The doors were still closed and locked, but after six o’clock came they never would be again, except on Christmas Day. Other than that, the store would be open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, including Thanksgiving, Easter, and Fourth of July.
It was like a holiday in the parking lot this morning…the bright lights, the crowds, the sense of anticipation in the air…Everything made it seem a little like Christmas morning, in fact, as everyone waited anxiously to unwrap the shiny present that was the new UltraMegaMart store.
Later in the day, Hiram Stackhouse himself would be here. Bands would play, merchandise would be given away, there would be free food and drink—within reason, of course—and the celebration would just grow larger as the day went on.
But for now, people just wanted to get in there and see what bargains they could grab. News choppers from the local TV stations circled overhead, sending back live shots of the crowd for their morning shows. No doubt more than one news director wished that the crowd would get so impatient to start shopping that they would rush the doors and a riot would break out. What great footage that would be! Visions of local-news Emmys and triumphant ratings books danced in their heads.
The constantly growing crowd was well behaved, though, and nothing of the sort happened. Sure, folks were anxious to get inside and start shopping, but a spirit of camaraderie extended through the mass of people. They were all in this together, and years from now, they could tell their children and grandchildren that they had been there when the UltraMegaMart opened its doors for the first time.
Talk about your historic occasions.
CHAPTER 24
“Do you really think Dad’s gonna show up?” Ronnie McCabe asked her mother as they stood in line in front of the store’s middle entrance, about a hundred yards from the doors.
“He said he would,” Terry replied. “He usually keeps his word, if he can.”
“Yeah, but I know how much he hates crowds and shopping.”
Terry smiled. “He doesn’t hate it. He just has that typical male gene that prevents him from understanding how important shopping is.”
They shared a laugh as Terry checked her watch. Less than ten minutes to go before the doors opened.
Jack wasn’t supposed to get here until eight o’clock, which meant that Terry and Ronnie would have to kill a couple of hours until he arrived. That shouldn’t prove to be too difficult, Terry thought. It would probably take them a while to even get inside the store, and once they were there the aisles would be crowded. No use getting in a hurry. She and Ronnie could afford to take their time.
When you came right down to it, they had all day.
Allison Sawyer heard a cheer go up, following immediately by a swelling chorus of excited shouts, and she knew the doors must have swung open. She looked at her watch and saw that the digital readout said 5:59. Either the watch was a little slow, or the UltraMegaMart employees had jumped the gun by a minute or so. She didn’t care which was the case. The only thing that mattered was that soon she would be inside and could start shopping for Nate’s Christmas presents.
She kept a tight grip on her purse, and had her arm wound through the strap to make it even more difficult for anybody to snatch it away from her. She had been putting money aside for months now—not easy to do when her salary as an assistant manager at a movie theater didn’t do much more than cover their bills every month—and she had 148 dollars saved up to spend on her son. Right now that seemed like all the money in the world to her.
Nate hadn’t even opened his eyes when she carried him next door and left him sleeping on the neighbors’ sofa. With luck she might be back at the apartment before he woke up.
But that was pretty unlikely, she thought as she looked around her at the crowd. Barricades had been set up at the store entrances to funnel people into manageable lines, so that there wouldn’t be a dangerous stampede when the doors opened. Those lines were moving slowly. The one Allison was in hadn’t budged yet. Like a long line of cars at a traffic light, it took a while for everybody to start moving once the light turned green—or in this case, once the doors to the UltraMegaMart opened.
“Come on, come on,” Allison muttered under her breath. People were already in there, grabbing up the good stuff, she thought.
All she could do was hope that there would be enough left over for her once she finally made her way into the store. She didn’t want anything to ruin Nate’s Christmas.
There ought to be a law, Ellis Burke thought. A law against greedy, stupid people. Of course, if there was, the legal system in Texas would be even more bogged down than it already was, because then cops would spend all their time arresting people for being rednecks.
He wished he had gotten here earlier. But judging from the crowds in the parking lot and in front of the doors, he would have had to arrive before five o’clock to be anywhere close to getting in. He was just going to have to stand here with all these yokels and wait his turn. That annoyed the hell out of him. He deserved better than that. He wasn’t one of the mob.
But like it or not, today he was.
At least it wasn’t raining, he told himself, or too cold. The temperature was probably in the upper forties, just chilly enough so that a jacket felt good. And the doors were open and the lines were moving, also a plus. Burke shuffled along with the thousands of other would-be shoppers.
To occupy his mind, he tried estimating how many people were in line in front of him and how fast that line was moving, so he could make some sort of educated guess about how soon he would reach the doors and be able to go on inside. After a few minutes he gave it up as a hopeless task. There were just too many people. He couldn’t keep up with all of them.
Where were they all going to go once they were inside the store? he asked himself. Sure, the place was big, but was it big enough to hold everybody who was out here? Of course, some shoppers would be leaving as others went in, but it might take a while for that ebb-and-flow effect to kick in. Most of them probably planned to spend at least an hour on their shopping, maybe more. In an hour or two’s time, would so many people try to crowd in there without enough people leaving so that all the space would be taken up? Burke got this crazy image in his head of the walls of the UltraMegaMart beginning to swell, to bulge out more and more, until finally they couldn’t stand the strain any longer and they exploded outward, spewing rednecks in every direction in a tidal wave of blue jeans and gimme caps…
A sudden shout jolted that bizarre image out of Burke’s head. He started to look around as a frightened voice cried, “Oh, my God! What’s that man doing? What’s he got? Stop him, for God’s sake, somebody stop him!”
CHAPTER 25
All the foreign embassies in Islamabad were located in the northeastern corner of the city, in the so-called diplomatic zone. Stretching to the west from there was the administrative zone, the center of Pakistan’s government. Since the hospital where surgery had been performed on Brad Parker was run by the government—like practically everything else in Islamabad—it lay in this sector of the city, about two miles from the American embassy.
Even at what would be thought of in the United States as rush hour, there weren’t all that many cars and trucks on the roads in Islamabad, because the rank-and-file Pakistanis, the low-and medium-level government workers who made up most of the city’s population, couldn’t afford a vehicle. But that didn’t mean the streets weren’t crowded. Ford had to dodge numerous pedestrians, bicyclists, and even the occasional donkey-drawn cart as he maneuvered his car toward the hospital.
Despite his name, his family wasn’t related in any way to the automobile manufacturers, at least as far as he knew. Growing up, he’d taken some ribbing from friends because even though his name was Ford, he had driven Chevrolets, Dodges, and whatever else he could afford at the time. Most of them were junkers because, after tearing up his knee in his freshman year of college, he had lost his scholarship. It had taken a lot of scrambling and long hours a
nd struggling to make it through college and then law school.
His high marks, his athletic ability, and an indefinable something had drawn the attention of government recruiters. He could have gone to work for either the FBI or the CIA, but since he had grown up in North Dakota, he’d decided that he wanted to see the world, so he had opted for the Company.
He had seen the world, all right…all the ugly, dangerous places in it.
At the moment, making his way through the streets of Islamabad, he was in a little Japanese car that belonged to the embassy. He didn’t like it very much; his height and broad shoulders made the car seem cramped.
But it was what he had, and he’d learned to make do. As a veteran of numerous backwater postings since he’d gone to work for the Company, he had become good at doing more with less—less funding, less political support, fewer assets on the ground. Ever since the nineties, when the American intelligence community had been gutted along with the military, it had been a constant struggle for the shadow warriors to rebuild their capabilities. You would have thought that 9/11 would have served as a true wake-up call for the politicians. They needed to give the intelligence services adequate backing and by God start paying attention when those services tried to warn them about something.
But of course the effects of that terrible day in September had worn off pretty quickly once the news media grew tired of promoting them and the opposition party realized that a weakened, feeble America was better for them in the long run. The current occupant of the White House was proof of that. She never would have been elected without the constant drumbeat of negativity from her party and their loyal lapdogs, the mainstream media.
Ford grimaced as he braked and let one of those donkey carts cross in front of him. Modern, glass-sided buildings rose on both sides of the street. The dichotomy of such a sight was common in the Third World, and Ford had long since stopped letting such things throw him off stride. The modern and the primitive went hand in hand here. That was just the way it was.
As Ford drove on toward the hospital, he visited some scorn on the so-called conservatives, too. It was easy to blame the liberals for everything, and in truth, most of what was wrong with the country was their fault. But the other side wasn’t totally blameless either. When they’d had their chance to govern, they hadn’t quite mastered the competence required for such a job, nor had they been able to resist the temptation to pander to the opposition, to waffle on their convictions, to try to please everybody instead of doing what was best for the country. Partisanship and the never-ending electoral process had come close to wrecking what had been a pretty good system for a couple of hundred years.
Close…but no cigar. The United States still functioned, and for all its problems, it was still the greatest country in the world. Deep down, all the carpers and naysayers, both at home and abroad, knew that. That was one reason their never-ending bitching and moaning had a hollow ring to it.
And it was also one reason that, despite all the annoyances and the real dangers, Lawrence “Fargo” Ford was going to continue devoting his life to protecting his country.
He pulled into the hospital’s small parking lot, hoping against hope that Brad Parker had regained consciousness, even though it was unlikely. Until Parker could tell them exactly where the terrorist threat was aimed, the only precautions the folks back home could take were general ones, the same sort of things that everybody tried to do these days.
Like all the buildings in Islamabad’s administrative zone, the hospital was fairly new, a three-story building with lots of glass and chrome, surrounded by small but neatly kept lawns. Ford locked the car and followed a concrete walk to the main entrance. Automatic doors slid aside. He walked into the lobby, past a guard station where a turbaned member of the Pakistani Army was posted with a machine gun looped over his shoulder by its strap. The soldier called to Ford in Urdu, asking him to please stop for a moment.
Ford did so, showing the guard his identification papers. The man nodded and waved him on. Ford supposed that news of the American patient on the third floor had gotten around the hospital. Hell, given the efficiency of the grapevine that operated in the capital city, speculation was probably rife by now that Parker was an American intelligence agent, a member of the CIA or Special Forces.
That was why Ford planned to stay at Parker’s side from now until the guy woke up. He had already taken a big enough chance going back to the embassy to brief the ambassador on what was going on. Keyne was an officious, sanctimonious son of a bitch—a typical appointee of the current administration, in other words—and had insisted that Ford fill him in personally.
There was only one elevator in the lobby. Ford pressed the button to summon it and waited. After several minutes he pushed the button again, and began to frown as the elevator still didn’t come. He glanced up at the numbers above the door. The one for the third floor was lit up. It stayed lit up.
Suddenly, Ford turned and lunged across the lobby toward the door that led to the stairs.
Behind him, the guard at the entrance shouted a command to stop. Ford didn’t even slow down. A volley from the machine gun ripped through the air, the bullets slamming into the wall next to the staircase door as Ford threw it open. He dived through and started bounding up the steps, taking them three at a time.
Whatever was going on up on the third floor, the Pakistani soldier was part of it. That came as no surprise to Ford. Most of the army was loyal to the government, but like every other segment of society in the country, it was also riddled with sympathizers and outright supporters of the radical Islamic fringe groups. In this part of the world, almost anybody could be a terrorist—or want to be one.
Ford knew that he hadn’t been hit. He wouldn’t be moving as well as he was if he had been. He also knew that his heart was already pounding wildly in his chest. He wasn’t as young as he’d once been, despite his efforts to keep in top shape. He thought he could manage three flights of stairs without having a coronary, though.
He had to, if Brad Parker was going to have a chance.
Ford wondered if the burst from the machine gun had been heard on the third floor. It was certainly possible. Even if it hadn’t been, the turncoat soldier would be alerting his friends up there even now. Ford would probably find a reception committee waiting for him.
That was why he slowed down as he rounded the bend in the middle of the third and final flight of stairs. He reached under the tails of his coat to the small of his back and took out the little flat nine-millimeter automatic he carried there. He always had the 9mm either on him or within easy reach, all the time.
When he got to the door, he kicked it open and jerked to the side, spinning out of the line of fire as another machine gun chattered at him and sent steel-jacketed death sizzling through the air of the stairwell. Ford dived through the opening, staying as low as he could, and spotted the gunner about halfway along the corridor that stretched out in front of him. The 9mm in Ford’s hand barked twice.
Both slugs tore into the machine gunner’s body on rising angles. One came out his back in a spray of blood. The other hit a rib and bounced around crazily, pulping everything in its path. The gunner jerked and shuddered and sprawled back against the wall for a second before pitching forward on his face.
The intensive care unit where Brad Parker was being taken care of lay on the left-hand side of the corridor, beyond the point where the machine gunner now lay with a spreading pool of blood under him. The elevator was at the far end of the corridor. Its door stood open, and Ford could see why. A body lay across the threshold, stopping the door every time it tried to close. The man wore the uniform of a Pakistani soldier; he had been on guard in the elevator, his job to keep any suspicious characters from reaching the third floor.
Clearly, he had failed. Even from this distance, Ford could see the soldier’s wide, emptily staring eyes. The man’s face was already starting to turn purple from the blood trapped in his head by the wire garrote that w
as dug deeply into the flesh of his neck.
From behind the double, swinging doors of the ICU came more gunshots. Ford scrambled to his feet and ran toward them. Parker had had two guards with him. Ford could only hope that those guys were holding out somehow against the assassins who had come to the hospital to make sure that Parker never revealed what he knew about Hizb ut-Tahrir’s plans.
It came as no surprise to Ford that there was a leak at the embassy. That had to be how the terrorists had found out about Parker and knew where to look for him. No embassy in the world could be a hundred percent secure, because no embassy was a hundred percent self-sufficient. You had to rely on the locals for a few things. That opened the door to potential leaks.
If he had been here to supervise things personally, Ford thought bitterly, instead of dealing with that stuffed shirt Keyne, the would-be killers never would have gotten this close.
Too late to worry about that now. Instead, he had to stop them from shutting Parker up permanently, if it wasn’t already too late for that.
And if it was…God help the folks back in the States who found themselves sitting on this year’s Ground Zero.
CHAPTER 26
The woman doing the yelling was heavyset, middle-aged, and black. Her right hand clutched the hand of a little boy; the left pointed, finger jabbing forward as she shouted, “Stop him, stop him!”
Hurrying toward Burke at a pace halfway between a walk and a run was a man in his early twenties, one of those skinny Goth kids dressed all in baggy black clothes, the lank hair falling around his face dyed an unnatural shade of black to match his garb. All that darkness made the doughy pallor of his face even more pronounced. His frantic eyes locked for a second with Burke’s, and in that second Burke saw the multiple studs in both ears and the one right below the guy’s mouth. His tongue was probably pierced, too, but Burke couldn’t see that.
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