by J. L. ROBB
Vinny parked and opened the sliding passenger-side door, grabbed his toolbox, pressure and freon gauges, and headed up the loading ramp and into contractor security.
“Hey Vinny, whazzup?”
The security guys, and gal, there was only one gal, especially liked Vinny. Vinny just had that aura of goodness.
Vinny had been with Global Warming HVAC for several years and had been servicing the penthouse chillers at CDC almost the whole time he was a tech for Bubba. Bubba really liked him and gave him the better clients to service.
Vinny always remembered the guards’ birthdays. He would bring them small gifts, something hand-made, since Vinny didn’t make a lot of money. He always asked about their children and would sometimes say a prayer with them if his mood was right. Vinny was a good Christian man, always prayed at meals, football games and before he got on I-285 around Atlanta. He had good Italian heritage.
Passing security was a joke really, considering how much CDC had supposedly tightened up; but they knew Vinny, and it was the day for the monthly HVAC service inspection. It was posted on the security schedule, just like always.
Vinny was on his sixth year of employment with Global Warming, Atlanta’s largest minority-owned contractor. The owner of Global, nicknamed Bubba because of his love for fishing and drinking beer, was married to Samarra Russell’s closest friend, Jill. Bubba knew that his association with Samarra’s husband, a U.S. Senator, had helped him land some great contracts in the Atlanta area and beyond. Bubba’s accounts included the CDC, Emory University, Georgia Tech and Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Six years earlier, on July 4th, Vinny answered an emergency air conditioning call at the Hudgens Center for the Arts, located between Lawrenceville and Duluth, both North Atlanta suburbs.
The Center was sponsoring a special Children’s Fair for underprivileged children of all ages, and Jill had invested long hours to make it happen. Less than an hour later, the Center’s air conditioning problem was resolved and was cooling better than it had since Jill had been involved there. Vinny was great with the kids too. She was so impressed with the young Vinny and recommended him to her husband, reminding him that Vinny was an Italian minority with a lot of experience. Not just anyone could work on chillers. Vinny had worked for Global ever since.
“Hey Vinny, did you know Russ is in the hospital? Came down with something during the night, all of a sudden.” The guard was nonchalant.
“Oh no!” Vinny was concerned. He had known Russ five years, and they were friends from the start, similar values. Plus they went to the same church.
“Yep. Don’t know what all happened. They’re keepin’ it hush-hush.”
Vinny, equipment in tow, entered the service elevator. The elevator walls, unlike the deep mahogany walls in the main building elevators, were covered with hanging fabric, thickly padded to protect the walls from damage. Even so, the walls were damaged, holes torn in the padding by heavy furniture and large moving dollies from the past.
The Security Officer in Charge disarmed the alarm system for the roof access hatch, and the guards returned to the day they had inherited from the previous night of horror. Police and Homeland Security agents were everywhere.
The service elevator journeyed ever so slowly to the fifth floor; and Vinny thought about the events of the day on his way up. He had not been scheduled for the service call, but here he was. He had volunteered for the call the day before; but Bubba assigned another tech instead, Charley Rich. Charley had once been a property manager before deciding to change trades in a rapidly failing real estate market.
Vinny left his gauges at the bottom of the wall-ladder and ascended, toolbox in hand. His small stature helped him through the hatch and onto the roof.
***
Rich Badey left Park Place five minutes after the three men he had monitored, the evening’s almost full moon clearly visible, even above all the light pollution shining skyward from the surrounding buildings and streetlights. He walked to his condo just a block away. Rich loved the Perimeter Mall area, everything was within walking distance.
The pen-recorder in hand, Rich hurried to plug directly into the USB port at the rear of his new Sony laptop. The microphone was the high-techiest of all such devices on the market and came with a steep price. The digital-filtering network in the pen’s circuitry should make most of the conversation discernible, and it did.
Some of the conversation was a little garbled by the music.
“…hits in two days. All hell could break loose if it’s anything like the one that hit in 1985.” It was the voice of the brown-haired dude, Chad he thought, or something like that.
“Sheryl Lasseter, The Admiral and … (garbled)… Thurman met at the Pentagon to see what to do about the satellites. We can turn…(garbled)…save a few, maybe most. The flare is extremely proton-dense but is traveling fast and shouldn’t last long. The satellites with new shielding devices should make it.
“Electrical grids all over …(garbled)… could fry. Lots of ice cream gonna melt.”
The music started again and conversation was lost. When this music set finally stopped, Donna Summers immediately began singing the disco-version of MacArthur Park through the surrounding sound system; and the short dude was saying something about Israel, Mossad and a new seven-year peace treaty. Apparently the United States and the Palestinians liked the peace agreement, but Israel still had serious doubts. Rich figured Israel would once again make concessions and probably turn over control of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians or some other foolish gesture.
Rich knew a little about the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, as it was later called. He was an investigative reporter and had written free-lance articles about the miraculous rebirth of Israel and the wars that would be Israel’s future. He knew all about May 14, 1948, the day that Israel was reborn. Reborn because Israel had existed as a country before, unlike Palestine, and was the only country in the history of the world to be totally destroyed and then reestablished. The same could be said for the language of the Jews, Hebrew.
Her inhabitants were disbursed or killed by the Romans in 70 A.D., and Jerusalem was ravaged and burned to the ground. Almost 2000 years later, atheists around the world would proclaim the errors of the ancient Jewish prophets, asking:
“When will this prophecy be fulfilled? When is the Jewish God going to restore the disgraced and disheveled Jewish people to their land? It will never happen. Everything today is just like it was 2000 years ago.” They scoffed and laughed at the unenlightened.
But it did happen, almost, almost because the prophecy stated that Israel would occupy her original borders, the borders that God had spelled out to Moses, three and a half millennia before, at least according to the Old Testament and Jewish history.
For a birthday present that May 14, 1948, five Arab Muslim nations attacked Israel; and Israel has been defending herself ever since. The new borders that established Israel as a nation on that day were nowhere near the borders as outlined during Moses’ day. Israel was less than half her original size.
Rich remembered one quote from a May 18, 1967 broadcast by Cairo Radio:
“The sole method we shall apply against Israel is a total war which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.”
It seemed to Rich that Israel had been at war with one Arab nation or another ever since, Israeli territory constantly increasing in size as the borders expanded through war, not brought on by the Israelis but by the surrounding countries. Prophecy was being fulfilled before the eyes of the world, but no one seemed to be paying attention except the evangelical Christians. Even today, rockets still landed in Israeli settlements, fired by militants that called themselves martyrs.
Rich listened to the recording two more times, gleaning all the verifiable conversation he could. This had proven to be a great day:
Airplane full of missionaries disappears in an ash cloud.
An asteroid or something was heading toward Earth.
Rich considered what would Jesus do about this, Israel giving back land that God had delivered into their hands? He downloaded the digital recording to his laptop and called his boss, Taj St. Amande. He did not think God would be happy with the Peace Agreement.
CHAPTER TEN
“There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven.” Luke 21:11
In the early morning, Samarra finally drifted off, entering the world of dream land but not happy dreams land. Her sleep was troubled. She seemed to have a slight fever and her back hurt, probably from climbing the ladder with the bulky toolbox earlier in the night.
As she slept in her comfortable Buckhead home, her breathing a little shallow, Vinny the HVAC tech slowly climbed the wall-ladder on the 5th floor of CDC, cautiously. A fall to the hard concrete floor would not be good. He penetrated the roof hatch and walked over the pebbled roof as best he could, and into the chiller room.
Vinny volunteered the day before to do the chiller service at the CDC, it would have been easier for him, but that was not to be. As a result, Vinny’s morning started a little earlier than it normally did.
Charley Rich had been the tech scheduled to go to the CDC today; and being a creature of habit, he stopped for breakfast every day except Sunday, at Magnolia Bakery where he purchased a coffee of the day and an almond bear claw. Charley always parked his shiny new truck around back, so no one would hit it. He was that way. Guys were that way.
Balancing the coffee, bear claw and truck keys as best he could, Charley didn’t hear or see the man in a black hoody hurry from the woods adjacent to the parking lot. There were no metal halide security lights to provide safety; but it was a nice neighborhood.
Before Charley could unlock the truck door, the pain of the six-inch, carbon-fiber blade echoed through his body, as the blade slipped silently under Charley’s rib cage. The killer was good.
Charley would have yelled out in pain but for the chloroform napkin held tightly over his mouth. He could not defend himself, as his hands were full of coffee, claw and keys; but the look of surprise in Charley’s now widely-opened, green eyes was priceless in Vinny’s mind. Charley couldn’t believe that Vinny, who prayed in public and coached little-league baseball, was killing him. Vinny loved the thrill that went through his body when he was blessed by the killing of the infidel, and his body quivered.
Charley was dead before he would’ve hit the ground, except that Charley didn’t hit the ground. Instead he was dragged into the woods where the man with the hoody resided, or at least visited occasionally.
Vinny grabbed Charley’s keys, Charley wouldn’t need them anymore, and drove away as Charley was making his way up the stairway to heaven, at least he had always assumed that’s the way it would happen. You died and went to heaven if you’ve lived the right life and kept your faith in Jesus. Charley believed that until his dying breath.
Vinny was not who he seemed and was one-of-two, identical twins born to rich parents and raised in Qatar. Who wasn’t rich in Qatar, the promised land of riches, surrounded by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Bahrain, just a hop, skip and jump from Iran?
Vinny thought Qatar was decadent, a place that, by the grace of Allah, was now the world’s richest nation and claimant of the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai. Take the tallest building in the world, put the Eiffel Tower on top, and it still would not reach skyward as far as Burj Dubai. Then there was the magnificent, manmade Palm Jumeriah, an island shaped like a palm tree with seventeen palm fronds and thirty-two beachfront resorts. Vinny did not consider Qatar to be Islamic by any means and knew the tower would fall and the manmade island would sink, soon.
Vinny was born as Aboud Rehza, the identical twin brother of Mohammed. Aboud and Mohammed were so identical, often their parents could not tell the two boys apart, at least in appearance. Every other way they seemed to be the same too, same quirks and characteristics. Aboud and Mohammed’s parents were considered to be moderate Muslims; and in their minds, they were. This however, was not the case.
If the cash flow could ever be traced, and it couldn’t, the discovery would show hundreds of millions, maybe billions of U.S. dollars flowing through a sea of financial deception; and the sea flowed from Miami through Grand Cayman and Jamaica, to Switzerland and other far-off, exotic locations. This money wasn’t going on vacation though; it was going to a Saudi bank that no one knew about, except the Select, a rumored but never proven group of Japanese businessmen. There were other names connected with the group. Where the money went from the Saudi bank, no one seemed to know.
Several international Islamic militant groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayef, al-Qaeda and others, received money from the Saudis, even the Shiite sects. No one seemed to know who comprised the Select. They did, however, know what to do with the funding.
At age twelve, many years earlier, Aboud and Mohammed were enrolled in the best-of-the-best al-Qaeda training camps in eastern Afghanistan, a way their parents felt would teach the kids self-defense of both their bodies and their precious religion, God’s religion, the peaceful and gracious religion of Islam. There they learned to speak English fluently, as well as Italian, Spanish and French. Aboud took it upon himself to learn two other languages during his six years of training, German and Chechnyan.
They attended school, a madrassah, much of their day, learning all about the Prophet Muhammad and his goodness and his peaceful nature. They learned from the Quran and clerics how bad and misguided the Jews and Christians were. They learned about the Jews and their foolish Passover ritual that the Jews denied. Every Muslim knew that the Jews killed Christian children at Passover and drank their blood. The Jews and Christians would change, or die.
Aboud and Mohammed Rehza loved The Prophet more than all things, next to Allah. They hated the filthy Jews more than anything, including Satan himself. They knew, had been taught, that Jews were worse than the devil; and the Christians weren’t far behind. Then there were the Shiites, their Muslim brothers who they couldn’t stand. Aboud and Mohammed were Sunnis, not Shiites; and they were the true Muhammadans.
As the boys grew older, they received extensive training in heating and air conditioning systems and repairs, even attending the highly regarded Carrier Internationalé Heating and Air Conditioning Training School in Paris, École du Réfrigeration Carrier. Carrier was the world leader in heating, cooling and environmental control systems; and Carrier equipment provided much cooling for the hot, dry atmosphere in the Middle East. Carrier even provided the necessary cooling to freeze ice in the desert outside Dubai, necessary for the world’s largest indoor snow skiing lodge.
As precocious as the twins were, they still had not figured out that Muslims had difficulty getting along with anyone, even their very own families. They had not learned that more Muslims had been killed by other Muslims, than all the Muslims killed by the West.
The Book of Genesis had predicted such, this enmity between the descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s first but illegitimate son, the son of Abraham and his young servant girl, Hagar.
Because Ishmael was a child of wedlock, not the legitimate son of Abraham and his wife Sarah, God passed a judgment against Ishmael and his future Arab descendants, saying plainly and clearly in Genesis, 16:12:
“He (Ishmael) will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
However, as smart as the Sunni twins were, they had never read the Book of Genesis, only the Quran. Old Testaments and New Testaments were not allowed in their land, under penalty of death.
Aboud and Mohammed were different than other Arabs or Persians. Their pedigree had been genetically chosen, their parents being associate members of Select; and the twins did not look like everyone e
lse. Their skin was lighter, less olive. Everyone at the camp was puzzled, wondering why the twins looked, well, so American, so European.
“It is a gift from Allah. Why do you question?” bin Laden reassured the trainers.
“He sent them for His glory, for Allah has Great Plans for us. Be patient. It is not for you to question Allah.”
With that, bin Laden rose from the floor of the cave and moved further back into the darkness where he would meditate for hours. This night he thanked God, Allah, wondering how the God of the Crescent Moon could weave such wonderful mysteries in his life.
***
Vinny, adrenalin still running his system after the killing of Charley Rich earlier that morning, walked to the chiller on the left side of the penthouse mechanical room and picked up the toolbox that was under the chilled-water pump, marked with a green arrow, just as planned. He opened the toolbox carefully, after donning a small oxygen mask, just in case. The samples were intact, though he noticed that the integrity of one of the Spanish Flu powder vials had been slightly compromised. He was glad he had the mask and gloves.
Vinny killed an hour, reading the Quran in the mechanical room. He wanted it to appear that he had actually done something, and something he had done. This was a great day for Allah, the Merciful.
An hour later Vinny exited security and waved to the lone guard as he left, heading to Charley’s white cargo van. Vinny knew the guard would never notice that he signed in as Charley Rich, the guards were so slack when Jason or Russ weren’t around. Besides, Charley and Vinny had similar profiles. This had been too freaking easy.
He drove the white van out of the lot, past the security vehicles still present from the previous night, but not before securing a time-delayed explosive on the frame of the small, blue pickup truck that would later be driven off the lot by the sole security guard, the only one who could identify Vinny; and he was glad of all the distractions. He would not worry about the security cameras. They were under control.