Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

  “What?” Wallace asked, bouncing the battering ram in his powerful hands, the weight of the tool comfortable on his massive shoulders.

  “What if it’s booby-trapped?” Clark asked.

  Detective Wallace looked at his partner for the day, speechless.

  Clark continued. “All I’m saying is that I think this woman has quite a few dead bodies under her belt, and a booby-trap would fit her hobbies perfectly. Who know what she has on the other side of this door. Not to mention the missing ricin.”

  After a long thoughtful pause, Detective Wallace responded. “Good call.” The detective eyed the warehouse exterior. He sized up the building and looked at the large steel roll-up doors on the front of the warehouse. He peeked his head around the corner. “Follow me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Let’s check out the back.”

  Detective Wallace took a swing at a small padlock and the door on the chain-link fence near the back of the warehouse swung open. He looked down the back wall.

  “No back door,” Clark said, stepping to the detective’s side.

  “Then we go through the wall. It’s made of cinderblock.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Longer than the hinged door, that’s for damn sure. But we only need a few feet of space. The rest is up to you and your robot.”

  “You make it sound like it’s a pet.”

  “I call them like I see them.”

  “I’ll have you know this robot here is a technical marvel. And this is an old model.”

  “A gamer’s wet dream.”

  “Start pounding, John Henry.”

  “Is that a racist joke?”

  “Heck, no. Was John Henry black?”

  Detective Wallace shook his head in disbelief. “Youth.”

  “What do you know about gaming, anyway?”

  “Had a double homicide once over a gaming tournament. Punk kids who couldn’t remember the last time they went to school. Sitting around playing each other in video games. Violent games, too. It was a thousand bucks to enter the tournament, financed by drugs, and it went on for three days. The first man out of the tournament shot the host and then strangled the friend he lost to. Strangled him with the cord to his control pad. Learned more about gaming than I ever wanted to know.”

  Clark examined the wall. The cinderblock was in need of paint and mortar. It wasn’t likely to get either.

  “I don’t need much room for the robot. Aim for the crack that’s already there. It should be a weak point.”

  “Are you a mason?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Just so we got that straight.”

  Detective Wallace swung the battering ram backwards and as the heavy cylinder reached the apex, Detective Wallace added his own 240 pounds to the physics equation. 40,000 pounds of force sent the head of the battering ram halfway through the wall. Three strikes later the hole was large enough for a basketball.

  “Just a little more,” Clark said. I can almost put the robot through if I lie him down horizontally.”

  Detective Wallace grunted as the battering ram lunged forward. “What makes a robot a ‘him?’”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sounds queer to me.”

  “Can we make the hole bigger?”

  Detective Wallace took two more John Henry swings and looked at his handiwork. “Big enough?”

  “It’ll do,” Clark answered.

  Clark took the robot — an eight-wheeled, two-foot high, self-correcting vehicle with a video panel — and pushed it through the hole.

  “What if it lands upside down?” Detective Wallace asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. It has wheels on all sides. It also has a roll-over feature, so if it gets stuck on something, an arm will extend and push the robot over in the other direction. We designed it so it won’t get stuck. Well, at least not easily.”

  “And you can see what the robot sees?”

  “Once I connect the monitor to the remote control and raise the camera on the robot.” Clark took a second and plugged a blue cord into the side of his remote controller. He handed the video monitor to Detective Wallace. “Now let’s see what we have.”

  The monitor gave Wallace and Clark a dog-level view of the room on the other side of the wall. Clark adjusted the sight on the robot with a thumb stick on the controller and the view on the monitor focused upwards.

  “Looks like an office.”

  “Yes it does. It’s a little dark.”

  “I can fix that,” Clark said. A second later a light illuminated from the robot.

  “Neat toy.”

  “A multi-thousand dollar toy. Years of research. And like I said, this is an old model. The new ones can operate in total darkness, go through water, up stairs.”

  Clark maneuvered the robot through the office, skillfully avoiding the legs of the table and desk. At the wall, the robot took a right and followed the light into the main room of the warehouse.

  “It is a little lighter in here,” Wallace said, flashing the video screen towards Clark.

  Clark focused the robot’s eyes upwards.

  Wallace gave his play-by-play, standing next to Clark, sharing the monitor. “Windows.” The detective looked up at the back of the building and pointed. “Twenty feet in the air.”

  Clark nodded and gave the throttle a little juice. The robot zigged and zagged around the warehouse floor as it made a cursory lap through its new environment.

  “It’s a big open floor,” Detective Wallace said looking down into the monitor.

  Before Detective Wallace could get the words out, Clark’s thumbs jumped from the dual pad controller.

  “Looks like we got a body,” Wallace said, squinting at the monitor as the shoeless feet came into focus. Clark moved the robot slowly forward and its light shone on the body.

  Clark moved until a face entered the screen. Blood trickled from the body’s mouth. Clark became ashen. Detective Wallace steadied him by the shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m all right. Didn’t expect to see that.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “I hope not,” Clark said, taking a deep breath of cold air.

  “Let’s go in for a closer view.”

  Clark maneuvered the robot past the feet and toggled back and forth so that they could get a view of the whole corpse.

  “I would say our body looks like a male, in his thirties. Middle-Eastern descent. Bad scarring on his cheek. Can you pan up?”

  Clark did as he was asked.

  “Looks like he is handcuffed to one of the main support beams. Not very nice.”

  Clark kept the robot moving, slowly casing the body in an investigative circle. He steered the robot around the pole, ventured in for a close-up of the cuffed hands, and stopped near the head. Eyes glued to the monitor, his ears focused on the silence coming through his earphones, Clark jumped when the face on the screen turned towards the robot. Clark’s response startled the detective, who also jumped, in turn causing Clark to let out a “whaaaaaaa” like Shaggy from Scooby Doo.

  “Looks like our dead guy isn’t dead,” Detective Wallace updated.

  Clark pushed the robot to full power and its wheels screeched, running into Abu’s side and then backing away.

  “Easy. Easy. Don’t kill the guy.”

  Clark settled down and a voice came through on his headphones. “Yeah, don’t kill the guy.”

  Clark looked at the monitor. “We have audio.” He pressed a button on the remote control and a small screen flipped up, rising from the main body of the robot in front of Abu’s eyes. He pressed another small button and the camera feed on the remote controller indicated it was on with the illumination of a small red light.

  “Now he can see us, too” Clark said. “In addition to audio.”

  “You have an extra earpiece?”

  “No,” Clark answered. “If you want to hear, lean close. He should be able to hear us speak n
ormally.”

  Abu cleared his throat and attempted to say something before his voice choked out like an engine on a small plane in a freefall.

  Abu swallowed hard. “Neat toy,” he said in a raspy voice, looking directly into the screen in the middle section of the robot. He could see both Clark and the detective’s faces wedged into the field of view.

  Clark introduced himself and then tilted the remote control entirely at Detective Wallace. “And this is Detective Wallace of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department.”

  “Glad to see you,” Abu said, groggily. “Listen carefully. My name is Adahi Uhad, but for the last seven years I have been known as Abu Safi. I’m a clandestine operative working for the Central Intelligence Agency. US-born American citizen.”

  Gone was the brutish, hot-headed veneer that he had maintained for the last seven years. Back was a well-educated, calculating CIA operative who was trying to give his assessment of the situation as the only witness.

  “Is the door booby-trapped? Can we come in?” Wallace asked, looking into the small camera lens on the remote control for the robot.

  “The door isn’t booby-trapped, but this whole warehouse needs to be treated as a high level bio-hazard site. I wouldn’t suggest entering the premises without protective equipment. Level Four protective equipment.”

  Clark and Wallace looked at the hole in the wall, and then took several large steps back into the open lot.

  “Ricin?” Clark asked.

  Abu’s head nodded slowly.

  “You were poisoned?”

  “Accidental ingestion. It was a calculated risk. I volunteered to process the ricin with the machines in the side room. I changed the settings and proceeded as slowly as I could. I was hoping to buy time. I processed the ricin, and the output was a fine powder, though not as fine as they think. I put the powder into cylindrical plastic containers that were sealed and then washed. After that, Ariana further configured the containers with explosives and put them in suitcases and backpacks.”

  “Do you have I.D.?” Wallace asked.

  “No, and if I did, it wouldn’t be real.” The rest of Abu’s story came between labored breaths and bloody coughs. “I’m a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Born a Muslim, raised an American by Pakistani parents. I have a wife and two kids. I’ve been undercover for over seven years. I’ve been out of contact with the agency for over a month. I left for the U.S. from Pakistan in December. All this can be verified. Prior to December, I spent four years in training with Al-Qaeda. Learning explosives. Or enhancing my CIA training, as it turns out. I was injured in a blast two years ago by a fellow bomb-making student who was careless. I was originally inserted into Guantanamo Bay in 2004, completely undercover. Few people at the CIA knew of the mission. I was working a target in the Pakistani government named Karim Al-Housad. He has high-level connections. Diplomatic connections.”

  Clark looked at Detective Wallace and then back down at the monitor.

  “A man?”

  Abu nodded. “Yes, a man”

  “I think you may have been after the wrong person.”

  “The thought occurred to me.”

  “Should we contact someone?” Clark asked into the mouthpiece on his headset.

  “I need you to call a number and enter a passcode. Leave a message and give them this address, wherever I am. Nothing can be done for me, except maybe morphine for the pain. Also, tell the CIA that the tracking chip in my left forearm has been disabled.”

  “Tracking chip?” Clark asked.

  “Yes,” Abu answered weakly. The pace of his speech increased and decreased with each wave of pain. “The chip was disabled by 80,000 volts of electricity delivered through a stun gun. Very clever, really. Totally unforeseen on my part.”

  Clark spoke. “You aren’t the only one the woman we’re looking for has fooled. Her husband, two governments, a university, INS, DMV, a neighborhood.”

  “You need medical attention,” Wallace said.

  “If you want to call, you call after I convey what I know. You will need a bio-hazard team, not just an ambulance.”

  Abu swallowed again then continued. His lucidity was fading and he repeated parts of the story. “My name is Adahi Uhad. The woman you are looking for has approximately six hundred pounds of processed ricin she plans on using. I spent two days processing it. I tried to lessen the lethality by processing it to a larger size than specified, but it is still very deadly and very fine. Deadly enough to have killed me, and I was dressed for the occasion.”

  Abu coughed. His head rose off the floor and then dropped back down onto the concrete.

  “She has lost two members of her team, but she may have more people at her disposal.” Abu grit his teeth and inhaled deeply. He continued slowly. “She is going to use the Metro and aim for Metro Center. Explosives will deliver the ricin and will be detonated via cell phone signal to homemade triggers. Black suitcases. Large, blue backpacks. Three men dressed as businessmen. Two younger men dressed as students. At least five terrorists in total. Spread out along the length of both platforms. One of the terrorists is taller than average. A tall Middle-Eastern man, about 6 foot 3 inches, approximately thirty years old, pulling a black suitcase with wheels, in Metro Center. There can’t be many targets meeting that description.”

  “When?”

  “Today, 8:30. There was a truck and a car parked here inside the warehouse. There was also something in the far room that I never saw. Maybe a van. I think I heard a sliding door shut.”

  “What does the truck look like?” Wallace asked.

  “A fifteen, seventeen footer. It had Piedmont Delivery on the side, but that was painted over with white spray paint. An amateur job.”

  Abu’s eyes rolled into his head as he kept talking. “Call this number.” As Abu recited, Clark nodded into the remote control screen. “Do you need me to repeat it?”

  “No, I’m good with numbers.”

  “Call the number. Tell them my name and location. Tell them about the chip. Someone will come. Tell them it is a bio-hazard site.”

  Abu’s breathing started to labor anew. “Tell my family that I miss them. Tell them that I love them. Tell them I made the sacrifice for them and for Islam. To show them there are people who will die for their Islamic beliefs … when they are righteous ones.”

  Abu mumbled the word “another,” and then coughed. Blood rolled from the corner of his mouth.

  “There is something else,” Abu rasped. He slowly curled himself upward into a ball, his body wrapped around the support beam he was handcuffed around. His breathing disintegrated into a choke. Ten seconds passed as Detective Wallace and Clark watched the man struggle. Slowly, Abu uncurled. “Check my hand … I found this on the floor of the office.”

  Clark moved the robot to Abu’s hands and focused the camera as close as its magnification would allow. The bright red ribbon with the number on it gave Clark the chills followed by a loosening of his bowels. Clark looked at detective Wallace. “That’s not good.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll explain in the car.”

  Chapter 59

  Detective Wallace checked his watch and yelled into the dash mounted radio in his car. “No, no, no. I need the wireless communication link to Metro disengaged, and I need all traffic coming into Metro Center held at their location.”

  “You are not authorized to give that command,” the voice said on the other end of the radio. “You will need to have your captain notify the chief of police with that request or supply the appropriate emergency code.”

  “I’ll give you the appropriate code. Disable the fucking link to underground Metro wireless communications and get that station evacuated or you will kill a thousand people.”

  “Hold just a moment,” the radio dispatcher responded.

  Detective Wallace kept the radio in his hand as he hit the breaks to avoid a taxi.

  Clark opened his flip phone and his thumbs danced through
the Central Intelligence Agency number that Abu gave him. The other end of the phone rang once. A recorded, computerized voice greeted Clark with a three-word sentence. “Enter your passcode.”

  Clark punched the numbers into his phone and a series of high-pitched computerized beeps followed. When the beeps stopped Clark left a rambling message, repeating the name and location of the ill agent. He ended with a designation of the location as a bio-hazardous site and hung up.

  “You forgot to mention the tracking chip,” Wallace said between orders, barking police codes into the dash-mounted radio. The police cruiser was up to sixty miles an hour and traffic was forcing the detective into NASCAR maneuvers, one hand on the radio handset, one hand on the wheel.

  Clark tugged on his seatbelt to make sure there was tension. “If a call to a CIA number with a secret passcode and a CIA agent’s name and location doesn’t get a reaction, nothing will.”

  “I would expect a call back.”

  Clark didn’t answer. “You think we should have left him?”

  “I don’t think we had a choice.”

  The car bounced and Clark’s head ricocheted off his headrest. He glanced at the speedometer and the needle was rising through the seventies as they headed south on Georgia Avenue. A group of homeless wandering across the street scattered as the police cruiser roared past the District’s largest shelter.

  “You should have said ten thousand deaths. Maybe that would have gotten the dispatcher’s attention,” Clark added.

  “Maybe. You better hang on. I have an idea.”

  Syed, the soldier-businessman, stepped off the Blue line train. He tugged the large wheeled suitcase over the crack between the train and the platform, holding the second bag, a sizeable carry-on, in his left hand. His new present, the Beretta Px4 Storm, was safely shoved into the back waist of his pants and covered by his suit jacket.

  The platform teamed with bodies, six deep. Lobbyists hurriedly elbowed consultants who cut off tourists. Government employees pressed slowly in every direction: on and off the train, up the escalators, down the platform. Syed pulled his bags through a throng of business suits and a retirement group from Oklahoma with matching t-shirts. He found his way to the large concrete bench in the middle of the platform and stood his bags on the tile ground. He recalled what Ariana had said about the direction of the blast, and he adjusted his suitcases for maximum damage, placing them front-to-front.