Terminal Rage

by Khalifa, A. M.

  Blackwell had no clue what he was supposed to be looking at. Sensing that, Strauss wiggled his flashlight and pointed it to where he wanted Blackwell to focus his attention.

  “Right there, Alex.”

  There they were.

  Three upright freezers lined up, their stainless steel doors camouflaged by the aluminum walls of the room.

  Blackwell’s heart yanked around in his torso. The hair on his nape lifted and the temperature in the room dropped to sub-zero.

  The freezers were calling his name, but his feet were nailed to the floor. He scanned the room for Strauss and his men, who had attached their flashlights to their heads with special head straps, their guns at the ready.

  Srauss’s second guy took out gas masks from his backpack and passed them around.

  “Reinhard’s device checks for explosives across a wide perimeter. We must also account for chemicals and biological agents. Put this on, Alex.” Strauss handed Blackwell a mask.

  Blackwell hesitated at first, then complied. The mask felt immediately oppressive. He took a few steps toward the three metallic chests, then turned his head back to the Germans.

  After a deep breath to oxygenate his body, he approached the freezers and pulled open the door of the one closest to him.

  The light of the internal cabinet was blocked by whatever was stored inside, creating an odd halo that merely suggested the horrific content of the freezer. Strauss pointed his flashlight inside to expose a better view of the carnage.

  Blackwell began to hyperventilate.

  The mask was suffocating him so he ripped it off his face.

  Strauss lashed his hand out to stop him but it was too late.

  “It’s okay, Kristof. It’s okay.”

  The smell of frozen flesh and blood was unmistakable.

  An emaciated, naked man frozen like a slab of meat faced him with closed eyes.

  Blackwell’s toes curled up and his stomach heaved, producing a foul taste on his tongue. No matter how many times or how hard he swallowed he couldn’t get rid of it. The stench made his throat itch and burn. I should have kept that damn mask on.

  Get closer. Closer now.

  The victim had been executed with a clean shot to the forehead. Hardly any decomposition. Whoever froze him must have done it right after they killed him.

  Strauss walked up and squeezed his arm. “We can’t stay here forever.”

  Where have I seen this man before?

  Why was I summoned to witness this?

  Blackwell studied every contour of the dead man’s face, desperate for a clue or an epiphany. He’d seen him before but just couldn’t remember where.

  Eyes closed, Blackwell inhaled volumes of air.

  “Do you know this man, Alex?”

  Strauss’s voice trailed in the background.

  A rush of images and sounds haunted Blackwell’s mind, but still no memory of the dead man he was staring it.

  Burned corpses of children and women, charred to the bone, against the faint, melodic ringing of some sort of bell.

  Blood splattered against body parts still intact but nowhere near the bodies they were severed from.

  The bell was no longer sweet, but loud and oppressive, chiming at the same demonic rhythm of the horrific images flashing before his eyes of once happy mementos now transformed to relics of death and destruction.

  The aftermath of a heinous terrorist attack. It’s him!

  Blackwell cracked open his eyes, staring at the dead, frozen body of Tarek Nabulsi, one of the two men Seth had exchanged for Julia Price. Strauss opened the other two freezers. The body of Hassan Madi was in one of them.

  The third freezer also contained a brutally executed man who Blackwell did not recognize immediately.

  Unlike the Jordanians, the third man hadn’t been killed by a bullet, and his eyes were not closed. Wide open, merciless eyes of a butcher whose final seconds of life had been forever frozen in time. A large moustache. His throat had been cut like a smiley face.

  Demir Salimovic. The third dead man was the Bosnian handler who had recruited Nabulsi and Madi for the Sharm El Sheikh attack.

  “I know them all. I understand everything now.”

  “Do you want us to call it in or clean it up?”

  “We clean it up, Kristof.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Thursday, April 19, 2012—2:35 p.m.

  Hermosa Beach, CA

  When Blackwell left New York in November immediately after the Exertify case, the only thing he yearned for was to hold his kids and beg their forgiveness. Never again would he sacrifice their well-being for the greater good. Never again would he embroil himself in FBI business, no matter how urgent the crisis. The world is always on the brink of some disaster or beholden to the next deranged terrorist mastermind.

  As it turned out, most of the promises he’d made to himself on that mid-afternoon train ride from New York to DC turned out to be hollow knee-jerk reactions.

  He had failed to see something back then, only to fully acknowledge it today on his way to the Grand House Hotel in Hermosa Beach to meet Robert Slant. Blackwell finally accepted he was clinically dependent on winning. Not just protecting the innocent, but wrestling to the ground the most tenacious criminal minds. The four years he had spent trying to deny this was ample proof he wasn’t capable of doing anything else in life. The guilt over what happened in Hermosa Beach had only burned him out because it was the first time he’d lost. Some people abuse sugar, others indulge in narcotics, even sex can be highly addictive. Blackwell’s fix was winning. Armed with that knowledge, the only thing he needed to figure out in the long run was how to keep doing what he couldn’t stop doing without hurting the people he loved the most.

  No longer attached to the FBI, Blackwell had no legal authority or jurisdiction to be snooping around a federal case, let alone a closed one with no political desire to see it reopened.

  But that’s exactly what he came here to do.

  Slant was waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel, holding an expensive but battle-worn briefcase. He seemed more gaunt and agitated than the last time Blackwell had seen him in New York. As he approached Slant, the stench of tobacco smoke from his former CIA friend wafted toward Blackwell.

  When they had spoken on the phone a few days ago, Slant had explained he was in Hermosa Beach for covert meetings with wealthy Syrian dissidents pouring in with truckloads of cash and critical intelligence on their nation as it slowly burned itself to civil hell.

  Blackwell understood why many people at the Bureau would be uncertain of Slant’s loyalty. Whatever business he was up to here, it stunk of CIA, not that Blackwell cared. In fact, precisely because Slant was not an FBI bitch is what made Blackwell trust him enough to request the favor he was here to cash in.

  “Sorry it had to be here, Alex.”

  Slant must have read up on Blackwell’s case file. Four-and-a-half years ago, when Blackwell was working the Hermosa Beach case, he and Monica had spent the first and last night of the investigation at the very same hotel.

  “You know what they say about beggars and choosers. Thanks for sticking your neck out for me, Bob.”

  With no access to the classified databases and information networks of the FBI, Slant seemed like his best bet.

  “Let’s do this in my room. Safer.”

  Blackwell nodded and moved with Slant across the lobby. Despite the veneer of indifference he had hoped to project, his heart heaved heavier as memories of what had happened in this town four-and- a-half years ago bubbled to the surface.

  Early morning on July twenty-first, 2007, a masked, heavyset man broke into a house on Sixteenth street in Hermosa Beach. The wealthy couple who lived there had driven up to Santa Barbara for the day, leaving their three teenage daughters home alone.

  The intruder slipped in
through the backyard, held the girls up with a gun and then tied and gagged them.

  With heartless precision, he raped them on their parent’s bed, one after the other. Repeatedly.

  When he was done with them, he installed three high-tech devices around their necks and called their father on his cellphone. The abductor told him what he had done to his daughters in graphic details, and emailed him photos to prove it.

  His single demand was a three-million-dollar ransom to be transferred to a bank account in the Cayman Islands. A million for each daughter.

  The devices chained around the girls’ necks were collar bombs, loaded with plastic explosives set to a timer. If the ransom was paid, he would disable and unlock the collar bombs remotely. But if they didn’t comply within forty-eight hours, the collar bombs would explode.

  Using hidden cameras he had installed around the house, he would be monitoring the girls on the inside and surveilling the external perimeter of the property. If the cops or the FBI tried to rescue the girls, he would override the timer and detonate the bombs. And for good measure, the collar devices were connected wirelessly to a beacon signal planted somewhere inside the house. If any of the girls tried to escape and went out of range, it would trigger the explosives.

  He hung up, left the house, and until this day was never identified, captured or heard from again.

  Blackwell was part of an FBI team lead by Monica flown in from DC to work the case. He wasn’t just one of the Bureau’s best negotiators, but had extensive training with the Office of Victim Assistance at the Bureau. Many times during hostage crises, events changed rapidly and he would find himself communicating with the hostages instead of their captor. That’s how it had panned out in Hermosa Beach. With the abductor gone, Blackwell counseled the girls and collected every morsel of intelligence from them while the information remained vivid in their minds.

  After a grueling first day on the case, Blackwell and Monica went back to their hotel. They had less than five hours to get some shut-eye before resuming the operation.

  While they rested, the FBI techies would work around the clock to come up with a possible extraction and rescue plan, which Monica would either approve or reject, opting instead to pay the ransom.

  Slant opened the door of his beachfront room and showed Blackwell in. The shutters of the balcony were open, with the afternoon sun flooding the room. He tossed his briefcase on the coffee table and turned to Blackwell.

  “What can I get you?”

  Blackwell didn’t respond immediately and scanned every inch of the room. The earthy green and tan color scheme was exactly as he remembered it, as were the plush fabrics and carpets. Even the evocative aromas permeating the air took him back.

  “Sure. Corona.”

  “I’ve got manly drinks too if you want,” Slant chuckled.

  As Slant fiddled with the mini bar, Blackwell stepped out on the balcony. His eyes trailed to the shoreline. The beach was empty except for a little boy and his father flying a red kite. The tiny figure of the child reminded him of Milo at that age.

  On a balcony just like this it all started four-and-a-half years ago.

  He and Monica had picked up some In-and-Out burgers and wolfed them in the car driving to the hotel for the night.

  After he had checked in his room ready to call it a night, Monica called to ask him over for a nightcap. She would pop open a couple of frosty Coronas for them. A cold drink and chilled conversation would do him good.

  Blackwell had never worked a case with Monica before. Despite the office rumors to the contrary, she seemed approachable.

  And she was smoking hot.

  Looks aside, she was a tough agent with an enviable case record. Whenever he had crossed paths with her in the corridors of the Hoover building, she had nothing but polite smiles to offer him. The male agents who had worked with her made her out to be some nasty piece of work, but Blackwell wasn’t an idiot. He understood what it meant when a man called a woman who could do his job far better an ‘ass-licking, opportunistic bitch.’ Misogyny with a dash of good old-fashioned professional spite was endemic at the Bureau.

  They sat on her balcony with their feet up on the wooden rails nursing their drinks. Even without the benefit of varnish on her toenails, he tried hard to keep his eyes off her bare feet. He liked the sight of them but didn’t want her to catch him checking her out. Monica wore a wasabi green T-shirt through which the imprint of her nipples declared there to be no bra for the night. Not much later, he would also discover there had never been any panties either.

  With no makeup and with her hair set wild, there was something primal about her he had never seen before. Her no-bullshit, bad-ass work persona had come off at the end of the day like contact lenses or a pair of tight shoes. She spoke candidly of her personal life, even confessing to the handful of affairs she’d had with fellow agents. Like quicksand, Blackwell was sucked into her orbit. By the third beer he was spilling the beans about everything from his work frustrations to his failing marriage.

  Melanie had become resentful of his job and his unwavering commitment to the FBI. She was jealous of his career because she’d given up hers to raise the kids. The last five years of their marriage could be summed up as her breaking his balls every day, and Blackwell taking all the long-distance jobs he could get his hands on to be away from home as long as possible.

  As he poured his heart out to Monica about what the FBI meant to him, she reached out and held his hand and their feet touched on the rail. Neither of them questioned it or made the other feel awkward. The touching just happened and was electric.

  After they had lost count of the beers, Monica got up to use the washroom and gave him an unexpected peck on the lips, once again, without any implicit drama.

  No buildup.

  No guilt.

  No promises.

  Just a kiss neither of them would remember the next day with the benefit of sobriety.

  A minute passed.

  Then five.

  Then ten.

  Blackwell turned around to see her through the open balcony door when she came out, but that only happened a whole fifteen minutes later.

  She emerged naked.

  He swallowed hard.

  This was more than a carefree footsie or an impulsive kiss on the lips.

  She dimmed the lights in the room, slipped under the sheets of her bed and purred softly.

  “Alex?”

  “Yes?”

  He could barely hear his voice against his raging heart. Even as his mind tried to steer him clear of danger, Blackwell knew exactly how this night would end.

  “Will you come here and fuck me?”

  As Slant popped open the Corona and poured the frothy foam into chilled glasses, Blackwell couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this was the same room where he and Monica screwed until the early hours of the morning.

  All agents, including the most hardened ones, know that sex and field work stress feed off each other. The perils of the job set the mood for risky behavior, while sex itself is the greatest releaser of mental and physical exhaustion. That’s why you didn’t even need to be miserably married like Blackwell to end up banging one of your colleagues. You just have to earn it by working field cases long enough.

  Slant’s room was tidy but all Blackwell could see were bed sheets scattered on the floor, his body fused into Monica on the carpet because they couldn’t wait to get to the bed. Thrusting inside her with animal vigor as Monica moaned and screamed for mercy, for more, for Blackwell to go faster, to go nice and easy, but whatever he did, to never stop. All night with an astonishing recovery rate he thought had long abandoned him when he passed thirty-five, Blackwell’s body and soul melted in ways he never dreamed would be possible again. Two fiery bodies like molten lava against each other. Her tongue licking his nipples into hard pebbles. The taste of he
r saliva inside his mouth. A forbidden hunger being satiated to the tune of uncensored screams gushing out of her mouth as they both ascended to heaven and crash-landed simultaneously.

  Four-and-a-half years later as he stood in Slant’s almost-identical room, his soul was once again raided by the heady mix of pheromone-infused sweat, Monica’s intoxicating perfume, and the erotic stench of a man and woman extracting every nectar of pleasure from each other while they could.

  On that day when the sun finally cracked, Blackwell had a smirk perpetually branded on his face after many long, sexually uneventful years. His mind raced as it spawned exhilarating fantasies of leaving Melanie and starting fresh with Monica. His carnal urges and desires had been rekindled. A woman he had so far only admired from afar had swiftly colonized his heart and swept him to the dirtiest places he had only ever dreamed of in the past.

  His body soaked in dopamine, Blackwell even rationalized how getting together with Monica would be good for his kids. The pain he and his wife had inflicted on them with their constant selfish fighting couldn’t have been doing them much good. They’d probably be better off with divorced parents who are content, rather than married ones who are stinking miserable.

  At some point during the night when he and Monica were doing the life out of each other, the FBI’s bomb squad and rescue team at command post had come up with a plan. A way to break into the house and rescue the girls by neutralizing the three triggers that could set off the collar bombs.

  The perpetrator had given them forty-eight hours to pay the ransom, and there was still plenty of hours left, so the timer reaching its deadline was a moot point. Which meant the extraction plan had to neutralize the two remaining events, the girls trying to escape and breaking the connection with the beacon signal, or a direct remote instruction from the attacker.

  Overnight, the tech team had hacked into the beacon signal, successfully cloning and broadcasting it inside the house—that took care of the second trigger. A Hostage Rescue Team unit would storm the house and extract the girls, keeping them near the fake beacon signal at all times, allowing the FBI to move them.