“We need somewhere to go,” Morgan said as he pulled open the panel under the steering column and reached in for the wires.
“I have more people I can call. It is a greater risk. But it can be done.”
Morgan touched the ignition wire to the power wire, and the engine came to life. He maneuvered the car out of its spot and drove through the parking lot and onto the street, wind blowing in through the broken window.
“They were American, weren’t they?” said Badri.
“The agents? Yeah. I think so. Something about the way they carried themselves, the way they held their guns.”
“You could have given me up, turned yourself over. They probably would’ve taken you back. You could’ve given them a story about using me to escape. Wouldn’t even be too far from the truth. But instead you risked your life to escape with me.”
“I told you,” said Morgan. “I’m done with them. All of ’em.”
“I think I didn’t quite believe you until now.” Badri looked out at the industrial suburbs of the city. “Okay,” he said. “If you wish to join with us, I will stand by you.”
Morgan turned to look at him to make sure he was serious. “You mean it?”
“Yes. I mean it. And I will tell you about this. I have something. We have had it since before I was captured. I will not tell you what, not yet, but I will tell you that it can kill thousands. Tens of thousands.”
“I see. And this weapon—how will you get it into the United States?”
“It is already there,” said Badri. “With some allies from my organization. But my people did not know how to deploy it effectively.”
“But now that you’re out, you can guide them.”
“This can be a new 9/11,” Badri said. His eyes shone with the fire of fanaticism.
Morgan’s voice lowered to hardly more than a whisper. “You want to make this a new 9/11. I want to help you make this something greater. I can give you the means to cripple the US government in a way that they will not be able to recover for decades.”
Badri smiled. “Welcome to the cause.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Alex returned to an empty house in Andover, Massachusetts.
Night had fallen, too late for any kids to be out in the now silent streets. She got out of the cab and unlocked the front door, dropping her bag in the foyer and making straight for the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, but there was no food, just a few condiments on the door, a half stick of butter and a little bit of cranberry juice in a container. Her mother was off in Martha’s Vineyard consulting on the house of a client who was summering on the island. Alex figured she must’ve cleared out the fridge before she went.
So very practical, her mother.
She checked the freezer. In there Alex found a Tupperware of frozen ravioli with a note.
Welcome home, honey. Forty minutes in oven at 350 degrees. Sauce in the pantry.
Yes. Quite practical. Alex smirked in appreciation.
She set the ravioli in a porcelain dish and poured in half a jar of her mother’s homemade tomato sauce, made and canned for an entire year at a time. Then she set the oven to 350, set a timer for fifty minutes, and put the dish in without preheating.
Leaving the oven to do its work, she went to the living room, flopped on the couch, and turned on the TV. This she hadn’t done in a long time, but it was so easy to fall into old habits when she was at home. Especially when she was feeling as forlorn and defeated as she was then.
She clicked through the channels and settled on infomercials. She couldn’t concentrate on anything anyway. The chipper chatter at least served as appropriate background noise for her wallowing.
She pulled out her phone and looked at the messages that had accumulated in her absence. Loads of junk email, a couple hellos from her friends Simon and Katie from her brief stint in college—Katie’s more insistent and offended by her lack of response—and one from Karen O’Neal, some canned words of concern from a couple of weeks ago.
Alex checked the clock. Just past eleven at night. On impulse, Alex called her. The phone rang only once before she picked up.
“Alex?” She sounded awake, at least.
“Hi, Karen. I was, uh, out of town for a while. I hope it’s not too late to call.”
“Please. Sleep doesn’t even cross my mind before midnight. What’s up? Are you okay?”
“I, uh, I’ve been out of town. I was wondering if there was any news about my father.”
The question hung on the line. Crickets chirped in the hot night.
“I’m sorry,” Karen said finally. “We haven’t had any luck finding him.”
“Right. Yeah.”
“Do you want to grab coffee sometime this week?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll text you.”
She threw her phone across the living room to land on the couch and groaned. The absence of her father was a keen, stabbing pain. The past weeks had kept her busy, on track, doing something. Now that she stopped, all that she had left was the reality that he wasn’t there and wasn’t coming back.
What was life going to be without him? What was her life going to be at all? She felt like this changed everything.
She had done depression, and didn’t care for a repeat. Would she go back to training? Follow in his footsteps? Would that bring her some sense of fulfillment, keep him alive in her somehow?
Then there was revenge. That might keep her going. But she’d read enough to know where that led. Death or disappointment.
But what else was there for her? How was she going to deal with life now?
The same way she’d dealt with the rigors of training, she told herself. One day at a time. One minute at a time, when necessary. Just the next push-up, the next ten feet of running, the next five minutes awake. This was just like that. Do what you have to do not to die right now.
So she wept, not caring how loud she was in the empty house, and buried her head in a pillow, screaming, and punching the couch cushions. She didn’t know how long she was at it, but when the oven dinged, announcing that her ravioli was ready, she stopped, panting, drying her eyes, and stoop up. One day at a time started right now.
Alex picked herself up off the couch. The smell of basil and tomato wafted to her nose, the comforting fragrance of her mother’s cooking.
A warm meal at home. Seemed like a fine first step.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Morgan and Badri landed in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, in the late morning, bearing fake passports. The bored-looking immigration agent didn’t give them a second glance as she entered their data on her computer.
They picked up a rental Kia hatchback at the airport that they had no intention of ever returning and drove west together, along the coastal highways under the noontime tropical sun. Morgan’s hair, half an inch grown in, flowed like a field of wheat in the wind streaming in through the car window. On their right, the sea would sometimes peek through the dense jungle.
Once they had driven for two and a half hours, Morgan checked their position on the handheld GPS. He parked the Kia on the shoulder of the road and plunged into the woods, through the dense underbrush, slapping at the mosquitoes that harried them the whole way.
They trekked for hours under the shade of the green canopy, Morgan correcting their course using the GPS every few minutes.
“The jungle turns you around,” he told Badri. “Stop paying attention for a minute and you’re lost.”
The sun was low in the horizon by the time they reached the shore, where the rickety wooden fishing boat was already waiting for them. On it was a weather-worn Dominican man, skin browned by the sun, shirtless and in ragged shorts, and a younger man in a wife-beater shirt and faded baseball cap. He tensed when he saw them at first, looking with especial wariness at Morgan, before Badri spoke.
“Señor Batista?”
“Sí,” he said, nodding his head and grinning.
Batista waved them on board. Morgan took stoc
k of the boat as he stepped onto the deck. The wood looked more deteriorated than Morgan liked for any boat going on the open sea, and everything from the hull to the cabin seemed cobbled together and patched over many times.
They set off without ceremony, leaving the island of Hispaniola behind and moving north. Morgan pulled on a Panama hat he’d bought at the airport to protect against the sun.
The two men stared at him openly as the boat chugged along, and Morgan understood very well why. He was not the kind of person they would normally carry across, not the kind of person who’d normally enter the country illegally. But an explanation was not forthcoming. Morgan was a paying customer, so he didn’t have to explain a goddamn thing.
Morgan and Badri had brought along cereal bars to tide them through the passage, but the younger man, Diego, who Morgan learned was Batista’s son, had caught some fish earlier that day. They grilled it on deck in a makeshift barbecue pit made out of a paint can and what might have been part of a dish rack. Morgan ate with relish, with his hands, the fish resting on a piece of banana leaf.
The hold was full of fuel canisters to get the boat through the long journey and back, so they had to sleep on deck, out in the open. Which suited Morgan fine enough—out there, they had at least a light breeze to combat the stifling heat.
They spoke little during the journey. Before, driving through Uzbekistan, Badri would talk freely about his family and his life outside the organization, and even a few stories of terrorism, of narrow escapes from the CIA, and his capture by the Russians. But now, the weight of their mission was bearing down on them, and they couldn’t bring themselves to say anything about anything else. They did not even discuss the ultimate mission itself, instead focusing on the details of their passage, and then only so far as it was necessary. Mostly, Morgan looked out into the dark water as it disappeared far in the horizon, or in the dark of the night, lit by stars and a sliver of moon.
It took a day and two nights to come with sight of the shore, and then they spent a day of waiting because they couldn’t approach in daylight. So they waited, the boat bobbing on the gentle sea, just far enough from the continent that they would not have to worry about the American Coast Guard finding them and either arresting them or escorting them back to their place of origin.
The boat started moving again at dusk, all lights off to avoid detection. They landed in the dead of night at a deserted bayou beach in Louisiana, where an ally of Badri’s was waiting with an inconspicuous seven-year-old VW Jetta.
Chapter Forty
Morgan’s confederate drove them into the night and past dawn, stopping only to refuel. The driver was a taciturn, grave man of few words, so they rode in silence almost the entire way, until they pulled into a country house in rural Virginia. There they were greeted by a soft-spoken young man with a shaved face. He introduced himself as Rasheed. Like everyone else along the way, he regarded Morgan with nothing short of total suspicion.
“He is an ally,” Badri said.
He wanted to get them situated, but Badri was impatient. “Where are they?”
The young man, deferential, led the way down a solid old wooden staircase to the basement. Among the abandoned appliances, tools, and building materials, he walked to a working chest freezer and pulled it open. The top was layered with meats in grocery store trays and frozen vegetables. He removed them, setting them aside, to reveal a steel box underneath.
“Here they are,” Rasheed said. He opened the box without removing it from the freezer to reveal six plain steel canisters, about as big as tennis-ball containers. Badri looked at them with ravenous eyes, filled with the destruction that they would cause.
“Novichok,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Russian nerve agent. The deadliest ever made. Not a gas, but a powder. Causes all muscles in the body to seize and contract. You cannot breathe, and your heart stops pumping blood. You die within minutes. Perhaps seconds.”
He drew out a canister and held it out for Morgan to see. “Here is our instrument of destruction,” he said. “Here is how we will bring America to its knees.”
Chapter Forty-one
The farmhouse they occupied was old and two-storied, built of horizontal slats that were once whitewashed but now showed the faded gray of the wood underneath. The grounds were modest, but the house was shielded from view of its surroundings by trees. They were a few miles from Palmyra, the nearest one-horse town.
It was a spot well chosen for its isolation. You could spend months in here without anyone so much as sighting the house from the road.
Morgan heard the Chevy beater truck before he saw it coming up the driveway, carrying Rasheed. He got out of the car holding bags from the thrift store in one hand and Burger King in the other. Badri was out of the house, in the nearby woods, making a call to his associates in the organization.
Devout as he was, Rasheed was a slob. From the looks of it, he subsisted on mostly snack foods, and empty bags of chips and fast food were strewn about the living room, which held nothing but one ratty couch. It was some kind of warped jihadi version of a filthy bachelor pad.
Rasheed slammed the screen door open and set the bags down on the Formica table in the dining room. He greeted Morgan with undisguised disdain.
“Lunch,” he said, tossing a paper-wrapped Whopper into Morgan’s lap.
Not exactly his favorite—Morgan hadn’t eaten fast food in years, at least not voluntarily—but he was famished. Even with Diego’s fishing, food on the boat had been slim pickings. He unwrapped it and took a large bite out of it.
“I brought clothes,” Rasheed said, dropping a thrift store bag at Morgan’s feet. Eating the burger with one hand, Morgan sifted through the clothes with the other. Rasheed had an impeccable sense of style. Among the pickings were a shirt from a company barbecue so big that it wouldn’t look out of place resting on a tent pole and a lime green button-down. But the clothes on Morgan’s back were starting to get ripe, and this was what he had.
Morgan looked up from the bag to find Rasheed staring at him.
“I do not know what you did to fool Badri,” he said. “But I do not believe you are here to help.”
Morgan stood to confront him, chest out, hands balled into fists. “Badri believes me. And he’s your boss. So I don’t much care what you think.”
“Infidel!” Rasheed spat on the floor.
“And what are you gonna do about it?”
Rasheed narrowed his eyes, and then drew a gun from his waistband. Magnum Big Frame revolver, .44 magnum. Talking about stopping power would be damning with faint praise. At this range, it would be a question of how much of Morgan’s face would remain afterward.
“Big man with a big gun,” said Morgan. “Let’s game this out. You blow me away. Then what? What do you tell your boss?”
“It does not matter. You will be dead, and no longer willing to betray us.”
Morgan’s voice dropped an octave. “He trusts me. I’ve saved his life more than once, so maybe he trusts me more than he trusts you. And he wants what I have to offer. Kill me, and your punishment will come.”
“Not as swiftly as yours,” Rasheed said. But Morgan could tell he was shaken.
“Your plan will fail without me,” Morgan said. “They’ll catch you, and best case scenario is that you die in the process. You won’t have another 9/11 on your hands. You’ll have another underwear bomber.”
Rasheed gritted his teeth and grimaced. “You are lying.”
“Then pay the price and kill me.”
Rasheed cocked the gun. Morgan got ready to make a grab for it. Rasheed was brave but untrained. Morgan might be able to get the best of him.
“Rasheed!”
It was Badri, standing outside the screen door. He walked into the house speaking in harsh Arabic, and Rasheed, hissing, uncocked the gun and tucked it back into his waistband.
“What happened?” Badri demanded, in English.
“Friendly disagreement,” said Morgan, turning away and
heading for the stairs. “I’m going to take a shower. I have some clothes I can’t wait to try on.”
Chapter Forty-two
Morgan locked his door that night and braced the handle with an old wooden chair. He then set the moldy mattress on the floor against the wall. He wasn’t going to risk Rasheed getting any ideas in the middle of the night.
He woke up with the cock’s crow, but stayed in his room, stretching and doing his morning exercise. An hour later, he unblocked the door and walked out. The house was still, the other two still sleeping.
Morgan went downstairs and looked for something to eat for breakfast, but all he found were potato chips and packaged cake, so he settled for a glass of tap water instead.
Carrying the cup in his hand, Morgan walked to the basement door. He looked down, at the freezer, thinking of all the destructive power it contained. He felt chills as he considered it.
“See something you like, American?”
It was Rasheed, from the top of the stairs.
“Just thinking about the plan,” said Morgan. “We’re going to have to devise a strategy sometime soon.”
“We will set them off in the White House,” Rasheed said. “And we will kill the President of the United States.”
Morgan chuckled at the notion. “You won’t make it ten feet into the White House. You’ll be shot down in the entrance hall. The best you can hope to achieve there is to kill a handful of tourists and security guards.”
“Then you have a better idea?”
They were interrupted by the sound of Badri coming downstairs.
“Morning,” said Morgan. “I was just about to tell Rasheed here that we need groceries and supplies. Proper food. Eating all this junk is expensive, too. We shouldn’t be wasting the little money we have.”
For Duty and Honor Page 11