But for some reason, he had assumed that the group taking over the UltraMegaMart would all be male, his cohorts from the training compound in Pakistan. The idea that a woman who had adopted some of the Americans’ ways, who even dressed like an American slut, would be with them when they carried out their glorious mission simply had not occurred to him.
The more he thought about it, the less he liked it.
“I will speak to the sheikh,” he said stiffly. “You should not accompany us. There will be much danger—”
“I don’t care about that, as long as I get to kill some Americans before I die. I fully expect to die, you know, just as you and all the others do.”
“But…but you should not.”
“Because I am female?” Shalla made a curt gesture of dismissal. “All are the same in the eyes of Allah.”
“This is not true. Women are delicate flowers to be protected.”
She sneered. “Do I look all that delicate to you?”
In truth, she did not. Her arms and legs, despite being rounded and feminine, were also strong with sleek muscles. No doubt she could, as the Americans said, “kick ass.” But that still didn’t make it right.
She moved closer to him, brazenly defiant. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll probably both be dead,” she went on. “I’m not hungry anymore. Not for food.”
Yes, she had definitely been around American women too much, Hamed told himself. Otherwise, she never would have been so forward.
But even as he was embarrassed by her scandalous behavior, he was also drawn to her, and although he hated to think that he could be so weak in his resolve, he was actually considering her blatant proposition when the sheikh came into the kitchen, taking them both by surprise. Hamed and Shalla jumped a little as they turned to face the older, distinguished-looking man.
“You children should be resting,” Mukhari said with a faint smile. “Perhaps you are nervous. You should ask the Creator to grant you peace.”
Hamed nodded. “Yes, of course. I will return to the living room.”
Shalla shrugged, and Hamed didn’t miss the way her unbound breasts moved under the soft fabric of the T-shirt. “I guess I’ll go back to bed, too,” she said. She added, “Good night.”
Hamed gave her a curt nod and didn’t say anything.
He lingered as Shalla left the room. Without a note of reproach in his voice, the sheikh said, “Even a man who is truly devoted must guard against distractions.”
“This is true,” Hamed agreed. He was grateful that Mukhari had come in when he did; otherwise, who knows what might have happened.
Now he could go to his death unsullied, if that was what Allah willed.
And nothing would happen to ruin the plan.
CHAPTER 21
“What’s the verdict, Doc?” Lawrence “Fargo” Ford asked the chief medical officer at the American embassy in Islamabad. “How long is he going to be out?”
The doctor shook his head. “It’s impossible to say. By doing surgery, we were able to stop the bleeding in his brain and repair the fracture in his skull. But Mr. Parker’s brain is still swollen, and in all likelihood the swelling will have to go down before he regains consciousness. That could be a few hours, or days, or even weeks or months. We just can’t predict something like that.”
Ford and Ambassador Keyne traded looks, and then the ambassador said, “Thank you, Doctor. I’m sure you did the very best you could under the circumstances.”
“I don’t mind telling you, I would have rather been performing that surgery in an American hospital, rather than a Pakistani facility. It would have helped to have a real neurosurgeon, too.” The doctor shrugged. “But even though everything wasn’t state-of-the-art, we managed to get the job done.”
“When can he be moved back here to the embassy?”
“Not for several days,” the doctor said. “And he probably shouldn’t be moved even then. Is that all?”
“Yes, thank you,” Keyne said.
The medical officer gave the two men a brusque nod, then left the ambassador’s office. Ford sank down wearily into a chair in front of Keyne’s desk.
“I take it you have Mr. Parker under guard,” Keyne said.
“As best I can with Pakistani security forces,” Ford replied. A hint of bitterness and anger crept into his voice as he added, “I can’t very well surround his room with United States Marines, much as I’d like to. Might offend our hosts, and not offending anybody seems to be the most important consideration in Washington these days. Wouldn’t want to damage our standing in the world community again so soon after it’s starting to be repaired.”
“The President that you’re disparaging appointed me to this position, you know,” Keyne pointed out.
Ford spread his hands. “Disparaging? Who said I’m disparaging anybody?”
“I know how you people feel about her,” Keyne snapped.
“‘You people’? That’s sort of a discriminatory thing to say, isn’t it, Mr. Ambassador?”
“You know what I mean. You Company men who think you know more about what’s in the country’s best interests than the people who were elected to lead it.”
“Let’s just say that sometimes we have a better grasp of the real world,” Ford drawled. His manner became more brisk as he sat forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “And here’s something from that real world for you, Mr. Ambassador—Islamic terrorists are planning to attack a target inside the United States…and we don’t know what it is. Parker risked his life to bring us that intel, then lost consciousness before he could pass it along.”
“I understand that.”
“Have you told Washington about it?”
Keyne scowled. “What is there to tell? We don’t have any concrete evidence of anything. Your people haven’t managed to decipher those documents that Parker was carrying, have they?”
“Not yet,” Ford admitted with a sigh. “The blood they were soaked in obliterated a lot of the writing. The blood Parker shed in getting here, I’d remind you.”
The ambassador grimaced. “You don’t have to remind me.”
“We’ve been able to make out words here and there,” Ford continued, “enough to tell that it’s some sort of operational plan. But we haven’t figured out what the target is. That means Parker is probably the only one who knows, at least on our side.”
“All we can do is wait for him to regain consciousness.”
“Yeah, that’s all well and good…except for the fact that he said the attack was going to take place the day after Thanksgiving.”
Keyne glanced at his watch. “It’s nearly Friday morning in the States.”
“Yeah. I know. That’s why I sent a signal of my own to Washington.”
A sharply indrawn breath hissed between Keyne’s teeth. “You went over my head?”
“Sorry, Mr. Ambassador. Homeland Security, and my bosses at Langley, had to be alerted. They’ll keep it on the down-low so that they won’t cause a panic, but at least this way the authorities will have some warning.”
“This administration doesn’t play politics with terror,” Keyne said.
Ford managed not to laugh in the man’s face. All administrations played politics with everything. That was one of the first things you learned when you took up arms in the shadow wars. But the current occupant of the White House lived and breathed politics, especially the politics of power. She had never done anything in her adult life that hadn’t been aimed at getting her elected to the highest office in the land, and now that she occupied that office, her sole concern was getting reelected. Ford had already begun hearing worried rumors that she might not want to go peacefully when her time was up.
If something like that ever happened, Lord knows what would happen to the country. But it wouldn’t be anything good, that’s for sure.
“I won’t forget what you’ve done,” the ambassador went on. “In the meantime, keep trying to translate those documents. And keep an eye on Mr.
Parker.”
“Yes, sir. I thought I’d go on over to the hospital now. My people don’t really need me here. I’m not a document expert. My specialty is more in, ah, field operations.”
“You mean you’re a killer,” Keyne barked.
“I prefer to think of myself as a warrior, sir. One of the last lines of defense between us and the barbarians.”
Ford sometimes wondered if that battle could really be won, that ages-long struggle between civilization and barbarism. He had a bad feeling that he already knew to whom the ultimate triumph would belong.
But until that day came—or his time ran out—he wouldn’t lay down his sword and shield. Not while America’s enemies were still out there, coiled in their dens like snakes, plotting their evil.
CHAPTER 22
Walt Graham carried a little more weight through the midsection these days than he had when he was playing power forward for Texas A&M, but he liked to think that he wasn’t that far out of playing shape. He knew he could still whip his son in a game of driveway one-on-one.
But he had to admit that he was more winded afterward, and sometimes his knees ached. He wasn’t old, though. Far from it. He was in the prime of life, and an FBI agent, just as he had always dreamed of being, and he had a pretty wife and three fine kids. Life was good.
Which was more than enough reason right there to be worried. Nothing gold can stay, some poet had said. Robert Frost? Graham couldn’t recall for sure, but he remembered the line from one of his college literature courses and he knew it was true. Life starts looking too rosy, you better run for the damn hills…’cause all hell was probably about to break loose.
Knowing that, Graham didn’t feel the least bit surprised when he walked into the Dallas office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at five o’clock in the morning and saw the upset expression on the face of Eileen Bastrop, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge who had called him at four fifteen and asked if he could come to the office.
“What is it, Eileen?” he asked in his deep rumble of a voice.
She handed him a curling sheet of fax paper. “This came in about an hour ago.”
Somebody with a long memory for old comic strips had once referred to them as Mutt and Jeff, since Graham was six-five and Bastrop barely topped the five-foot minimum height requirement for female agents. Of course there were considerable differences between them other than their height, the most immediately noticeable being that he was a black man and she was a white woman with such pale blond hair that it almost appeared to be silver.
Both were well-trained, highly competent agents, though, and all business most of the time. When they overheard that Mutt-and-Jeff line, the glares they both sent at the perpetrator insured that it never happened again.
Graham’s eyes efficiently scanned the fax, and even though the words it contained were shocking, none of that shock was visible on his face. His customary unflappable expression remained in place.
But he was feeling it inside. Man alive, was he feeling it.
He looked up from the curling paper and said, “This isn’t a false alarm, is it, Eileen?”
She shrugged. “Who knows how these things will turn out? There have been plenty of warnings in the past that came to nothing. This could be another one. But we have to take it seriously either way.”
“Oh, I take it seriously, all right,” Graham said. “I’ve got a bad feeling in my gut about this one. Those camel-jockeys have been waiting a long time to hit us again.”
Bastrop pointed at the fax. “That says Hizb ut-Tahrir is behind whatever is being planned to go down. They’re what you call a pan-Islamic group. In other words, they not all Arabians or Egyptians. They could come from just about anywhere that there are Muslims.”
“So I shouldn’t call them camel-jockeys?” Graham asked with a slight smile.
“It would be politically incorrect, not to mention inaccurate, for you to do so.”
“All right, point taken. Will ‘crazy bastards’ do instead?”
Bastrop nodded. “Crazy bastards will do just fine.”
She perched a hip on the edge of a desk. They were the only ones in the office at the moment. A couple of young agents had been holding down the fort on the graveyard shift. They had called the ASAC when the high-priority fax arrived from Langley, and once she had seen what was going on, she’d sent the kiddies down to the break room so she could talk this over in private with the Special Agent in Charge.
“What now, Walt?”
“We follow protocol,” Graham said. “Notify the antiterrorism people at all the local law enforcement agencies, as well as the State Troopers and the Texas Rangers. Tell them to keep things as quiet as possible. We don’t want a panic on our hands.”
“The news media will get the story anyway,” Bastrop said with a resigned look. “They always do.”
Graham sighed. “I know. And those valiant defenders of the public’s right to know won’t even entertain the notion of keeping their traps shut for a change, or that everybody might be better off in the long run if they practiced a little discretion.”
“If it bleeds, it leads,” Bastrop said. “Freedom of the press and all that.”
“Oh, I believe in freedom of the press. I surely do. But it wouldn’t hurt those folks to show a little common sense every once in a while.”
“Might hurt the ratings or the circulation numbers, and that would anger the gods of the bottom line.”
Graham snorted. “We could commiserate all day about the sorry state of the mainstream media, Eileen, and it wouldn’t change a blasted thing. Get the Boy Scouts back in here and get ’em to work on the phones.”
Bastrop straightened from her casual pose and said, “Will do, Boss. It’s more work for us now that all the different agencies try to share their intel, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but it gets better results.” Graham stifled a yawn. “I think I’ve got a turkey hangover. I didn’t want to wake up when the phone rang. Didn’t much want to crawl out of a warm bed with my wife next to me either.”
“We all have to make sacrifices.”
Graham happened to know that Eileen Bastrop lived alone, didn’t have any family in the area, didn’t have a steady boyfriend. He wasn’t sure she even dated anybody. Most of the time he figured that the FBI was pretty much her entire life. Every so often he wondered what she did for fun, but that was none of his business, so he just didn’t think about it much. She was a damned fine agent, and that was all that really mattered.
Graham went into his private office while Bastrop and the two young agents got busy alerting the local law enforcement agencies about the terrorist threat. He took the fax with him and studied it, trying to parse more meaning out of the simple words.
The intel Langley had received from one of the CIA’s agents overseas was sketchy. There was a confirmed threat from Hizb ut-Tahrir, not just against American interests, but against American soil. The bastards wanted to hit us again, somewhere right in our own backyard. But where exactly that might be, nobody knew.
So the word had gone out to the entire country. Be on the alert. Be ready for trouble. The enemy is out there, and he’s poised to strike.
Lord help us, Graham thought, if we’re not ready for him.
CHAPTER 23
The stockers had been working around the clock for days, getting merchandise on the shelves in all the departments. Cash registers and bar-code scanners had been tested and retested, calibrated and recalibrated. Electricians finished up last-minute wiring jobs. Plumbers tightened the connections on toilets in the restrooms. Here and there a little more fresh paint was dabbed on. The floors were mopped and buffed. Frozen foods and perishables were carted in and put in the proper places. Outside on the parking lot, the last stripes and arrows were painted on the asphalt. More than a hundred people had labored through the night to put all the finishing touches on the spanking-new store.
As long as two football fields, behind a massive parking lot, it ra
n roughly north and south on the west side of the interstate. The property was located at the top of a long, fairly gentle rise. Looking to the south, one could see the skyline of Fort Worth in the distance. To the north lay the vast sprawl of Alliance Airport, and beyond it, also visible from the high ground, rose the grandstands of Texas Motor Speedway, the NASCAR track. Stretching for miles along either side of the highway were residential and retail developments, but this was perhaps the prime piece of real estate in the area, easily accessible by millions of people, and the advertising blitz had made certain that every one of those people knew the store was having its grand opening today. There would be no “shakedown” opening to get the bugs out. When the doors slid back for the general public at six a.m., it would be for the first time ever.
Minnesota had the Mall of America. Texas was going it one better. The Lone Star State had the first UltraMegaMart. Hiram Stackhouse wasn’t finished either. On several thousand acres around the store, he planned to build restaurants and hotels, apartment complexes, even a golf course and resort. Anything that anybody would ever need or want would be found right here by the time Stackhouse was through. And this would be only the first in a series of such complexes that he would build all across the country, ensuring him a lasting legacy as America’s greatest entrepreneur. Maybe the greatest of all time.
The lights illuminating the parking lot could be seen for miles in the predawn darkness. Normally the interstate wasn’t too busy at this hour, but today a river of red taillights stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions as traffic backed up on the highway. Shoppers waiting to get into the parking lot lined the frontage roads, and those lines spilled over onto the exit ramps and shoulders of the highway itself. Security guards waved flashlights and directed traffic, but getting that many cars off the road and into the parking lot was a slow process. Once shoppers finally found a place to park, they left their cars and joined the lines in front of the store’s five main entrances. They would have lined up on the loading dock and gone in through the service entrance if they could, but guards were posted at the rear corners of the store to keep unauthorized people from venturing back there.
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