Sleeper Cell

by Chris Culver

  “Yes, I have a ticket,” he said, feeling his pockets. His hand brushed against the switch in his pocket, and then he touched the glossy card stock ticket Hashim had given him that morning. He hesitated before pulling it out, though.

  He was willing to die for his cause, but he wasn’t willing to waste his life. Already, the Secret Service agents had begun watching him intently. If he had gone in earlier with a large crowd, maybe he could have slipped through the security gate unnoticed, but not now. Even if he didn’t set off the metal detector, the Secret Service agents would pat him down. He’d never make it inside.

  Abdullah took his hand out of his pocket and turned around as if he were searching for something on the ground.

  “My mother gave me the ticket,” he said. “I must have dropped it.”

  “That’s all right,” said one of the campaign workers. “We have some open seats, so you can come in with or without your ticket.”

  Abdullah stood straighter and shook his head. “No, my mom wants the stub back as a souvenir. I’ll be right back. I need to find it.”

  The campaign workers started to say something, but Abdullah started backing toward the entrance as a Secret Service agent passed through the metal detector and into the lobby. Abdullah’s heart pounded, and sweat began beading on his forehead.

  “Put your hands on top of your head, sir,” said the agent, his hand hovering over the firearm on his hip. Abdullah started backing toward the entrance.

  “It’s all right. I’ll be right back.”

  The moment the words left his lips, his vest started beeping, and he realized how badly he had misunderstood his role in this mission.

  Chapter 12

  Agent Navarro’s body went stiff. He keyed his microphone.

  “Repeat, main entrance.”

  “Control, we have a young man here. He seems confused and disoriented. How do you advise?”

  Navarro flicked his fingers across his tablet until he came across the video feed from the lobby. The video showed a man in his early twenties. He had very dark skin and hair cropped close to his brow. The young man’s movements looked stiff, but that didn’t worry Navarro. Most people got nervous when the Secret Service took an interest in them.

  The clothes, however, stuck out to him. The man’s sweater was bulky and thick. From the neck down, he looked like a man who would have had to turn sideways to fit through many doorways. His face, though, was thin. He had something under his clothes. For all Navarro knew, the man carried a shotgun.

  “Take him into custody. Administer first aid if he’s having a medical emergency, but first of all, secure his person and find out what he’s got under that sweater.”

  “Understood, command.”

  Navarro kept his eyes on the tablet as one of his agents passed through the metal detector to step into the lobby. The young man hesitated and then held up his hands as he backed toward the front door. Then, both he and the Secret Service agent stopped and looked down. Navarro held his breath.

  “Main entrance, what’s going on?”

  Before anyone could respond, three agents appeared from offscreen and tackled the young man. Navarro’s heart started pouring.

  “Main entrance, I repeat, what’s going on?”

  “Subject is beeping, Control.”

  For a split second, Navarro’s breath caught in his throat as his mind processed that information. Then the reality of the situation slammed into him full force.

  “Main entrance, secure his person and—”

  Navarro never got the chance to finish the order.

  Hashim smiled at his granddaughter. She had straight black hair, skin a few shades darker than olive, and brown eyes like her father. He hated to use her as cover, but sometimes he had to take risks to succeed.

  Though the Americans claimed to take the moral high road, they profiled everyone within their borders and categorized them by race and threat level at both the local and federal levels. Where an Arab man sitting on a park bench alone might have garnered significant attention from the Secret Service, an Arab grandfather sitting with his beloved family would look as American as Thanksgiving dinner.

  “Habibi, please watch your ummi for the next few minutes,” he said. “Can you do that for me?”

  She smiled and nodded and turned toward her mother. Hashim looked to his son.

  “Let’s put up the drone.”

  Hamza handed the kite strings to his wife and daughter before walking to the double stroller he had brought and taking their drone from the rear seat.

  Hashim knew very little about drones, so he had let his son do the research before they purchased anything. Hamza had settled on a professional quadcopter with an integrated high-definition camera on a gyroscope. With the extended battery, it could stay aloft for almost forty-five minutes and fly nearly four miles in any direction before losing a signal. At that point, it would use an integrated GPS tracker to return to the spot at which it had taken off.

  In Hamza’s tests, it had been able to fly to an altitude well over two thousand feet—outside visual range—and still take crystal-clear video of the ground with its digital zoom camera. It was a remarkable piece of surveillance technology, one that would come in very handy here.

  Hamza put the drone on the ground and then used the remote control to take off. Sabah, Hashim’s grandaughter, covered her ears at first, but the buzzing motors quickly disappeared. Hashim watched the video feed from his tablet. Every image that camera took was streamed live to a distributed network of servers on three different continents. The events today would be seen live by thousands of men and women around the world and recorded in high-definition video for all of humanity to witness.

  “Yasin is in the middle of the crowd, but he’s moving,” said Hamza, looking up from the screen attached to his drone’s flight controller. “He’s going to run.”

  “I see that,” said Hashim, reaching into his pocket for a disposable cell phone. “He’ll still serve his purpose.”

  Hashim opened the contact list and selected the second of two phone numbers. He looked up at Sabah and smiled. She looked directly into Hashim’s eyes, away from the school. The instant his finger hit the call button, a signal passed from his phone to the nearest cell tower and then to the disassembled phone on Yasin’s vest.

  The current that would have created the ringtone, though, bypassed the speaker and instead flowed through a circuit that collected and amplified it before sending it into a blasting cap attached to a brick of RDX explosives. It all happened within a thousandth of a second.

  The explosion ripped across the park like a cannon shot, reverberating against the trees. For one single moment, the world passed into stunned silence.

  Then the screaming started.

  Sabah’s mother grabbed her daughter and held her to her breast, crying. Hashim looked at the screen of his tablet. A nearly perfect ring of bodies surrounded the spot where Yasin had once stood. The windows of the school that were nearest them had shattered. Limbs and body parts lay across the ground like shells scattered on the beach after a hurricane.

  For a few moments, nothing moved, but then people began pulling themselves from the ground. Most of them ran in random directions, away from the bomb blast, but a few brave souls ran toward the damage to check for survivors. They weren’t Hashim’s concern.

  “Show me Abdullah,” said Hashim, glancing at Hamza. Hamza nodded and moved the drone so it had a better view of the elementary school. He couldn’t see through the glass, but Abdullah hadn’t run out yet. He still had a job to perform. Hashim turned his attention to his phone and then looked at Sabah and her mother. “Don’t look at the school.”

  Dalia, Hamza’s wife, nodded and held her daughter close. Her eyes were almost glassy. Hashim wouldn’t have involved his family if he could have helped it, but they provided him the cover he needed for the job he had to do. He opened the contact list on his phone again and thumbed in the first number. Almost the instant he hit the se
nd button, the front windows of the school shattered, and a second ear-splitting blast reverberated around the trees and surrounding structures.

  Already, in the distance, he could hear sirens. Hashim looked to Hamza.

  “Take it up now, but we need to run. We can’t get caught yet.”

  Hamza nodded once more, and Hashim turned his attention to the tablet before standing. He ran to the stroller and began pushing it. Hamza released their kite to fall where it would and urged his wife and daughter to follow Hashim.

  They ran toward the street, all the while Hashim watched on the monitor as the drone climbed higher and higher, giving them an aerial view of the school and surrounding streets. Once the drone hit approximately two thousand feet, Hashim said they had gone high enough.

  Now, the real work began.

  The moment he heard the first explosion, every neuron in Special Agent Sean Navarro’s brain fired at once, and they all screamed the same thing: move.

  He sprinted across the stage and wrapped an arm around both Senator Hill and President Crane. The explosion had sounded distant but strong. Likely, it was outside the building. Once he had the two VIPs off the stage, he handed them off to a pair of agents who hurried them both out the back.

  Then another explosion ripped through the building, this time much closer. It was from the north, very likely the main entrance. As loud as it was, he had very likely just lost people. He keyed his mike and looked down at the crowd. Half a dozen of his agents had sprinted toward the first family, sometimes carrying two children each.

  A security team had scouted the area beforehand and had secured a fallback location within the building. If he knew what kind of threat they faced, he might have suggested they hunker down and wait for additional security personnel to arrive. Already, though, they had two coordinated, powerful blasts. If they had too many more of those, the building could come down around them. Ultimately, that made the choice for him.

  “Evac, evac, evac,” he said, his voice straining to be heard over the screaming crowd. “Roadrunner, contact Magic. I want gunships in the air. Stagecoach, roll as soon as Cohiba is inside. Cowpuncher, we are wheels up as soon as Cohiba is secure. Overwatch, anything moves toward Cohiba, put it down.”

  As he shouted orders, smoke began filling the auditorium, bringing with it a scent that Navarro had smelled all too often when employed by the US Army in Iraq. Someone was burning.

  He put it out of his mind and sprinted after the president and the rest of his security detail. The locals would have to secure the crime scene here and protect the civilians. His first priority was the president.

  The hallways around him blurred as Navarro sprinted. He exited the building through a Secret Service checkpoint between the cafeteria and kitchen. His protective team had just secured the president and Senator Hill inside the Beast, the president’s eight-thousand-pound limousine. Navarro dove through the open door and pulled it shut behind him. Instantly, the vehicle’s climate control systems purged it of outside air—a precaution in case of a biological or chemical weapons attack. Behind those eight-inch-thick hardened steel walls and five-inch-thick ballistics glass, they were safer, but not yet safe.

  Navarro looked toward the front of the car. “Go, go, go, go.”

  The vehicle took off with a speed that belied its massive girth. Both the president and Senator Hill lay on the floor with agents on top of them to act as shields. Navarro looked out the window at the armored SUV behind them. Already, the protective detail had rounded up the president’s family and secured them in the second car. They, too, were off.

  “Where’s my family?” asked Crane.

  “They’re right behind us,” said Navarro. He keyed his mike. “Evac route Delta. Magic, where are my birds?”

  “Five miles out. One minute,” said a soft, female voice at the Helicopter Command Center at Pease Air Base.

  “Roadrunner, I want everything but friendly signals jammed. I don’t want anything getting through.”

  “Understood, Control,” said a Secret Service agent in Roadrunner, the mobile communications center rolling behind them in the motorcade. Navarro exhaled heavily, trying to get his breath back.

  “Are we safe?” asked Senator Hill.

  Navarro looked at him, as if noticing him for the first time. “Not yet, sir. Hold on.”

  Chapter 13

  Sabah cried big, terrified tears that neither her mother nor father could calm. Sirens blared in every direction as they walked. Hashim tried to comfort her, but she didn’t want to hear from him. He hated to think it, but it probably helped that she cried. Any child would have cried in that situation. By crying, she helped them blend into the crowds around them.

  And already, there were crowds.

  People who lived near the park and elementary school had come out of their houses to see what had happened, while panicked audience members from the political rally sprinted toward the perceived safety of their cars. Hashim and his family fit in very well. As he pushed the stroller, Hashim glanced at his tablet on the stroller’s rear seat.

  Though he had already tossed the controller, Hamza had set the drone to hover fifteen hundred feet above the school, giving them an bird’s-eye view of the unfolding scene. Once the drone’s batteries ran low enough, it would gently descend and land in the same spot from which it had taken off. The police would find it, but that was part of the plan.

  On his screen, Hashim watched as a pair of Secret Service agents escorted the president and Senator Hill into the back of the presidential limousine. The first family went into a full-sized SUV behind them. Within moments of their doors closing, the vehicles sped off. The farther they traveled from the elementary school, the more options their drivers would have to reach their destination, but for the first half mile, there were only four possible routes, and Hashim had a team member on each.

  “He’s taking Maple Avenue,” said Hamza, glancing down at the tablet while also carrying his daughter.

  “I see that,” said Hashim, reaching for his cell phone. Every member of his team was on high alert, but he needed to give his men some advanced warning to make sure they were ready.

  Before they left New York that afternoon, everyone had set their phones up to act as walkie-talkies, allowing instantaneous communication among group members. Hashim hit the button to talk.

  “Batul, God has blessed you today. You will become a martyr. Everyone else, go to fallback positions.”

  “Allahu akbar. I’m ready.”

  Hashim recognized Batul’s voice. There was no hesitation or catch. He was a true soldier. This would be a very good day for his cause.

  Batul heard the sirens already. He knew he didn’t have much time left. He sat on the side of the road near a tree approximately a quarter mile from Westbrook Elementary. Beside him rested a heavy canvas backpack. He had a bachelor’s degree in economics from Ohio State University, and he could have done any number of things with his life. This, though, was his duty. This was his moment.

  The backpack held a surprise no one would see coming. Most of the bomb makers in the Islamic State had been ignorant of modern physics. They understood how to modify depleted uranium shells left over from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan into IEDs, they understood how to follow a wiring schematic to turn a cell phone into a remote detonator, and they understood how to hide explosives alongside the road, but very few lived to old age, and even fewer survived with their limbs intact. Almost none could truly innovate.

  Hamza Bashear, though, Hashim’s son, had an analytical mind and the academic background to be a real force for good. He had made devices that would take down an empire. Inside his backpack, Batul had a large-diameter PVC pipe packed with twelve kilograms of RDX high explosive. Into that, Hamza had inserted an eight-kilogram conical copper liner he had shaped and welded himself. The tip of the cone, the apex, pointed toward the tree, while the large opening pointed toward the street.

  The moment Batul ignited the blasting cap ins
ide his backpack, the high explosive would burn with a velocity of nearly nine kilometers per second. According to Hamza, the explosive force would hit the apex of the cone first, sending it toward the street like a copper nail moving six thousand meters per second. As the force pressed against the base of the cone, it would invert the entire structure so that it took on the shape of a carrot.

  The tip would hit the target first and physically push aside steel like a nail driving through wood. The remainder of the projectile would follow and splinter inside the target, shredding everything within its path.

  Batul couldn’t follow the physics of shaped charges, but he understood the concepts. As long as he detonated his device on time, he would strike a great blow for God.

  He reached into the side compartment of his backpack for the switch. The infidels screamed in the distance, but their prayers and exhortations fell on deaf ears. They had turned their backs on God, and God had turned His back on them. For the good of humanity, they had to be purged.

  “Ashhadu Alla Ilaha Illa Allah, Wa Ashhadu Anna Muhammad Rasulu Allah.”

  Batul repeated the Shahada, his profession of faith and promise of his obedience to God, as his finger hovered over the switch. He saw the motorcade speeding down the street. In the distance, a helicopter neared. It would arrive just in time to witness God’s vengeance.

  “Ashhadu Alla Ilaha Illa Allah, Wa Ashhadu Anna Muhammad Rasulu Allah.”

  Sirens blared in all directions. Batul’s heart thudded against his breastbone. His hands shook, but he felt as alive as he ever had.

  Two SUVs passed first, hidden police lights flashing. They practically flew down the street. Batul readied himself. When they had practiced these maneuvers, they hadn’t known how fast the presidential motorcade would move, so they had had to make educated guesses.