with a pilot to Havana. And I want room on the plane for me and one hostage. Just one. You can keep the other.”

  “That’s going to be very difficult,” said Andie.

  “I’m giving you five minutes.”

  “I need you to work with me on this. It’s a big ask. I can’t do it in five minutes.”

  “I’ll give you ten. But the next time my phone rings, it better be you calling to tell me the car is here and the plane is on the runway.”

  “Okay,” said Andie.

  Amir seemed surprised. “Okay then.”

  “We’re going to get this right,” said Andie. “I understand what you want, and we’re going to get it right the first time. There are no do-overs.”

  “You’re damn right.” Amir hung up and tucked the phone into his pocket.

  Jack didn’t move. He’d totally understood the message from Andie. That was his favorite expression with Righley as peewee soccer coach: no do-overs. Jack read it to mean, Take whatever shot you get, Jack. There’s not going to be a plane to Cuba.

  He was three feet away from the crossbeam in the broken bed.

  “Walk,” said Amir.

  Jack didn’t even glance in the direction of what was the weapon of last resort, if not of choice. He turned and started walking, counting down from ten minutes in his head.

  Chapter 64

  Maritza started the walk back to her car.

  She’d lost sight of Abdul shortly after crossing to the other side of the street. Had she been allowed to walk straight from point A to point Abdul, all would have been fine. But the MDPD on perimeter patrol had forced her to take the long way, outside the barricades. Before she could reach the spot, Abdul was gone. Maybe it hadn’t been him after all. It was petty of her anyway, this urge to spit in his eye and tell him to his face that all his lies were about to catch up with him.

  Another thought came to her. Maybe he’d seen her coming. She checked over her shoulder as she crossed back toward her side of the street.

  “Keep walking, folks,” said the officer at the barricade. “Nothing to see.”

  The police were doing their best, but with media vans at every barricaded cross street and the Action News helicopter whirring overhead, the crowd wasn’t buying the “nothing to see” baloney.

  “Are they filming a movie?” Maritza overheard someone say.

  “Quick, selfie!”

  “Move along,” said the officer.

  An MDPD squad car was parked at the curb, beacons flashing. The driver’s-side door was open. A handful of officers were standing near it, talking. From the looks of things, it wasn’t just idle chitchat. Something was up. With the door open, the console-mounted computer workstation was in plain view. Maritza glanced at the glaring rectangular screen as she passed, and she did a double take. There were a pair of images on the screen, both the face of the same man. Abdul with facial hair. Abdul clean shaven. She was too far away to read the on-screen message, but she could see the large bold letters directly above the photographs: BOLO. Even the occasional watcher of police dramas knew what that meant.

  Be on the lookout—which explained Abdul’s sudden disappearance.

  Maritza kept walking, exhilarated, wishing Xavier were with her to slap a high five. She couldn’t be certain that Xavier had broken his silence. But maybe he’d heard about the hostage standoff on the news and realized that, no matter how many threats Abdul made against his mother, brother, and sister, taking the fall for a crime he didn’t commit was no way to protect his family. It was time to hold the real terrorists accountable.

  “Don’t scream,” said Abdul, and suddenly he was walking alongside her, his arm around her shoulder, and his gun pushing up below her rib cage.

  They were still a block away from where she’d parked her car, but they were well away from the crowd and commotion on LeJeune Road.

  “Just keep walking normally,” he said. “We’re taking your car.”

  “There’s a BOLO issued for you.”

  “Yes. It looks like Amir cracked.”

  Maritza hadn’t considered that possibility. Maybe Xavier hadn’t broken his silence. “You won’t get away.”

  “I will if I have you with me. They have to give me something for giving up the next school shooter.”

  “Just like you pinned the first one on Xavier. Except I don’t have a family you can threaten to make me take the fall.”

  “I have ways to make you cooperate.”

  Maritza was all too aware, and she couldn’t deny it, but the voice from behind them made a response unnecessary.

  “Police! Stop right there!”

  They stopped on command. Abdul whispered in her ear, poking her ribs with the muzzle of his pistol. “Tell him your father is deaf.”

  She hesitated.

  “Do it!” he whispered.

  “My father is deaf,” she said.

  “Then why did he stop when I told him to?” the cop asked.

  “Because I stopped,” Abdul whispered.

  Maritza repeated his answer.

  “Okay. Well. Then . . .”

  Maritza estimated that the cop was about fifteen feet behind them, and even though she and Abdul were looking down the street in the opposite direction, she could tell the officer was flummoxed.

  “Do what you need to do to get your father to put his hands in the air,” the cop said.

  “I have to sign,” Abdul whispered.

  Maritza hesitated. She knew Abdul was trying to create a distraction, but he was pressing the gun so hard into her abdomen that her eyes teared.

  “I have to sign,” she said.

  The cop took a moment. “I just want you to raise your hands in the air, and raise his with yours. Nice and slow.”

  Maritza started to comply, raising both her hands and taking Abdul’s left hand with hers. The gun in Abdul’s other hand was still poking her in the side as the officer’s radio crackled.

  “This is Officer Michaels,” he said. “Just got off duty and was walking over to the sub shop, and I spotted—”

  “He has a gun!” Maritza shouted, but before the cop could say another word, Abdul whirled around and fired two quick shots. Maritza screamed and saw the officer drop to the sidewalk, as she dove between two parked cars on the street for cover.

  Abdul fired one shot in her direction, shattering the taillight just above her head. Then he ran. Maritza hurried to the fallen officer. At least one of Abdul’s rounds had hit its mark, and it was an obvious kill shot—a through and through wound, with point of entry to the left of his nose and a deadly exit through the back of his skull. He was probably dead before he’d hit the sidewalk.

  “Oh, my God,” said Maritza.

  She grabbed the radio and told them where they were, what had happened, and who was on the run.

  “Stay right there,” the dispatcher told her.

  She saw no point. The officer was dead. She couldn’t help him. Abdul was getting away.

  She laid the radio on the sidewalk and made a promise to the dead officer. “I got this,” she said. She ran to her car, popped the trunk, and grabbed the AK-47 that Abdul had trained her to use.

  Then she ran after him.

  Chapter 65

  Andie watched the cursor on the computer screen.

  The hand-sketched plan as mapped out by the tactical team leader told most of the story. It looked like a play drawn up by a football coach on the blackboard. But this team was already in position, and its SWAT leader had gone silent. So Schwartz filled in the details for the negotiators inside the mobile command center, referencing the on-screen diagram as needed.

  “It will be a
simultaneous breach from two points of entry,” he said.

  The cursor moved to the common wall that separated the hostages from the adjacent room. It had been virtually demolished by the crash entry of Amir’s car, but SWAT had descended like ghosts to assess the damage and its potential impact on a breach.

  “Cameras and on-site inspection confirm that the south wall is seriously compromised,” said Schwartz. “There’s a section about midpoint that can withstand a blast of explosives needed to create an entry point.”

  “Explosives?” asked Andie.

  “The doors are barricaded,” said Schwartz. “We could blast through it, but it could send debris flying and injure the hostages. And we can’t have SWAT tripping all over stuff on the way in.”

  The cursor moved across the screen to the back wall.

  “In all these old roadside motels, there’s a service corridor that runs right behind the rooms from one end of the building to the other. This motel is so old it’s not even close to being up to building-code requirements. SWAT tells me there’s only one sheet of drywall on this back wall. The working side, facing the corridor, is exposed studs. And they’re thirty inches apart, not the usual sixteen or twenty-four inches. Easy point of breach with enhanced percussion.”

  Easy. Andie found the word choice interesting. There was nothing easy about breaching the den of a hostage taker.

  “Questions?” asked Schwartz.

  His cell rang. He checked the number and didn’t hesitate to answer, even at such a crucial point. “Keep us apprised,” he said into the phone, and the expression on his face made Andie fear the worst.

  “Officer down just outside the perimeter. We think it was Abdul.”

  The words seemed to leave everyone numb. Then Carter spoke. “I guess you were right, Henning. I should have listened to Maritza.”

  It was probably the first time in his life Carter had eaten crow, but the Pyrrhic victory of an “I told you so” was not what Andie wanted.

  Schwartz laid a hand on her shoulder. “You did your job, Henning. I’m confident that Amir is expecting at least one more phone call from us before we breach. SWAT has the element of surprise. And we’ve done all the talking we can do.”

  Andie was silent. And then she nodded.

  The ASAC put on his headset, adjusted the microphone, and spoke directly to the team in position.

  “Green on your ready,” he said.

  Chapter 66

  Maritza was running at full speed. Even with a rifle in her hand, she was faster than Abdul. She’d closed the distance between them to about twenty yards, when he stopped, turned, and looked back. Maritza stopped and raised her rifle. She wasn’t close enough to hear him or even see his lips move, but everything about his reaction to her weapon screamed Holy shit!

  He fired a shot in her direction, which missed, and then ran into the alley.

  The chase had taken them away from the residential area. Abdul was heading toward the airport. They were in the warehouse district, where every building looked the same and everything shut down after dark. Warehouses were built to zero lot lines, each long and rectangular building separated from the next by a narrow alley. Maritza dialed 911 on her cell phone, still running. She told the dispatcher she was chasing the man in the police BOLO but didn’t have an exact address.

  “Five blocks east of LeJeune Road,” she said, breathing into the phone, “by the hostage standoff.”

  “Stay on the line, please.”

  “I can’t.”

  Maritza stopped at the front corner of the warehouse, at the entrance to the alley into which Abdul had disappeared. She put away her phone and caught her breath. With her back against the wall, a rifle in her hand, and the enemy somewhere in the dark alley, it was all eerily reminiscent of another time and her darkest days in Iraq. She poked her head around the corner and peered cautiously down the black alley. The warehouses were much deeper than wide, nearly the length of a football field from front to back. The alley had no streetlamp, or at least not a working one. The moonlight did little more than create confusing shadows in what seemed like an endless black tunnel. She knew he was still in the alley. The run had left her winded, and Abdul had to be in even worse shape. Surely he needed rest.

  Maritza could have stayed right there and waited for the police. She chose not to, repeating to herself the words she’d shared with Abdul’s latest victim: “I got this.”

  She entered the alley, keeping close to the wall, her rifle at the ready. Ten feet into the darkness, she stopped, listened, and reassessed. Roll-down steel shutters covered the windows and doors that faced the alley, blocking off escape routes. Corrugated boxes, flattened and stacked one on top of another for disposal, rose in cardboard towers along the wall near the Dumpster. She took another step forward, then stopped. There was a noise. Something—or someone—was behind the Dumpster. She took cover behind a thick stack of flattened boxes and waited. Her heart pounded. The chorus of sirens in the distance grew louder. Police were on the way. It gave her comfort, and yet it heightened the sense of urgency.

  Two quick shots rang out, followed by pops in the stacked cardboard that was her cover. Maritza returned fire, squeezing off ten quick shots.

  Abdul cried out in the darkness, and then she heard something hit the pavement. It was not at all like the sound of the fallen police officer hitting the sidewalk. It was something inanimate, metallic, like a gun.

  Slowly, sliding her back against the wall, Maritza moved deeper into the alley closer to the Dumpster. She heard Abdul groaning on the other side of it. He was definitely wounded. She maneuvered around the Dumpster, leading with her rifle, and saw him. He was down on one knee and clutching his bloody hand. She’d shot the pistol right out of his grip. There was no telling where it had landed, but Abdul was disarmed.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  “You shot me, bitch!”

  “Move a muscle and I’ll shoot you again.” She dug her cell phone out of her pocket to dial 911 again.

  No service.

  Abdul chuckled through the pain. “Better service in Baghdad, no?”

  She put her phone away. “Nothing is better in Baghdad.”

  “Wrong,” he said, grimacing. “Prostitutes are better.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You think I wanted the life of pleasure marriages, Rusul?”

  The use of her real name was clearly intentional.

  “I don’t care what you wanted. You’re a monster.”

  Another mirthless chuckle, and then he looked up at her, his expression deadly serious. “Agent Carter used me. His country used me. I gave him everything I had for eight years to fight al-Qaeda. It cost me my wife, my sister, my mother. Everything.”

  “How could you join a terrorist organization that murdered your family?”

  “It wasn’t al-Qaeda. They were murdered by ISIS. The Americans left us at their mercy by pulling out before the job was done. Does Carter care? No.”

  “That wasn’t Carter’s fault.”

  “For nine years, I risked my life fighting terrorists for the Americans. Carter owed me more than ‘Good-bye and good luck.’ Do you know what ISIS did to men like me who helped ‘the invaders’?”

  She did. She’d witnessed it with her own eyes.

  “My wife, my mother, my sister were not enough,” said Abdul. “They took my son, my daughter, and all their classmates. They gunned them down like animals.”

  “At school,” she said, purely a reaction.

  “Yes. At their school.”

  “So Riverside was your idea. When Carter asked you to help root out Amir Khoury’s connection to al-Qaeda, it was you who put the idea of a school shooting in his head.”

  “Justice. Put down the gun, Rusul. Carter used me. He used you, too.”

  “No,” she said, her voice quaking. “Carter saved me.”

  “Saved you?” he said, scoffing. “He needed young women to gather intelligence in Iraq.”

 
“And then he brought me to this country, where I would be safe.”

  “And he paired you with me to infiltrate the Khoury family. Saved you,” he said, almost spitting out the words. “It’s all about the mission, Rusul. He used you. The Americans use everyone.”

  “You’re the user, Abdul. You used Xavier. And when he wouldn’t do as you asked, you took Amir’s pistol and did it yourself. And Amir went along with it. What kind of sick father allows a man like you to pin a school shooting on his own son?”

  “Better than letting him fall in love with a whore.”

  “Shut up, Abdul!”

  “Did you kid yourself into thinking you could actually have a boyfriend, Rusul?”

  She wanted to pull the trigger.

  “Did you think you could undo the thoughts I put into that boy’s head? The hatred Amir put into his heart? Did you think the two of you would live happily ever after, Rusul?”

  She wanted to pull it so badly.

  “Do you honestly believe you can ever be more in this life than a tight virgin for lonely men?”

  His words alone might have been enough to push her over the edge, but as he dove to his right, Maritza saw the gun, and she had no choice. She squeezed the trigger, again and again, faster and faster, releasing round after round until the flurry of bullets took Abdul down to the pavement.

  The sound of blaring sirens grew louder. The police were near.

  Maritza dropped her gun, fell against the Dumpster, and wept until they arrived.

  Chapter 67

  On edge. Stressed out. At the breaking point. From Jack’s vantage point, all of the above applied to Amir. The deterioration of his emotional state over the past seven or eight minutes had been precipitous. The darkness was getting to him. Streaks of light seeped through the cracks in the draperies, and his cell phone added a little more. But it wasn’t enough.

  “Too dark in here,” he said for the fifth time in the last five minutes.

  “Use my cell phone,” said Molly.

  “No. I need to save batteries.”

  “I could peel back a corner of the drapes,” said Jack.