Enemies Domestic (An Alex Landon Thriller Book 1)

by Gavin Reese

  “Your medic pack?” Alex had tired of this morning’s emotional ebb and flow, and welcomed the moment he had assurance one way or another that a legitimate threat existed here.

  “Yeah, I sold Reggie my brother’s old medic pack from when he was over in Afghanistan. I’m sure that’s it!”

  “How long ago did you sell it to him?”

  “Same day as the car, ‘bout three weeks ago.”

  “Any reason he’d make himself look like you for the cameras?”

  McNealy had been alternately replaying and pausing the footage to try to get a better look at the male, and he interrupted Rocky before he could answer Landon. “That’s him, I know that’s Reggie.”

  “Whaddyagot, Tom?” Alex saw Rocky seemed obviously angered that someone might be impersonating him.

  “Here, see that? He’s wearing that stupid cover-up sleeve.” He looked up at Alex to explain what Rocky already knew. “Reggie says he’s got some military tattoo on his right forearm, but he never let anyone see it and would never really talk about it. They let us have visible tattoos if they’re not offensive, but he always wore a stupid, tan neoprene sleeve on his right arm instead of just wearing a long-sleeve uniform shirt.”

  “And--” Alex’s ringing phone interrupted him. He looked at the caller ID and saw ‘Jon MCDOUGAL’ on the display. Alex felt he had to answer while the man’s credibility momentarily improved. “Landon.”

  “Hey, I found the car, parked in almost the same spot near Central and Washington. Have you been over here yet?”

  “No, I came straight to the Tower.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a Quran and a handwritten note in Arabic, or Pashtu, or something like it, on the passenger seat, doors are locked and I haven’t seen him anywhere.”

  “I think we got him here in the tower, can you send me photos of the note and Quran? I need a good close-up of the writing that someone could translate.”

  “Yeah, give me a few seconds and I’ll send them over. This looks bad, Landon, real bad. I don’t think the guy’s Muslim, though, I think he’s trying to put blame for this on someone else.”

  “Yeah, that seems like a theme this morning. Get me those photos right away so I can get them translated.”

  Seventy-Four

  Central Avenue near Washington Street. Phoenix, Arizona.

  From the sidewalk adjacent to the Alero’s passenger side, Jonathan McDougal used his cell phone to photograph the note and Quran, but the glare off the windows and the camera’s angle relative to the note surface didn’t allow a decent, close-up image of the text. Frustrated, Jonathan knew he had to get inside the car, but really wanted to avoid setting off any booby trap left behind for first responders and investigators. He drew a small metal flashlight from his left cargo pocket and pressed the tail cap button once to activate its 700-lumen setting. Walking to the driver’s side, Jonathan shone light into the car to investigate the vehicle’s interior and saw several wires connected to the front passenger door, none of which had been visible from that side of the car. He slowly circled the vehicle several times and ensured no suspicious wires were visible on any of the other doors or windows. Looks like only the front passenger door’s rigged…probably, he thought. Jonathan developed a plan that he knew would have drawn incredulous ire from his former soldiers and commanders alike. After years of preaching caution and personal preservation, he now committed to risking his own life to break into the sedan. All for a photograph.

  Jonathan ran to a small construction site across Central Avenue where workers poured concrete into prefabricated molds. He quickly found a long piece of rebar lying on the ground and moved into the site to retrieve it.

  “Hey!” One of the workers saw him and moved from the back of the lot to confront the intruder. “You can’t be in here, man, go be homeless somewhere else!”

  Jonathan didn’t take the time to be insulted and had no patience to explain himself or ask permission. “That car over there is rigged with a bomb,” he stated as he bent down and picked up the rebar like a club, “and I’m gonna go break out a window, wanna help?”

  The worker backed away, toward his friends, and put his hands up in front of his body in the universally-recognized signal for a desired lack of confrontation. “Hey, man, you say so, you can have the rebar, man, just don’t hurt nobody.”

  Fully aware of the image his candid statement and actions created, Jonathan regretted having made the worker feel threatened, but politeness and consent took too much time. “Do yourselves a favor,” he said as he pointed the rebar like a bat, “call the cops and tell them to cordon off this area, and you guys need to get the hell outta here.” With that, he turned back to the task at hand, and silently prayed.

  Seventy-Five

  American Bank Tower Stairwell. Phoenix, Arizona.

  Despite being reasonably fit for his age, Duke had struggled to climb the bottom forty-six flights of stairs at American Bank Tower for the fifth time in the last two days. Laden with the large medic pack and the two pressure-cooker IEDs it concealed, he felt and heard his heart and carotid artery pounding like bass drums. His quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes burned with lactic acid, and his breathing had been labored and fast since the 10th Floor. After wiping his right hand across his brow to remove the nearly free-flowing sweat accumulated there, he transferred the moisture onto the right pant leg of his black polyester SSH Security uniform. Duke glanced down and realized sweat from his chest, shoulders, and armpits had propelled a large, wet, and descending ring to expand downward on his light-blue imitation police uniform shirt; a whiff of his own acrid body odor briefly hung in his nostrils as he plodded across the midfloor landing.

  As Duke turned and ascended the last flight of stairs, he saw two long, bare fluorescent bulbs harshly lit the 23rd Floor stairwell above him and hummed softly against the near-silence therein; his attention fell to an opaque plastic light cover that lay broken and scattered on the concrete landing directly beneath the bulbs. “Gimme another few minutes,” he breathlessly muttered, “and the whole fuckin’ building’ll look like that.” He smiled at the thought of his imminent first salvo in this New Civil War. In stark contrast to his obvious, sweat-soaked and wheezing misery, his smile broadened as Duke stepped up onto the 23rd Floor landing. Pausing briefly to catch his breath, he stared at the locked metal door before him marked “Construction Access Only.”

  “Forty-six flights knocked down today, two-hundred-and-thirty in the last twenty-four hours,” he proudly whispered aloud between inhaled gasps, “and it’s about to be worth every miserable fuckin’ step.” Duke triumphantly pulled a cumbersome security key ring from his front right pants pocket, an effort which also produced the small metal case that held his stash of hand-rolled cigarettes and American flag-engraved Zippo lighter. He passed the key ring to his left hand, returned the cigarette case to his pocket with his right, and then methodically rifled through the ring’s comically large collection of keys.

  There, finally. He held the Construction Master Key between his right thumb, fore- and middle fingers; the high-security key appeared virtually identical to all others on the ring, so Duke had added a dot of black paint on its bow to differentiate it. He stepped to the metal door and confidently inserted the master key to its hilt into the door lock’s metal cylinder; quickly turning it clockwise, he heard a solid thunk as the deadbolt fully retracted. Although Duke quickly pulled the door open and stepped into the brightly lit construction site, he passed the threshold only enough to allow the construction door’s hydraulic hinge to slowly close it behind him. He paused and stood just inside the doorway as the heavy metal door swung shut, and looked around at the space to ensure nothing had changed since his last departure only a few hours ago.

  Because thick, lightly-tinted ballistic glass accounted for more than ninety-percent of each of the floor’s four exterior vertical walls, natural light flooded into the space and nearly negated the need for the numerous and harsh
overhead fluorescent tubes. While his breathing slowed and became less labored, Duke visually scanned the 23rd Floor for anything out-of-place, beginning at the top of the large room. He saw all the drop-ceiling tiles still missing, which revealed the electrical lines and fiber optic cables normally contained between the floor of 24 and the ceiling of 23. The upper glass exterior walls remained unobstructed, and all the power tools, construction equipment, and various material supplies remained against the lower portions of the glass walls where Duke had placed them to become additional falling debris once his detonation destroyed this floor. Ignoring any blast-induced velocity, he thought, gravity alone would accelerate the wrenches, saws, and woodscrews to almost ninety-five miles-an-hour before they impacted the masses below. The floor between the construction tools and material amassed against the exterior glass wall and the interior vertical support columns remained unobstructed, which Duke had cleared to avoid any trip hazards while he worked with his IEDs.

  Duke shifted his gaze to the vertical steel support columns that presently kept the Tower upright; equally-spaced, each of four lesser columns stood centered in a respective horizontal quadrant of the floor and a fifth, larger column stood in the very center of the 23rd floor. He saw two pressure cookers remained secured to each lesser column, placed just as he’d left them on opposing sides of the heavy steel structural beams. The first eight’re still in place, he thought, and I’ve got the last two to weaken the main, central column in the backpack.

  Duke intended the ten IEDs to simultaneously weaken all five American Bank Tower columns beyond their ability to support the fourteen floors and rooftop deck above them. Despite being much smaller and less stoutly constructed than the World Trade Center, Duke knew American Bank Tower would certainly not fall immediately; he hoped, however, it would not stand erect as long as the World Trade Center towers had and give fire personnel the chance to successfully extinguish the flames or heroically die in them.

  Satisfied his work had remained clandestine and unmolested, Duke turned and locked the construction door’s deadbolt behind him. He then retrieved an electric drill, bits, and large screws construction workers had left behind, and used them to secure the floor’s four stairwell access doors. Just in case those lazy fuckin’ security guards decide to start working today. Not that it matters at this point, no one has time to stop me if I buckle down and stay on task. Duke heard a number of approaching sirens, a common sound for the downtown area, and walked to the north wall to look down on Van Buren Street. After he saw no cops in the immediate area, and no one rushing up to American Bank Tower, he dismissed the distraction as unrelated.

  If I’d been found out, he thought, the guards probably would’ve started an evacuation. Time to get to work before they do. Duke had brought his SSH security radio along to alert him if the guards began snooping around or were tipped off to his presence in the construction site. Now that he felt confident he had not been discovered, he decided to turn the radio off for his own safety; although he doubted its frequencies could accidentally set off his IEDs, he wanted to remove that tragic possibility before he connected the fuses. Duke pulled the radio from his belt, and turned its volume dial counterclockwise until he felt and heard the distinct click that informed him the device had powered off. He watched the small screen go blank and, just to be certain, removed the external battery. Better safe than vaporized, he surmised.

  Duke quickly set about the task of “daisy chaining” the pressure cooker IEDs together with Prima cord, which he’d learned to be a practice common throughout the American demolition industry and among Afghan insurgents. This det cord PETN shit ignites at more than twenty-thousand feet-a-second, he reminded himself, so fast my brain wouldn’t even register the explosion. Glad Cleveland’s smurfs scavenged these lines from a buncha open-pit mines scattered around the state, cause the ATF tracks it “cradle to grave.” He chuckled at the realization that somewhere in Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives records, these stolen lines of pentaerythritol tetranitrate cord were already recorded as having been detonated, and Duke greatly enjoyed the irony. Cleveland’s accomplices donated the explosives and components to him, then he quietly gave them to me. Cleveland wanted credit for acquiring the materials, and I wanted him to be the last person anyone else knew to have ever had them.

  Seventy-Six

  American Bank Tower. Phoenix, Arizona.

  Alex disconnected Jonathan’s call and returned to the conversation with the guards. “So, why would Reggie wanna look--”

  “He wants my job.” Rocky interrupted to answer his previous question. “He’s been bad-mouthing me to the sergeant, sayin’ that he thinks I’m a little mentally unstable, maybe even dangerous, I think he wants to get me fired and take my full-time job. He wants my paycheck.”

  “No, that’s definitely not it.” Alex dialed Berkshire as he spoke. “Did he come up past 23 yet?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t see him, but let me double-check the footage.”

  Alex saw McNealy work the computer to access the relevant cameras, and placed a second call to Berkshire. Ron’s probably on the line with Lieutenant Dobbins. Four rings later, Berkshire answered. “Ron, it’s Landon. He’s here at American Bank Tower, and I think this thing is real. Didn’t you tell me you have access to a software program that’ll translate written languages from photos?”

  “Yeah, right, that Interpol graffiti software, my laptop is at the office, but I can send something over to the intel analysis center and get it translated for you. I’ve got a public translation app on my phone that’ll do it immediately, but I can’t guarantee it’ll be as accurate as we need.”

  “Good, I’m gonna you a photo of a note from this guy’s front passenger seat as soon as I get it. McDougal’s there now, and says it looks like it’s written in Arabic and sitting next to a Quran. Get back to me right away so I know how to play it here. Thanks.” Alex hung up the phone and saw a notification scroll across the top of his phone display that informed him McDougal had just sent two text message photos. With little review of them, Landon forwarded the images to Berkshire’s work cell. He then opened them and confirmed it looked exactly as Jonathan had explained, although Alex thought it looked as though broken safety glass had been scattered on the seat, as well.

  Stay calm and think, he told himself, keep asking and answering, ‘what’s important now?’ He glanced up at the guards, both of whom stared at him for direction. Rocky appeared dumbfounded and McNealy looked to be awaiting a kill order.

  “There’s a Quran and a fuckin’ A-rab note in his car?” To Alex, Rocky appeared equally comprised of disbelief and terror.

  “Actually, Rocky, there’s a Quran and a fuckin’ A-rab note in your car. The plates were never changed into his name and the state doesn’t show an Owner Notice of Sale on file. You wanna tell me why?”

  “Hey, wait a--” Alex again held up a finger to stop Rocky when his phone again rang and he saw Davis called. I really need a second cop here so I can focus on doing only two or three things at once.

  “Jay, you alright?”

  “I ain’t bleeding yet, but I fuckin’ lost him,” he said with exacerbation evident in his strained voice, “I had eyes on him getting off the 10 at 27th Ave, but I lost him after that. He’s somewhere in the area, Alex, so I put the BOLO out to D-P-S after I couldn’t reach you.”

  “But you did see the car, right? Did you see the plate?”

  “All I saw on the plate was the 4-10, but the driver was a white guy in a light blue collared shirt with shoulder patches, probably a security uniform. Got off at 27th and skidaddled somewhere fast.”

  “Thanks, Jay you’re my hero. You just saved me a whole lottuv interrogating here. I think we got the car abandoned off Central just north of Washington, can you head over there and secure it for me? It looks like this thing is real and I may need you and some friends to block off the area around that car for the bomb squad.”

  “Good fucki
n’ news, this shit is real!” Jay’s apparent concern over keeping his job instantly subsided as their reality apparently struck him. “Goddammit, Alex, this shit is real! Fuck! Okay, yeah, I’m on the way. Where’s the suspect?”

  “He’s about 250 feet above me in American Bank Tower, somewhere up near the 23rd floor.”

  “You’re inside the building?! Get the fuck out, man, we can’t laugh about this later in the unemployment line if you’re dead!”

  “Gonna start working on evac now, need to find a way to stall him so the fifteen floors of cubicles above him have time to get out.”

  “Git-er-done and get the fuck out, man! I’ll go sit on the car, call if you need anything else.”

  “Thanks, Jay.”

  “If you’re stupid enough to start climbing stairs, at least remember to turn that damned radio off so you don’t key up the mic and accidentally blow something up.”

  “Thanks for the reminder. Hey, check this shit out.” Alex disconnected the call without further explanation; he desperately needed to lighten his own mood, and using their long-running inside joke of hanging up on one another momentarily helped. As he turned back to Rocky, Alex keyed up his mic to broadcast on his police radio. “David-33, emergency traffic.” Releasing the mic, he spoke to Rocky as he awaited dispatch to clear him back. “What time did you get into work today, Rocky?” Alex saw a small television behind the security desk, apparently tuned to a local news channel, broadcast a BOLO for Reggie and his tan Alero, and included the vehicle description and license plate, his physical description, and last known location. Alex realized the overly manicured news anchor didn’t mention anything about a potential bomb inside the vehicle. I wonder how that got missed.

  “David-33, go with emergent traffic.” His dispatcher’s voice returned his focus to the tasks at hand.