by Tom Field
She picked up her bag, grabbed her coffee in her flask and walked up to the door. As she opened the door to leave she said,
“God, I want you so much. You really are the best kisser in the world.”
And with that, she was gone.
She knew how to play him.
There was definitely no doubt about that whatsoever.
He had one call to make before he jumped into the shower. He took out his cell phone and dialled the number.
“Hello Ryan,” a female voice answered.
“I need your help, like immediately,” he said. “Is Tackler with you?”
“Of course he is,” the voice replied.
“I need you both for the next few days. Can you drop everything else, it’s important?”
“This sounds urgent?”
“Yes Nicole-Louise. It’s very urgent.”
“Then you had best come on over. The Old Man has already said we need to be here around the clock for you.”
“See you in an hour,” he said and then he hung up the phone.
TWELVE
An hour later, He was ringing the intercom of Nicole-Louise and Tackler’s building on Park Avenue in Lennox Hill.
“Come on up,” a gruff, barely awake voice said. He walked in and climbed one flight of stairs to the first floor and knocked on the door of apartment fourteen. The door was opened by a guy in his early thirties, who was wearing navy blue towel shorts which came down to his knees, and a white, grubby tee shirt which had a picture of a front page of the New York times stating, ‘Sid Vicious is Dead!’. The guy was no more than five feet seven and could only have weighed a maximum of one hundred and forty pounds.
“Hello Tackler,” Ward said.
“Hello,” he replied, “Come in.”
Nicole-Louise and Tackler knew everything that there was to know about Ward because they were the ones who had made his electronic footprint disappear. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they were among the top five computer hackers in the world. They found everything eventually. Ward had paid them two hundred thousand dollars of Centrepoint’s money to move the seventeen million that he took from the South Africans, making sure ten could not be traced and only seven would be discovered. The incredible irony was that two months later, Centrepoint had paid them another two hundred thousand to find the seven million he believed Ward had taken. The three of them would always laugh at this.
“Oh look, it’s our lack of sleep for the next few days,” a woman said as he walked into the living area.
“Hello Nicole-Louise,” he said with a smile.
“No time for pleasantries,” she said, ignoring his smile.
Nicole-Louise was tall, had long, light brown hair and alert, blue eyes. And the fact that she was always so cool under pressure and dressed so casually was what Ward loved about her the most.
She and Tackler made an odd couple. They didn’t seem to fit. She was outgoing, strong, confident and vibrant and he never said much. He told Ward once that he hated people in general but liked him a lot. He always took this as a real compliment until Nicole-Louise told him one day that he only mentioned that to him because he made him feel uneasy, and he was petrified that one day he would kill him. The compliment lost weight that day.
Nicole-Louise studied him to gauge how worried he was. She always did this and somehow, she was always able to measure by his demeanour how serious a situation was. She was the only person who could do this with him.
“Well?” she demanded rather than asked.
“I want you to search for everything possible on someone. I want you to hack into everywhere and find something, anything, that doesn’t look right. I want you to hack into the FBI and CIA systems and get me every bit of information on all FFW sympathisers, where they are, and who would be most likely to want to help someone. I want you to try and find a bomber who is coming to New York any day now.”
“What kind of bomb?” Tackler asked.
“A big bomb. You know what happened in Paris and London over the past few days I take it?” he asked.
They both nodded at the same time.
“It will be bigger than that, much bigger. So right now, the three of us are the best chance of stopping it.”
“No pressure then,” Nicole-Louise said.
“Names?” Tackler asked.
“The bomber is Asif Fulken; start there and with the FFW list,” he said.
Tackler scribbled Fulken’s name down as Ward spoke.
“How long do you think we have? You said a few days?” Nicole-Louise asked.
“He won’t be here yet. If we find him before he gets here then we will stop it happening. You two chase him from here and I’ll chase him from the ground. I need that FFW list urgently.”
“We will have it in an hour and will e-mail it to your phone,” Tackler said.
“Do we know where the bomb will go off?” Nicole-Louise asked.
“No, but I think we will stop it,” he replied.
“What makes you so sure of that?” Nicole-Louise asked, still studying him intensely.
“Because I already know who the people behind the bombings are.”
THIRTEEN
Outside in the street, he called Gilligan.
“I’m on Park Avenue, come and get me, driver.”
“You are at Nicole-Louise’s and Tacklers?” Gilligan asked.
“I was.”
“I’ll be there in thirty,” Gilligan replied.
Ward hung up.
He kept playing over and over in his head what he had seen on the footage that UKBC News had showed him, and while he admitted to himself that they were subtle moments in the grand scheme of things, he also knew that they were the defining moments in stopping the New York bomb. Gilligan turned up after twenty five minutes and pulled into the kerb driving the standard black Sudan and he climbed into the car.
“Sorry I’m early,” Gilligan said, flashing his big smile.
Gilligan was a big guy in every sense of the word, and not just because he was six foot three and must have weighed pushing two hundred and eighty pounds. He was in his early forties and a lot of his muscle had lost its granite like feel, but it still retained enough definition to send out a signal that said, ‘Don’t mess with me’.
He had been brought up on the tough streets of Harlem and Ward knew that he would get the right feel for everything that was happening in New York. His facial features always made Ward smile; he was the spitting image of the former boxer Marvin Haggler. He was a brawler too, and he often wondered if they had been adopted when young and were both unaware of their connection to each other. It was a point he had raised with him a number of times, and a point always met with contempt by Gilligan.
“So, what do you know about the FFW funders and supporters here in New York?” he asked.
“As much as anyone but the Kingpins tend to move around so they aren’t always in one fixed place,” Gilligan said.
“So how would we go about finding the Kingpins? Like today?” he inquired.
“Easy. Everyone who comes to New York descends on Times Square. Like everywhere else in the world, there are all sorts of terrorist groups watching who comes in and who is new on the block. It isn’t just us who monitor the visitors. The FFW eyes down there belong to a guy called Bassam Khadil. He’s a bit of a punk, pretty harmless if I’m honest. He just plays at being a terrorist. All he really does for them is act as a phone boy, communicating information for the real important guys to establish who is who and why,” Gilligan said with the tenacity that he had grown to rely on from him.
“Then we should go and pay him a visit,” Ward instructed.
They drove the couple of miles to Times Square and pulled into a side road just off of West 46th Street, close to the Church of Scientology of New York. Gilligan stepped out of the car without saying anything and Ward followed until he stopped at the rear entrance of a building. The walls of the building were thick with grime, only broken up by the occasional piec
e of graffiti, which demonstrated that the street artist who signed it, ‘Paynt-Tuch’, was more talented in his artwork than he was with his grammar. There was a cold looking grey door made of thin steel; secure to the passing eye, but likely not impregnable. Gilligan approached it and said, “OK I’ll do the talking to start with? Your limey accent probably won’t get us invited in.”
“Go for it but be vague. Ask them what they have heard about an impending event happening soon. Let’s play a little dumb, see what they give us before we turn the screw.”
“OK,” Gilligan replied.
“One more thing,” Ward added, “How many guys are likely to be in there and is this likely to turn nasty? I’d hate for you to get hurt.”
“I’m pretty sure I can cope but if I get scared I’ll give you the nod,” Gilligan said, flashing his smile.
‘God, I swear you and Marvin Haggler were separated at birth,” he said, his face showing no sign of a smile.
Gilligan knocked on the door and the door rocked. ‘Definitely not impregnable’ Ward thought to himself. A short Middle Eastern guy opened the door, probably from Iraq, he concluded.
“What do you want?” the guy asked in very poor, broken English.
“I want to see Bassam Khadil,” Gilligan said with authority.
“He not here, I not see him, I never heard of him,” the little guy comically replied, and he went to close the door. Gilligan put his foot in the crack of the door and his shoulder against it. The guy was not going to be able to close it.
“Don’t waste my time, this is important,” Gilligan said as he pushed through the door and stepped past the little guy.
“You stop there. You not scare me Mr. Marvin Haggler, there will be trouble,” he protested with a less than convincing threat, which Ward found impossible not to be amused by.
Gilligan turned and delivered a right hook into the little guys stomach that lifted his feet of the ground about six inches, knocking the wind clean out of him before he fell to his knees, doubled over, desperately trying to get air into his lungs.
“Go Marvin!” Ward said, a comment Gilligan chose to ignore. They walked along a small corridor, across a worn brown and orange carpet, towards a brown door, which had paint peeling off and without breaking stride; Gilligan turned the handle and walked in.
Inside the room there were five guys; all similar in size and stature to the guy who had opened the front door. The room was clearly the kitchen, judging by the filthy yellow lino floor, and it contained a sink, dirty looking refrigerator, a stool and two cupboards on the walls that were open and housed such items as tea, biscuits, sugar and various items of food that Ward did not recognise. Four of the guys were sitting around a grubby looking table in the centre of the room, talking and drinking from ornate Turkish coffee cups. The other guy was sitting on a stool, glued to a laptop he had on the side counter. The four at the table looked up startled and the guy on the laptop closed the lid to hide whatever it was he was viewing on the screen. Instinctively, the four guys sitting down put their hands flat on the table to show they were offering no threat and holding no weapons. Ward noted that this was something they were used to and that surprise visits by various arms of the security service were something that they knew how to respond to.
“I want to talk to you,” Gilligan said to the guy sitting at the head of the table. The hierarchy of command working even this low down the chain, the head of the table being the place to be, and so this must be Bassam Khadil, Ward thought to himself.
“What do you want?” Khadil replied.
“I want to know who is new in town,” Gilligan said.
“Well there is a new pimp on 7th and a great new show at the Marquis theatre,” Khadil flippantly replied.
“Very funny,” Gilligan said, “I need to know what’s happening. We have wind that something is going down and you are the eyes and the guy who knows the most, so we need your help.”
Gilligan was smart. His deliberate massaging of Khadil’s ego had him thinking he was important straight away. Ward noticed that it was plainly clear from Khadil’s reaction that he had no idea what Gilligan was talking about. Guys that low down the food chain are never trusted with important information, but that wasn’t what they were there for.
“No matter what I know, I would never share with you. I am a warrior fighting a holy war and what is going to happen will be part of our cause,” Khadil declared, looking at the other three guys around the table to demonstrate how important he was, and that he could be trusted with the secrets of the elders. All three of them looked back at him in awe.
Ward walked over towards the guy with the laptop. The guy immediately held it close to his chest, wrapping his arms around it to protect it, almost with the intensity that a mother protects a new-born.
“Listen Khadil,” Gilligan continued, “We know you are a big player, so what can you tell me?”
“The end is coming, the west will fall,” he declared in a totally unconvincing tone.
Ward stepped towards the guy with the laptop. The guy held it even tighter. He leant forward and without speaking, tried taking it from him. As he pulled the laptop towards him, the guy’s vice-like grip meant that he came towards him too. Without warning, he jerked his head forward eight inches and smashed his forehead into the bridge of the guy’s nose. The guy released his grip on the laptop immediately. One of the men at the table went to stand up in a half-hearted attempt to look tough, but Gilligan put his right hand on the his shoulder and the force of Gilligan’s hand pushing down sent a clear enough indicator that he would be fighting a lost cause, and so he promptly re-assumed his sitting position.
As the guy fell to the floor clutching his nose, Ward opened the laptop and hit the return button so that the screen came back to life. He studied the screen for no more than two seconds and then closed it again. He put the laptop back on the counter and turned towards the table, slapping the guy on the back of the head as he moved towards the group sitting down. He stopped next to the guy sitting to the right of Khadil and said, “You don’t know anything, do you?” looking straight into Khadil’s eyes.
Khadil was momentarily confused by Ward’s accent. The realisation that something big was happening crept over his face.
“Here’s what you will do,” Ward said, “You will tell me the name and address of the person that you relay your information to. If you don’t, my friend here will beat it out of you, so we get it anyway.”
“I can’t. I can’t betray my brothers,” Khadil replied in a quivering tone.
Before he had finished his sentence, Ward smashed his left elbow into the side of the face of the guy sitting next to Khadil.
It caught the guy square on the jaw with a sickening crack, which echoed around the room as the blow landed. The guy let out a high-pitched scream and rolled to the left and fell off of the chair and onto the floor, right next to Khadil’s feet.
“Who do you report to?” he calmly asked Khadil again.
“Hassan Al Holami,” Khadil replied without hesitation.
“How do you contact him?”
“By cell phone,” Khadil stuttered.
“What does he tell you to specifically look for?”
“Anyone who doesn’t look like a tourist, any potential homeless kids who could be persuaded to join our cause, any police activity that seems out of place. And I also notify him of the arrival of any brothers that have arranged to come here.”
“Where do I find Al Holami?”
“I really can’t tell you that, there will be reprisals.”
Ward kicked the guy on the floor who was still whimpering, clutching his jaw.
“Where do I find Al Holami?” he asked again, “He will never know you told me.”
“He’s in Bowery on East 3rd street, apartment block 153, number 4, ground floor, opposite the marble cemetery,” Khadil conceded.
“Good. If he knows we are coming, I will come back and kill you all. Is that clear?” Ward asked ca
lmly.
“Yes. Just do not mention you spoke to me,” Khadil begged.
“I won’t.”
He nodded towards Gilligan and they both walked out of the kitchen. As they opened the door the guy who Gilligan had punched in the stomach was still on the floor, just about catching his breath. They walked past without comment or a second glance.
“You sure the FFW have a handle on any of this?” Gilligan asked.
“It’s a dilemma for them. They know Asif Fulken is coming, but they also want him dead for running away from the brotherhood. They would not be able to actively assist him but they would willingly hide him. If the bomb did go off, they would welcome the destruction it would cause, but after that he would still be hunted. I think they will be prepared to give him a safe house and maybe the equipment he needs, but he will still effectively be on his own.”
“You think we will stop this?”
“Yes I do,” Ward replied, “I know the bomber, roughly who is behind it and roughly when it will happen.”
“How do you know all of this stuff when everyone else is in the dark?”
Ward ignored the question.
“One last thing, what was the guy on the laptop looking at to warrant you giving him a slap?” Gilligan asked as they climbed into the car.
“He was watching pornography.”
FOURTEEN
Asif Fulken had gotten to New York with no problems whatsoever. The train journey to Liverpool had been the riskiest part of the journey and that went without incident. The ferry across to Dublin had been uncomfortable, simply because he preferred his feet to be on solid ground at all times, and it was a constant battle to stop himself throwing up, a task not helped by the constant smell of vomit that engulfed every toilet on board. The seven and a half hour flight from Dublin had been the most pleasant part of his escape from London. It gave him time to reflect on how smoothly his plan was going, and how he was always one step ahead of the inferior people who hunted him. He had no doubt that by now, the CIA would know he was behind the bombings in Paris and London, and knowing this gave him a sense of power. He thought how hundreds of men were looking for him and how they would never find him. He was too alert, too on his game, and too smart. The leaders of the FFW were his main concern. They did not want anyone acting outside of their control, but he believed with complete conviction, that once the mission was complete and the leaders could take the credit; then he would be forgiven and left to live his life in peace.