by Jack Mars
The little girl almost screamed, but didn’t. The woman chopped the girl on the side of the neck with the blade of her hand. She didn’t pass out, but she went limp, her eyes rolled back showing the whites, and she almost fell. The bones seemed to have gone out of her legs.
The woman caught her and eased her to the ground. The girl was very docile. The old woman wrapped duct tape around her mouth and the back of her head. She wound it around several times, catching the girl’s long hair in it. She slipped a pair of eye shades over the girl’s eyes. She gagged her mouth. She cuffed her hands behind her back. The girl offered no resistance at all. If not for a slight muffled whimpering, it would be hard to tell she was even awake.
“You stop that whining,” the woman whispered fiercely. She gave the girl’s body a violent shake. “If I hear another peep from you, I will kill your father and sister. Do you understand me?”
The girl nodded.
The woman zipped open the giant suitcase all the way. The sides were hard plastic. On the inside, the case was molded to accept a body just about the girl’s size.
She stuffed the girl into the suitcase. It took several moments. This was the critical time, and the time that made the woman nervous. It was taking too long. These Secret Service agents were all wired together. A moment of silence half a beat too long, and they would all come running.
Finally, she had the girl inside. The woman zipped the bag shut again.
Alone now, the old woman, who was not old, wheeled the suitcase around the body on the floor, giving it a wide berth. A pool of blood was spreading out and becoming a lake, and she didn’t want to track her wheels in it.
She pushed open the door leading to the terminal.
*
Pierre opened his eyes and yawned.
Across from him, the old woman he’d seen before slowly made her way under the giant TV set and toward the bank of elevators. She dragged along that big heavy bag of hers. It seemed like something was wrong with one of the wheels.
Pierre almost had the urge to help her, but he figured she pulled the bag with her on a regular basis. It was probably better if she handled it herself. The practice would help her keep up her strength.
As he watched, she entered an elevator and a moment later, the door slid shut.
He glanced around.
A Secret Service agent approached. The same one as before? He wasn’t sure. Sorry. They all zoomed in and out of his life so often, it was impossible to keep track. He didn’t know who anyone was.
“Sir, the cars will be here in two minutes. I suggest you and the girls get ready.”
Pierre nodded. He glanced toward the bathroom.
Michaela spent a lot of time in front of mirrors, carefully inspecting changes to her body, brushing her hair, making faces, and in general admiring herself. It was an occupational hazard of the beautiful people. And for now, it had gone on long enough.
He looked up at the other female agent. He noticed she didn’t have an earpiece in. “Do you mind popping in there and finding out what’s holding her up?”
“Of course.”
The woman headed toward the bathroom. She walked quickly, and a moment later, she disappeared inside. The door slowly slid to a close.
A few quiet seconds passed.
Suddenly, five large men ran toward the bathroom door.
Pierre was surrounded by Secret Service. In an instant, they had him and Lauren up from their seats and running toward the sliding glass exit door. Pierre was out of control, moved along by the strength and speed of the burly men around him.
“Wait!” he shouted. “Michaela is in the bathroom!”
Lauren made a yelping sound of terror.
A black SUV roared up to the curb, its passenger doors already open. The agents shoved Pierre and his daughter into the back seat. Two agents piled in on top of them, pressing them to the floor of the car.
“Go!” one of the agents screamed at the driver. “Go! Go! Go!”
The car lurched forward, speeding toward the airport exit. A strong man held Pierre down across the seat.
“Very important,” the man said. “Did you see anyone?”
Pierre shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Anyone. Anyone at all.”
“I don’t know. I saw an old woman.”
“What old woman?”
“An old woman came out of the bathroom. She had a big suitcase.”
A Secret Service man in the front seat shouted into a handheld walkie-talkie. “An old woman. The suspect is an old woman with a large suitcase.”
“What did she look like?”
“I don’t know,” Pierre said. His mind was a blank. His head was spinning. “Where is Michaela?”
Beside him, somewhere in the dark speeding car, he heard Lauren’s low moan.
“What color was the suitcase?” the man said.
“I don’t know! Dark. It had wheels.”
“What was the woman wearing?”
“Michaela!” Pierre screamed, as if that might conjure her in the car with them. For an instant, he imagined how that could work. Magic. He would just turn his head, and she would be there next to him, squashed down on the car seat by a Secret Service man. So he did turn. He turned his head as much as he could, but she was nowhere in sight.
“Is she dead?” he said.
“She’s missing,” the man on top of him said. “She might have been abducted. That’s what all signs point to. But I promise you we’re going to find her. This happened only a few minutes ago, so she’s still somewhere on the airport grounds. And we’re closing all the exits. They will never get her out of the airport. We just need you to answer some questions about the woman you saw.”
Pierre had no faith in what this man was saying, none at all. Magic had a better chance of working.
This was impossible. This was a nightmare.
The Secret Service man was still speaking, but Pierre no longer heard him.
“Michaela!” he screamed again.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
5:45 a.m. – Eastern Time
United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC
“Is she here?” Brooklyn Bob said.
Kurt Kimball shook his head. “No.”
Susan sat in the Situation Room. Even at this late hour, the room was nearly full of people. Empty coffee cups littered the tables. The office-sized garbage cans overflowed with empty takeout food containers. A smell was beginning to permeate The Room, a smell of people who had gone a long time without showers.
Susan looked at Kurt Kimball. He was running this show. Kurt was Susan’s National Security Advisor. She didn’t even know what that meant anymore. There was no security. There was no advice worth taking. Everything was out of control.
She couldn’t bring herself to look at the computer screen with the live feed from Brooklyn Bob’s hideout in Syria. She sat staring at the table, blessedly encased in a feeling of numbness she had never experienced before. It was self-protective, and that was good, but it was also weak.
There was too much to be done. Something had to be done. If she couldn’t rouse herself… Oh God, Michaela.
She glanced at the clock on the wall. Ninety minutes had passed since she had first heard the news they had taken Michaela. Ninety minutes since they had tried to make contact with this monster Brooklyn Bob. Ninety minutes he had made her wait.
“Why don’t I believe you?” Bob said. Susan was beginning to think of him as just Bob, like an old friend, like your friendly neighbor Bob. “Why do I think she’s sitting right there with you? Susan, if you can hear me, yes, it’s true. The mujahideen have taken lovely Michaela. Now you know what it feels like to lose someone. Now you know what you people have been doing to us for all these years. Can you feel it, Susan? This is loss. This is pain. A piece of you has been taken away, and it may never come back. Not pretty, is it?”
“Bob,” Kurt Kimball said. Kimball’s voice was angry, seething. Susan looked at
him. His round bald head was dark red. A thick vein stuck out on his forehead. “We are locked onto your location. You could die at any minute. I will call in the air strikes and gladly watch you get obliterated.”
“Shut up, errand boy! I’m talking to the President. I’m talking to Susan.”
In the first moments, the doctors had offered Susan a sedative. More than a sedative, really. A powerful tranquilizer. They had offered the same drug to Pierre and he had taken it. It was the right thing to do. He was sleeping now, he and Lauren both were, out at the Malibu house. Security was tight there. They were safe.
But Susan couldn’t take the drug. She had to be alert. She had to… direct things.
“We’re not stupid,” Bob said. “We know you can find Michaela. We know you have all the latest gadgets. You might even already know where she is. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. But know this. She is surrounded by mujahideen who have taken an oath. They will die before they let you have her back. At the first sign they’ve been discovered, they will kill her without hesitation. And by the first sign, I mean one security guard snooping around with a flashlight, a news helicopter flying too low, a homeless guy taking a piss in a rose bush and talking to himself. Anything that doesn’t look right, and Michaela dies. If a SWAT team pulls up, or a bunch of paratroopers fall out of the sky… well, let’s just say she’ll be dead before they even touch the ground.”
“What do you want?” Kurt said.
“Wait a minute,” Bob said. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. That’s just for starters. The second Ebola attack is still on. That hasn’t gone anywhere. You guys did okay with the first one. It looks like you might even have things under control a little bit. But Charleston is really kind of a small city, isn’t it? The next one is going to be bigger. And it’s going to be badder. It’s going to be the baddest thing you’ve ever seen.”
Susan looked up. On the computer screen, skinny, bearded Bob was standing with a dark blue New York Yankees baseball cap on. Would he really attack his own hometown? Was that what he was suggesting? Did he have any control over where they hit next?
Bob smiled. “But you can stop it from happening, at least for now. And you can have Michaela back. It’s easy. All you have to do is a few things for us.”
“We’re listening,” Kurt said.
Bob’s smile died in an instant.
“I know you’re listening, dummy. That’s why I’m on here with you. Of course you’re listening. So listen to this. There’s an open air prison in the Iraqi desert near Qafa. You know the place. When the Crusaders took Mosul some time back, over five thousand of our brothers were captured and crowded into this place.”
Kimball turned and snapped his fingers at two of his young staff members. “Qafa?” he mouthed at them. Instantly, they both started working on the laptops in front of them.
“We know our brothers are dying of starvation there,” Bob said. “We know they are dying of thirst. We know they have no cover from the sun. We know you are torturing them to death.”
“We don’t torture people, Bob. We’re not like you.”
Bob ignored him. “We want that prison closed immediately, and we want all of our brothers released and given safe passage fifty miles west to our territory. Are you writing this down? That’s the first thing.”
Bob glanced down at a list he was holding. “Next thing, very easy. We want the Guantanamo Bay prison closed immediately, and all brothers remaining inside given safe passage to their home countries, or any destination of their choice.”
“Bob…” Kurt said.
“Next and final thing, for now. We may decide we want more later on. We probably will. But for the moment, this is it. There is a CIA black site prison called the Salt Pit. It’s in Afghanistan, at an abandoned brick-making factory outside Kabul. It’s an evil place. Our count is that there are more than two hundred prisoners inside, trapped at the mercy of your most psychotic and demonic torturers. Most of these prisoners are not mujahideen. They are ordinary people arrested falsely. Whether they should have answered Allah’s call is not for us to say. That is between them and the Great One. But we want them out of there. We want that prison closed, and we want the people inside transferred to the custody of the Red Cross so they can receive medical and psychological care. And we want the perpetrators of that site arrested and brought to justice. Not your justice. Ours.”
“Bob,” Kurt Kimball said. “You know these things are impossible.”
Brooklyn Bob glanced away from the camera. “I have about six a.m. your time, correct? Good morning, East Coast. I’ll give you six hours to make your decision. Let’s get back on here at noon your time. At noon, you should begin the process of releasing prisoners at Qafa, and transporting them to our borders. Safely and humanely, please. We will know if you are doing this, of course. By noon, you should be in touch with Red Cross personnel in Kabul to begin the transfer of prisoners from the Salt Pit. And you should be placing the torturers under arrest, ready for transfer to the custody of mujahideen. We understand that the logistics of closing Guantanamo may take a little longer.”
“Impossible,” Kurt said again.
“If these things aren’t happening by noon, then Michaela dies immediately and we launch the next attack soon after. Okay? You have six hours. That seems fair. Thanks for chatting with me.”
“Bob,” Kurt Kimball said. There was an edge to his voice.
On the screen, Brooklyn Bob hung up the satellite telephone. He reached in front of him for something that was out of the picture. A second later, the video feed cut off.
*
“Madame President? The Saudi ambassador has arrived.”
Susan sat at her desk in the upstairs study. The windows were west-facing, so the early morning light was a bleak shade, almost blue. Susan was more of a sunset person anyway. She stared down at the surface of the desk and ran her fingers along the smooth wood. It was a nice old desk. It had been in this office a long, long time. There was something reassuring about that.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll summon him in a few minutes.”
The aide went out and Susan looked up at Kurt Kimball and Richard Monk, both sitting across from her. The issue of Michaela, and the issue of another impending Ebola catastrophe, hung between them. Susan wasn’t ready to talk about either thing.
“Give me the update on Charleston,” she said.
Richard glanced at his tablet. He heaved a sigh. Of relief, of exhaustion, Susan had no idea. Richard had been here for at least forty-eight hours straight.
“We got very lucky,” he said. “It’s a disaster of gigantic proportions, but nothing on the scale of September eleventh. Latest estimates suggest that about a thousand people have been infected, nine hundred and fifty of whom have died, or are likely to die. About sixty people died in violence related to the outbreak, especially at the barricades. There have been over three hundred arrests. But the city was closed so fast that nearly every single infected person was contained inside. A few small hotspots appeared in the suburbs overnight, but these were quickly locked down and quarantined. The disease has not reached a wider radius, and many people within the quarantine zone were never exposed to the infection. With most hosts dying quickly, the virus should burn itself out over the next week to ten days.”
“Kurt?” Susan said. “What are the implications of this?”
Kurt didn’t look at his tablet. “Dire,” he said. “Charleston is a small city, and because of its geography, a city you can close. The attack was visible and unusual, and our forces responded to it immediately. We have computer models that suggest if an hour had passed between the attack and our response, a hundred or more infected people would have passed out of the quarantine zone before it was imposed. A hundred people doesn’t sound like a lot, but they would have basically rendered the quarantine useless.”
“In what way?” Susan said.
“They would have spread the infection at a rapidly increasing rate, generating hot sp
ots throughout the region, in municipalities without the resources to deal with them. Highway rest areas, bathrooms, gyms, restaurants, public places of all kinds, would have led to explosive, and possibly exponential growth in the numbers of infected. The infection likely would have traveled north and south on Interstate 95, reaching nearby states very quickly. By trapping the virus in Charleston, and concentrating our response there, we’ve been able to smother it. But if it had broken out, the worst-case scenario is we would have had no way of stopping it, or even slowing it down.”
He paused. He glanced at Richard, then back at Susan. “We came very close to a disaster with few precedents in modern history. The bird flu of 1918 killed perhaps fifty million people. This could have become that bad, or worse.”
In the past few minutes, an idea had started to form in Susan’s mind. It was an idea about Luke Stone. Stone had acted instantly, and with no authority, to close the city. He did that knowing many people trapped inside would die. But he had also done the more important calculation, which was that without quarantine millions of people might die. He made a difficult decision very, very quickly, and then acted on it.
“And they’re going to attack us again,” Susan said.
Kurt nodded. “It seems so. Only in a bigger city, and if they learned their lesson, a sprawling one with no obvious way to lock it down. Think the outer boroughs of New York City. Think Detroit, or Philadelphia, or Atlanta. Think Los Angeles or Houston. The obvious response is to impose twenty-four-hour nationwide curfews starting now, but you can’t keep a curfew going forever. Economic activity would come to a halt. Anyway, people need to eat. The minute we lifted the curfew, we’d be vulnerable to attack again.”
Susan turned to Richard. “Do we know where Luke Stone is right now?”
Richard shrugged. “We tracked him to Trudy Wellington’s apartment in Georgetown late last night. I’m not even going to speculate about that. Don Morris, Trudy Wellington, Stone… you can connect those dots however you like. Before he arrived at Wellington’s place, Stone was in Charleston, inside the quarantine zone, and still pretending he was acting on your orders. I don’t think he’ll stop until he’s in jail.”