by Ted Bell
She peeked into her daughter’s room and said, “School. Way. It’s first grade. First grade is totally awesome. It is waaaay better than kindergarten, trust me on this one, Barclay. Now get yourself dressed and come down and eat your breakfast, got it?”
“Oh, okay,” Barclay said, sliding from the bed and padding into her bathroom in her pink nightie.
One down, Alice said to herself, moving along the hall to eight-year-old Margaret’s room. Margaret was up, dressed, and sitting at her dressing table brushing her long blond hair.
“Morning, Margaret. Nice to see you up and dressed so early.”
“Mother, do you think I’ve gotten prettier over the summer or uglier?” She leaned into the mirror and made a face at herself.
“What do you think?”
“Uglier.”
“Wrong answer. You’re the prettiest little girl in the whole world. And don’t ever forget it.” She pulled the door closed and went to check on Trevor.
Trevor was also dressed but not combing his hair because he didn’t have any. He’d shaved it all off at the beginning of summer vacation. He had watched the war movie Jarhead so many times this summer he knew almost every line of dialogue by heart. He even had the U.S. Marine’s distinctive patois down pat. Trevor Milne had literally metamorphosed himself into the Jake Gyllenhaal character, Swofford, and when he saw his mother standing in his doorway, he snapped to attention, saluted, and tooted “Reveille” with his lips just like in the movie.
Finishing the song, he saluted again and remained standing at attention, eyes straight ahead. The top sheet on his bed had military corners stretched so tight you could bounce a quarter off it. This was one of the benefits: a twelve-year-old who not only made his own bed, but also shined his shoes every night and kept his room absolutely immaculate.
“Breakfast in five, Corporal. Be there.”
“Breakfast in five, sir!” Trevor said, snapping off a salute. “Hoorah!”
“It’s the first day of school, Trevor. Maybe lose the camo pants and combat boots? You know, maybe ease into them during the semester? Good idea?”
“Welcome to the suck,” he said, pausing for beat before adding, “sir!”
“You got it, Marine,” she said, smiling as she pulled his door shut. It was amazing. She had actually gotten accustomed to being addressed as “Sir” by her twelve-year-old son.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, she and Jay had escaped for their annual romantic getaway to the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. They’d left the kids with a babysitter, a seventeen-year-old day student at the Lawrenceville School just across the river. Trevor had clearly wrapped this poor girl, Annie, around his little finger. When she and Jay returned a full day earlier due to Jay’s illness, they discovered that Trevor had moved every stick of furniture out of his room. Stored it all in the attic.
He had then covered the bare floor of his room with about an inch of sand he’d bought (having persuaded Annie to drive him to Home Depot) and pitched a pup tent in the middle of his room. Beside his tent was a Christmas tree stand with a sawed-off broomstick mounted in it. At the top, he’d hung an American flag. Models from Trevor’s collection hung on fishing line from the ceiling, including B-1B bombers, B-52s, F-16 Fighting Falcons, and Black Hawk helicopters.
Trevor, of course, was first to appear in “mess hall,” and Alice was happy to see he was wearing a pair of nicely pressed chinos and a starched khaki shirt. Not perfect, but better than camo. Margaret and Barclay followed shortly and seemed not only to have adjusted to the idea of school, but seemed almost giddy with excitement about it. Everybody wolfed down their breakfast, anxious to make the long trek down through the woods that led to the narrow rural road where the school bus would pick them up at the end of their driveway.
It was about a ten-minute hike, and Alice practically had to run to keep up with her children.
When they arrived at the road, the big yellow bus could be seen in the distance, cresting a hill about half a mile away.
“Armored personnel carrier at nine o’clock, sir,” Trevor said, completely serious.
“Hostile or friendly?” Alice asked.
Trevor smiled and said, “Good question, Mom.”
The bus finally rolled to a stop just in front of them. Since they were the last house on the route, it was packed with raucous, laughing children. Many of them pressed their faces against the windows and a couple stuck their tongues out, presumably at Trevor because he was sticking his out at them.
“Okay, team,” she said, herding them toward the door. “I want everyone to behave, pay attention in class, and try to avoid food fights. I’ve already got enough laundry to deal with, thank you.”
“Yes, Mother,” Margaret said, mommy’s little angel. Barclay said the same thing, even using her older sister’s inflection. Then she reached up for one last hug as the school-bus door hissed open.
“Off you go,” Alice said, looking up at the driver for the first time as the kids climbed aboard.
“Where’s Mrs. Henderson?” she asked the dark-haired young man at the wheel.
“Called in sick. I’m the new substitute driver.”
“Sick? She’s been driving this bus since I was in sixth grade. Never sick a day in her life.”
“Always a first time,” the youth said, pulling the lever that closed the door.
The bus lurched away and then began the long climb up Potter’s Hill, the highest point in Washington’s Crossing.
She watched the bus moving away with a growing sense of uneasiness. A mother’s instincts. She had not liked the young driver. Not liked anything about him. Not the way he spoke to her, the way he was dressed (a little cap on his head), or the way he failed to say “Good morning” the way Mrs. Henderson always did. Nor did she particularly care for the way he smiled at her as he pulled the door closed. There was something wrong with that smile, she thought, something dreadfully wrong.
She stood there, arms wrapped around herself, watching the bus accelerate up the steep hill, wondering if she was actually going crazy. Delusional? Paranoid?
No.
“Oh, my God!” she heard herself cry aloud.
Then she started running after the bus, screaming as loudly as she could for it to stop.
About a third of the way up the hill she simply ran out of breath. She’d been running as fast as she’d ever run in her life, but the hill was just too steep. The bus was nearing the top now, and she knew she’d never catch it. All she could do was stand there helplessly and watch it, praying she was only being silly, getting to be just as paranoid as everybody else in the country seemed to be lately.
When the bus reached the very top of the hill, red lights flashed and it seemed to pause for a moment.
The explosion sent shock waves rolling down the hill, staggering Alice Milne. She looked up to see a massive ball of fire and billowing black smoke where her children’s yellow school bus had been just a split second earlier.
Alice Milne started running up the hill.
The blistering heat of the flaming bus seared her eyes as she reached the top of the hill and the roaring funeral pyre that was now reducing her children and her life to ashes.
FORTY-FIVE
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
THE RED CRESCENT SOCIETY AMBULANCE rolled up Islamabad’s Peshawar Road, nearing Golra Mor and the newly opened hospital. It was just after midnight. Any time after ten o’clock, the well-ordered, tree-lined streets of Islamabad were empty, save the occasional white cab or two. It was not a town for night owls. The only restaurant open at this hour was a highly controversial Pizza Hut that had opened in a nearby shopping mall.
Up front, the ambulance driver, Imran, and his paramedic first aider, Ali, were smoking cigarettes and talking, what else, politics. In the darkened rear of the vehicle, the occupant inside the heavy-duty dark green body bag wasn’t talking at all.
Imran took a right into the wide entranceway of the new Quaid-
e-Azam International Hospital. The ultramodern four-hundred-bed facility had only opened recently after endless construction delays, political infighting, and infrastructure difficulties. Something having to do with an underground parking garage was the street gossip. The wait had been worth it, though, most people thought. The radical, blue-mirrored architecture resembled something one might find in downtown Dubai rather than the capital of Pakistan.
A gift from a national hero. A fierce warlord named Sheik al-Rashad.
The ambulance stopped under the covered entrance to the Emergency Room. The two men inside got out in a hurry. They’d been held up at a security checkpoint for more than two hours and both were eager to get home. The driver said hello to the armed security guard as he swung open the rear doors.
The guard, Muhammad, was an old friend to ISI operative Imran, another ISI agent who’d been disgraced and lost his job. This is where the poor bastard had ended up. Driving an ambulance was shitty enough. The graveyard shift at a hospital was the bottom of the barrel. The paramedic helped the driver slide the body onto the bright yellow collapsible gurney.
“Late night, Imran,” the guard said in English. “Looks like cold storage for that one.”
The paramedic shook his head and whispered to the driver in Urdu, “Now there’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious. No wonder they threw this idiot out of the secret service.”
Imran said, “How do you know the secret service threw him out? How do you know he’s still not working for them? How do you know they are not working for him? Once ISI, always ISI.”
“I heard he got kicked out on his ass.”
“Did you now? Do not believe everything you hear, brother. You will live longer.”
The large-paned glass ER doors hissed open and the EMS team wheeled the gurney quickly past Registration, past the rows of elevator banks. And, finally, through a set of stainless-steel double doors above which hung a sign that read mortuary/restricted.
The morgue. The smell of death and decay. The myriad, nameless chemicals of the constantly processed dead. They passed through the dead-empty morgue and, as expected, no autopsies were being performed because of the late hour.
At the far end of the facility, beyond the morgue refrigerators, the grossing station, the histology supplies, and the necropsy equipment, there was a nearly invisible black glass panel in the wall. A card reader was next to the panel.
Imran swiped his card and the stainless-steel doors slid wide open. Once the gurney was inside, he swiped his card again, this time on an electronic reader that was the sole way to initiate descent.
The big Otis dropped smoothly at least three or four floors underground. Maybe more. The thing was so fast, so quiet, and so smooth, you really couldn’t tell how far down you were going. Felt like a journey to the center of the earth.
They came to a soft landing. “Lands like a butterfly with sore feet, this elevator,” the paramedic said. The driver placed the flat of his hand against the center of the door, a scanner read his palm print, and the glass panel slid silently into the floor, rising again after they’d passed through.
The doors opened with a soft electronic ping and they pushed the gurney out into the dimly lit space beyond. It was some kind of reception area, empty now except for one man sitting in the shadows.
“This all right?” the paramedic asked. The man was sitting at a desk with his feet propped up, smoking a cigarette. They’d parked the gurney about ten feet from a modern desk that looked like it had been carved out of a block of steel. The only light in the room was a desk lamp, and the man’s face was not visible in the small pool of smoky white light it cast.
“Perfect.”
“Will that be it for tonight, sir?”
“You realize I’ve been sitting here for two hours.”
“Sorry, sir. Security checkpoint on the Rawalpindi Circle. Traffic was backed up for five miles.”
“Sure it was. Good-night. Thank you.”
They left without a word.
The man at the desk stared at the body bag in silence for a few seconds, puffing absently on his cigarette as if he had all the time in the world. He bent down and opened a drawer. Grabbing a liter of Johnnie Walker Blue by the neck, he unscrewed the cap and set it, and a Baccarat crystal tumbler, on the desktop. As he closed the drawer he caught a fluorescent glint of blued steel. The .45 automatic he always brought, no matter how cozy the circumstances.
He heard the sound of a zipper and swung his head around to regard the new arrival.
Looking at the body bag, he saw the wide nylon zipper sliding from the head down past where the waist would be, to just below the knees.
The corpse sat up and stared at him.
The man at the desk returned the stare, smiled, and said, “You look like you just came back from the dead.”
“Two fucking hours,” the corpse said in English. “I told that idiot Malik to route the driver on the back roads.”
“You knew about the checkpoint?”
“It was my fucking checkpoint! Of course I knew about it.”
“Scotch?”
“What is it?”
“Johnnie Blue.”
“How much did you bring me?”
“They don’t make trucks that big.”
Abu al-Rashad, the lower half of his body still zipped into the body bag, was the most powerful man in Pakistan. He looked it, even in this ridiculous pose. Every inch the warrior, all six feet of him, his skin leathered and darkened by decades in the saddle and sun, his thick hair still jet black at forty, his white smile startling in the creases of his ruggedly handsome face. He was the kind of man who could take the skin off your hand with a simple handshake.
He threw back his head and laughed. “It is good to see you bearing gifts, my brother. A sign you are up to something big. Are you?”
“Let’s go into your office and have a drink, shall we. I will tell you my plans.”
“And then I will give you a tour of my new bunker. I have two other floors besides this one. Communications, battlefield command center, my bedroom suite with a suitably shy French maid, and a first-rate kitchen with a chef also from Paris. Even a movie theater.”
“Built beneath a hospital so the Americans won’t bomb you to paradise.” Smith smiled. “Nor the Israelis.”
“A little trick I learned from Hamas.”
“Amazing. The Israelis knew the Hamas HQ was under the hospital in Gaza City and yet they didn’t bomb it. I would have.”
“You and me both, brother. Boom-boom.”
“Well. You certainly seem to have your life exactly the way you want it for now.”
“I do. Except for the fact that there’s a fifty-million-dollar price tag on my head and I have to travel about my own country in a fucking rubber body bag.”
SHEIK AL-RASHAD LOOKED AT SMITH, the Arab’s large black eyes gleaming in the lighting hidden in the ceiling crown moldings. His office, deep inside a bunker beneath a civilian hospital, was paneled in ebony. His desk was of intricately carved ivory, depicting the life of the Prophet. He leaned back in his deep black leather desk chair, placing his hands behind his head. Having just heard what Smith intended to do, al-Rashad now said, “You, my beloved brother, are fucking insane.”
Smith said, “That quaint premise was clearly established years ago, old friend. My only question to you is, are you or are you not willing to aid me on this latest, admittedly insane, but nonetheless potentially devastating operation of mine?”
“There was one question I have,” the Sheik said and he wagged his head in the familiar Afghan way. Smith smiled at the ritualistic game they were playing.
Ah, the enigmatic smile of the wizened yet wise warlord. Could mean yes. Could mean your head. Could mean nothing at all. He gave the old devil a wry smile in return and they were both content to sit in silence for a time sipping their scotch. The bottle on the Sheik’s magnificent carved desk was already half empty.
“Your question?”
/> “This idea of yours is fraught with risk. You could easily be killed or captured by the British. A catastrophe that would put all of our plans in jeopardy. Especially if you were captured and tortured.”
“Yes.”
“So. One wonders. Why do you yourself need to be personally involved at all? Surely the team can handle this without you.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. But I must be there. I’d pull the trigger if I had the skill. You will understand when I tell you this target holds great symbolic interest for me. This is no ordinary operation. It is intensely personal.”
“I understand now. I agree. You must go. And if things should go wrong, you will take yourself out of the picture, of course.”
“Of course. Cyanide is my constant companion.”
The Sheik turned his eyes toward the ceiling, tapping the tips of his fingers together, clearly mulling this over. He thought like a chess player. It was the reason for his ascension to power in the void created by the absence of Osama bin Laden. He was always at least four moves ahead.
“It would be good public relations, naturally,” Sheik al-Rashad admitted. “An explosive international media strike right to the heart of the enemy.”
“Well put. And wholly accurate.”
“It is not surprising that it is you who has conceived this assassination. You are always following your natural inclinations.”
“Naturally. It is my sole destiny and what I live for. But I tell you. Not a bomb on this earth could rival the devastating effect this will have on our enemies.”
“Not even the precious nuclear arsenal we will soon control at Islamabad?”
“All of those weapons will be in the hands of the Sword of Allah before we are done, brother. Only a matter of time.”
“An extremely powerful nuclear device seems to have gone missing at the Islamabad nuclear weapons facility.”
For the first time, Smith’s face showed excitement.
“Good, excellent. Without a problem I hope?”
“The security guards at the airport storage facility were put in place by my ISI friends years ago. All of the guards’ families are held at one of my bases in the mountains, under constant threat of death. No one will ever know how we are removing the weapons.”