False Flag

by John Altman

  She lowered the ampoule carefully into the plastic tub, then turned to the spoon and knelt again. Her hands were steady.

  She touched the needle’s bevel to the bowl of the spoon and depressed the plunger.

  The quivering green drop moved onto the spoon. She covered the spoon with the paper cone and then the rack, put the syringe beside the ampoule in the plastic tub, and closed the airtight lid. At the same time, Michael knelt and, with a tenderness that surprised him, removed a rabbit from the cage.

  The animal seemed to know. Its ears lay back, and its feet pedaled desperately. During the short journey from cage to baking rack, it shat a dozen pellets onto the floor. He put the animal on the rack above the paper cone and released it. It squatted, frozen.

  Kristen covered it with the bell jar and checked the seal.

  Michael attached the loose wire to the battery’s negative terminal. The spoon beneath the paper cone began to heat. A curl of black smoke, and the paper turned orange, flared briefly, and broke apart. The rabbit jumped, banging against the side of the jar and making Michael jump in turn. But the seal held.

  The spoon glowed orange now, and the drop of pea soup danced, spat, and sizzled.

  The rabbit jumped off the rack and huddled by the edge of the jar, staring at the glowing spoon. The other rabbits in the cage seemed to be watching, too.

  The rabbit began to drool, and its eyes rolled upward. It leaped again, shaking the glass, and rolled kicking onto one side. Dribbling urine and bloody feces, it jerked and flopped, gave a single mighty shudder, and lay still, eyes open in death.

  An evil smell came through the mask, through the vinegar. Wondering whether he had inhaled the gas, Michael braced himself for the running nose, the tightening vise in the chest. But nothing happened.

  He detached the wire, and the spoon began to cool.

  * * *

  When they had finished cleaning up, they left the sealed hazmat tub outside, near the lawnmower. Later, they would bury the ampoule and divide the remaining contents of the tub among dumpsters in three states. They released the two surviving rabbits and chased them off into dark woods. They showered, Michael first. When it was Jana’s turn, she stayed beneath the needle spray for a long time, letting it prick and scour her. She soaped, rinsed, soaped again. Rinsed again, soaped, rinsed.

  She went down to the kitchen. Michael was standing there, loitering aimlessly in the half-light. He knew that it was time for the evening meal, and must feel obliged to follow convention despite his obvious lack of appetite.

  She kissed him, stripping off his clean clothes, his fresh boxers. Then she took off her own clothes and pulled him down onto the linoleum floor.

  Ugly, ugly. Two animals rutting on a dirty floor. Grunting and writhing, she made herself uglier still. Their bodies two sacs of liquid, gas waiting to be released, putrefaction waiting to happen. Two rutting animals, disgusting and ugly. Kidneys and bladder, liver and spleen, heart and intestines. Lust and death, Eros and Thanatos. Shameless, greedy. Avenging angels, lords of the flies.

  His face in the twilight looked stricken. He had gone limp inside her. He was essentially a weak man, she reflected—soft beneath the hard corded muscles. He needed masks, walls, boundaries. He was out of his league. But he would do his job. She could push him where necessary. A steady hand on the tiller. Even as he went limp inside her, she refused to let him go, continued grinding against his pubis until she climaxed suddenly, sharply, joylessly, in a spasm like the dying rabbit’s.

  She rolled off him.

  For the time being, she was done with him.

  * * *

  Later, during the night, he said, “They’ll think we’re all the same.” His eyes slick and shining in the gloom.

  She burrowed into the hollow of his shoulder, now playing the role of girlfriend, intimate, confidante. “Does it matter?”

  A pause. Let him get it out. Let the wound drain. Ubi pus, ibi evacua.

  “Security will be even tighter after Paris. They might …”

  “They won’t.”

  “But they might.”

  “But they won’t.”

  She trailed a finger across his chest. Up and down and up. Playing him the way Yoni had played her, but softly, softly. All the best instruments required a delicate touch.

  He released a pent-up breath. “Maybe we don’t need to. So many lately … Maybe they’ve done it for us.”

  “We need to. The world forgets. They forgot the Shoah. They’ll forget Paris.”

  His jaw grinding. Muscles tense. His entire body rigid. Then, all at once it relaxed, as if a string had been cut. “Kristen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Silas …” He fought back tears. “His mother looks after him. But …”

  “Yes?”

  “My cat,” he sobbed. “Take care of my cat.”

  * * *

  Breakfast was black coffee.

  Inside the toolshed, icy air whistled through gaps between the slats. Frost on the wood and on the earth floor. Breath visible in narrow shafts of morning sunlight. Again they went to work without consulting, wordlessly dividing up the chores, a natural team.

  Sunday morning. A hush on the winter air. How loud would the explosion be? Jana remembered the detonation on the ridge in Vermont. Its ferocity had taken her by surprise.

  The chik-chik of the staple gun echoed off the forest as they hung the green tarps. Of course, they had come here for the isolation. But in such seclusion, the explosion would seem all the louder. For this reason, they had considered renting a place near Quantico, where endless artillery tests would cover any boom. But Michael had rejected the idea. He lacked the nerve. She had not pressed the point. One chose one’s battles.

  Once they had tarps stapled to the walls, ceiling, and floor, Jana readied a test tube. Same dimensions as the ampoules: seven centimeters long, a centimeter wide, the glass wall a bare 1.2 millimeters thick. She filled it with turpentine, leaving a centimeter of space at the top, and added red dye. Sarin and turpentine boiled at the same temperature. If the liquid had volatilized, the explosion would leave a fine, even red mist covering the tarps. If not, they would find fewer and heavier splotches of red. The difference at the event would be five dead—those immediately surrounding the blast—instead of fifty, maybe even five hundred. A girl could dream, couldn’t she?

  Meanwhile, Michael had prepared the Nonel tube, blasting cap, and plastique. He shaped the charge around the end of the test tube, then went outside and found a stick, which he broke to about the length of his forearm. He jammed the sharper end through the tarp, into the frozen earth floor with a strength that surprised her. Then he fixed the charge against a knurl in the wood, approximating the eventual orientation inside the prosthetic leg: explosive inside, toxin out. Choosing a burner phone, he programmed the number.

  They walked fifty yards from the shed. He raised the phone.

  A little dusting of snow lay evenly on the ground, unmarked by feet, human or animal. Slippery. Jana put her hand against a pine trunk, bracing herself. Not that there would be a shock wave. This explosion would be much smaller than the one that had surprised her in Vermont. That had been the biggest blast she could manage. This would be just enough to atomize the liquid.

  She was excited now, her heart beating faster in anticipation.

  FLOOOM!

  A feeling as much as a sound—a prickling along the nape of her neck. She looked at Michael, expecting to see exultation on his face. But he looked distracted, mildly concerned, like someone wondering whether he had remembered to turn off the stove back home.

  They moved toward the shed again, Jana in the lead.

  At a thudding sound, she quickly turned. Michael had fallen, the prosthetic leg losing purchase against the snow. Shamefaced, he regained his footing, his North Face jacket now dusted with snow. She gave a
reassuring smile. He returned it without conviction.

  Inside the shed, she examined their handiwork. The tarp was an even pink: misty red dye shaded by the green plastic underneath. She heard Michael coming up behind her and stepped out of the doorway so he could see for himself.

  They spent a few moments appreciating a job well done. Or at least she did. His thoughts were impossible to read. He still wore that look of distraction, of mild apprehension. Then they donned gloves, stripped the tarp off walls and ceiling, and folded it together, collecting shards of glass and other debris, and left the bundle by the sealed hazmat tub, to be disposed of later. The lawnmower, tools, and WD-40 went back in the shed.

  They were about to go back inside, to pack up and make a final pass with bleach, when she heard the unmistakable crunch of tires coming up the drive.

  Suddenly, she had a queer, hammering headache. The same feeling she’d had when sneaking a cigarette with Miriam, hanging out six flights above Madison Avenue, and the apartment door swung open unexpectedly. Busted. All the fanning hands in the world wouldn’t clear away the smell before Aunt Becca came to see what was keeping her little angels so unusually quiet.

  She turned. Somehow, she already knew what she would see: a police cruiser. Across the passenger-side doors was emblazoned Sheriff: Loudoun County.

  Michael wore that same look of mild concern as the cruiser stopped before them.

  A single man inside, wide-brimmed hat in silhouette. Jana stood empty-handed, taken entirely by surprise. She had nothing with which to kill the man. Stupid. Nobody to blame but herself. She had let down her guard.

  Her eyes sought Michael’s, but Michael was looking away … at the hazmat bin.

  Ah, fuck. Don’t give it away.

  She started toward the driver’s side of the cruiser. The loudspeaker atop the car crackled importantly. “Stay back. Keep your distance. Hands where I can see them.”

  She paused, head pounding like a bass drum, hands hanging loose by her side.

  The cop hesitated for another few seconds, weighing the situation. Taking their measure, she thought. One of him, two of them. Michael was a big boy. Broad-shouldered, powerful. Run the plate, call it in, wait for backup. Or handle it alone?

  A bird sang. Here it was December, but the bird sang sweetly, and that seemed to decide it.

  The cop got out of his car.

  The beat in her head receded to a dull thud. She could handle this.

  One hand hovered near the holstered gun on his belt. The other tipped the wide brim back off a long, morose face. Carroty-red hair. Freckles. Oy vey, she thought. It’s fucking Opie.

  He took two steps forward, planting himself midway between them. Relaxing his body language, showing that he didn’t consider them a threat: nice lady and her friend. He was here to help. “Mornin’,” he said.

  “Morning.” She was tempted to drop the final “g” in imitation, but that would be slathering it on too thick.

  “I see by your plate you’re from out of town, so maybe you don’t know.” Long, droning vowels. “But there’s postings all around here. No huntin’, fishin’, or trespassin’.”

  She nodded.

  “You rentin’ for the weekend?”

  She nodded again.

  He nodded back; looked at Michael, then at the hazmat bin. The breeze picked up, stirring the fine snow. Something was missing, and it took Jana a second to figure out what. Then she had it: she still expected to feel flyaway strands of hair against her face when the wind blew.

  The cop kept looking around—for the rifle, she guessed. He or a neighbor had heard the bang and assumed they were hunting. That made sense. That was what people did out here. Yet he saw no gun. But, of course, the gun might be anywhere: in the house, the car, the shed. The story he had told himself still held.

  His eyes ended up again on the sealed plastic hazmat bin. The gathered bundle of pink-stained tarp. Where did these fit into the story?

  The headache pulsed, trying to drop a veil of red inside her mind, pushing her to do something she might regret. She squared it back and held her ground.

  “Where y’all from?” the cop said in a conversational tone. Looking at Jana a little more closely now. Perhaps thinking of an attempt-to-locate he’d seen back at the office; trying to remember just what that face had looked like.

  “DC,” Michael answered.

  The hand still rested with the thumb hooked over the gun belt.

  Then something shuffled in the forest. They all turned reflexively. A rabbit. Not one of the fluffy-tailed bunnies they had released, born and raised in the tranquility of a pet store, but a wild cottontail, driven by winter to venture closer to human haunts than it otherwise might.

  As the sheriff looked toward the woods, the hand drifted a few centimeters from the gun.

  Jana’s body made the decision. Moving in, dipping behind him to buy an extra fraction of a second out of his field of view, she swung a hard right hook into the base of his jaw, just under the ear.

  He went down like a sack of cement. Gun still in its belt. She kicked him in the side of the head, and the hat rolled away. She kicked him again, a terrible regret filling her. What was she doing?

  The cop was crawling away, toward Michael but clumsily, one hand trying to protect his head, the other scrabbling for the gun. Michael still had the distant look in his eyes. But then something changed, and she saw what, until now, she had not known was in him.

  The cop worked the gun out of his holster. Michael leaned down and plucked it gracefully, almost politely, from the man’s fingers. Stepping back, he flicked off the safety and fired two shots from point-blank range.

  Jana turned away, head throbbing, stomach roiling on the brink. But she had not eaten for twenty-four hours, so there would be nothing but bile to vomit.

  Another shot, flat and undramatic.

  A small echo.

  Part Four

  Chapter Twelve

  Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE,

  Washington, DC

  Every morning, a courier from Nebraska Avenue delivered a zippered and locked portfolio, and every morning, the courier took away a signed receipt.

  Every morning, Barry Innes, head of operations of the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center, opened the portfolio and divided the leads inside among the personnel in the conference room. Every morning—even today, Christmas Eve, although only six people had shown up to work—they split into teams and chased the leads down.

  And every day, they came up blank.

  Dalia could see them losing heart. Only the fact that the task force had the personal blessing of the chief of staff, who, in the wake of the Paris attacks, had given Homeland carte blanche, kept mutiny at bay. Cynically, she could not help realizing that the bloodshed, in allowing them to proceed without a lot of inconvenient scrutiny, had been a blessing in disguise.

  Each day, teams deployed, grumbling, to investigate the latest batch of murders, missing persons, stolen cars, reported sightings of fugitives, suspicious purchases, packages left in public places.

  When not chasing wild geese, they investigated dozens of upcoming events around the Washington area that were deemed worthy of attention: the Cherry Blossom Festival, various White House holiday parties, the Strings of Joy concert, the State of the Union address, ZooLights, the Military Bowl, the Easter Egg Roll, the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, the Washington Auto Show, and more, always more. And always leading nowhere.

  This morning, they interviewed an event planner who handled private FBI soirees, a tour guide who conducted an annual New Year’s Eve cruise down the Potomac, the general manager of a meter-reading company whose employees regularly entered customers’ homes, and the maître d’ of a Farragut Square restaurant known to cater to members of Congress.

  They stopped for a late lunch at a Foggy Bottom steakhouse
. A wreath on the wall, tinseled and baubled, generated the sweet scent of pine. After ordering, Horowitz excused himself to call his family, leaving McConnell and Dalia momentarily alone. They could see him on the sidewalk, through the reverse-stenciled letters on the restaurant windows, smiling broadly as he listened to the phone.

  “Feel bad, taking him away during the holidays,” said McConnell. A basket of bread arrived, and he twisted off a piece and reached for a dish of oregano-laden olive oil. “Young kids. He should be home.”

  “But it’s not his holiday. He’s Jewish.”

  “Ah, it’s cultural more than religious. Everybody celebrates. Even Jews, after a fashion. Chinese food.” He dipped the bread and popped it into his mouth.

  “Don’t fill yourself up,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Just saying. You order a nice steak, then you—”

  “Channeling my ex-wife, I swear to God.”

  “So it’s official: we won’t get married.”

  “No, we sure as hell won’t.”

  “Probably tear each other’s throats out.”

  “You can say that again. Wouldn’t last two weeks. But you know, Dalia, there’s nobody I’d rather have in my foxhole.”

  The steaks came. Horowitz was still on his phone outside the window, laughing. And for a moment, Dalia felt more homesick, more hopeless, more alone, than she had ever felt in her life.

  Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC

  Christina Thompson was checking sight lines from the Cannon Rotunda when she got the call.

  After hanging up, she put two fingers inside her wrist. Her pulse ran fast. She drew a breath and held it. If they knew anything, she told herself—if they even suspected anything—she would be answering questions through an attorney. This was ripples from the Paris attacks, nothing more.

  She assembled her poker face carefully.