by Rebecca Rode
“Actually, I still have your number. I’ll give you a call.”
“Jeremy,” she complained, as we headed for the elevator. “What if I have questions about broomstick guy?”
“No story on broomstick guy, Celeste,” he said as we slid into the elevator.
“Hottest couple in town?” I said, trying to inject levity into my tone. I was hoping he’d laugh with me, but instead he set his jaw and shook his head.
“I don’t want to talk about Celeste,” he said, a finality in his tone. The elevator filled with a heavy, awkward silence. It made me feel uneasy. Why didn’t he want to talk about her? “But I do want to talk about these protesters,” he said, cutting into my thoughts.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. His avoidance was making my chest feel tight. I cleared my throat. “You caught that too? I wasn’t sure you were paying attention.”
“Of course I was. It could have something to do with the bomb. All the more reason to get this evidence to CSIS as fast as we can.”
“I got us a room. I think we should look over the evidence while we wait for the car to pick us up.”
“We’re going to have to go on faith that whoever we talk to at CSIS will honor our request to remain anonymous,” Jeremy said as we made our way down the hall to our room.
“Yep. No hard-nosed agents who follow the rules with an iron fist.” I figured we had a fifty-fifty chance. The backs of the pictures shuffled through my mind. I had to be missing something. Celeste’s words kept coming back to me. Ahmed Samaar is the only Muslim who has been anywhere near the protestors.
Ahmed. Why was that so familiar? Then it came to me. The backs of the pictures. I needed to show Jeremy.
As soon as we got into the room, I pulled out the bench pictures and spread them out over the bed.
“Look at this.” I put my hand over the numbers between the letters beginning and ending the code. Jeremy sidled up beside me, and I shifted slightly. I didn’t want him too close at the moment.
“M-E-L-E-K, Melek,” he said, surprise lacing his words. I thought about saying something snarky like, Good for you, you can spell, but I held back.
I covered the numbers on the next picture.
“Ahmed,” he said, the surprise still in his voice. “Probably the contact they were meeting with in town.”
I nodded. “But what are these numbers in-between the letters? And why don’t all the codes on the back have names on them?” My eyes were fixed on the numbers.
“Not meeting places?”
“At first I thought they’d be coordinates, but there are two too many numbers.” Only then did it hit me that they all ended in double zeroes. I grabbed my phone and put the numbers into my phone, leaving out the zeroes and the letters. Google Street View popped up. There it was, the area around the courthouse, including the Harley Hotchkiss Gardens, and sitting in the forefront of the picture was a bench. A bright flowery bench. “Check this out, Jeremy. If you take off the last two digits, they turn out to be coordinates. They are meeting places. Their GPS wasn’t precise enough to pinpoint each bench, but I bet you a thousand dollars, they’re all benches near the courthouse.”
“The courthouse.”
I nodded and put the numbers from the door frame into the phone. The courthouse popped into view. “This is the picture with the gold plate and door frame. It’s a door to something in the courthouse.” Jeremy came over and put his arm around my shoulders. I rotated out of his grasp and moved toward the window as if I needed better reception. I searched for Calgary’s Court Centre, and it gave me the same basic GPS coordinates.
“Most likely that judge’s chambers.”
“If I had to make a guess, that would be it.”
“You’re a genius.”
I shrugged. For some reason, the compliment felt patronizing. The way he’d called me his colleague still chafed at me. What would be so wrong with calling me his girlfriend? After all, he hadn’t given her my real name. I shook my head. This doesn’t matter, I thought. I can’t let this get in the way of what’s really important. “We better call the CSIS. It’ll take them a while to get here anyway. See if you can figure out when the attack is supposed to happen."
“On it.”
Jeremy took out his phone and dialed. He held the phone up to his ear, but after only a few seconds, he moved the phone in front of him and looked at the screen. “No.” He pressed buttons again, but then said, “Can I see your phone? I’m not getting any reception.”
I handed him my phone, working hard not to huff. If his phone didn’t work, why did he think mine would? He dialed a number.
Jeremy grimaced and laid the phone down. “We don't have cell coverage anymore.” He seemed distracted. The whole idea of him trying my phone after his didn’t work was ridiculous. A mistake he wouldn’t normally make if he were on his game. He went to the window and opened the curtains and stared out. It was black, almost black as night with a starless sky. After a full minute, he finally said, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The clouds are pretty thick out there.”
“Landline,” I said, pointing to the phone on the bedside table. “But normally you would have thought of that after your phone didn’t work. You’re distracted. Is it Celeste?”
“I don’t want to talk about Celeste right now.” He frowned before picking up the landline to call, but even I could hear the loud, repetitive beep. He hung up, then picked it up again and paused to read something on the phone, and then pushed a button and held the receiver up to his ear.
I could hear him speaking into the receiver, but couldn’t focus on what he was saying. All I could think about was that we were supposed to be a team and he was keeping something from me. A very pretty something.
He raked his hand through his already messed up hair, and I tried not to think about how sexy it looked. He replaced the phone on its cradle. “Bad news, no one has reception."
Dread thrilled through me, and I almost forgot how hurt I was feeling. “You know what this means, Jeremy.”
He was shaking his head. “I don't know if we can do this on our own.”
Reality set in. There were only two of us, and we had no idea when the hit was going down or where the bomb or bombs had been placed. The courthouse was huge.
“We don't really have a choice,” I said. “Not if this hit is happening today. You heard Celeste,” saying her name caused a shudder of revulsion, but I managed to suppress it. “There are still tons of people stuck in the courthouse.”
“We need to figure out when this is going to happen, if we can.”
I had to think like a terrorist. When would I let this bomb explode? When would I find it most advantageous? When the most people were in the courthouse? When the most chaos could be achieved? I knew the answer. A Friday afternoon right before the end of the day when not only the courthouse would be hopping, but so would the streets outside. That would be today.
There was huge roar of thunder and a crack of lightning almost on top of each other. The lights flickered and went out.
Chapter 6
JEREMY SWORE. THE LIGHTS FLICKERED back to life. They were dimmer, but still there.
“Generator?”
“I’m sure.”
“We need to find something before we lose power for good.”
I didn’t want to. My insides were all jumbled up and I wanted to lash out, but it didn’t seem worth pushing the issue about Celeste when so much else was going on. I opted for letting it slide, though the tension between us was palpable. We both shuffled through the pictures which had given us the most information.
“Look at this manhole cover.” Jeremy handed me a picture. “What are those numbers?”
I could see an 83 and 94. The numbers hadn’t been written on, but were part of the molds of the metal covers.
That’s when I saw it. Two sequences of numbers, written in the shadows of the pictures. 825135 and 825150.
“I may have found something,” I said. “Look in the d
arkest parts of the pictures. Not the ones with the benches, but the others. I thought there wasn’t any writing on them, but I may have found some. I’ll bet you anything, you’ll find six numbers.”
He rotated the pictures in the light. “Yep. 825320 and this one,” he said. “825200”
“What’s today’s date?” I asked, grimacing.
“August twenty-fifth,” he said without hesitation, realization dawning on him.
“Eight, twenty-five,” I whispered, my brain whirring. “What if the first three numbers are the date and the second three indicate times?” We grabbed the rest of the pictures and wrote down all the times we could find on scraps of paper while ordering the pictures according to those times, face up. We laid the scraps of paper with the times next to their corresponding pictures.
The first of eight had 12:00 on it. It was the picture of manhole 94. The next, 2:00, was of the courthouse steps. Then came what we thought was the courtroom door—3:00. Another section of door showed 3:10. All the faces had 3:30 on them. The picture with the latest time on it was 4:15. It was only a scrap of a picture that had been burned so badly we couldn’t make out what it was. We both glanced over at the blinking light on the room’s clock. Unfortunately, it blinked 12 o'clock over and over again. It hadn’t been reset from losing power. Jeremy looked at his watch. It was 3:30 exactly.
“Not only is this happening today,” Jeremy said. “It’s in progress and almost completed.” He looked with a touch of despair in his eyes at the rest of the burned pictures that had no times written on them anywhere that could be seen. The times had most likely been burned away in the fireplace. If they hadn’t been, we might have been able to get a better handle on the terrorist’s plan. We’d have to work with the information we had, and we would have to act fast.
“If this thing is going down before the close of the work day at 4:15, then we have less than an hour to find the bombs and disarm them.”
“Good thing the courthouse is just down the street,” I said.
We looked at the stack of pictures we’d just taken the times from. “Are they putting bombs in each of these locations?”
“Probably not,” Jeremy said. “They’re probably pictures of important locations, though.”
“I would say out of all these places, the one with the plaque above the door and the manholes are the locations for the bombs.”
Jeremy nodded, understanding my train of thought. “That door probably leads to the judge’s chamber.”
“And if they’re leaving a bomb in the sewers, and their target is the courthouse, then the sewers must be just outside the courthouse or close to it. If they bomb those, it would cause more confusion and chaos.”
“And stop anyone who might be coming to help,” Jeremy added grimly. “Let’s not waste any more time. Our first and most important bomb or bombs to disarm would be within the courthouse where, according to Celeste, there are still hundreds of people.”
“But we can’t go in the front door with our go bags,” I pointed out. “They’ll have metal detectors at the entrances. We’ll just have to sneak in another way.”
“No. We need to get in there ASAP and locate the bombs. The quickest way is through the front entrance.”
“But we won’t have any tools—or weapons—if we go in that way.” Frustration and irritation had crept into my voice.
He set his jaw. “We don’t even know if there is another way in. What if we don’t get there in time? Stop being careless.”
“You stop being so stubborn!” I protested. “You know as well as I do that we won’t get anything done without those bags.”
I glared at him, he looked away. Silence rose between us like a wall.
“If you’re so set on going in the front door, why don’t you do that, and I’ll find another way in with the bags?” I said when I could no longer stand the silence.
Jeremy ground his teeth, mulling it over, before finally answering. “No. It’ll have to be the other way around. Of the two of us, you’re more likely to get in through the front without arousing suspicion, and I’m more likely to be able to brute force my way in.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Jeremy held up a hand, a look of pleading on his face. I sighed, and bit my answer back. I was sick of arguing anyway. What he said made sense, even if I didn’t like to admit it.
“Fine.”
“You get in and locate the bombs, and when I get there we’ll disarm them together. After we’ve disarmed the bombs inside, then we’ll focus on the ones in the street.”
To think these men wanted to prevent any help from reaching the courthouse after the bombs went off made me sick inside. “Who are these people? What do they want?”
Jeremy shook his head, “We don’t need to know that now. We know where and when they’re going to strike—that’s enough.”
I sighed.
Jeremy cleared his throat, and I got the feeling that he was trying to clear away the tension between us and act like everything was normal. “All right, you’ll need to get in disguise. Celeste said that they weren’t letting anyone out of the courthouse, but they certainly wouldn’t deny a wet passerby some protection from the storm.”
I coiled my hair on my head and pulled on a short black wig, black thick framed glasses and a jogging suit. I tied a scarf around my hair, knotting it at the base of my neck. Some bright red lipstick and harsh black eyeliner completed the disguise. Jeremy wore grey khakis with a black belt, a plaid button up with a blue tie and black comfort shoes. A blond wig finished his ensemble. He would fit right in at the courthouse. “We’ll meet at the judge’s courtroom.”
“It’s a plan.”
He walked over to the window and pulled the curtains back. Rain came down in sheets and slashed against the windows with a vengeance. It was dark, like night had come early. We both put on thin rain jackets with hoods from our go bags. I left first.
***
The park-like area with trees and walkways next to the courthouse was empty of people as were the sidewalks and the street. As I crossed the street, the wind trying hard to push me over, I walked over a manhole cover and instantly, the picture with a small section of such a manhole raced across my mind. I had to check it out.
There were two numbers on the grate: eight and five. Drops of water hit the metal with tiny splashes creating rivulets between the raised portions of the sewer cover. For a moment, I hesitated, thinking about lifting the cover and going inside, but I had no way to tell Jeremy that’s what I was doing. He’d freak if I didn’t show up at the judge’s chambers. No, I needed to stick to the plan. It was enough to know where it was for after we’d cleared the courthouse.
Thunder roared overhead and lightning lit up the sky as even bigger drops fell from heavy, dark clouds. The water was past puddling already and tiny streams of water ran over all surfaces. Soon they would combine into a river of water. There was no use trying to avoid it and my feet were wet almost the second I stepped out into the street. The sound of the rain hitting all the surfaces was loud, almost like I was standing at the base of a waterfall.
I passed a white van as I hopped onto the sidewalk in front of the looming glass and steel courthouse. I pulled the light rain jacket close. I could tell the courthouse was running on generator power. The lights were dim and occasionally flickered. Were the metal detectors even working? Maybe they wouldn’t let me in after all. I went over other possible ways to enter the building as I made my way up the slippery and wet courthouse steps, my pants wet to the knee now and my shoes sloshing with water.
Panic rose up in me, a snake coiling inside my belly ready to strike. The only other way in would be by a bathroom window and I’d most likely need to disable an alarm to get in. I had no tools. I should have kept my go bag. And if the modern designers had been smart, there wouldn’t be a bathroom on the main level. I looked up and wondered if any of the windows even opened in the twenty-four story glass building. After another very loud thunder and lightning ch
orus, I banged on the locked courthouse doors. Two guards rushed quickly to the door. They shook their heads, and I pointed to the sky and shouted, “I need shelter.” I gave them my best desperate smile.
The two men looked at each other, then gave me a sympathetic look and something silent passed between them. They opened the door and I rushed in. A cool blast of air hit me as I entered the large lobby. They still had an air conditioner running. It didn’t help that some of my clothes were wet. Several workers stood, arms wrapped around themselves for warmth, awaiting orders from their superiors that they could go home.
“That was the scariest thing ever,” I complained. “I was trapped out there! But I knew the courthouse should be open. Why was the door locked?” I looked into the room to see bunches of people milling about, sitting on benches and on floors, and propped up against walls. “Oh,” I said as if the idea had just come to me. “You didn’t want anyone to leave because it was too dangerous.”
“Right. So, you're here for the duration.” The security guard grimaced.
“Oh, I don't care. That storm is so bad out there, and it came on so fast.” They sat back down at their posts just inside the door. “Well, thanks for letting me in.” I leaned on the desk and looked out at the people. There were a good fifty in this lobby area alone. How many others were somewhere else in the building? As soon as I heard the two guards talking, I took the path straight for the information desk, which had a scowling lady sitting at it.
I needed to find out which courtroom the ruling was handed down in and who the judge was. That way I could go right to the courtroom and then to the judge’s chamber and possibly his clerk’s office to search for the bombs. I imagined the terrorists would most likely go for the courtroom first because that’s where the judge had handed down his ruling. It was time to put on the ditz.
“Hi, I was just wondering where the courtroom is where that cool judge let those foreigners have it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. I’m just so excited to be here. I know I probably can’t meet Judge…” I snapped my fingers like I was trying to recall his name. “Oh, sorry. You know the one that told the Muslims to stop wearing those scary face things if they wanted to fit in.”