The youth’s head bobbed slowly. “I do not want to be a warrior anymore.”
“And the others … what about them? What about Khadir?”
Fresh tears rolled down Halil’s face. “The bus. On the road, going that way.” He made a feeble wave in a southerly direction, then screwed his eyes up, scowling. “I heard the American speak. The driver. He told the commander the names.”
“Names?” Marc seized on the word. “Halil, what names? It’s important you remember.”
“Will-Ard,” he said, sounding it out. “Per-Shing. Perhaps they are other men.”
The words meant nothing to Marc without some kind of context, and he filed them away to consider later as Lucy came back into the diner with the paramedic. If there is a later, he told himself.
Marc went to the other man before he could get too close. He nodded toward Lucy. “She fill you in?”
“Not really,” said Chang. “Look, what’s this all about?”
“Here’s the thing,” Marc replied, taking a deep breath. “That lad over there has something surgically implanted inside him, and you need to get it out. We can’t move him. We have to do it here. We have to do it now.”
“Wh-what happened to your accent…?” The paramedic’s eyes widened.
“You are going to help us. Because you know that kid needs you.” Marc let his hand drop to the nearby pistol. “And because I will hold this to your head if you don’t.” The words came from some calm, cold place in the center of Marc’s thoughts. Chang saw the unblinking certainty in his eyes and nodded.
“Okay.” He swallowed hard. “Help me get him up.”
* * *
Halil moaned as they maneuvered him on top of a long table, resting him on a layer of tablecloths, a bunched-up apron for a pillow. Chang produced a pair of emergency scissors and sliced cleanly down the length of the youth’s shirt, to reveal his swollen belly beneath.
To his credit, the paramedic didn’t balk at the sight of the dark, gummy sutures and unhealed scars. “I’ve seen worse,” he said. “But this…” He made a negative noise. “This is shitty workmanship.”
Lucy loaded a syringe with a morphine solution and as Chang looked for a vein, Marc found Halil’s hand and gripped it. His fingers were weak. “You’re going to be safe,” he said, and he tried to mean it.
“You were there,” Halil whispered, “at the orphanage.”
“Yeah.” He saw the paramedic put the needle in and the drug discharge.
“I don’t want to be sent back…” Halil was going to say something else, but then he fell into silence.
Chang opened his medical kit. “He’s already got something in his system, I can tell by the pupil dilation. Couldn’t give him a full dose, don’t know how it would interact. So he’s going to react when I cut, which means you need to keep him steady.” He made them use astringent antibacterial wipes on their hands, then handed each of them plastic gloves and paper surgical masks to wear. Finally, Chang gave Marc a breathing ventilator—a mouthpiece with squeeze-bulb. “You’ve seen these on TV, right? Keep him breathing evenly.”
Marc nodded, put the ventilator over Halil’s pallid lips, and started pumping the air bulb.
The paramedic muttered something under his breath that could have been a prayer, and then he went to the sutures in Halil’s belly with the bright, shining blade of a scalpel. “Gonna cut along the lines that are already here,” he said, talking through his actions as much for himself as for them. “They’re too fresh to have healed fully. Day old at the most.” The scalpel met flesh and sank in.
Halil twitched, but they were ready for it. Marc watched with detached interest as Chang traced the lines of an inverted “V” over Halil’s belly. There was blood, but less of it than he expected. A metallic odor rose and he started to breathe through his mouth.
The paramedic muttered again, his tone angry. “Who did this?” he said, grinding out the question through gritted teeth. “Is this you people? It’s fucking barbaric!”
“No, not us. Keep working,” Lucy told him sternly. “We’re on a clock.”
At mention of that, Marc glanced at the big analog clock on the wall of the diner, a chrome thing with old advertising graphics suggesting it was Always Time for a Coke. The minute hand was coming around to the top of the hour, and he remembered how Al Sayf liked to set off their attacks in hourly increments. The Barcelona blast had been on the dot of 6 p.m.
Chang peeled back a flap of flesh with a set of forceps and Marc looked right into Halil’s peritoneal cavity, a mess of wet organic shapes that looked better suited to a butcher’s block. Blood trickled down and pooled on the white tablecloths. He bit down on an automatic gag response.
“You’re no use if you’re going to puke,” snapped the paramedic.
Marc shook his head, grotesquely fascinated. Something was wrong in there. He saw a string of objects wrapped in plastic, linked in a chain.
“What the hell is that?” Chang saw them too, and probed at the mass with a haemostat. “Are those … drugs?”
“Take over.” Marc pressed the ventilator into Lucy’s hands and leaned in for a closer look. He ignored Chang’s complaints and steeled himself before reaching into the open cut. It was warm and slippery, and he had to force himself not to look away.
Marc’s fingers pinched the edge of the plastic packet and pulled. With a wet, sucking pop, a string of five clay-like spheres, each connected to the next by thin wires, emerged from Halil’s open belly. Blood dribbled off the vacuum-sealed plastic sheath surrounding the device. “I got it,” he said, drawing in a shuddering breath. “Ah, shit.”
He heard Lucy deflecting Chang’s questions, saying something about getting Halil sewn up and the hell out of there—but he wasn’t really listening.
Marc carried the ugly little payload into the diner’s narrow kitchen. Pots and burners were still on the go, left untended after the chaos. With a sweep of his hand, he cleared a space on a cutting board and let the body bomb snake out across it. He used a water nozzle from the dishwashing sink to clean off the device, and stood back to take it in.
It was a horrible, cunning design. Each “pod” was a clump of HMX explosive as big as a tennis ball, the silver tabs of electrical detonators buried in them. A rat’s tail of wires coiled back to a small cluster of electronics that could fit in the palm of Marc’s hand. Through the plastic sheath, he could make out a long-life camera battery and the stripped-down workings of an old 2G-type cell phone. All of it constructed with faultless care, each soldered joint perfect, the entire bomb assembly flexible enough to fit undetected inside a human body.
He found the clock again. Less than a minute till the top of the hour.
Marc sliced the plastic sheath with a paring knife to expose the bomb’s workings. There were too many detonators, too many intertwining connectors to know which line was the primary.
It wasn’t a case of red wire, blue wire. Every wire was the same shade of black. He gripped the control unit between his thumb and forefinger, feeling a terrible sense of pressure building behind his eyes—almost a premonition of the device’s unspent destructive force just seconds from being unleashed. He stared at the inert spheres of doughy matter, uncertain what to do. Which wire to cut?
Without thinking about it, his hand closed around the grip of a thick meat cleaver lying nearby. He brought it down on the coil of wires and severed all of them at once. The control unit skittered away, falling to the tiled floor.
As it landed, Marc heard the device sound a high-pitched beep; in the same second, the clock outside clicked as it struck 8:00am.
For long seconds, he stood still, waiting for something else to happen. When it didn’t, he gathered the inert explosives and stuffed them into a take-out box. Marc bent to scoop up the control unit and saw a tiny LCD screen among the detonator components. A line of text there read One Missed Call.
Tension he didn’t know he had been holding in burst out in a short cackling laugh. Marc ma
rveled at the strange calm that had descended on him in those moments, not knowing where it had come from. Somehow, his body had barricaded all the terror he should have felt for the time it took to defang the bomb. Now that was over, the dam broke and it all came rushing over him in a wave of frigid cold. Marc had to put out a hand to steady himself on a nearby stool.
“All clear,” he managed, in a cracked voice.
The paramedic was sheathing the unconscious Halil’s torso in fresh bandages. Marc could smell the chemical tang of medical-grade adhesive. “I did a quick fix,” Chang was saying to Lucy, “but it won’t last. Plus he’s got an infection from whatever idiots cut him up in the first place. We don’t take this kid to the ER right away, sepsis is going to rip him up.”
Lucy shot Marc a look, and he read from it what he needed to know. “Go get a stretcher,” she told the paramedic. “We’ll follow you to the hospital.”
Chang took two steps, and then halted as he saw Marc. His eyes narrowed “Those weren’t drugs, were they?”
“You heard Agent Reese,” he replied. “Your patient is a material witness to a federal crime. We need him alive and well.”
“Right, yeah,” said the paramedic, and he left the diner in a rush.
Lucy turned on Marc. “Tell me you disarmed it.”
He showed her the severed cable. “You could call it that, I suppose.”
“Hey, whatever works.” She paused, and then did something Marc wasn’t expecting. Lucy reached out and gently stroked Halil’s brow. Then the moment was gone and she was looking at him again. “Is there a back way out?” Off Marc’s nod, she came forward, tossing him his pistol. “Then let’s book.”
He hesitated, glancing at Halil. Marc felt a pang of guilt at abandoning him so soon after making his promise to save him.
Lucy saw what he was thinking and went on. “Dane. The second those locals think hard about it, they’re going to figure out we’re not FBI.”
“Or the Mounties,” Marc added, and he blew out a breath, knowing she was right. They could not afford to get caught up, not now, after losing so much time in pursuit of Khadir. “Yeah. C’mon, this way.”
* * *
This time Lucy took the wheel, and in a crunching snarl of spitting gravel, she barely let Marc get the passenger side door shut before the GT-500 leaped away and out on to the highway. The car slalomed around a pair of parked State Police cruisers and over a line of crackling road flares, cresting the next hill before the cops had time to react.
Lucy pushed the accelerator pedal to the firewall, taking advantage of the clear road ahead, and the needle on the speedometer climbed steadily up the numbers. “You need to call Delancort,” she said.
Her jaw set. She was wondering how she could justify losing their target to preserve the life of Halil. Solomon was not a callous man, but he was pragmatic. He would not easily accept the saving of one as a priority over hundreds of others.
“In a sec,” Marc replied. He dragged the battered laptop from his pack and flipped it open. “I need to check something first … The kid gave me a lead.”
“About Khadir’s target?”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so. It was two names. First one was ‘Willard.’ Ring any bells?”
“No.” She gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Scary movie about rats.” A school bus flashed past heading in the other direction, and Lucy couldn’t help but glare at it. It was empty, one of thousands of the vehicles that were out on the streets that morning, all across the country.
“Got about twenty million hits on Google…” Marc’s hands flew across the laptop’s keyboard. “So much for that. Second one was ‘Pershing.’ Like the general from World War II.”
“Right, ‘Black Jack’ Pershing.” She remembered the name from history class in officer candidate school. “The Army named a tank after him…”
“Also schools and streets and parks, so Wikipedia says.”
Lucy felt an unexpected jolt of insight that made her breath catch. They were passing a highway sign with lane indicators directing drivers toward Baltimore, Annapolis and beyond, to Washington. She hadn’t visited the nation’s capital in a long time, but now the Brit’s words were sparking fragments of recall, making unexpected connections. “The park,” she repeated. “Pershing Park in DC.”
“Got it.” Marc brought up a map application and scanned the image. “Within spitting distance of the White House. You think Al Sayf are going to mount an attack on Washington?”
She gave a grim nod. “I think by now we know that Omar Khadir isn’t the kind of terrorist who thinks small.” Lucy took a glance at Marc and saw that his attention was fixed on the screen’s display. “What? Something else?”
“You want to know what’s directly across the street from Pershing Park? The Willard Intercontinental Hotel.” In the next second, Marc was talking into his smartphone. “Delancort? It’s Dane. Looks like the target is Washington DC. That’s where Khadir is headed. I’ve got location intel … Pershing Park and the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“Ah.” The other man’s reply automatically issued out of the car’s wireless speakers. “That makes a very unpleasant kind of sense.”
“How so?” demanded Lucy. Traffic was building up, forcing her to slow. She slipped the GT-500 across the lanes, looking for the road that would bypass Baltimore and get them on the direct route to DC.
“We have been threat modeling, looking at potential targets along the road corridor we believe Khadir is using. A political assembly in Baltimore. The Aberdeen Proving Ground. The NSA facility at Fort Meade … And of course, Washington.”
Marc’s eyes narrowed. “You have a potential?”
“We may want to consider it an actual. The President of the United States and the First Lady will be present today at a public rally on the National Mall.”
“That’s the strip of park, runs from the Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial,” offered Lucy.
“Yeah,” muttered Marc. “And full of crowds, I’ll bet.”
“It’s an election year,” Lucy said.
Delancort went on. “The president will be addressing the nation on the subject of college reform and higher education. Student groups from all over America have been invited to attend.”
“That’s how he’s going to get them in there,” Marc breathed. “Teenagers. Students. Khadir can just walk them in, then set off the bombs right in the middle of the speech…” He trailed off. “It’ll be carnage.”
“They’d need security passes,” Lucy added, thinking out loud. “But he’ll have thought of that.”
“How far away are you?” said Delancort. “The president is scheduled to go on stage in a few hours. I will contact Mister Solomon, have him see if he can use his contacts to pass on a direct warning…” He didn’t need to add what would happen if that failed. “I admit I am not confident.”
Lucy shifted up to top gear and aimed the hood of the Mustang at the feed lane, gaining speed as they went.
“We’ll make it,” said Marc, tapping the disconnect.
* * *
The warehouse was like all the others in this part of Ivy City, one among many clustered around the industrial neighborhood in the northeastern section of the American capital. It was run down and dilapidated, and from the layers of grime covering the windows, Khadir estimated that it had been standing idle for years. He walked around the silent bus parked inside the echoing building, occasionally glancing up to make sure no one on board was thinking of getting out. One runner was more than enough.
For all this country’s might and all its claims to the status of superpower, the building was proof enough of America’s weakness, of its slow rot. Only a few miles away there were gleaming streets, great monuments and ornate buildings befitting a nation-state that shouted defiance to the globe, but in this place there was decrepitude and wastage, one hidden under the other.
The clarity he had found in becoming a warrior for Al Sayf showe
d him these truths. Khadir did not hate the people of this nation, he pitied them, just as he pitied all the other men and women and children who toiled under blood-soiled flags. They were complacent. They needed to be shocked out of their docility, to understand that their masters could not protect them. Only when the sword fell would they have the same clarity that he did.
He halted where Teape was lounging against a wheel arch, watching a droning news reporter on the screen of his smartphone. A well-dressed Caucasian woman was talking directly into the camera, a video feed displayed next to her showing footage of crowds gathering at the foot of the Washington Memorial. She talked about the president and his wife, about the education platform the politician’s party was using as their spur for re-election. She talked about renewal and success and other uplifting topics.
Khadir gave a derisive snort, thinking of the people in this district, wondering how much of that would reach them if their current leader served a second term. It was a moot point; by tonight the president would be dead, his wife and countless others along with him.
He pulled his own smartphone from a pocket, paging to the control application for the weapons. Number Seven was dark, the timer at zero. That meant the troublesome youth had been dealt with, the device within him having fulfilled its purpose … But if that was so, then why was it not being reported?
Was it possible that news of the detonation was being suppressed by the authorities? Khadir doubted that. The media were untroubled with conscience in such things, and they would broadcast any incident no matter how tawdry or bloody in order to secure a greater audience share—even if what they aired were the deaths of their own.
Khadir’s concerns fell silent as he caught the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside the warehouse, and he drew a Beretta 92 from a paddle holster and approached the roller gate at the front of the old building. The Italian-made pistol was the same design as the Helwan 920 he had used in his time as an officer of the Egyptian Army, and it was comfortable in its familiarity.
He peered through a gap in the gate and saw an unmarked black van roll to a halt. Khadir stiffened as figures emerged from the vehicle—two men wearing District of Colombia Metropolitan Police uniforms—but then that familiar pre-battle tension faded as a third man joined them. Jadeed.
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