by Alan Gratz
I nodded.
“Now,” he said, “if you know your assailant is going to shoot you, you want to try to disarm him.” He aimed the empty gun at me. “Take the gun away.”
“Here?”
“You think your attacker is going to move someplace more convenient if you ask him?”
I stared at the gun in Dane’s big hands, then tried to grab it as fast as I could.
Click. The bullet he would have fired would have gone straight in my brain.
“Don’t grab up,” he told me. “Grab down. Again.”
Click. I grabbed down, but I was gut-shot before I could pull the gun free.
“Get yourself out of the direct line of fire. Go toward the side with the gun. It’s easier for me to come around across my body than it is for me to swing out wide, see? Again.”
I moved. Grabbed his wrist. Pushed down.
Click. Still dead. Or at least shot in the leg like Mickey.
“Better,” Dane said. “Grab the weapon, not the wrist. Your goal here is to control the weapon.” He put my hand on the gun. “Bend my wrist back with the weapon in your hand. All the way back, that’s a joint lock. Hardest position for me to do anything with my hand. Then, while you’ve got my weapon locked away from you, that’s when you counterattack.”
“Counterattack?”
“Something fast. Something painful. Kick him in the groin. Hit him in the throat. Claw at his face.”
“That’s not very honorable,” I said.
“Honor’s got nothing to do with it. This is about survival. It’s you or him.” Dane released the tension in his arm, and I let go. “You use leverage and pain to get the weapon. Then, when you got it, you unload it. Discharge it. Kick it or toss it away.”
“Shouldn’t I aim it at my attacker?”
“You got it from him, who’s to say he won’t get it back? No. Not until you’re a trained soldier. Even then, the best way to survive a gunfight is to not be in one. Worst he can do without a gun is beat the snot out of you. Worst he can do with one is shoot you dead. You get rid of the weapon, and you run away. Call for help. Let’s do it again. Just the leverage part.”
I tried to do everything he told me. Twisted. Grabbed the gun. Tried to push his wrist back into a joint lock. It was like trying to snap a telephone pole. I was strong for a high school senior, but I was still just seventeen. Dane kept the gun pointed right at me. He let me struggle helplessly for a few seconds before pulling the trigger.
Click.
“And the last part of the lesson is the most important part of the lesson,” he said. “Don’t ever try this stuff on somebody a lot stronger than you.”
“Great,” I said. “So I just need my attacker to be either my grandmother or a freshman in high school.”
Dane laughed. “You’ll get bigger, and the army will make you stronger, cadet.”
“If I get in,” I said.
“I told you. You’ll get in,” Dane said. “Let’s do it again. I’ll go easier on you this time.”
We practiced the move again and again, Dane pushing back, but not so much that I couldn’t push him back. By the end, I at least knew what I was supposed to do, even if I wasn’t doing it all that well.
“Mickey just sent the signal,” Jimmy said from the driver’s seat. He had his cell phone in his hand, reading the screen. “He wants to chat.”
JIMMY PULLED INTO A GAS STATION. WE REFILLED, bought snacks, and made bathroom runs, then huddled around Jimmy’s laptop to talk to Mickey together. I ate a Slim Jim and sipped a Dr Pepper as Jimmy finished the complicated process of establishing the secret, secure connection.
This time Mickey was sitting in his car. He looked better, though. More rested. He hadn’t slept on the floor of a van like me.
“I ran the Super Bowl idea by the big brains,” he said. “They’re as incredulous as you are, Jimmy. Still, I think they at least said something to Super Bowl security, so they’ll know to be on higher alert, such as it can get any higher. But it’s all the more reason for us to have gotten you out of there, Kamran.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“If the CIA isn’t going to do something about this, we have to,” Mickey explained. “I ran down your food services angle, Aaliyah. The food concessions for the Super Bowl are being supplied by Kendall Food Services, which distributes out of Nashville, Tennessee.”
Dane glanced at Jimmy, who immediately pulled out a tablet to look them up.
“So far it’s the best interpretation of Darius’s clue we’ve got—assuming he really is talking about the Super Bowl. The food delivery isn’t supposed to leave Nashville until later tonight. Dane, I want you and the team to check it out.”
“But—what about Darius?” I asked. “The Super Bowl’s in four days. We have to find him.”
“Our priority is preventing an attack on the United States,” Mickey said. “Darius knows that.”
“He’s a Ranger,” Dane said. “He’s ready to die for that.”
Mickey quickly held up his hands. “Not that we aren’t going to do everything we can to prevent that from happening, Kamran,” he assured me. “But Dane’s right. Your brother is a soldier. A very good one until just a few months ago, by all accounts, and perhaps even better since. He’s doing what he can to stop this terrorist attack, and now we have to as well. If the target is the Super Bowl, we have time. Not much time, but time. And if we do foil whatever it is Ansari has planned, it’ll all be over well before then.”
It’ll all be over, and then they won’t need Darius anymore, I thought. We’ll kill Haydar Ansari’s terrorist plot, and Haydar Ansari will kill Darius.
“CAN YOU CHECK AGAIN?” AALIYAH SAID TO THE security guard behind the desk at the Kendall Food Services warehouse facility. “My name is Hana Nazari. N-A-Z-A-R-I. Channel Five News?” She held up the microphone she was carrying like she was talking into it. “You haven’t seen me on TV?”
Aaliyah certainly looked the part. She was prettier even than ESPN’s Emily Reed, who also had dark hair and olive skin. Aaliyah had changed back into the sharp gray business suit and black high heels she’d worn at the DHS building. I couldn’t help staring at her, then chided myself for it.
“I’m sorry,” the security guard said. A badge pinned to his shirt said “Voss.” I didn’t know if that was his name or the security company’s name. “I don’t have any record of anybody agreeing to let a film crew in here tonight,” he told us.
“It’s just a puff piece,” Aaliyah said. “ ‘Supersize Food Trucks Off to the Super Bowl.’ ‘Nashville Feeds the Super Bowl’s Hungry Fans’? Great publicity for Kendall Food Services.”
The outside door opened, and Jimmy came into the lobby wearing a blue jumpsuit and white hard hat, and carrying two bags of tools. “BellSouth,” he said. “Somebody called about phone line repair?”
“Yeah,” the security guard said. “Down the hall and—”
“Chris, what was the name of the person we talked to?” Aaliyah interrupted. She was talking to me. Chris was my alias for this little performance. I was supposed to be her cameraman. Though how anybody could take me seriously with the video camera Jimmy had given me, I didn’t know. It wasn’t a little home handheld version, but it wasn’t one of those big things you had to lug around on your shoulder, either.
Aaliyah was waiting. I picked a name from the directory on the wall over where I stood, like I was supposed to.
“Murray?” I said. “Murphy? Something like that?”
“William Murphy?” the security guard said. “In public relations?”
“Yes. That’s the one,” Aaliyah said. “Could you call him?”
“Ma’am, it’s ten forty-five at night.”
“Which means the eleven o’clock news starts in fifteen minutes,” Aaliyah told him.
“Hey, bub,” Jimmy said. “Router room?”
“Sorry,” the guard said, flustered. “Down the hall and to the right. Sign’s on the door.”
Aaliyah stalled, babbling on to the security guard about recent features she’d done, to give Jimmy time to get where he was going.
“Okay, go,” Jimmy said. I almost jumped as his voice came through loud and clear in the earbuds Aaliyah and I wore.
“Please? Could you call him?” Aaliyah begged the security guard. “I don’t know why Mr. Murphy didn’t leave word, but we did talk about it, and I’m supposed to go live in twenty.”
The security guard relented. “I’ll call.”
I looked around nervously while the security guard picked up the phone and dialed. I didn’t understand how this next part could work, but Jimmy had assured us he could do it.
“Mr. Murphy?” the security guard said. He put a finger to his other ear like he was trying to hear the phone better. “Mr. Murphy? This is Clifford Voss, night security at the distribution center. Yes. I’m sorry to interrupt your party, but there’s a Miss—”
“Nazari,” Aaliyah told him. “Channel Five.”
“—Miss Nazari here from Channel Five, and she says she—Yes, sir. That’s right. No, sir.”
Somewhere down the hall, not very far from here, Jimmy had patched himself into the warehouse’s outgoing phone lines. The name I’d read out while he was in the lobby had told him who the security guard was going to call, and all he’d had to do was intercept the call and pretend to be Mr. William Murphy. I hadn’t believed him when he’d said it would be a piece of cake, and I still worried that the person Clifford Voss was talking to on the other end of that line was the real William Murphy.
“I see. All right, sir. Thank you. Sorry to bother you. Yes, sir. You too.” Mr. Voss hung up and looked at us suspiciously. My eyes flicked to the door, ready to run.
“MR. MURPHY SENDS HIS APOLOGIES,” THE SECURITY guard said. “He says he talked to you, but he just forgot to leave word with security.”
“Well, of course he did,” Aaliyah said. She was already walking for the door to the warehouse. “Thank you, Mr. Voss. We know where to go.”
“I’ll call the floor manager on duty tonight and let him know you’re on the way,” Voss said.
“Terrific,” Aaliyah called over her shoulder as I hurried along behind her. “Thank you!”
The swinging doors thumped closed behind us, and I let out a breath. Aaliyah didn’t seem a bit nervous, though, clicking briskly along the concrete corridor in her high heels.
She put a hand to the four-way communicator she wore in her ear. “ ‘Hey, bub’?” she said quietly, imitating Jimmy from before. “Who are you, Wolverine?”
“She knows the Wolverine!” Jimmy’s voice came through on her earbud and mine. “Be still, my fanboy heart! Kamran, you’ve got competition, kid.”
I blushed. I’d hoped my mini-crush on Aaliyah wasn’t quite so obvious.
“Cut the chatter,” Dane said through the earbuds. He was linked in, too. He could hear everything we said to each other. “We’ve got a job to do. Jimmy, we need shipping manifests, authorization papers—”
“Yadda yadda yadda,” Jimmy said. “I know the routine. Give me ten minutes and I can tell you what the CEO had for breakfast this morning.”
Jimmy’s job was to hack into the warehouse’s computers and look for evidence that anything was amiss.
I brushed against a water cooler, almost overturning it in a clumsy attempt to keep up with Aaliyah’s brisk pace. She slowed down for me.
“You’re nervous, aren’t you?” she said.
“Yeah,” I admitted. I was supposed to be studying for midterms right now, not going undercover with an elite ops group. I didn’t want to mess up, but I had another worry, too.
“You’re doing great,” Aaliyah told me. “Just keep following my lead.”
“If we—if we do find something,” I said, giving voice to my greatest fear, “if we do uncover some kind of plot and stop Haydar Ansari, and Ansari’s been using Darius to feed us false information, doesn’t that mean he won’t need Darius anymore? That he could … could kill him?”
Aaliyah nodded, her eyes sympathetic. “It’s possible. But I’m not going to give up on him, Kamran. When this is over, we’ll find him and clear his name, no matter what.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“What?”
“This. Helping me. Helping Darius. Working for Mickey.”
Aaliyah took a deep breath, and for a few moments the only sound was her heels clicking along on the floor. We came to a door and pushed through it. Between us and the loading docks at the far end of the compound was a long warehouse full of boxes marked KENDALL FOOD SERVICES. There wasn’t a soul around—it was, after all, almost eleven o’clock at night.
“How old were you when September eleventh happened?” she asked at last.
“Um, three.” I felt very young all of a sudden.
“I was fourteen,” she said. “A freshman in high school. Exeter. You know it?”
I shook my head.
“Big fancy boarding school in New Hampshire. Hadn’t even been there a month. Didn’t have any friends, wasn’t in any clubs yet. And after September eleventh, nobody wanted me to be their friend, or be in any of their clubs.”
It was exactly the same thing that had happened to me when Darius hit the news. I knew exactly how she must have felt—the looks, the whispers, the snubs—and I told her so.
“Right. So take what you went through for two weeks and multiply that by four years. My father wanted to pull me out of Exeter, send me to school in Switzerland. But I begged him to let me stay. Maybe a little bit of it was out of stubbornness. But mostly it was because I loved America. I’d dreamed of coming here since I was a little girl. I loved American TV, American movies, American food—”
“American boy bands?” I said.
She smiled. “No. I worshipped American boy bands.”
“She tell you who played her sweet sixteen birthday party?” Jimmy cut in on our earpieces, making me jump all over again. I’d forgotten he and Dane were still listening in. “NSYNC. Her rich daddy paid them to play just for her.”
“Justin kissed me,” Aaliyah said dreamily. “Right here.” She pointed to a place on her cheek and I laughed, but she was totally serious. “Everybody from school was there, of course. So excited. But they just came for the concert. They were never really my friends, none of them. They never got close enough to me for that. You asked me why I do this, and that’s why. September eleventh … crystallized me. Changed me. Made me want to prove to all the haters that not all Muslims are radical terrorists. So after I graduated, I went to Georgetown to study international relations, specifically Arab relations with the West. That’s where Mickey found me. He hired me right out of college as a CIA consultant, and I’ve never looked back. When he told me about your and Darius’s situation, I was in. No-brainer.”
I nodded. Living in my little bubble in Phoenix, it had never occurred to me that there could be somebody else out there who got what I’d been going through so completely. Somebody who had experienced the same prejudice I did, and was doing everything she could to undo it.
At last we reached a warehouse where a skeleton crew was filling refrigerated tractor trailer trucks with pallets of plastic-wrapped Kendall Food Services boxes, and I did a double take.
I knew one of the people loading the trucks.
IT WAS DANE! HE WORE THE BROWN PANTS AND work shirt of Kendall Food Services, and he was checking off loaded pallets with an electronic scanner. I knew it was his job in this little performance to infiltrate the warehouse “unofficially” through the back door, but I was still surprised at how thoroughly he’d done it. The Green Berets really were amazing at getting into a place and blending in without causing a ripple.
A red-faced white guy in a white shirt and brown tie hustled over to us. Fresh sweat stains ringed his armpits, and he dabbed at his balding, sweaty head with a handkerchief.
“I—I’m Fred Sore
nson,” he said, stopping us in our tracks. “I—nobody told me you were coming.” He looked at my camera like it was a bazooka. “You want to film the food being loaded onto the trucks?” He looked around. “Why?”
“Puff piece,” Aaliyah said again, slipping easily back into character. “ ‘Nashville Food Company Feeds Hungry Super Bowl Fans.’ It’s Super Bowl all the time on TV right now.”
Fred Sorenson swallowed and patted his head again with his handkerchief. The man looked like he was about to have a heart attack. Aaliyah had to notice it, too.
“Well, maybe just some shots of the food trucks leaving, then?” he said.
Jimmy’s voice was suddenly in our ears again. We could hear him, but Fred Sorenson couldn’t. “This is interesting,” Jimmy said. “All the other food—French fries, nachos, popcorn, candy—came from their usual vendors. But their usual hot dog vendor couldn’t deliver. Last-minute refrigeration failure at the hot dog supplier’s facility in Chicago. Kendall Food Services had to go to a secondary supplier in Houston. Hot dogs just came in this afternoon.”
Hot dogs! That’s what Darius and I had pretended to lure Godzilla into the rocket with.
“Actually,” Aaliyah said to Sorenson, super smooth, “we thought we might open a box or two. Show the actual food that’s being shipped out. Something American. Something that says ‘football.’ A box of hot dogs, for example.”
Fred Sorenson practically spluttered. “H-hot dogs?” Behind him, Dane left one tractor trailer and hopped up into another to look for the boxes of hot dogs. “I—I don’t think that’s—I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sorenson said. “You really ought to go. Please.”
Dane’s voice came low and steady in our ears. “Got ’em. Only the top boxes are filled with hot dogs,” he said. “The rest are filled with plastic explosives. C-4. Enough to level an entire stadium.”