by Thomas Waite
“You work on your computer all the time,” Sufyan said, a prod that didn’t appear appreciated by Tahir, who replied crisply:
“Like you on your phone.”
“Do you work on it a lot?” Lana asked Tahir.
You’re real subtle, Emma thought.
“It is the only way I can stay in touch with our friends and family in Sudan.” Tahir smiled at Lana, which is to say his lips parted just enough to flash his perfect teeth.
“I thought you didn’t have any surviving relatives there,” Lana replied.
“Cousins. Our clan.” That smile again, sneaky as a snake bite.
Em watched her mother eye him the way she always stared at her when Lana expected Emma to say more. The silence trap. That was what Em called it. She’d learned to avoid it—after years of fumbling verbally and trying to fill it, often with self-incriminating information. She saw immediately that Tahir was a much faster study: he simply went back to eating.
• • •
“Awkward. Awkward,” Em said to Sufyan when they walked outside to wait for his uncle, who’d stopped to thank her parents for dinner, as formal in parting as he’d been at the table.
The FBI agent, Robin Maray, smiled at Emma and Sufyan. Good-looking, for sure, Em thought, smiling back. Too old for her, though. Old as her mom and dad. And she loved Sufyan.
“We’ve got to slip away from your uncle and my dad soon,” she told him.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you but you have to promise to keep it secret.”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean it. Say—”
“I promise I’ll keep it secret.”
“I’m pregnant. I need to get away from those two and get to Planned Parenthood as soon as possible.”
“Why?” Sufyan exclaimed. “This is glorious news.”
Glorious?
“No, it’s not gl—”
Tahir was walking toward them. She doubted he could read her mind—or his nephew’s—but she had no doubt that he’d at least heard her last few words. Among them might have been “I’m pregnant.”
“Text me,” Sufyan said, as if they’d been discussing his latest basketball drills. He bounced a ball up and down the court every day.
She nodded and said good night. She still didn’t dare kiss him, even on his cheek, not in the presence of his uncle. And here she was, carrying his child.
He’d be bouncing a baby on his knee if they didn’t do something fast.
• • •
After the rusty brackets holding the pipe to the wall broke loose—and feeling himself falling backward at an ever-increasing rate—Jimmy heard a sound even more ominous: the pipe itself snapping apart where it was coupled to the bottom length that ran about fifteen feet to the ground.
Which was a “break” for him because the pipe’s ancient steel peeled apart slowly at the seam, with the gentleness of a new mom laying her baby in a bassinet.
Jimmy even had a chance to lower his feet to the ground and step out of the way. The words “in the flow” came to him, one of Janey the piccolo player’s favorite expressions when they were humping and bumping.
In the deepening shadows of night, Jimmy pressed his back against the building and took a breath, wondering if Janey hated him as much as her brothers did. One brother now: XXL had told him the younger bro died last night, shaking her head like Jimmy was to blame, once again. And there she was, big head sticking out the window. He pressed himself flat against the brick. There would be no missing the pipe, though.
“Where are you, McMasters?”
He heard her tell someone “Pipe’s all bent. That walking sack of smallpox must have fallen with it. Can’t get far.”
Yes I can, Jimmy thought, racing along the hospital wall to the employee parking lot.
He had to check seven cars before he found an unlocked door. He couldn’t believe how untrusting people were these days. But the owner of the old Toyota 4x4 had been kind enough to stash the keys on top of the sun visor.
Jimmy never looked back, driving to a warehouse district not far from the boat garage for Sexy Streak. He hoped like hell BP hadn’t changed the push-button combination for the gate to the compound.
Jimmy punched in the five digits. The lock didn’t open. Tried it again. Still didn’t work. He looked up, wondering if the old coot security guard was still around. Didn’t see him. Then Jimmy looked back at the buttons and made himself take a breath, realizing he might have been off on the last number. True enough.
Third time’s the charm.
BP’s warehouse—one of many, but the only one he’d been in when he worked for the company—rose before him. A city block wide, two stories high, and filled with the tools of the oil trade, including explosives. He needed just enough dynamite to blow the pipe that ran from the seabed to the platform to set off the blowout preventers, BOPs. If the ISIS assholes caught him, they might even think he was doing their work for him. That’s what he planned to tell them, anyway.
When? Right before they chop off your head?
Then he spotted the old security guard shuffling along. He looked harmless. He wasn’t. He carried a pistol and stun gun, using the latter mostly to fry stray cats.
Wilbur. His name made him sound sweet as a teddy bear. Fact is, he smelled sour as an old sock and cussed faster than a Lotto loser. And he loved his nightstick, tapping everything as he walked along. Right now he was cracking it against the concrete walls of the warehouse every few seconds, warming up, no doubt, for surfaces less resilient.
Jimmy huddled by the steps to a loading dock, shoehorning his body into the slim shadows thrown by the security lights.
Knock-knock. Pause. Knock-knock.
Getting closer.
Wilbur, called “Burr” by his friends, all two of them, walked right above Jimmy without looking down. Burr must have patrolled this stretch ten thousand times without ever seeing a soul.
Jimmy stuck to the shadows till the knock-knock softened, then he peered over the edge of the loading dock and watched Burr amble around a corner.
Jimmy hurried across the well-lit concrete to an unlocked door in the center of the building. The interior had night lights outlining the tall shelves and, as Jimmy knew from his brief and spectacularly unsuccessful stint at BP, the outlines of anyone entering the facility after hours.
But if the oil giant was as cheap with security in the warehouse as it had been with the men hired to protect the offshore oil platform now under ISIS control, then there would be no one monitoring those cameras. But Jimmy couldn’t count on that so he crawled in the shadows till he was down the third aisle to his right, hoping the dynamite hadn’t been moved. Not exactly. It was still there, but the sticks were now locked in a steel case as large as an upright freezer.
Getting awful formal around here. Not like the good old days when he had helped himself to a stick or two for some fast nighttime fishing. Let her rip and catch some fish.
Knock-knock. Burr was entering the warehouse. Knock-knock.
Jimmy swore, worrying the guard had spotted him with the security cam. He might be watching a video feed on his phone.
Knock-knock. Getting louder.
But Burr didn’t sound like he was rushing to get to him. Just tapping his nightstick as he’d always done.
Jimmy wedged himself between the steel case and the crisscrossing brackets that supported the shelving rising high above him. He felt no more effective than a kid playing hide-and-go-seek.
The nightstick struck the locked case, then cracked against Jimmy’s knee.
Burr paused with his searchlight pointing down at Jimmy, pulling his Taser out so fast that Jimmy knew the security guard must have practiced on plenty of kitties.
“It’s me, Burr.”
“Who’s ‘me’?” Burr demanded, peering through his thick glasses. “I don’t know no ‘me,’ shithead. All I know is you’re crouching like some goddamn cat next to the ’plosives. ’Course, I love find
ing cats.”
Jimmy put his hands up. “I’m coming out. I’m coming out.”
“What? You must think this is the Queer Pride Parade. ‘I’m coming out,’” Burr mocked. “Get the fuck out of there ’fore I fry your testicles.”
Jimmy cupped himself instinctively. “I’m Jimmy McMasters.” Hoping his name still meant something to the cussed old creep.
The light flashed right into Jimmy’s eyes.
“Hell if you ain’t,” he said, taking a step backward. “What the fuck are you doing here? Last time I saw you was on the outtakes from the surveillance cam they showed at the Christmas party. You was rootin’ and tootin’ with those high-tailed strippers. Man, they were treating you like the prize calf in a ropin’ contest.”
“You like that, huh?”
“’Least you went out in style, not like these other half-dead fuckers. But let’s get to the issue at hand, Tit Fucker. What the—”
“‘Tit Fucker?’ I was doing other stuff, too,” Jimmy protested.
“Yeah, but that shit was funny. And Jimmy, you should be proud of yourself. Those pictures got themselves a rerun on the Fourth of July picnic up on a big white sheet.”
“Thank you.” What else could he say?
“But what the fuck are you doing here?”
“You see me coming up on that beach with those ISIS terrorists?”
“Yeah, I saw that on the TV. Then I heard you stuck it to that Today Show guy, laid him up faster than a run-down dog.” Which probably explained Burr’s immediate retreat when he recognized Jimmy.
“I didn’t mean to, Burr. I was just feeling so great I thought I’d—”
“Fuck him. I hate his smiley ass anyway. So what do you need the dynamite for? Goin’ fishin’?”
Jimmy told him.
Burr smiled. “Glad to oblige. How much you need? And don’t go gettin’ greedy.”
“Six would be perfect.”
Burr opened the steel case, grabbed the red sticks, and handed them over to Jimmy. “You ever let on I did this, I really will fry your testicles. My brother’s the sheriff. He survives, he’ll help me.”
“I won’t say a word, but since you’re helping me this much, you got a gun you could spare?”
“Now that could be traced to me—”
“I’ll throw it in the Gulf when I’m done. I swear.”
“—if I hadn’t already filed off the numbers.”
Burr reached down and pulled a .38 Saturday night special from an ankle holster. “I always keep a drop gun on me, case I need to shoot some loser and say he drew on me.”
“You are a first-rate thinker, Burr.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Jimmy. Take the sticks and blow them shitheads to bits.”
“You got it, man.” Jimmy tried to shake Burr’s hand, but the old guy backed up farther.
“Do I look like Matt fucking Lauer? Get outta here.”
Jimmy didn’t breathe till he was beyond the reach of that stun gun. Then he rushed across the loading dock and jumped down to the pavement.
Seconds later he was back behind the wheel of the 4x4 and heading to the home of Sexy Streak, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. That platform was more than 140 miles out in the Gulf. He wasn’t sure he could even carry enough fuel to get out there and back. Be right on the margins of the boat’s range.
It’s a goddamn suicide mission, he thought, swampy Gulf air thickening as he drove up to the boat garage.
But facing down that boatload of terrorists could have got him killed, too. And you did that. You got the hero in you, Jimmy.
Janey had told him that over and over, panting those very words into his ear.
She could be right. And “hero” would sure sound better than being remembered as “Tit Fucker.”
He unlocked the garage and opened the big wide door. Sexy Streak still had bullet holes high on her starboard hull. Otherwise, she looked sweet as ever. Hell, Jimmy had a few holes in his own face now. Pull off this caper, though, and they’d look different. Heroes had scars, sometimes lots of them.
If they survive.
He started the engines, their rumble music to his ears as he slipped into the Gulf and left Oysterton behind, maybe for the last time.
A THOUSAND MILES NORTH of Jimmy’s bold incursion into the Gulf, Lana sat on the couch with her laptop as the blackest hours of morning arrived. Typically, she would have succumbed to weariness long before two a.m., but pain had subverted the best intentions of sleep. That was the price of refusing the powerful palliatives prescribed for her leg wound. She needed mental clarity, and the drugs had made her not only drowsy but, in a word, stupid. She could not afford stupid. Neither could her family nor the country. So her leg throbbed. How could a goddamn piece of Prius plastic hurt so much?
“It cut through a nerve,” Dr. Rivera had told her. “I did microsurgery, and it should heal nicely, but nerves are, shall we say, touchy? You’re going to be uncomfortable. Take your meds. Don’t be a hero.”
Hero? She’d never cast herself as one. But Lana did see a confluence of her own interests with those of her family and nation, so she was doing everything she could to keep her mental resources as sharp as the fury she felt toward the forces intent on destroying her country.
The mystery of Tahir Hijazi commanded all of her attention as she stared at a freeze frame of his chiseled face on her screen. She was certain he’d beheaded the colonel, though she’d shared that conclusion with no one. First, she wanted to know what he was really doing in the U.S., besides watching over his nephew and—if his words the other night were true—her daughter. The revelations she’d unearthed so far about his role with Al Qaeda and his emergence as a double agent on behalf of the U.S. had been startling. But had he added “triple agent” to his portfolio by working with ISIS as well? Moreover, the very thought that Em’s welfare might at times be in the hands of a man who’d decapitated Lana’s own would-be assassin proved an unnerving prospect, no matter how much she had welcomed Tahir’s timely intervention. She would have brainstormed with Deputy Director Holmes about the Sudanese, but her boss was still in the ICU.
Maybe it was time to open an early morning line of communication with another colleague.
Using a data tunneling protocol Lana felt confident was secure, she texted Galina Bortnik on the off chance that her employee was working. Galina had reported keeping odd hours to care for her daughter Alexandra, who was ending chemo for her leukemia. The cyberspy had also been using her late nights and early mornings to shoehorn in efforts to breach NSA security, per Holmes’s assignment to her. His replacement, Marigold Winters, whom Lana found so repugnant—and a control freak of the first order—was apparently unaware of Galina’s mission. If Flowers had any knowledge of it, Lana felt her old nemesis would have stopped Galina immediately, fearful of revelations about security lapses on her newly established watch.
In these dark hours, Lana wasn’t even comfortable with the notion that she herself would be around long enough to see the results of Galina’s investigation. Just after midnight, Lana had been shot through with adrenaline when she’d found her own face plastered on a poster on an ISIS website. Modeled after the iconic ones of the American West, it read “Wanted Dead or Alive, Lana Elkins. $100 million reward.”
A hundred million? Lana couldn’t help but feel flattered—in the worst possible way. Surely the FBI would counter by providing protection by more than one agent per shift.
Surely? The bureau was stretched to the breaking point by domestic challenges that ranged over the rest of the country.
The ISIS site then noted what Lana had registered instantly: the reward was the biggest ever offered, more than three times the bounty paid for Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s brutal sons, who had made their infamous father seem puppyish by comparison; and quadruple the bucks posted for bin Laden.
ISIS was also calling for all true warriors of Islam in the States to hunt down and kill Cairo, though their financial commitme
nt to those who achieved this goal was considerably less: $100,000.
Lana looked up, checking on the old Malinois as he rose a few feet away to begin one of his periodic patrols of the house. Then she knocked off a text to Galina: “Have you come across anything involving Tahir?”
The irony remained that Galina, whose employment at CyberFortress was tenuous—thanks to senatorial efforts to try to force the recent Russian émigrée to work for the NSA—had more power to investigate that agency than anyone else in the nation.
Within seconds of sending off the message, Lana’s private phone rang, the one she’d used for gambling. She answered it warily.
“It is me, Galina,” the younger woman said in her distinctive accent.
“I’m not sure this is a safe phone,” Lana found herself whispering.
“It is safe for me and you right now, but you should know that it took me only forty-five minutes to break the secure connection to your phone.”
Had Galina done more than figure out Lana’s encrypted connection? The gambling? That was the real worry, but Lana couldn’t ask. She could only trust that Galina hadn’t come across her visits to texasholdem.com. Failing that, might she trust that Galina, hailing from the free-for-all corruption of post-Soviet Russia, would think little of her vice? At least Lana had forsworn any gambling of late.
But it still left her acutely uneasy about talking on the phone—and highly dependent on Galina’s assessment of her security. Which she just broke. Lana’s sense of vulnerability was only heightened by recognizing that untold hordes would want to claim the $100 million price tag recently placed on her head, including many Americans of a distinctly non-Islamic, but highly greedy, persuasion.
“Tahir says his nephew, Sufyan, is in ‘difficulties.’ That was how he put it. He has been communicating with people in Sudan. I think he wants to get the boy out of the U.S.”
“Does he say that specifically?”
“No. I am saying what you call the ‘tone’ of his words.”