The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  He sighed and lay still. No point in even trying to get up again. He might be vertical, but he’d still be trussed up like a roaster, and blind to boot. He heard the man’s footsteps as he came down the stairs and into the kitchen. They stopped for a moment. He heard a door open, and smelled a whiff of basement air. Then there came that deadly humming sound.

  “Hey, don’t hit me again,” he said. “I’ll be good.”

  “Oh, ya, you will,” the man whispered, and then Swamp felt himself being dragged and then dumped headfirst onto the top few steps of what was probably the basement stairs. The man was silent, and Swamp held his breath. He wondered if he was supposed to start crawling down the stairs, but then the electric trip-hammer came again, whaling both of his shins so hard that he lurched forward in a huge spasm of contracting leg muscles and then slid all the way down the stairs for what seemed like forever, banging every protruding edge of his body several times on the way down. He fetched up on what felt like hard-packed dirt, his bruised right cheek pressed against a stone wall. He could hardly feel all the bumps and bruises through the haze of cramping leg muscles and jangling nerves.

  He stopped fighting the program and just went limp instead. He heard a door close up above him, followed by the sounds of someone coming down the steps. At least no one expected him to get up and do it again just now. He barely felt the man wrapping his lower legs in tape, nor did he much care. What was a little more tape at this juncture? He was well and truly screwed.

  Heismann went back upstairs after locking the cellar door. It was twenty minutes to midnight, and he wanted to be right next to that mysterious cell phone, the one that turned itself on. The mortar was perfectly level now, although he had had to reset the elevation angle to compensate for the newly level platform. He was still uneasy about the discrepancy in target coordinates, but had to assume Mutaib had access to ground-truth data. And he had the television, which would provide spotting data.

  He would fire two rounds and then stop. If the television covering the inauguration proceedings showed direct hits, he’d drop in the other eight rounds and then make his run. If they were off, he would adjust the mortar one time and then fire the eight rounds. He had to assume there would be airborne surveillance over the city, and if by chance they had one of those reverse-trajectory radars, there’d be F-15’s rolling in on the town house as soon as the rounds stopped falling. Even if he was off in his aim point, those big projectiles would still be devastating, going off above the packed west portico at eighty feet in the air and blasting hundred-foot-wide cones of shredded steel all over the exterior of the building. A total decapitation strike: all the important outgoing government officials, the incoming government, the Supreme Court, the congressional leadership, both presidents and vice presidents. And all this using a weapon that had been around since the late Middle Ages. Give the Arabs credit: They had seen the beauty of it at once. And as everyone knew, the Arabs held a certain fondness for the Middle Ages.

  Eleven-forty-five. He turned on the phone. The text screen lighted up but remained blank. He set the phone down on the windowsill and sat down to wait. He would have to find a way to get the big man in the basement up here for the attack. His prisoner would now have a vital role to play as the witness, so he needed to leave some way for the pensioner to escape before the house burned down around him. And if the Arabs decided to abort the mission, he’d leave all the fuel in the tank and his uninvited guest in the basement. Let Mutaib’s bomb take care of business. What was one pensioner? He kept looking out the windows to make sure there wasn’t a search on for the man, but with all those police out on the streets tonight, he would most likely not be missed until morning. By then, it would be much too late.

  The phone trilled from the windowsill. He picked it up and read the text: “Execute.”

  He felt a cold chill spread through his stomach. They were going through with it. He shook his head in wonder. Did they have any idea of what would happen next? He was reminded of a sick joke he’d heard circulating after the Arabs attacked the World Trade Center in 2001. A father takes his young son to view the memorial at the site in lower Manhattan. The son asks what happened there. The father tells him that Arabs attacked the World Trade Center and killed three thousand people. The son asks, “Daddy? What’s an Arab?”

  Very well. He felt the bottom of the phone getting suddenly hot and dropped it on the floor, where it indeed proceeded to melt itself.

  Time now to double-check the structure supporting the floor, attend to the fuel tank, and then get both his body and his escape wardrobe ready. He shut off the single table lamp in the bedroom and looked out the back window at the distant Capitol dome, all lighted up for the festivities. Even from here, he could see reflections of blue strobe lights from the street in front of the Capitol, the lights playing across the towering white marble facade. There must be a thousand security people over there, he thought. He wondered if they’d get much sleep tonight. They were probably still poking around in hall closets and looking under vehicles for bombs.

  He wondered if he’d get any sleep tonight. But why not? He was ready. Alles ist in Ordnung.

  12

  SWAMP AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF THE TASER HUMMING nearby and flinched. He lay partially on his side on the cold floor, his arms still hoisted above his head. His shoulders were numb and his back and sides ached so much that he could barely move. He had no idea of what time it was or how long he’d been out on the basement floor. He seemed to remember the man coming back down the stairs last night and doing something that produced a stink of fuel oil, which he could still smell. Now the man was doing something at his feet, and suddenly his legs were free. Kick him hard, his brain said, but his leg muscles just laughed at him. They were far more interested in the restoration of normal blood circulation than in launching any surprise attacks. A wave of pins and needles flooded through his feet.

  “Up,” the man ordered. Swamp thought the guy was trying to disguise his voice, because the word came out sounding more like “op” than “up.”

  “Can’t move,” Swamp said as he tried to raise his knees.

  “Up,” the man said again from behind his head, and then he emphasized the point with the hum of the Taser. Up it is, Swamp thought.

  It took him a full minute of bending, twisting, and gasping as his body resisted the maneuver. One of the problems of being a big guy, he thought. Lots of muscle mass to unkink. He got on his side, then to his knees and then, using the wall, pushed himself relatively upright, although off balance because his arms were pinned in the air like that. The man closed in again with the Taser and attached something around his neck. It felt like a rope. He could see dim light through the tape but not much else. He leaned on the stone wall for a moment, but then the rope was pulling and he had to follow it or fall down. Getting up had been much too hard, so he followed the pull.

  “Stairs,” the man said after Swamp had taken four painful steps. He felt with his right foot and encountered the lowest tread. The rope tugged again and up he went, leaning against the wall all the way up to make sure he didn’t fall off the outer edge. He didn’t know whether or not there was a railing and didn’t want to find out the hard way. He concentrated on remembering what he was doing as they went up the stairs, the man in front of him; then they reached the top and turned left and left again. Hallway? His head collided with something and he bounced back, lost his balance, and slipped sideways up against what felt like a plaster wall.

  “Up,” the man said again, impatient this time. He reinforced the order with an ugly jerk on the rope. Swamp went through the whole process again, his arms and shoulders complaining now as he tried to use them for balance. Once vertical again, he resumed his forced march, going down the hallway, then right and up more stairs. He could see light through the duct tape, so he knew it must be morning. This time, he felt the presence of a railing and climbed with a bit more confidence. The man took a right at the top of the stairs and then tugged Swamp thr
ough a doorway, which scraped both his extended elbows. As he regained strength and flexibility, he began to think of what he should be doing to escape, but then the man ordered him to sit and pushed him back against a wall. He slid down obediently, grateful for the sudden support the wall provided for his arms and shoulders. It was much colder up here on the second floor, and Swamp thought he could hear tree branches moving around, as if the room was open to the outside air. His feet and legs were free, and now he needed to get this tape away from his eyes.

  The man left the rope around his neck and went out of the room, coming back in again after a minute. He came over to where Swamp was sitting with his back to the wall and then put a foot on Swamp’s knees and forced them flat to the floor. With the humming sound of the ever-ready Taser in his ears, Swamp just had to sit there as his feet were rewrapped in tape. So much for some sudden karate moves, Swamp thought, as if he remembered any. Then the man moved to Swamp’s right side, and the humming noise got louder. He felt steel on his cheek and the sharp point of a knife working its way beneath the duct tape over his eyes. He froze, not wanting his captor to make any mistakes just now, and then the man began sawing at the tape. Then he was working his fingers under the edge, and Swamp squinted his eyes shut as hard as he could, knowing what was coming. The man ripped the tape off in one sudden move and Swamp grunted with the pain of it as his eyelids tried hard to go with the tape. He struggled to open his eyes, but there was enough mastic from the tape on his eyelids to stick them together. The man dropped the knife with a clatter on the floor and then pried Swamp’s right eye open with his fingers. The sudden exposure to daylight made him blink furiously, which opened his other eye, and then both his eyes filled involuntarily with tears and he couldn’t see a thing.

  The man got up and backed away from him, waiting for Swamp’s vision to adjust. Then he stepped right around in front of him. Swamp blinked several times again and looked up. He was stunned by what he saw when his eyes finally cleared.

  “You!” he exclaimed as he looked into the dark eyes and hawk-nosed face of Emir Mutaib abd Allah, managing director of the Royal Kingdom Bank.

  “Hello, old chap,” the Arab said. “Remember me?”

  The Arab straightened up and walked out of Swamp’s sight before he could reply. My God! Swamp thought. This was Erich Hodler? As he was trying to assimilate the idea, he saw the giant mortar poised out in the middle of the room. He looked up and saw the skylight, with the big bite taken out of the roof structure to its right. He looked left out the window and saw the Capitol dome bathed in noontime sunlight.

  Son of a bitch! Could that thing reach the Capitol? There were ten rounds clustered around the mortar, looking like olive green demon spawn clustered around their mother. He looked back out the window. It was a huge mortar, nothing like the 60-mm Army weapon he’d seen demonstrated at agent school. And those things could go a mile, so what could this monster do? Then he understood precisely what it could do. There was a small television behind the mortar, on which coverage of the inauguration ceremony was in full progress. Ten rounds, properly aimed, fired right at noon, fragmentation warheads, and they’d get the whole government. Correction: the old and the new governments. He remembered every picture he’d ever seen of an inauguration, with all those people packed in like sardines all over the Capitol steps. It would be a massacre. Then the man was back, and so was the duct tape around his eyes. He tried to lunge forward, to do something, but he got absolutely nowhere as the Arab grabbed that rope and pulled hard, toppling Swamp over on his side and cracking his head against one of those pieces of marble littering the room. He fought to stay conscious, but it was very, very difficult. So much easier to just give into the beckoning red haze.

  Heismann checked his prisoner’s pulse and found it strong. He hadn’t meant to knock him out, but the man was truly large and he’d startled him with that sudden move. But he would still remember that face. And with luck, this man would escape and tell the world who had been in the room with the mortar. Nothing like an eyewitness who was also a federal agent. Even if he was a pensioner. Mutaib was a dead man, and he, Heismann, wouldn’t have to go to the bank after all.

  He got up and kicked the knife away from the prostrate pensioner and then made sure the man’s arms were still firmly pinned. He tied the end of the rope to a radiator and tightened the noose. He’d go make his transformation, then come back and cut through enough of the tape that the pensioner would be able to get free once the attack was completed. And, of course, he’d let him watch, as long as he remained compliant. He’d leave him with one good chance to get free. Or not, as the case might be, he thought with a shrug. Pinning all this on Mutaib was a nicely satisfying wrinkle, but not vital to his own escape or the success of the attack. But still…

  He looked at his watch: 11:20. Forty minutes to go. The television camera was panning over the crowd on the Capitol steps, stopping to zoom in each time the announcer identified an important official. Time to reincarnate himself as the lady next door. He pulled the curtains, being careful to remain out of sight, and checked the street outside. More cars than usual were parked along the street because most people had stayed home from work today. The morning news had reported that most of the country was as shut down as the capital, with all government offices closed, as well as the banks and all the major stock markets.

  He’d not been able to detect any lurking shooters sent from Mutaib parked out in the street, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t rented two town houses on this block. He could just imagine telescopic sights focused on his front door, and probably his back door, too, for that matter. But they would have to be circumspect. Looking through the crack in his curtain, he saw a police car cruise slowly down the street, the cops visibly scanning the parked cars and house fronts. Mutaib’s people would wait for that bomb in the basement to do its work, but if it didn’t—and it wouldn’t, not now—that’s when he’d expect long guns to begin poking out of windows.

  But Mutaib’s assassins, if they were there, wouldn’t see what they expected to see. Instead of Jäger Heismann slipping out a door or a window, what they would see was the beginning of a house fire and then an almost naked woman come screaming hysterically out of the house next door and run right across the street and into that mid-block alley.

  He checked on the pensioner once more, but he was still down. Then he left the room and crawled through the hole in the middle wall. He pushed the boxes aside in the closet and went into the woman’s bathroom, where his makeup, clothes, wig, and the breast pump were all laid out on the counter. He checked his watch again. He had thirty-seven minutes. He stripped off all his clothes, sat naked on the chair he’d pulled up to the bathroom countertop, and went to work.

  Connie propped herself up in the hospital bed to watch the inauguration. She had muted the sound, tired of the newscasters’ lame attempts to fill the time until the proceedings began. The visiting nurse had come, then left after arranging a few more things to her satisfaction. She had inspected the wound, changed the bandages, and adjusted the settings on the pain pump. She’d warned Connie that she was beginning the weaning process on the pain meds and that she would have to evaluate her tolerance for the new settings. Connie had a chart and the appropriate instruments for measuring her vitals, as well as water and food, books, the TV remote, and a telephone, all within reach.

  None of it probably would have been possible if Connie hadn’t been a nurse. But as it was, she thought she was medically safer here at home than she would have been in any hospital. She’d tried to reach Jake, but the headquarters operator had told her that everyone was on the street today to handle the inauguration. Connie had declined to leave a message on his voice mail, unsure of who might have access to it. She dreaded all the upcoming paperwork and legal documents that would be necessary because of Cat’s murder and also the Bladensburg woman’s death in Garrison Gap. Jake had promised to help her through all that, but she was probably going to need a lawyer.


  She finally saw the two presidents, the new and the outgoing, along with their wives, step out of the ornate Capitol doorway and approach the dais. The cameras did enough of a close-up to contain both men, and Connie thought they looked a little different, until she realized they were probably wearing makeup, which in the cold light of day subtly altered their features. They both wore long, bulky overcoats, made even bigger by their bullet-resistant vests. Her cable system had gone dark this morning, so she could only receive the three major networks via her rooftop antenna, and the quality of her picture was definitely diminished. She unmuted the set and sat back to watch.

  Swamp came to with a painful headache and a sense of total dread. He halfheartedly tested his bonds and confirmed that he had been trussed up again and was completely immobile. He thought about his options. Muster the strength to roll across the room and knock that damned mortar over? Or dislodge it enough to throw off the aiming point? But where was his captor? He listened carefully but could hear only the wind outside. The television—why couldn’t he hear the television? Had it been on mute before? There was tape over his ears, which might explain it.

  He tried to move—nothing major, just an inching movement with his hips and upper legs. He was almost getting used to this business of having his arms lashed up over and behind his head, and except for the cramp in his neck, he found he could move his upper body along the floor on the points of his elbows. But then the rope noose tightened about his neck, cutting off his air. Okay, so much for that idea, he thought, swallowing as he felt the sudden constriction, then easing back toward his original position.