Armageddon Conspiracy

by John Thompson

  FRED LUCAS SAT IN THE passenger seat of Kosinsky’s truck and scowled at the thousands of headlights on the Long Island Expressway. Nine thirty at night, yet traffic crawled in both directions.

  “Long Island,” he groused as Kosinsky pulled off the expressway and stopped at the pumps of a self-serve gas station. “I’d rather live in Afghanistan.”

  Kosinsky shrugged. “I’ve lived here all my life,” he said. “You get used to it.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  Kosinsky gave a wry smile. “I’ve had that thought a few times tonight.”

  Fred grunted in agreement. He hated what was about to happen, but then he thought how some Arab shitbirds had killed Harry. Now, tonight, they were going up against the same kind of people. He didn’t think he’d want to keep on living if something happened to Brent.

  He opened his door and climbed out of the pickup. An empty five-gallon can sat in the truck bed. He took it out, unscrewed the top, and waited while Kosinsky ran his credit card through the pump.

  “Regular or high test?” Kosinsky shouted over the freeway noise.

  Fred looked up and smiled. “Like it matters,” he yelled. He had a fireman’s bias that most cops were full of crap, but this was a guy he could get along with, even one he could like.

  He squeezed the handle and heard gas stream into the can. Thirty years putting fires out made it impossible to do this with an easy conscience. Still, he’d been over it in his mind and knew this was probably the only way. Besides, it was for Brent—and Harry. Suck it up you old bastard, he told himself.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  NEWARK, NJ, JULY 1

  AGENT JENKINS SLAMMED DOWN HER phone, grabbed a tissue, and wiped her oily forehead at the hairline. She needed a shower, and her stomach was a seething mess. For the past thirty minutes she’d been intermittently calling DeVito’s house phone and cell phones, ditto for Kosinsky’s. There were many possible explanations for why neither of them answered. They might be bowling, out to dinner, or at a movie. They might not be together, only she knew they were.

  “Shit,” she whispered, as she finally made her decision. She dialed a Washington number then put her right hand under her nose, sniffing the residual nicotine on her fingers. God, what she’d give to light up right now.

  After two rings, the night duty officer answered. She identified herself and said she needed to be patched through to whichever Executive Assistant Director was on duty. As he was no doubt instructed to do—because EADs did not like being disturbed in the evening—the duty officer asked several times whether a lower level person couldn’t suffice. After his fifth attempt to sidetrack the call, he put her through.

  Jenkins heard the tremor in her voice, but at least she knew this particular EAD to be forceful and decisive. She told him without preamble about the missiles, the stolen money, the lengthening chain of murders that appeared loosely associated with Prescott Biddle, the satellite photos, and her conclusion that a raid on Biddle’s estate was required to prevent an assassination attempt on POTUS the following day.

  To his credit the EAD did not mention chain-of-command issues or ask her why she wasn’t calling her titular boss in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “Agent Jenkins, do you have any idea of the shit storm this will create?”

  “Yessir,” she said.

  There was a long silence before the EAD spoke again. “I’m sure you’ve considered the impact on your career if this proves unsubstantiated?”

  Her pause lasted only a second. She was rolling all the dice on her intuition, but in the past thirty minutes, she’d also learned that Maggie DeVito and Brent Lucas had gone to the same high school, graduated the same year, both at the top of their class. DeVito was in a liaison job, yet her investigation was so precisely targeted that she had to have some outside direction. She intuited that DeVito had enlisted Kosinsky to help cover her tracks. All of which implied that DeVito was in contact with Brent Lucas.

  “Yessir,” she told the EAD.

  “I had to ask.” There was another silence. Finally, the EAD said, “Permission granted to conduct a raid with all due haste.”

  “Thank you, sir.” In FBI parlance, ‘all due haste’ meant the raid would be preceded by an exhaustive planning session, only tonight there was no time. “Um, there’s another piece of information. I believe two Project Seahawk agents may already be attempting an interdiction.”

  “On their own?” the EAD squawked.

  “Yessir. I’ll provide details later. Right now, I don’t think they’re important.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” the EAD groaned. “I’ll mobilize the New York office and have all available agents at your disposal. I’ll also have Nassau County S.W.A.T. standing by for instructions. Get moving, Jenkins.”

  “Yessir.”

  Jenkins hung up and grabbed her copies of the NSA photos. She pulled her bulletproof vest from the hanger behind her office door then ran down two flights to the Border Patrol area. She found the woman she’d bummed the cigarette from earlier and tossed a five-dollar bill on her desk. “I need a few more. It’s an emergency.”

  The woman looked up from her computer. She glanced at the money, shrugged, and then pulled the pack out of her desk drawer and held it out. Jenkins snatched six cigarettes, stuffed one behind each ear and four in the breast pocket of her jacket. “Thanks,” she mumbled, then rushed toward the elevator.

  Moments later with her blue light flashing and a lit cigarette clamped in her teeth, she roared through the deserted Newark streets. She phoned the Manhattan FBI office and the night Duty Officer told her five agents would be waiting for her in a navy blue van outside Federal Plaza. She told the DO to requisition night vision goggles and an M16 with a laser aiming device and extra magazines for each agent and for her as well. She also asked for communications gear, flash-bangs, and smoke grenades.

  Next, she phoned the Nassau County Police and identified herself to the night sergeant. He in turn patched her straight through to the Chief, whose angry tone told her he’d been awaiting the call. “First off, I want to go on record as telling you this may be the craziest goddam idea for a raid I’ve ever heard. You got that?”

  The Chief’s voice was rough with age, and Jenkins pictured a careful survivor, probably a man looking to retire in a year or so without major stains on his reputation. She ground her teeth, knowing she needed his cooperation. “Thank you for expressing you thoughts, Chief,” she managed.

  The next thing surprised her. “I just had to say it,” he said. “SWAT’s been alerted. I’ll have twenty-five officers for you, armed and ready in less than an hour. Our helo’s already been given coordinates, but the weather’s turning to crap. I just hope to hell you know what you’re doing.”

  That makes two of us, Jenkins thought. “I assume you have fire department maps of the property?”

  “My SWAT team trains every damn week. They’ve got maps of every major building and every piece of ground in this county.”

  “What about the town police?”

  “Oyster Bay Cove?” the Chief scoffed. “They won’t get near this. Anything happens that makes us look bad, they’re gonna be in the newspapers and on TV saying they fought this tooth and nail. They’re gonna say we’re the dumbest bunch of bastards ever born. You better expect it.”

  “I hear you,” Jenkins said. If she were wrong on this, the Director would personally flay her with a rusty knife, so she couldn’t sweat the small stuff.

  Fortunately, the night traffic was light in the Lincoln Tunnel, and the navy blue van was parked outside Federal Plaza as promised, the five agents standing on the sidewalk. They obviously knew the purpose of the raid because they wore combat gear and unhappy expressions. Jenkins parked, locked her car, and introduced herself to the four men and one woman.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” one of the men said.

  Jenkins walked up to him and pulled herself up as tall as possible so she could look him straight in the eyes. “That makes two o
f us.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  LONG ISLAND, JULY 1

  PRESCOTT BIDDLE HAD JUST BEGUN to tease Anneliës’s left nipple with his tongue when his cell phone began to ring. He ignored it. It stopped but then went off again almost immediately. This time he rolled across the hotel’s king-sized bed, checked the caller ID, and saw that it was an “unknown number.”

  “Don’t answer,” Anneliës whispered, putting her arms around him as she tried to take the phone from his hand.

  The ringing stopped, and then started a third time. Only now the readout showed the call coming from his cottage, and he hit the answer button.

  “Mr. Biddle.” Abu Sayeed’s voice was calm, almost languorous.

  “You shouldn’t be using this phone!” Biddle snapped.

  “You didn’t answer when I used my cell,” Abu Sayeed said. “And I need something.”

  Biddle felt his pulse begin to hammer. “You have everything you need already.”

  “Not quite.”

  Biddle knew Anneliës could overhear because he felt her body stiffen. “What are you talking about?”

  “We need you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Mr. Biddle. Suffice it to say that we have something that belongs to you.”

  Biddle heard the sound of a door opening in the background, then a scream of pain followed by a woman’s voice calling his name. The door slammed. “That was your wife, Mr. Biddle,” Abu Sayeed said as he came back on the line. “I think she is quite anxious that you return quickly.”

  Biddle’s heart bucked helplessly, caught in a vice grip of guilt. He began to hyperventilate. Weeks earlier he’d considered sending Faith to another of the alcohol treatment clinics that always failed to help, but he’d put it off. Why? Biddle now wondered. In some shameful recess had he harbored a secret hope that the terrorists would remove the problem of his marriage? “You have no right!” he sputtered.

  “Hurry back, Mr. Biddle,” Abu Sayeed said, and then hung up.

  Biddle sat on the side of the bed and looked back at Anneliës. She lay with the sheet bunched at her hips, her perfect breasts rising and falling with her respirations. She reached out for him, but he moved further away, hit with a sudden flash of intuition. “This is why you insisted we come here,” he said. “How long have you known?”

  Anneliës held his stare, but he could see caution and anxiety flickering in her eyes. “There is no way I could have prevented it,” she said.

  “You could have warned me!”

  She said nothing.

  “I have to go,” he said after a moment, and then turned away from her and began to pull on his clothes.

  “No!” Anneliës cried.

  Biddle ignored her. This was the last thing he wanted, but he had no choice.

  Neither one spoke as they dressed. Biddle found it odd when she followed him from the room and into the elevator, but his thoughts and emotions were too jumbled. He was about to say something when she climbed into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover, but his attention was diverted by the weather. A wall of low black clouds eclipsed the moon. Distant thunder rumbled in the heavens, and the wind cut and swirled in savage gusts.

  It was only a summer storm, he told himself as Anneliës began to drive, but he sensed an approaching maelstrom that was anything but normal. Was this God speaking? A band of rain lashed the windshield then stopped. Wind buffeted the heavy car, rocking it on its axles. Biddle closed his eyes and tried to picture himself as a Christian warrior striding across a vanquished earth, but he saw only the image of a normal man.

  They were a half mile from his estate when Anneliës braked savagely to a halt. The headlights glistened on the wet pavement, and leaves skittered past in the wind. The sight reminded him more of autumn and death than summer. Anneliës hammered the steering wheel with her fist. “You can’t do this!”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  She gave him a bloodless smile. “You don’t understand any of it!”

  Biddle looked at her with dawning awareness. “What’s to understand?”

  “I know what Abu Sayeed is capable of!”

  He kept staring at her in stunned silence. Finally, she continued. “Sayeed hired me. He paid me to gain your confidence, and I was willing to do it. I just had no idea that I would fall in love with you!”

  Biddle felt numb. One part of him wanted to believe what she was telling him, but the analytical part cried out that she was lying, that she’d been lying from the very start. “The Lord wants me to confront the infidels.”

  Anneliës sat with her head bowed, hands locked on the wheel, appearing to wrestle with some decision. Finally she turned to him, her eyes filled with tiny points of red light. “Abu Sayeed is not going to follow your plan!”

  “He has to!” Biddle cried.

  “He’s going to fire his missiles into Manhattan and then use you as a hostage to escape!”

  Biddle put his palms over his ears, as if by shutting out her words he could make them false.

  “You’re his enemy!” Anneliës shouted.

  “God will make Abu Sayeed fulfill His purpose!” he roared. His mind could not—would not—contemplate another possibility.

  “Well, Abu Sayeed’s God may have a different plan!”

  His wild rush of anger took him by surprise. He slapped her hard enough to draw blood at the edge of her lip. She made no sound but turned her eyes away, and he felt something draw back into her, almost like heat leaving a room.

  “Never take the name of the Lord in vain or talk about other gods as His equal,” he said in a tight voice. He paused and waited for a response.

  She kept her eyes on the road. “Idiot!” she snapped.

  Biddle watched her and tried to analyze the enormity of what had just taken place. She had suddenly become a different person, someone hard and cold. Only it couldn’t be. God would not let him lose her, not now, not when he was so close to returning Jesus to earth!

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  LONG ISLAND, JULY 2

  BRENT PACED THE NARROW SPACE between Maggie’s Toyota and Kosinsky’s truck and tried to wrestle his emotions under control. Impatience and anxiety raged against his guilt that others were taking so much risk.

  “Hey,” Maggie said, sounding exasperated, “will you please pay attention. We only have time to review this once.”

  They were parked behind a McDonald’s, beside the enclosure for the trash container. Maggie had her door open, her feet on the pavement. Fred Lucas and Kosinsky stood to either side, while DeLeyon sat in the passenger seat. Maggie held the aerial photograph spread across her lap and used a small flashlight as a pointer.

  Brent relented and came over to watch as she traced Biddle’s driveway. “Remember, there are three private security guards on duty, one right inside the gate.” She indicated the small octagonal hut that Brent had pointed out earlier. “Another up here beside the main house.” She pointed to an identical small building on one side of what looked like a six or eight car garage. She indicated a third structure down along the water, between the dock and the house. “And there’s number three,” she said. “I called the security company and verified that there are three guards on duty at all times, and that they’re long-time employees.”

  “Which means they’re probably ignorant of what’s going on,” Kosinsky added.

  Maggie nodded. “We have to hope that’s the case. It’s Biddle’s best bet for a tight alibi. If the guards are innocent, they won’t be expecting an attack, so we just have to keep them busy. Even if there’s shooting away from the house, they probably won’t try to be heroes. They’ll hunker down and call the police. That leaves the terrorists.” She turned toward DeLeyon. “Okay, what’s your job?”

  “I’m lost,” DeLeyon answered. “I stop right here,” he said pointing to the driveway entrance. “I ring the bell on the front gate and yell that I be needing some help. I ask to use the phone.”


  “Just keep him distracted,” Maggie said.

  Brent felt another stab of guilt. “Be damn careful,” he snapped. “You’re an African American kid in a rich white neighborhood late at night. You don’t know how some rent-a-cop might react.”

  DeLeyon raised his hand up in front of his face, and his eyes widened in mock horror. “Oh, Lawdy, look at me! I am African American! I never notice that before!”

  “It’s not funny,” Brent growled.

  Maggie reached out and gave Brent’s hand a quick squeeze. “He’s just trying to lighten things up,” she said gently.

  Brent shrugged but said nothing.

  “Okay, when DeLeyon distracts the guard, we go over the wall,” Maggie continued. She looked up at Fred. “When we do, you’re going to split off and get yourself into position near the house.”

  Brent took a quick glance at his uncle and thought that for once in his life he looked serious. Fred nodded and cast a dour glance into the back of Kosinsky’s truck at the cardboard liquor carton. The two half gallon bottles in the carton had been full of Boodles Gin until a few minutes earlier but now held gasoline. Wet rags protruded from the top of each.

  “You may not need to use them,” Maggie cautioned. “The three of us will head for the cottage in the back.”

  “Who takes Biddle down?” Brent demanded, unable to get past the idea that Biddle might escape.

  “There’ll be no place he can run,” Maggie said.

  “I know how you feel about Biddle,” Kosinsky said. “But the missiles and terrorists have to be our first objective.”

  Brent started to fire back a reply, but then he caught himself and nodded. Kosinsky was right.

  “Give me the signal,” Fred said. “I’ll hit the garage.”

  Brent pointed at the guard station that was right beside the garage. “It’s too risky. What if the guard starts shooting?”

  “It’s there, or it’s no place. I need to make sure people can get out.”