Countdown to Mecca

by Michael Savage

  Jack, meanwhile, found himself in the center of a police maelstrom. Armed cops seemed to appear from everywhere, like an never-expanding dartboard with Jack as the bull’s-eye. Only one weapon was pointed at him. Every officer, save one, was fanning out, looking for the shooter and securing the scene.

  That one, however, marched directly at Jack, his Sig Sauer P229 automatic in one hand, and his other hand out. It was Captain Daniel Jeffreys, with an expression that combined concerned and relief.

  Feeling that same relief wash over him, all Jack’s fear and tension also erupted.

  “What is this?” he shouted in adrenaline-fueled defiance. “Have you been following me?!”

  Jeffreys stopped in midstep, and nearly laughed in disbelief. Instead he boomed back, “You’re damn right we’ve been following you!”

  Jack stepped forward and grabbed the captain by the arms. “Thanks!” he exclaimed, a little too loudly, in the cop’s face. “What took you so long?!”

  18

  “He got away,” Doc said as he appeared from around the back of the DR building. “But I might have caught a glimpse of him on video.”

  “Let me guess,” Jeffreys said drily. “About six feet tall, slim, blondish?”

  Doc raised his eyebrows as he neared the pair. “They teach mentalism at the Academy now?” He jerked the digicam up. “I might even have got his van’s license plate.”

  “I doubt it,” Jack said miserably. “These guys have a way of obscuring their plates. I learned that at Sammy’s apartment.”

  They were sitting on the back lid of a SWAT van at the edge of the parking lot. A uniformed officer handed Jeffreys some coffees, and Jeffreys handed them over to Jack and Doc.

  “Why was Schoenberg killed?” the cop wanted to know, though he was really thinking out loud. “Were the Israelis catching up with him?”

  “Or maybe the United States?” Jack suggested.

  “That’s a little paranoid,” Doc pointed out.

  “Someone’s tried to kill me twice in as many days,” Jack retorted. “I’ve earned my paranoia.”

  A squat EMT made a disapproving face as she tried to tend the cuts and scrapes on Jack’s face, neck, and shoulder. Jack shut up, raised his chin, and let her do her work.

  The forensics van pulled up. Jack and Doc watched as the two technicians got out. They moved to the back and donned protective gear.

  “Come back to the station to make a statement,” Jeffreys said.

  “Can’t I make it here?” Jack asked.

  The captain smirked. “Sure. Then how do you propose to get back to town?” He motioned at the bullet-ridden Ford SUV. “Come on. I’ll drive you. And I promise, not a single question until we get there.”

  Jeffreys was as good as his word. But once they returned to the captain’s office, Jack and Doc saw why. Carl Forsyth and Dover Griffith were waiting for them. Dover came right over to Jack and studied his face with concern. Seemingly unconsciously her hand raised to tenderly touch the deepest cut on his cheek. Jack winced at the pain her touch of the wound elicited.

  “You should see the bull that gored me,” he joked as Jeffreys closed his office door and lowered the shades on his windows.

  “Who was he?” Forsyth seethed as Doc sat on the edge of Jeffrey’s desk.

  “Your guess is as good as Jeffreys’s,” Jack said as Dover took a position between her boss and her boyfriend.

  “Maybe better,” Doc drawled, handing the digicam to Forsyth, with the video he made while trying to catch the sniper.

  Dover and Jeffreys leaned in on either side of the FBI chief and all three watched the jiggling point-of-view shot as Doc had run toward the tower. Suddenly the image shot upward, and tried to zoom in, on a moving figure in the distance.

  “He slid down that ladder like a circus acrobat,” Doc commented. “And he ran like a gold medal sprinter. Even if I had my six-shooter, I doubt even I could have nailed him. I certainly couldn’t catch him.”

  The others watched as the man, his head obscured by a hoodie, disappeared behind some hedges. Moments later, they could hear a van engine. The image seemed to burst onto another parking lot and Doc’s camera just caught the van as it roared out the exit.

  “Can I send this to our techies?” Forsyth asked. “They should be able to clean it up.”

  Jack seemed reluctant.

  “You’ll get it back, better than you left it,” Forsyth promised.

  Jack nodded.

  “Even if they obscured the tags,” Jeffreys said, “the van may have been a rental. That could give us something.”

  “Yeah,” Forsyth said. “We’ll find the car and discover that the renter paid in cash and used a fake name, while the security camera will only show a hood, sunglasses, and maybe fake facial hair.” He shrugged apologetically. “At least that’s the customary MO. Still, we’ve got to explore every angle.” Forsyth looked at Jack. “You think this guy was one of the hit squad shooters?”

  “I don’t think so. This guy is in a different class entirely. The Levi Plaza guys didn’t have the single-purpose mind-set of experienced killers.”

  “Yeah,” Jeffreys agreed. “I don’t know a pro hit man who’d ever let themselves be hit by a trolley.”

  “So?” Forsyth asked. “I know you, Jack. You’re thinking something.”

  “Only what I’ve been saying all along,” Jack said darkly. “You’ve got the same information we do. How’s it adding up to you?”

  “Two and two is equaling five, Jack,” he responded, ticking off the facts, as he saw them, on his fingers. “Yes, a Russian plane went down. But we have no conclusive intel that it’s connected to this magic word your ‘friend’ supposedly heard. And yes, another friend of yours says that something ‘biotoxic’ is missing.”

  “They said ‘biotoxic’ and not ‘nuclear’?”

  “That was the exact word they used,” Forsyth replied. “On the alert scale, that’s considerably lower than ‘nuclear,’ since it’s considered, at best, a localized danger.”

  “As far as anyone knows so far,” Jack said, emphasizing the qualifier.

  “Fine,” Forsyth agreed. “Point is we have no idea whether that’s connected, either. See the problem I’m having, Jack? Anybody can take anything that happens to anyone anywhere in the world, then play ‘six degrees’ with it until it comes out just as circumstantial.”

  “But what about what just happened?” Jack asked, pointing at his facial wounds. “Are these just circumstantial?”

  “Jack,” Forsyth said, “both you and Schoenberg have plenty of enemies who wouldn’t need a magic word to try deep-sixing you. In your case, every Muslim and Mexican in the Bay area. And that’s just to start with.”

  “Uh-uh, Carl. That would be just too coincidental.”

  “Really? That makes more sense to me than dragging in decorated U.S. Army heroes into this tenuous, highly imaginative scheme.”

  Jack didn’t agree but he had no evidence to dispute what Forsyth had just said. He looked to the other’s faces, seeing concern in his friends’ expressions, and conviction in the police captain’s.

  “My immediate concern, here, is that Schoenberg was assassinated,” Jeffreys said. “I can assure you both that we will be investigating that without prejudice to where the trail might lead. And for the record: the general description of the assassin corresponds with the description of a man who has been looking for someone who fits Anastasia Vincent’s description.”

  Jack’s eyebrows raised at that revelation.

  Jeffreys continued carefully, “But I think you would have to admit that, even if this attack was connected to the previous attack, it is more likely because of something else Ms. Vincent did, something she isn’t telling you, rather than some sort of international conspiracy that involves the second highest-ranking officer in the United States Special Command.”

  Jack had to admit that when they put it like that, it sounded like he was lost.

  “So give me one good
reason I shouldn’t lock you up, Jack,” Forsyth said.

  “On what grounds, sir?” Dover demanded.

  “Obstruction of a criminal investigation, for one.”

  “‘Whoever willfully endeavors by means of bribery,’” said a voice as the door flew open. “Emphasis on the bribery. Has that occurred?”

  They all looked up to see Sol Minsky standing just inside the office with an extremely embarrassed police officer behind him.

  “I’m sorry, sir, he barged in—”

  “No problem, officer,” Jeffreys said, putting his fists on the desk and slowly rising from his seat. “Our visitor knows this place better than all of us put together.” He lowered his brow and pinned Minsky with his gaze. “And he knew it long before you were born.”

  Sol just smiled and glanced over his shoulder. “That means you’re dismissed, sonny.”

  The desk cop made a face and left. Sol, resplendent in a perfect suit, calmly closed the door behind him.

  “To what do we owe this rare public appearance?” Jeffreys asked evenly.

  “I heard my partners in—”

  “Crime?” Forsyth interjected.

  “Documentary production,” Sol corrected affably, “were being detained. I also heard that one of our company vehicles was damaged in an illegal attack on these innocent bystanders. So I thought I’d give these men a ride.” He looked cordially from Forsyth’s consternated face to Jeffreys’s grudgingly impressed visage. “That is, of course, if neither of you gentlemen has something better than a half-assed charge.”

  Doc stood. “Are we free to go, Captain?”

  Jeffreys nodded without taking his eyes off Sol.

  Doc’s own gaze shifted. “Are we free to go, Agent Forsyth?”

  There was another moment of tension, but then Forsyth’s shoulders relaxed. “Get out of here,” he growled. The three men started to do just that, Jack and Dover exchanging a tender look as he walked by.

  19

  General Thomas Brooks waited impatiently for the call from the Army Chief of Staff to come through. He’d known General Horace Ortiz since West Point, when Ortiz was a firstie and Brooks a lowly plebe. Brooks’s ability as a pitcher won him a spot on the Point’s junior varsity baseball team that year, which ordinarily would have accorded him a modicum of respect from upper classmen like Ortiz. But apparently Brooks had beat out a friend of Ortiz’s for the position, and the future chief of staff had ridden him all the harder. All these years later, traces of that original gulf lingered in their relationship; Brooks could have earned the Medal of Honor and he would still taste vinegar in his mouth every time he had to deal with the man who had become known as “Asskisser-Ortiz.”

  The service chief finally came on the line. Over the years his voice had lost most of its Hispanic twang—except when he talked to people he’d known back when.

  “There he is,” drawled Ortiz. “How are you, Tommy-gun?”

  “I’m fine, General.” Brooks made a point of showing his superior exaggerated respect.

  “Ready for your new … assignment?”

  So that was what they were calling being “MacArthured” nowadays. “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Good.” The pause that followed told Brooks that playtime was over. “I understand you gave a speech at Livermore last night.”

  “Yes, General. Part of my farewell tour.”

  “Huh,” Ortiz grunted. “I’m told it was quite … provocative.”

  “It’s nothing I haven’t said before.”

  “Well, that’s just it, ‘Bomb-em Brooks.’ You don’t have a cotton mouth, like me. Yours gets you in trouble time and time again.”

  Brooks remembered one of those times in particular, when mouthing off to a certain firstie had earned him a good thrashing—for which he, Brooks, was then punished with a boatload of demerits and several hours of “walking the area”—essentially going back and forth with a rifle on his shoulder. Of course, somehow his punishment didn’t interfere with his pitching schedule—a good thing for the Black Knights, as it came during his string of twenty-two innings of no-hit baseball.

  “Frankly, General, you don’t do yourself any favors by implying that America should go to war with Islam.”

  “I’m not in this to help myself and I’m not ‘implying’ anything,” Brooks corrected. “The West is already at war with Islam. We’ve been under attack since the Beirut bombing during the Reagan administration, and you know it. Islam won’t be satisfied until we’re wiped out. There’s an epic war going on in the Middle East right now. Egypt, Syria, Iraq—the radicals are marching. The problem is, most of the West has closed its eyes. And our leaders—”

  “Damit!” Ortiz interrupted. “Now I know why you didn’t get CENTCOM. Look, I don’t care what you say in private. But you keep Tommy-gunning your mouth off in public while you still have those stars next to those huge chips on your shoulders, and you’ll find out what the Chairman can do. Think we can’t do worse than put you out to pasture? Think again. In short, Thom, this is coming from the commander-in-chief. Shut. Your. Big. Mouth. That’s a direct order. Do you understand?”

  Brooks thought of many things he wanted to say. But what he did say was, “Yes, sir.” Ortiz sighed, and took a more conciliatory tone now that the message had been delivered.

  “Look, Tommy-gun, be reasonable. Keep your trap shut for the next week. Just one week. Then, once we shift you out of the army, you can say whatever you’d like and the public will be free to label you a lunatic crank on their own.”

  “Are we done here, General?”

  “We’re done here, General,” Ortiz replied. “I have more important things to do than explain to everybody that one of my senior officers is trying to start World War III.”

  On that, Ortiz hung up. General Thomas Brooks looked at the phone and spoke quietly but distinctly.

  “I’m not trying,” he stated. “I’m doing it.”

  20

  Montgomery Morton typed furiously on his smartphone, trying to get the message finished before the general came out of the office. They were going to be tight on time getting to the airport. There was too much going on, all of it bad: Pyotr, the last pieces of the device, a sick technician in Saudi Arabia—to say nothing of regular army business related to the turnover of commands.

  On top of it he was trying to contain the damage he had caused from overreacting to the escort overhearing the wrong thing. His old G-2 friends, the ones who were ready, willing, and able to help him out, were back at their units, scattered all over the country. The wounded one’s story about a car accident had been accepted. Morton was certain that none of them would ever betray him. All of them would rather forget the whole stinking SNAFU.

  He rubbed his eyes and tried to switch mental gears. Brooks was full of last-minute questions about everything; the latest was on the aircraft. And there were payments due. Or missing—Morton couldn’t keep everything straight. He was suspicious that the Russian mercenaries Brooks had hired had tried to double-deal with someone; there were communications on the website system they’d set up that he couldn’t account for. But for some reason, Brooks didn’t want to hear it. He trusted them, and their leader Pyotr Ansky, more than the people who’d been with the conspiracy since the beginning. Even more than he trusted Morton, it seemed.

  Well, he deserved that, Morton supposed. If an underling had behaved the way he had, Morton might’ve done the same as Brooks. But it was best to stop dwelling on it. That fiasco is over. He concentrated instead on the fact that the Russians had been hired to deliver the material, which had been stolen and placed on the plane by two hand-picked former Special Forces members. He thought Pyotr’s involvement was to end there. But it seems he was too talented to let go.

  To top it all off, Morton’s wife was almost as bad as the general when it came to his promised presence at his son’s sixth birthday party. He wanted to go very badly, but didn’t she understand it really wasn’t up to him? Morton felt the beginnings of a
nother headache coming on. He pulled the small case with his medicine from his pocket and quickly popped out another pill. He was about to shove it in his mouth when his peripheral vision caught a bulletin on his computer’s 24/7 newsfeed alert.

  “German Industrialist Killed in SF Attack,” it read. All thoughts of the pill were gone. Morton leaned over and read on furiously. “Helmut Schoenberg, the CEO of German conglomerate Der Warheit Unternehmen was shot to death this morning in a bold attack outside a building belonging to one of his companies in Oakland, California. Police have questioned at least one eyewitness, identified as former cable television host Jack Hatfield.”

  Hatfield? Again? he raged inside.

  “The murder occurred at approximately seven A.M., when Schoenberg was apparently inspecting a building owned by DR Inc., a subsidiary of the German conglomerate. The building has been vacant for approximately three months, following consolidation of their manufacturing operations overseas and the relocation of the business offices.”

  “Can I get you a glass of water?”

  Morton jerked in his chair, his head snapping up at the sound of the quiet, lightly accented, voice. “What?”

  “For your pill,” said Peter Andrews solicitously, back in his handsome pinstriped blue serge suit. “Headache?”

  Morton looked at the small white orb in his hand like it was an alien from outer space. “Uh, no, I mean yes, it is a pill, but no, you don’t have to get me any water.”

  “Very well. I am here with the car to take the general to the airport.”

  “Oh. Great. I’ll let him know.”

  “Thank you.” Pyotr walked calmly away, but stopped just inside the office door. “Hope your headache goes away.”

  “Me, too,” said Morton. Then, a moment later, Morton’s headache went back to the general’s car, and he finally got to take the pill. Even before he swallowed it, he felt better. If Brooks didn’t harangue him further, all would go according to schedule, and he might, just might, be able to make it to his son’s birthday party as well.