by Sam Powers
Park took a key out of her pocket. Then she opened a small, square panel towards the tail end of the cylinder and slotted the key into a lock; a quarter turn switched on a small green light. The woman turned away from the bomb, walking towards the adjacent table. A series of candles had been set up on its surface, like a small shrine. Several photos were leaning against the candlesticks. She started to light the candles.
The scene reminded Malone of an old war movie, the part in which the Japanese kamikaze pilot prepared himself for death. She looked around, frantically, for something to pry her wrist ties loose.
The throwing knife was nearly flat and she almost didn’t see it, lying in the shadows of the table to her right, just visible out of the corner of her eye. She looked back at Park for a moment, just to make sure she wasn’t paying attention; then Malone began to slowly drag the chair that way, trying to make as little noise as possible.
Park took out a phone and placed it on the table beside the makeshift shrine. Then she took a small square pillow from the tabletop and placed it in front of the shrine. The pillow’s position on the table had obscured a digital clock from view; it read eleven-fifty-seven. Park kneeled on the pillow then leaned forward to light incense that sat in jars next to the pictures. Park raised both hands in front of her in a sign of prayer and closed her eyes.
The knife was almost within her grasp; Malone shuffled the chair a few more inches, before checking on her captor again. Park was immersed in her prayers, having a conversation in Korean with someone. Her God? Her ancestors? Malone didn’t care. She had to reach that knife. It was just six inches from her right hand; her elbow was bruised and hurt like hell from the initial fall and from her attempts to cross the room; Joe was still unconscious. Malone held off a wave of anxiety and hopelessness. She wondered what time it was and how many minutes she had left; she slid the chair another six inches, the wood squeaking loudly enough on the concrete floor to make her wince, but again not drawing Park away from her ceremony. The blade was near her fingertips, as if she could almost brush the handle.
She needed to manoeuver herself around, swivel the chair so that her immobilized hand could grasp the end of the knife between her fingers, lift it off the floor enough to turn it, slide the blade under the plastic restraint.
The digital clock read eleven-fifty-eight.
The Delta Force commander hurried back to the command post, a dark-colored eighteen-wheel truck-and-trailer that was parked on the far side of the warehouse parking lot. The door hissed open for him and he jogged up the three stairs.
Inside, the director and his aides were gathered around a makeshift tactical map of the property.
“Sir,” he said.
“Colonel,” said Wilkie. “What have we got?”
“The robot confirms our initial assessment. The two guards at the front are no problem.”
“But?”
“But the one in the rafters is positioned over a steel girder, more than thirty feet up, and the one in the back is with the device. We have two unconscious prisoners, it appears, including one matching the description of your man Brennan and another of the reporter, Alex Malone. There’s also a guard.”
“Recommendation?”
“Go in hard and fast from three points,” the colonel said, pointing to the map, “here, here and here.”
“Time?”
“Twenty seconds from breach to control, maybe thirty. Might take longer to flush the guard out of the rafters but we’ll have the device by then.”
“Time to disarm?”
“The expert says it can be done quickly, in a matter of a minute, maybe two.”
“Then we go in one minute,” Wilkie said, looking at his watch. “It’s two minutes to midnight, gentlemen. We may be cutting this extremely close.”
Joe was beginning to stir, his body shifting slightly on the floor.
Come on, Malone thought, if ever I needed your help it’s now, dammit.
She pushed the chair a little further using her feet, wincing again as the wood squeaked its way across the polished concrete.
Then she felt it, the slightest of raised edges brushing the fingertips of her right hand. Something metal.
The knife. She grasped frantically for it, only able to use three fingers and a thumb, pincer like. Malone managed to raise its pommel just above the ground… then dropped it, the knife clattering loudly enough to draw Park’s attention. But instead of trying to stop her, the North Korean agent ignored her, turning her head back to the shrine, tears rolling down her cheeks as she submitted to the inevitable.
The clock ticked over to eleven-fifty-nine.
Malone stretched her hand as far as she could in the same vague direction, hitting the thin edge of the knife blade again. She tried to grasp it, pincer-like, between her thumb and forefinger. The blade rose shakily off the concrete… before the weight of it made her finger shake slightly, the blade clattering back to the concrete again.
“No goddamn it!” Malone said. “Just a little closer.”
From the front of the building, she heard the sound of glass shattering, voices. Then there was a bang from the direction of the side door, commands being shouted as a tactical team breached the building. A brief burst of gun fire followed, then another.
Malone glanced back to the makeshift shrine. Park had picked up her cell phone and was dialing.
“They’re too late,” Park said quietly. “In thirty seconds, my employer will detonate the device. And if that is unsuccessful, I need only to hit ‘send’ and this forsaken nation will burn in nuclear fire.”
Joe groaned a few feet away. “What….”
“Joe, wake up!” Malone said. “Dammit, please Joe!” She tried to pick the knife up again and managed to grasp it, before turning it so that the handle was in her palm, the blade under the wrist tie. She tried frantically to saw it back and forward, but the knife’s edges weren’t sharp enough and she wasn’t getting enough leverage.
The clock ticked over to midnight.
Park held her arms to either side and looked up, but with her eyes closed, a look of serenity on her face. “It’s time,” she said.
She stood silently. Malone was frozen, her eyes flitting between the clock and Park, expecting a momentary flash, a blinding heat, anything. From thirty yards away she could hear footsteps, boots on the ground, pounding their way towards the back of the building.
Park glanced down at the bomb, its gleaming chrome sullied only by the small square opening where she’d removed the switch panel.
Footsteps echoed along the corridor approaching them, soldiers’ boots. Park looked down at the clock again, then at the device. She looked anxious, obviously worried that the bomb hadn’t been triggered already.
She unlocked her phone with a finger swipe.
“No!” Malone yelled. “Please… please, I have a family, friends…”
“It’s better this way,” Park said. “It will all be over very, very quickly. You won’t feel anything.”
The tactical team reached the corner of the work space, the lead poking his head and muzzle around the corner. “This is the government of the United States. Everyone here is under arrest. Get down on the ground, with your hands on your head.”
“Goodbye, Ms. Malone,” Park said with a half smile, her face slightly sad.
She pushed the ‘send’ button.
18./
In Malone’s mind’s eye, she’d always had an idea of what it might be like to see a nuclear explosion; the mushroom cloud, the shock of heat, vision seared blood-red, the chromatic scale all out of whack as the blast vaporized her and everything else within range, the horrifying reality reduced to a split-second.
She pulled at her wrist restraints; she couldn’t even cover her face in reflex when Park hit the green send button. She closed her eyes tight and prayed quietly, thinking about her parents and her little brother, and all of the people she loved but would never see again.
But nothing happened.
A second or two went by, and Malone opened one eye, then the other. A few feet away, Brennan leaned up on his elbow, shaking off the pistol-whipping. Park was looking at the phone, bewildered. The tactical team rushed into the room, weapons high.
“Down on the ground!” the commander yelled at Park. “Down on the ground, now!” They were about twenty yards from her, but Park didn’t drop as requested, instead standing there confused; she craned her head around, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, vaguely aware that somewhere in the warehouse, another phone was ringing.
“Down now!” the tactical team leader screamed again.
At the other end of the warehouse, the asset’s phone had begun to ring. That was his cue. He leaned back against the beam, using his knee to brace the rifle, and looked down through the scope. As soon as the crosshairs were centered, he squeezed the trigger, two decades of training and instinct taking over in a smooth motion, with no second-guessing the recoil.
The .50 caliber slug covered the sixty yards in well under a second, most of Park’s skull exploding on impact, spraying the area in gore. Alex’s mouth dropped open before her stomach caught up with what she was seeing. She turned to her left and vomited heavily, even as the near-headless North Korean’s torso collapsed to its knees, then to the ground. “Jesus Christ!” the tactical team leader said, wincing at the sight. He turned around quickly. “Who fired that? Which sonovabitch fired that shot?”
Brennan had only just made it to his feet, and had caught the slightest muzzle flash out of the corner of his eye. He tapped the team leader on the shoulder patch with the back of his hand. “Up in the rafters.”
“The fourth guard?”
Brennan picked Park’s pistol up off of the floor and headed for the front of the building. A pair of soldiers were standing near the west wall, guarding a rope that trailed down from the rafters high above. “There’s a fourth guard in the rafters,” the colonel said as they approached the pair. “We’ve got him pinned up there…”
“No, you don’t,” Brennan said pointing up and in the other direction. “There’s a skylight halfway down the side beam along the other wall.”
Sure enough, enough moonlight made its way through the upper opening to show that it had been left unsecured.
“Damn it!” the colonel said.
“Give me that!” Brennan said, grabbing the M16 from a confused corporal. He sprinted for the gaping hole where the front doors had once been, out into the dimly lit parking lot, his eyes scanning the area as completely and quickly as he could.
There.
In the woods, the gaps of light between the trees were being intermittently broken by the shadow of someone quickly fleeing the scene. Brennan gave chase, ignoring the broken rib and the throb in his head, willing himself on. He crashed into the tree line, pushing aside sharp branches, stumbling through roots and shrubs until he emerge on the other side.
The asset was fifty yards ahead already, going towards a Jeep parked beside the road. Brennan stopped abruptly, raised the rifle to his shoulder and sighted the fleeing shooter. Then he squeezed the trigger.
The man went down hard, face first into the grass and mud on the roadside. Brennan sprinted after him. Behind him, he could hear a police siren closing. He reached the man and rolled him over.
“Oh Jesus,” he said.
“You’ve … to be kidding,” the wounded man sputtered.
Brennan’s mouth was wide open. He shook his head slightly in shock, eyes wide and disbelieving.
“Callum?! Christ… Callum?! You’re the sniper?”
“You shot me. Goddamn, Joe, you shot me…”
“That was you in Moscow? And Montpellier?”
Blood was beginning to soak through his friend’s shirt. The shot had gone through his vest somehow, or hit an open gap, Brennan thought.
“Feel faint…” Callum said. “Think this might be it, bud…”
Brennan felt panic. It was alien, unfamiliar territory for so many years. Behind him, a vehicle’s tires bit into the gravel as it ground to a halt. “Callum… I don’t understand…”
“For Sarah, my sister,” he said. He was panting, barely holding consciousness. “They killed her, Joe. Khalidi and his greed, Borz Abubakar…”
His sister; he’d said she’d died in an auto accident. Brennan never made the connection, the timing. A car door slammed. Two more police cars ground to a halt a few feet away.
“Hang on, Callum,” Brennan said. “Please… Dear God, please hang on…” He cradled his dying friend in his arms. “For the love of God, someone… get a doctor. We need a doctor.”
The officers converged as Brennan held his brother in arms, barely lit by the overhead street lamp in the earliest hours.
At the command post, the last of the guards was being booked and loaded into a detention van. The director and Jonah were standing by the trailer, being briefed by the colonel, as a group of local and state police cordoned off the road and kept both the public and media away.
It hadn’t taken long for word to get around the small town then out via its local newspaper reporter to the wire and the city papers, and within an hour, the place was crawling with press. Malone watched it all seated on the side steps up to the trailer, a blanket around her shoulders and a cup of hot herbal tea in hand, courtesy of a federal victims’ services worker. She was told to wait until they were ready to debrief her but the truth was, she wasn’t ready to go anywhere yet. She knew she had to file; she had to call Ken and tell him she had the story of the century, and art to go with it. But instead, she sat there, her face, hands and arms still featuring the odd little spatter of Park’s blood that the aid worker had missed in the near-dark of the parking lot.
The woman’s death had been surreal and had rocked Malone, as had the final few moments. She wondered why they’d been spared, what had happened to make the fates decree that the device wouldn’t go off when Park made the call. And she felt a little empty and numb for the experience being over.
Jonah saw her from the corner of his eye and walked over. “Ms. Malone?”
“Mr. Tarrant.”
“In a parking lot again, no less. We have to stop meeting like this,” he said.
She gave him a thin smile. “Thanks for trying. I think I might be in shock, a little.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Where’s Joe? Have you seen him?”
“Not in the last twenty minutes, but I’m sure he’s here somewhere. Look, we’d like to offer you a flight back to D.C. with us on the director’s plane. We’d have a chance to debrief you at length and you could get away from…” he pointed around at the near-chaos around them, “… all of this for an hour or two.”
Her first instinct, her gut feeling, had been to shrink away, to assume she couldn’t trust them. People had been hunting the two of them for months; their friends were dead, and a few enemies, too. But Tarrant had a warmth about his approach, a sense for the first time in longer than she could remember that the other person didn’t have the most vested of interests in helping her.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’d like that. Thank you.”
He began to walk back to the director’s side.
“Wait!” she said. “What about Joe?”
“I imagine we can make room,” he said. “Assuming he takes us up on the invitation. He’s turned us down before, you know.” He smiled when he said it, and for a second, Alex felt like things were a little bit normal again.
19./
July 5, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.
By the time Malone got home to her townhouse it was just past dawn.
They’d been back since before three in the morning, and she’d promised Jonah to not only continue her debriefing with them on the following Monday, but to get some sleep and take some time off to recover.
So of course, she’d immediately called Kenny and gone in to work. Newsman that he was, he understood why, and they began working on the story and special edi
tion while most of the nation slept.
The headline and second deck when she left the office had been unequivocal, a damning condemnation and, doubtless, the start of a long national headache: Nuclear Attack Foiled, with the subhead “Attack financier tied to presidential candidate”. The story outlined everything: the Association Commercial Franco-Arabe’s attempts to cover its tracks, to Borz Abubakar’s use of Khalidi’s oil insurrection money to buy the nuke in the first place, to the resulting fatal consequences to a bus-load of tourists and locals in rural Peru.
It outlined Callum’s role in the sniper attacks, and his motive, along with the fact that he was being manipulated by an American paymaster, someone other than the duplicitous David Fenton-Wright. While it didn’t state implicitly that Addison March was that paymaster, it did note his ties to Khalidi, and Enright’s suicide two nights before the nuclear plot was exposed, along with Khalidi’s assassination by a vengeful Jordanian soldier. People, she knew, would draw their own conclusions. March might never be directly tied in, she knew, but he would be investigated, scrutinized, and his chance at the White House was gone.
She opened the door to the townhouse. The telephone table answering machine was blinking furiously, but Malone ignored it. She hung her coat up, but left her overnight bag in the hallway. She kicked off her boots and headed for the bedroom to collapse for a well-earned twelve or so hours of sleep.
Malone flung herself onto the mattress. It felt good; a little soft compared to the motel, but good.
But something was wrong.
She wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it was familiar; she’d run into it before as a reporter, just not on such an important story.
Doubt.
It was itching away at her, ever present.
There were too many questions unanswered, things that didn’t add up. Like how two of Brennan’s former colleagues wound up involved, when Addison March couldn’t possibly have influenced the agent’s involvement. Or why the North Korean agent had let Joe live in Angola. Or why Callum had taken Park out. Or why the device didn’t’ go off.