by Brad Taylor
He didn’t wait to see further results, but he could hear the secondary explosions as he raced back to his safe house.
Thirty minutes later, he exited Interstate 610 onto the surface streets of Sunnyside, traveling south through the depressed area. Finally entering the run-down section he lived in, he passed a police car on the shoulder of the road, the sight making him nervous. He took a left, one block up from his safe house, and ran smack into a line of cars waiting to move forward. He leaned toward the windshield, holding his hand to his eyes to block the sun, and felt a shock of adrenaline.
There were two police cars on the road, and they were searching each vehicle before it was allowed to continue. It can’t be because of the port. No way. Clearly, some other crime had occurred and they were looking for a suspect—but if he went through, they very well might handcuff him instead. He knew he was a wanted man for what he’d done in Nevada, having seen his traitorous mother on the news.
With only two cars ahead of him, he backed up, causing the vehicle behind him to honk. He wheeled into the other lane, hearing someone shout at him. He glanced behind him and saw policemen running toward his truck. He goosed the gas pedal, racing the other way.
He turned the corner and saw the original police car pulling into the road to block him. He torqued the wheel to the left and rocketed by, scraping the cage on the front of the squad car’s bumper.
He glanced in the rearview and saw the police car pull out directly behind him, lights and sirens going. He skidded around another corner, the truck vibrating in protest. He immediately took a left, trying to lose the police by reaching the major thoroughfare that ran next to Sunnyside Park. Moving too fast, the truck’s tires broke contact with the pavement, sending him into a wild spin. He bounced through a ditch and across a sidewalk and slammed broadside into the trees at the edge of the park.
Shaken, he cleared his head, hearing the siren growing. He leapt out of the truck just as the police car slid to a halt. He ran straight into the thick woods of the park, the branches of the underbrush whipping and scratching his arms and face as he barreled through.
He heard the policeman shouting at him to halt, but he kept going. He hit a tangle of undergrowth and sprawled face-first onto the ground. He lay panting but heard nobody following.
The thicket, he knew, was only a couple of acres, and they were going to surround it. Then they’d bring in the dogs. He needed to get out before he was trapped.
He jumped up and began running again, straight west, toward the South Freeway, which bordered the woods. If he could get across that—put it between him and the park—he would stand a chance. He heard sirens on both his left and his right, realizing they were setting up observation points on the surface roads, but that would be harder to do on the expressway.
He heard the noise of cars on the freeway first, then saw a break in the trees ahead. He kept running until he reached the edge of the wood line, then squatted down, cautiously peeking out. No police.
He’d started to step out when he saw a police car to his right, at the corner where the freeway met the northern surface road. He pulled back into the wood line and ran south a hundred meters. He tentatively tried again. The south road to his left was still clear of police vehicles, but the freeway was a problem. It was two two-lane roads separated by a fifty-foot swath of grass. From his position, the woods on the other side of the freeway were about a football field away. A long distance to run in the open. The only good news was there wasn’t a lot of traffic.
He broke free, running flat out toward the freeway, waiting to hear someone shout. He heard nothing. He made it across the northbound lanes, then was forced to stop in the grass median, frustrated by traffic. He glanced behind him at the police car to the north but saw no reaction.
A break appeared in the southbound lanes, and he raced to the far wood line. His lungs on fire, his legs wobbly from the exertion, he finally reached the first shrubs and stunted pine trees. He pulled himself into the woods, now staggering forward. He went far enough inside to be hidden, and collapsed.
Gasping for air in the humid Texas heat, he thought about his options, which were few. He couldn’t go back to the safe house, so anything in there was lost. He had plenty of money but no transportation. Maybe he could steal a bicycle, but that wouldn’t get him to Los Angeles, and he was supposed to be there in four days.
He decided he would call his contact. Let him solve the problem. In the meantime, he would put as much distance between himself and Sunnyside as he could. He thought about which way to go and logically decided to continue west, toward Los Angeles.
The next target.
35
The following morning, I’d been awakened by my phone buzzing with an alert, annoying the hell out of me. I looked at my watch, seeing it was only six A.M. I snatched up the phone and saw it was the Taskforce telling me to call in secure, immediately. I did the quick math and realized it was midnight in the United States. Which was foreboding.
Jennifer propped up on an elbow, her hair all over the place like she’d rubbed a balloon to get the static electricity to make it stand on end. She wiped the sleep out of her eyes and said, “What’s going on?”
I said, “I think our trip to Alhambra is going to be put on hold. Kurt wants to talk.”
She perked up at that but couldn’t resist a jab. “But I already paid for the tickets.”
I got on the computer and said, “You did not. You never did anything with the laptop after I turned out the light.”
Behind me she said, “Yes, I did.” And then I got the joke. I dialed up on the VPN, saying, “So it was all work for you, huh?”
She started to reply, and the screen cleared. I held a finger to my lips as Kurt appeared. Without preamble, he said, “You’ve got Omega for your target.”
I glanced at Jennifer and said, “Why? What’s changed?”
Kurt said, “You guys seen the TV news lately?”
We both said, “No. What happened?”
He told us about a strike on a ship in Houston, something that had caused enormous damage tactically, with millions of dollars in destruction and a body count climbing north of 150, but even more strategically. Now one of the largest ports in the United States was shut down. I flicked on the television while he was talking and saw a repeating newsfeed showing a burning lake of fire next to a gigantic tanker ship.
I said, “Okay, got it. What does that have to do with our target?”
“Everything. Right after this happened, but completely unrelated, some uniformed Houston police were looking for a gangbanger and ended up chasing a guy avoiding their checkpoint. He crashed his vehicle but managed to escape. The fingerprints in the vehicle were from the terrorist in Nevada.”
“So . . . you think there’s a connection between the two?”
He gave me a weary smile and said, “Really? A wanted terrorist with a penchant for complex attacks ends up in the city that has a complex attack? Yeah, I do. More importantly, so does the Oversight Council—and you have the only lead in existence, as tenuous as it is. If I’m right, he’s no longer a lone wolf. No way would he have been able to execute this mission by himself, which means there’s a complex plan in play.”
“You don’t think this was a one-off? It’s pretty spectacular. You think more hits are coming?”
“I honestly don’t know, but Tower One was pretty spectacular as well. Before Tower Two and the Pentagon.”
“Who are we looking at? Al Qaida? It can’t be ISIS. Those yokels don’t have the brainpower to manage something like this. All they can do is spray and pray.”
“You have hit the conundrum of the day. We have no idea. It’s not al Qaida—or if it is, they’ve managed to avoid about a thousand different intel feeds, which just isn’t possible given the scope of the attack. It’s not anyone on our radar.”
That was scary. A te
rrorist group that announced itself with an attack like this was unheard of. Even al Qaida had done multiple lesser attacks before the big one, including the botched World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.
Kurt said, “You mentioned earlier you had a plan to roll this guy up. Can you execute?”
I said, “That’ll all depend on Creed.” I told him about Veep’s millennial trap, and that we were still waiting on the code to be built. He said, “I’ll get more manpower on it. If he can get it done, how soon can you execute?”
“We still have to find an ambush location, but that won’t take too long. This evening?”
He said, “Get it done, because I don’t think this asshole is finished yet, and we need whatever is in that drug dealer’s head.”
Twelve hours later, Veep and Jennifer were whispering sweet nothings to each other at an outdoor table, while I was forced to listen to verbal abuse from Knuckles, sitting on a cinder block at a construction site.
We’d been stationary for close to an hour before we got our first nibble, like a fish causing the bobber to bounce. Retro came on, saying, “Dragontooth is in the neighborhood, down on the river, and it’s doing the usual.” Meaning he was playing the game.
Now we only needed to see if we could sink the hook.
36
A muted television on in the background, Johan van Rensburg tried another four-digit combination on the iPhone 6s, and, as expected, came up blank. He’d hoped the man he’d killed in the cable car had been stupid enough to use 1234, 1010, or 1111, but he hadn’t. Giving up on the keypad, he tried several outdated hacks involving Siri, the voice activation application, on the off chance the owner hadn’t updated the iOS software. He asked the phone for the weather, the clock app, and email, hoping to get a backdoor around the passcode. Each time he was stymied.
Damn it. Why do they publicize that shit?
While deciding on his next move, he idly placed his thumb on the Touch ID fingerprint reader, and, of course, that didn’t work either. But it did give him an idea.
He went to the explosives he’d brought with him, laying the two blocks on the bed and looking closely at the wax paper wrapping. He found a multitude of fingerprints on the wax—some probably his own—but he continued searching anyway. He located four on the glossy paper that he determined were thumbprints. Using his pocketknife, he carefully sliced around each one, then picked up the individual slips of wax paper with the edge of a napkin, placing them in separate pint-size Ziploc bags.
It was something he could work on later.
He turned his attention to the passport, the face of the man he’d killed bringing the death home, but not in a bad way. He had no regrets about what he’d done, and he now had a name—Karim al-Khattabi, from Morocco.
Johan ignored the eyes staring at him from the passport photo, instead searching for something that could help. Outside of work visas for Gibraltar and Spain, there was nothing of interest. Karim had entered Spain more than ten years ago and had been in Gibraltar for at least two years, but he’d returned home only twice—presumably to update his visa.
He picked up the small address book, flipping through it. He saw scribbles, all in Arabic, which was no help. He was about to toss it aside when he found a list of names, all ending in al-Khattabi, with an address in Fez, Morocco. Family? Johan didn’t know. In truth, he didn’t know why he was even looking.
He’d managed to escape Gibraltar without incident—simply by walking back to his car and driving out. He’d continued straight to Madrid, finding a cheap hotel near the Royal Palace. He’d turned on the television, hoping to see some news about the discovery of the dead man, but the only English-speaking channels in Madrid were international ones: the BBC, CNN, and Sky News. None of them had picked up on a small-time murder in Gibraltar.
He knew Karim had been up to no good, and he hoped the police would discover the plot before some tourist was blown apart, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure what his next move should be. The target using the bank account was dead, so he’d cauterized whatever fallout might be coming to Icarus Solutions.
He wished he’d left the address book, passport, and cell phone with the dead man. The authorities could certainly use them more than he could. They needed them to stop whatever was about to happen, and he felt no small amount of angst about taking them.
He caught a news flash on the television, bringing him out of his self-pity. He focused on the report, seeing an oil tanker surrounded by fire, the ticker below the screen saying it was from Houston, Texas. He turned up the volume, listening to the description of the attack as the camera zoomed in on the wreckage. He saw the name on the hull and realized life as he knew it was over.
It was the same ship whose name he’d seen in Karim’s office. The one with the work order.
Christ. He blew up an oil tanker.
He watched the screen, mesmerized at the carnage and feeling the revulsion build at his running away from the crime scene instead of attempting to stop whatever the man had planned. Feeling sickened that he was connected.
But he was, inescapably. In his heart, he knew there was nothing he could have done, as the attack had already been in motion even as he was tracking his target, but the images on the screen caused his stomach to roil. It was the same feeling he’d had in Africa, entering a small hamlet and seeing the destruction. The raped women and dead children. Something he could have prevented, had the government let him.
He slept with that knowledge every single night.
He watched the carnage, seeing the body count, feeling the rage grow. Dexter’s name was on that bank account. Somehow, whether he knew why or not, Dexter was at the root of the attack. And now, so was he.
He checked his watch, seeing it was one in the afternoon in Florida, and dialed the phone. Dexter answered on the fourth ring, saying, “Johan, I’ve been waiting on your call. Did you find anything out?”
“Yeah, I did. You see that attack in Houston?”
“Of course. Everyone here is going apeshit over it. The body count is still rising, and they’re having a hard time putting out the fire in the bay. It’s a catastrophe. Why?”
“Your bank account financed it.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
Johan told him what he’d found, detailing the evidence and the unmistakable connections. Dexter said, “How do you know all of this? Did you talk to the man? Maybe he’s lying.”
Johan stared at the ceiling, wondering if his boss was just acting stupid or was truly that dumb.
He said, “I fucking killed him. He didn’t hand me his phone and passport. I took them from him after I found the explosives. He attacked me with a knife, and he paid for it.”
The first words out of Dexter’s mouth were, “You actually murdered him?”
Johan’s voice turned cold. “Don’t ever use the word murder with me. I don’t murder anyone. He attacked me, and now I want to know what the fuck is going on. Your bank account is tied into all of this. You are the thread.”
Johan thought he heard crying on the phone. He said, “Are you still there?”
“Yes, yes. I just . . . I mean . . . I don’t know what to say. They killed over two hundred people in Houston. The port’s shut down. It’s costing millions of dollars a day.”
“Who did you pay that original bribe to?”
“What?”
“Dexter, when I ask a question, and you answer ‘what,’ all that tells me is you’re trying to think up an answer. You want to fuck with me, you’d better go to interrogation training. If you want me to give you the fucking instruction, I’ll be home in a day. Now, I’ll ask again: Who. Did. You. Pay. The. Bribe. To?”
“It . . . it was a guy who had inroads into the Saudi kingdom. Nothing more. He was a guy that could get me a contract.”
“What’s h
is name?”
“I . . . I don’t remember. Tariq something. I could find out.”
“Are you recording this conversation?”
Flustered, Dexter said, “No, why would I be?”
“Okay, listen to me, and listen closely. I do not work for anyone who helps terrorists. Unlike you, I have lost friends and family, and I have fought them my entire life. If I find out that you’ve helped this man in any way—if I find out you’re lying to me—I’m going to kill you.”
Dexter managed to come up with a little bit of bravado, but Johan could feel it was forced. “Hey, wait a minute. I lost my best friend on 9/11. Don’t give me that. I would never help terrorists.”
“And yet here we sit, you prevaricating on who you bribed, and a bank account from fifteen years ago used in a terrorist attack.”
Dexter said, “I’ll find out the details. It was so long ago.”
“You’ll do more than that. You’ll go to the authorities with my information. Tell them what you know. Connect the dots from Gibraltar. Get them hunting the rest of them.”
“The rest of them? What are you talking about? The attack’s over. Why should we throw ourselves to the wolves?”
“Because it may not be over. Those bank accounts that had your name on them are complex, and they’re worldwide. I don’t care how you do it, but get that information into the system. Do it anonymously, do it on the nightly news, do it with your friends in the Pentagon, I really don’t give a shit, but get that intelligence out into the wild.”
Johan heard nothing for a second, prompting him to say, “You still there?”
“Yes, yes. I’m just thinking. This could destroy us.”
“It has already destroyed us. People are dead.”
“But they’ll ask about the first bribe.”