It was light when Mummar appeared in his doorway.
“Wake up, man. You’ve got work to do. First thing is to fix breakfast. Then you call in sick.”
“The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” Schrueders murmured to himself. Then, louder, “If I’m not going to Stevens, how can I be of help to you?”
“Two things, brother. First, you ain’t the condemned man. Not in that sense. We’re the ones who won’t be coming back. So all you’ve got to do is keep your nose clean, okay? Second thing, you are going to Stevens today, but you ain’t going to work. Best they don’t expect you, not what you’re going to be doing.”
Schrueders found himself in the kitchen, making breakfast for men he had never seen before and would be unlikely to ever see again in this lifetime, wondering just how he was going to achieve what they demanded of him. Scrambling eggs while he contemplated this seemed strangely surreal. He could hear the four men in the living room discussing the kinds of explosives and detonators that he had gone over with them the night before, and the best way of transporting them to location without being easily detected.
All the time, he did not think of the possible victims, only of distancing himself from any outcome.
When the four men had eaten, Mummar told him that before going to Stevens, there was need for the boys to do a little shopping.
“Been discussing the kind of carryalls and bags needed for this shit...This ain’t no shoe bomber or underwear bomber shit, man. This is bigger. We need something that can conceal it, still be wired to us and can pass undetected.”
“The kind of size and weight you’re talking about, and the kind of power it needs, you’re not going to be able to wire it to your bodies,” Schrueders said hesitantly, trying in his imagination to compare the explosives seen in the lab and in the field with how they may look on a human being. The more he considered it, the deeper his conscience receded. “I guess the kind of rucksack that a backpacker would carry would be the correct size. You could pack it into something smaller, but it wouldn’t be so comfortable.”
“Screw comfort,” Hus said in a harsh, cracked tone. “Get enough of that where we’re going after. Just don’t want to get stopped by the Feds before we get there.”
“Is that likely?” Schrueders asked, a note of panic creeping into his voice.
“Relax,” Banjo said with a sneer. “It ain’t you they know anything about. Or us, really. But they know something’s going down, so we got to be cautious like a fox.”
“We want to look like nice little tourists, just seeing some sights in NYC, and you’re the man who’s going to help us do that,” Mummar said. “We don’t have what we need, so you’re going to take Hus and Amir to the mall.”
* * *
BOLAN CURSED AT the fact that the targets had split into two groups and there was only one of him. Just as well there was the tech he needed. He left the Nissan with the surveillance cam that was set on the front of the brownstone, linked to his smartphone. Leaving a beat later so that it wouldn’t be obvious, he waited for Schrueders and the two men with him to reach the end of the street before he fell in behind them.
As they had left the building, their descent of the stone steps from the front door had given him an excellent angle to take some pictures, which he had downloaded to Stony Man for ID. It had been just a little too dark to get good images on the phone when they had arrived, but this was so perfect it could almost have been set up for the purpose.
There was no mall in the middle of Hoboken, but there was a shopping area that was located in the middle of the forty-eight-street grid that comprised the circumference of the town. It was here that Schrueders took the two, as yet unidentified, terrorists. Bolan stuck close to them as they shopped for hand luggage: rucksacks, duffel bags and other carryalls. In one sense it seemed bizarre to him that he was tailing terrorists who seemed to be comparing hand baggage like a pair of tourists. Yet all the while, his mind was sizing up the kind of explosive charges that they could pack into the different sizes of bags that passed through their hands.
Bolan watched Schrueders closely. He was nervous, his hands moving in tics and spasms, clenching and unclenching. His record had shown no affiliations with any Islamic groups; indeed, nothing since that deeply buried affiliation of his youth. The soldier was certain that Heider had blackmailed Schrueders into this action, and it was something that the man wanted no part of. This was something that should make him easier to deal with when the time came.
Having made their purchases, they left the shop. Instead of heading immediately back to the brownstone, as Bolan would have expected, they made a detour. They passed the clock on Eleventh Street and seemed strangely like the tourists they presented as their front.
Schrueders seemed to be growing more and more nervous, and it was strange to see the way in which the two terrorists berated him as they reached their destination.
Bolan could see why the engineer was almost visibly falling apart. He also doubted that Banjo—and Fraser in particular—would be impressed. Bizarrely, the three men entered Carlo’s Bake Shop. The picturesque frontage gave way to a bakery, where customers milled among a myriad variety of baked goods.
There was no way that this was a scheduled stop or anything to do with their mission. Bolan, fascinated and also needing to know just what was going on, opted to take a risk and follow them into the store.
As he entered, able to lose himself even in such a small space because of the number of shoppers, he could hear Schrueders and the two terrorists. The engineer’s tones were clipped, whereas the others sounded more relaxed.
“We should be getting back. We only had to get these—”
“Relax. This is the only chance I’m gonna get, and I don’t want to miss it. This place is famous, man.” The younger of the two terrorists spoke, looking around with fascination. The older of the two eyed him with contempt and spit out his reply in harsh tones.
“All the shit going down and you think of your stomach. Man, you gonna get fat.”
“I’m not gonna get that chance,” the younger man said ruefully. “So you ain’t gonna deny me this. I love the show, and I always wanted to see if their stuff is as good as it looks.”
Bolan realized what had drawn them there: the shop was the one taped for a reality show that he’d seen a few minutes of when he’d visited Leo Turrin in the hospital a while back.
Strange to think that even one of the most fanatical fighters had a side like this to him.
While the younger terrorist did something as mundane as buying cake, Bolan assessed the situation. There was no chance of taking them down here without collateral damage. It looked as though the four-man cell was operating independently, with only the help—albeit unwilling—of the engineer. So five men to eliminate. It was just a matter of keeping them in view so that they could be taken.
He left the three men to their purchases and exited the shop, taking up a position across the street so that he could wait for them unseen. As he did so, he checked the surveillance cam feed and saw that Fraser and Banjo were still ensconced in the brownstone.
There was also some information from Stony Man concerning the two unknown terrorists, unknown no longer. Hussein Ali, the older of the two at twenty-eight, was of Turkish descent, and had been resident in Washington since the age of six. He had no known gang or criminal affiliations. He’d had been born Muslim but had been generally nonreligious until conversion to the cause by a firebrand cleric. Since then, he had gained a reputation for protesting and for an online presence, but he had never been arrested and had been clever in treading a fine line with his internet presence.
The younger man was Amir Khan, whose parents had come to the United States from Uganda in the seventies after Idi Amin had decided to cleanse his country of those who had put growth and wealth into its struggling economy. Most had ended u
p in the United Kingdom, as they held British passports from their Indian roots. Some, like Amir’s parents, had looked at the struggling economy of the UK at that time and had opted for the promised land of America. They had been let down. Years of struggle and failing retail businesses had left their six children in menial jobs and sometimes on the wrong side of the law. This was the environment Amir had been born into, and it hadn’t taken long for his resentment to crystallize into gang life and the opportunity for revenge against the West offered by radical Islam, a West he felt had let his entire family down.
And yet he had been fascinated by something as American as a reality show about a bakery? Sometimes, Bolan really felt there was little logic to human nature.
The three men left the bakery and made their way back to the brownstone, with Bolan in discreet pursuit. He returned to the Nissan and seated himself, taking advantage of the coffee left on the dash, even though it was now cold.
It was now past eleven, and he figured that they were on a tight enough timetable that they had to make a move sooner rather than later. He was correct. Within twenty minutes of the three men entering the building, they were out again, this time with Fraser and Banjo with them. The five men made their way to the camper van. They looked tense, as though an argument had broken out between them.
He followed them to the Stevens Institute; they used Schrueders to gain access. Bolan could only hope that the engineer kept it together long enough to get them where they wanted, as he looked as if he was falling apart.
The soldier had a plan of Stevens that he could access on his phone. He had a shrewd idea of their destination, given their needs and Schrueders’s position. Get them there, and that was where he planned to isolate them and take them out.
The last thing he needed was a wild card.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Stevens Institute of Technology was located in the midsection of Hoboken known as Castle Point, and had been founded in 1870. This location was presumably why it had a castle gatehouse that, with its rounded and turreted tower, looked like nothing so much as an attempt to hark back to a past that had more connection with another country than the New World. It was cute and quaint and completely useless for security. Even more so when the staff members who were supposed to run security let Schrueders through with no question and were only briefly distracted by the soldier’s cover story of being an IT tech who had been called in to work on a malfunctioning network.
Bolan was glad he was finally able to use the cover he had researched at length for a previous assignment and had then barely used before hell broke loose. At least those hours speed-reading manuals had not gone entirely to waste. On the other hand, in a technology institute that had as big a rep as Stevens, shouldn’t the security have been a little suspicious at an outsider being called in to fix a problem that could—and should—have been easily fixed in-house? No matter. He was in.
* * *
“HANG A LEFT, then second right,” Schrueders muttered as he sat hunched on the front bench seat between Fraser and Amir, the driver.
“Look cheerful, bitch. We don’t want anyone getting suspicious,” Ali muttered savagely from the back of the van.
“Like they wouldn’t already,” Schrueders murmured. “I call in sick, then show up at the gate, and now I’m going to completely the wrong block.”
“Strikes me they don’t know their ass from their elbow,” Mummar replied. “They got plenty of CCTV,” he continued, peering under the horizon of the windshield to get a better look, “but they ain’t got much in the way of patrols, and they don’t seem to be busting any of their sizable guts to chase after us. Lazy-ass security, man.”
“That’s because nothing ever happens here,” Schrueders said in a melancholy tone. “That’s what I like about it.”
“No need for anyone to ever know that anything has ever happened here,” Mummar retorted. “Pretty sure that we shook the guy who wiped Heider’s cell. After we leave here and get the mission complete, there’ll just be the dispatches from home. Nothing left to trace us back here. You can go back to your life, Piet. No worries.”
“Apart from my conscience.”
Mummar laughed. It was harsh and grating. “Man, we all got pasts. And we all got pasts that come back and bite us in the ass.”
Amir pulled the van into a parking space as Schrueders, unable to answer through the pall of gloom that had settled over him, indicated the block they needed. They got out of the van and made their way across to the block entrance, looking around but not noticing the Nissan that had pulled into a space around the block. They didn’t notice the man in black who waited a few moments before getting out of his car and following them at a distance.
* * *
BOLAN WATCHED THEM as they walked across the road to the building housing the labs for experimental explosives and mining equipment. The four terrorists were clustered around the cowed scientist, who couldn’t help but look like a man on a death sentence. Bolan wondered how long he would last after they had what they wanted. Was he worth saving? Maybe. The information he could supply under interrogation could be of use. The question was whether it would be prudent to try to separate and save Schrueders at the expense of simply taking out the cell as a whole.
Stevens was built in the midtown section of Hoboken and sat on a serpentine outcropping at the foot of which was Sybil’s Cave, at one time a tourist spot for its waters but long since closed up and awaiting redevelopment. The cave at the foot of the cliff led to the shorefront of the river, which could serve a dual purpose: a means of escape for the terrorists and an escape for Bolan should his mission attract too much attention.
It was the middle of the day during a semester, yet the campus was not as busy as Bolan might have expected. There were small groups of students he had passed on the way in, and around this building there were a few people going in and out. It was a low volume of traffic, which he preferred. The fewer innocent bystanders, the better.
The five men had made their way into the building. After a discreet moment, he followed them.
The double doors leading into the block were unguarded, and although there was a security system, Bolan had no need to hit the keypad as a pair of students exiting the building held the door for him. He thanked them and watched them go, wondering if the man and woman deep in discussion had even noticed the man they had just let in.
He left them to it, walking down the corridor and taking in the CCTV. Several doors were closed. Behind some of them he could hear activity, while others were silent. The doors were heavily reinforced, and those sounds he could hear were muffled. It gave him pause to consider the possible explosive power that lay behind them.
He was now in the last corridor of the building; from here there were only the fire doors. There was one room, the door firmly closed.
Bolan acted as though there were no cameras recording his movements. After he had gone, there would be no reason to go back over the recordings: whatever he would do to end the terrorist threat, he could not risk it in this building. He knew that now, having been given an intimation of what was behind the doors. As for this moment, he doubted that anyone was actually monitoring what was coming up on any of the screens. But now there were more pressing concerns. He took a contact mike from one of his pockets and attached it to the door. He donned its earpiece. Beyond the door he heard hushed breathing; he could almost feel the tension.
And then the silence was broken.
* * *
SCHRUEDERS OPENED THE locked cabinet and took out the packages wrapped in oilpaper. Carefully he placed them on the nearest workbench, having cleared the space of retorts and burners. The four terrorists hung back. Seeing this now in front of them, each in his own way felt the enormity of what they were about to do, for themselves and for those they intended to harm.
Schrueders unwrapped one of the
packages. Inside was a slab of what looked like partially dried concrete. It was greasy and sweating.
“That’s it?” Amir said softly. There was a mixture of fear and awe in his voice.
“That’s it,” Schrueders replied. “It’s not much to look at, is it? You wouldn’t think that it took several years to get this compound. Several years of trial and error, tests that went fugazi. To get that—” he indicated some test tubes that were in the cabinet and contained a colorless liquid “—to this.”
“Is it safe, man?” Mummar asked in an undertone.
Schrueders looked at him with an amazed expression, for one second the research fellow showing rather than the prisoner. “Safe? Of course it’s safe.”
“But it’s sweating, man, That ain’t good...”
“This is not dynamite. If that sweats, it means trouble. This, on the other hand, is another matter. The liquid within helps keeps the compound stable. As a pure liquid, it’s volatile. In suspension, it’s stable as long as it doesn’t dry out. Then it’s combustible. You need to keep it in the right state of suspension. That’s the beauty of it. The detonators are not the usual type. They’re timed individually, and they work by drying out the moisture. No complex electronics, no need for any combustion. Just a simple and inevitable chemical reaction.”
Ali smiled and leaned in to look at the uncovered block. “It’s perfect. How much of it do we need?”
Schrueders blew out his cheeks. “A block this size will take out half a ton of rock. Sybil’s Cave would be cleared by it.”
“Sybil’s what now?” Mummar frowned.
Schrueders shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. The point is that if you want to take out something the size you’re talking about, you still need a lot of this stuff. That’s why you need the rucksacks. It’s powerful, but you’re talking a lot of tonnage.”
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