Independence Hall

by Roland Smith

  I typed:

  Boone is going to call me at some point. If I don’t answer he’s going to come running.

  Angela typed:

  By then we’ll be long gone.

  I just hoped we weren’t permanently gone. I typed:

  How are we going to get past the guards? Not that they would care if we leave… But they will tell Boone that we left together.

  Angela typed:

  Boone showed me the back door to the coach last night… And I don’t know about you, but I could use a cheeseburger. Maybe we’ll find some horribly unhealthy food on the way to Independence Hall.

  I tossed my BlackBerry on the bed and followed her into the kitchen. She stuffed a roll of paper towels into her back-pack (I didn’t ask why), slipped the pack over her shoulders, then flipped up a sofa cushion. Underneath was a hatch that led to a storage compartment beneath the coach, which just happened to be on the opposite side of where the guards were stationed. I had no doubt that Boone had parked the coach this way intentionally thinking that we might have to use the “backdoor.”

  Quietly, we eased ourselves through the hatch. We peeked around the rear of the coach at the guards. All three of them were now sitting at the desk playing cards.

  Up and Away

  We crept along the wall trying to stay in the shadows and not trip over anything. There was a ladder attached to the wall in the corner (a very high, unstable ladder that did not look like it would support a squirrel). At the very top was an open window and a row of cooing pigeons perched on the rafters above it.

  Angela started up the ladder like a ninja. I didn’t think it would hold both of us at the same time. While I waited I watched the guards. They continued to play cards.

  I looked up. Angela had already scrambled her way to the top and through the window. Halfway up I had to stop to catch my breath (and scrape pigeon poop off my hands). I hadn’t noticed Angela stopping to catch her breath (or wipe her hands). This meant she could not only beat me up if she wanted to, she also had better endurance than I did (and more tolerance for revolting slime). I squeezed through the window onto the flat, tar roof wheezing. Angela handed me a handful of paper towels, which explained why she had put them in her pack.

  “Sick, huh?” she said with a grin.

  “Yeah.” I wiped my hands, but not much of the stuff came off.

  As I followed her across the roof to the far end of the warehouse I glanced over the edge and noticed something was missing. Devorah’s car was still parked across the street, but she was no longer in it.

  “Problem,” I said.

  Angela backtracked. She looked down at the car, then up and down the street. “I don’t like it,” she said.

  “Me either,” I agreed. “It means Devorah could be any-where, including waiting for us outside the back door of the next building. Are you sure no one saw you come back here?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  I almost spilled my guts about X’s setup around the Electric Factory, but stopped myself. Why shouldn’t I have a secret too? Everyone else was withholding information. How had Boone put it? …X has some kind of array set up around the Electric Factory and he can monitor virtually everything within a three-mile radius. I should have asked what an “array” was. Whatever it was it hadn’t picked up Angela sneaking back into the warehouse. I just hoped it caught us leaving the warehouse.

  Croc had picked up Angela’s scent within minutes of Boone and Everett’s arrival at the hotel. They followed him as he sniffed along the sidewalk for two blocks, then the Blue Heeler/Border Collie came to a sudden stop and looked up at them. Boone knew the look. The scent trail had ended. Angela had gotten into a car.

  Everett examined the ground. “I don’t see any skid marks…no sign of a struggle. It couldn’t have taken her more than five minutes to get here. At that point we had all of Eben’s team under surveillance, except for Ziv.”He looked up and nodded at the sign above them. “Bus stop.”

  “Get the bus schedule and route,”Boone said.

  While Everett accessed the schedule on his BlackBerry, Boone called Uly and Felix and told them to get the Range Rover.

  “I have the route,” Everett said.

  “We’ll go to every stop until Croc picks up Angela’s scent. She had to get off the bus somewhere.”

  Boone’s phone rang. It was Blaze. He let it go to voice mail. As soon as the ringing stopped it rang again. It was Roger. He let that call go to voice mail as well. He wasn’t going to talk to either one of them until he knew what was going on. He was about to check in with Q when the intellimobile pulled up.

  “This can’t be good,” he said to Everett.

  Uly and Felix pulled up behind in the Range Rover just as the van door slid open. A glassless X squinted out at them. “I got sucker-punched,”he said. “Or more accurately…sucker-choked.”

  Vanessa was sitting in the driver’s seat, repairing X’s broken glasses with duct tape. X could not see beyond his nose without them.

  “This has turned into a really lousy day,” Boone said. He called Q and got his voice mail. He looked at the others. “And I think it just got worse.”

  He told Uly, Everett, and Felix to take Croc and follow the bus. “We’ll head over to the warehouse and find out why Q isn’t answering his phone. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

  The Range Rover drove off and Boone climbed into the van.

  Vanessa handed the twisted, but usable, glasses to X. As soon as he had them balanced on his nose he started fiddling with the electronics. Vanessa started toward the warehouse.

  “Okay,”Boone said. “What happened?”

  “Eben, or whoever was driving the car pulled into a covered parking garage,” Vanessa began. “We didn’t have enough clearance because of the dish on top. I went in on foot to see what I could find out.” She looked back at X.

  He stopped his fiddling and picked up the story. “While Vanessa was inside I started scanning through the surveillance cameras. Carma was still in her room. Nothing on the mini-cam, and the alarm Everett put on her door had not tripped, so nobody had come or gone. She’s on the third floor…no balcony, no fire escape, no way in or out except through the door.

  “I switched to Devorah next. Got lucky and caught her getting out of the car. I started tracking her with the camera array. As I was watching her I heard the door slide open behind me. I figured it was Vanessa. Devorah was in a hurry so I didn’t turn around. Thought I might lose her. Big mistake. The next thing I know there’s a large forearm expertly wrapped around my neck. I was out within seconds.”He gave Vanessa a dirty look. “Then Vanessa was slapping me awake.”

  “Okay, okay,”she said. “I’m the one who broke your glasses. But I also fixed them.”

  “Kind of,” X said, readjusting the glasses. “Anyway, I don’t know how long I was out. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. But in that time whoever took me out incapacitated all of our surveillance. We’re completely offline.”

  “Are you saying that we don’t know where any of them are right now?” Boone asked.

  “With the possible exception of Carma, that’s exactly what I’m saying,”X answered. “We’re blind.”

  Boone called Everett. “I need you to get over to Carma’s hotel and see if Devorah shows up there… The camera’s are out… Yes all of them… I’ll explain later.”He ended the call and looked at X. “Can the equipment be repaired?”

  “Here’s the weird thing,”X answered. “First, whoever did this could just as easily have put a silenced bullet into my noggin. And I’m going to thank him for not doing that if I ever get a chance to meet him. And second, if they really wanted to take out our surveillance they could have executed the computers the same way, a couple of bullets in the hard drives and we would have been down for days. Instead, they downloaded a nasty little virus into the computers that turned the data into a platter of scrambled eggs.”

  X pointed to the computers.
“I designed this system to be virtually impregnable. There are only a handful of people that might…and I emphasize might…be able to hack into it. And I know all of them personally, or at least I thought I did. If the information in their dossiers is accurate…and I believe it is…there’s no way Eben, Carma, or Devorah could have done this. And besides, they would have taken the equipment out permanently. It’s going to take awhile, but I can fix this.”

  “Are you saying it was the mysterious Ziv?” Boone asked.

  “It could have been,”X answered. “But on the way over here I remembered something from Malak’s dossier. She spent six months over at NSA being trained by their computer geeks. I know the guy who trained her. I called him, thinking he wouldn’t remember her from Adam. He trains hundreds of agents a year and has a terrible memory for names. When I asked if he remembered a Secret Service agent named Malak Turner he went crazy saying that she was the most brilliant student he’d ever had. He offered her a position working with him. She turned him down, saying that she wanted to stay in the field.”

  Boone looked at his watch. “I don’t think she could have gotten here from New York in time.”

  “I agree,” X said. “But she could have concocted the virus, put it on a flash drive, and had whoever choked me inject it into our system.”

  Corndogs and Tastykakes

  After about a mile of walking I gave up on Vanessa screeching the van to a halt and Boone jumping out to save us.

  Angela walked away from Independence Hall, then doubled back, stopping at a convenience store (where I bought two stale corndogs, a really good Tastykake cupcake, and a Pepsi), a restaurant (we didn’t even sit down), and a beauty salon (where she made a hair appointment for the following week. She neglected to mention the fact that she wouldn’t be in Philly the following week). After leaving the salon she doubled back again, stopping at a department store, where she bought a Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses.

  “How many pairs of sunglasses do you own?” I asked as we left the store.

  “I have no idea.” She threw the bag away and handed the sunglasses and cap to me.

  “I don’t wear sunglasses or hats,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

  “Just put them on.”

  I did (reluctantly) and glanced at my reflection as we passed a window. The cap and sunglasses weren’t much of a disguise, but to my surprise I kind of liked the way I looked.

  Angela popped into yet another business—this time a huge discount shoe store. At this rate we would never get to Independence Hall to meet the angel or the leopard. I caught up with her in the sneaker rack, which was about two blocks long. She was peeking through a gap in the shelves at the front door.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “What are we doing?”

  “Making sure no one’s following us,” Angela answered without taking her eyes off the door.

  “If Eben and his crew had seen us,” I pointed out. “They would have grabbed us already. If the SOS team had seen us they would have grabbed us. They have no idea that we’re on our way to see your mom. What we’re doing is ridiculous.”

  Angela looked at me. “I’m using standard counter-surveillance tactics.”

  She couldn’t see me rolling my eyes under my shades and I wondered if she was doing the eye-roll under her shades too…and how many times she had done it since she became my sister.

  “Look,” I said. “Your mother (or the most notorious terrorist on earth, I thought) told us to come alone. We came alone. It’s not our fault if someone is following us—and I doubt anybody is. We’re exposing ourselves to hundreds of people by running around back and forth. If we had walked straight to Independence Hall less than a dozen people would have seen us. If I saw two people acting like we’ve been acting I’d follow them just out of curiosity.”

  Angela’s sunglasses stared at my sunglasses for a second, then she smiled. “You might be right, but you wouldn’t have gotten those two corndogs.”

  I returned the smile. “That was the only counter-surveillance tactic that made any sense. Let’s just stroll straight over to Independence Hall and see if the woman is an angel or a leopard.”

  The security guards jumped up from the desk as Boone and Vanessa rushed into the warehouse. X had stayed behind in the van desperately trying to concoct an antidote to the virus infecting his impregnable surveillance system.

  “Just taking a little break here,” one of the guards said guiltily.

  Boone eyed the playing cards on the table. “I see that,” he said.

  “’Be nice if y’all could take your breaks separately though, if you get my drift.”

  They did. Two of the guards hurried over and took up positions on either side of the entrance.

  Boone looked at the guard that remained, tempted to have Vanessa stick a knife into his thigh from a hundred feet away. Instead, he asked if the guard had observed any unusual activity.

  The guard shook his head. “The boy came back to the coach awhile ago and nobody has left the coach.”

  “What about the woman across the street?”

  “The paparazzi dame? She’s still there as far as I know.”

  Boone shook his head. “Car’s there, but she’s not.”

  The guard shrugged. “Probably went to get something to eat. I don’t expect we’ll have much activity until the talent gets back here this afternoon. We’ll be ready for them.”

  Boone turned away and walked into the coach before he said something he might regret. Vanessa followed him inside. He wasn’t at all surprised to see that the coach was empty. He lifted the sofa cushion and stared at the open hatch beneath it. Vanessa walked into the master suite to search it while Boone tore out the three bugs and dropped them into a cold mug of coffee left over from breakfast.

  “We’re clear,”he said. “We can talk.”

  Vanessa came out of the master suite with Q’s BlackBerry. “Three missed calls,” she said. “All from Blaze.”

  “This is an all-time record for us,”Boone said. “We’ve managed to lose four injured Mossad agents and two kids in less than two hours. I should have pulled the plug on this thing last night.”

  Vanessa shook her head. “We already covered that territory. You made the right decision. We’ll find them.”

  Boone still wasn’t sure about the decision, but Vanessa was right…they had to find Q and Angela…and soon. Roger and Blaze would be flying back to Philadelphia in a few hours and he didn’t want to tell them that he had lost their children.

  “Call the guys off bus duty and bring them up to speed. Tell them to bring Croc to the building next door and start again from there. But before they come have him drop Uly at Carma’s hotel. I want him and Everett to go in hard. If Devorah shows tell them to hold them there until I call.”

  “Everett and Uly will enjoy that,” Vanessa said.

  Boone’s BlackBerry rang. He looked at the screen. He didn’t want to answer it, but he knew he didn’t have a choice.

  “Hi, Heather,” he said.

  “I know I’m never supposed to ask, but what is going on there, Boone?”

  Heather Hughes was one of Boone’s oldest friends, and his staunchest supporter. She was one of the few people who knew about his former double life as a NOC agent for the CIA. She had learned of it by mistake thirty years earlier and had kept it a secret all that time. He had called her about becoming Blaze and Roger’s personal driver. Heather was the one who had told Buddy T. to hire him for the job. It was no coincidence that Match’s first concert was at the Electric Factory in the same city where Malak Turner had allegedly perished. Boone had asked Heather to arrange it. And she had with no questions asked.

  “You don’t want to know, Heather,”Boone answered.

  “No I don’t…but I’ve got two very worried parents here whose children haven’t answered their calls and they want to know why. What can I tell them?”

  “Where are you?”Boone asked.

  “Chi
cago. Roger and Blaze are in their dressing room getting ready for Oprah. I flew in from LA this morning…and Buddy–the little toad–says he’ll try to squeeze me onto the jet this afternoon so I can be at the Electric Factory for the concert tonight.”

  “I guess I need a bigger jet,” Boone said.

  Heather laughed. “I figured the jet was yours. That’s going to save Match a lot of money.”

  “We’re charging them for it to make it look good,” Boone said.

  “But I’ll figure out a way to get the fee back into their account.”

  “Initially you said that all you wanted to do was ride with them to Philly. I assume that things have changed.”

  “Dramatically,” Boone said.

  “Do you know what you’re doing, Boone?”

  “Yes, I know what I’m doing,” Boone answered. “I just don’t know what everybody else is doing. But I’ll figure it out.”

  “When you retired,” Heather said. “My life got a lot simpler.”

  “Mine too,” Boone said. “But what I’m doing now is a lot more important than what I did back then. And trust me, the less you know about it the better off you’ll be.”

  “I trust you, Boone, but I still need something to tell the frantic parents.”

  “Tell them that the cell phones I got them malfunctioned and I had to take them back to the store to get fixed. We’ve been taking in the sights, going to museums, movies where they don’t allow cell phones, which is why I missed their calls. You were lucky to catch me at the concession stand getting some popcorn for the kids.”