With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  9

  Edina Lewis leaned over the Mailboxes Etc. manager’s shoulder. He pressed his finger against the screen.

  “That’s the address. 1642 Mulligan.”

  10

  “…fired, officer down, officer needs assistance, 1642 Mulligan! I need some help here, this is FBI Special Agent Joni Mitchell, they’re shooting at me…”

  The radio squawked in the operations room and in the command and control set that Ole carried.

  “The fuck?” Ole said. “Those are our people!”

  “1642 Mulligan is just across the highway from here,” Hunter said. “That’s where the two vics from the airport lived.”

  “Go, go, go! HRT on the bus, we got agents down, now!” Ole screamed. “Mother fuckers! Mother fuckers!”

  A black bus pulled up, Suburbans front and back. Hunter scrambled for a seat in the command and control van, and the Hostage Rescue Team rolled away, sirens and lights blazing, to the aid of their brother and sister agents.

  Behind them, the forensics team turned their attention to the slow, detailed search that was their task. No one noticed, hidden in among the dusty ceramic figurines on the top shelf in the front room, a small, postage stamp sized black box with a gleaming glass lens in it.

  11

  Bullets spanged into the G-car that Joni crouched behind. She huddled behind the engine block, remembered that was the point most likely to prevent a bullet from coming through. God damn it! John was laying out there, and she was hiding behind this car, and they were shooting at her! Joni scuttled to the end of the car, behind the trunk. Bullets peppered the front of the car, and she heard the distinct flat crack of a rifle and the louder whang as a bullet coursed into the engine. She stood up from behind the trunk, and fired at the figures she saw in the doorway. Her bullets sprayed wood chips and plaster spray from the door jamb, and she heard a cry from inside. Then a man button hooked out, a small rifle tucked into his shoulder like a pro, and he fired a rapid fire volley of rounds that struck the trunk of the car, blew out the windows, and forced Joni down into a crouch besides the wheel well.

  It was at that moment that Joni had the epiphany that comes to any one who’s been under fire, the realization that in this instance, your life hangs in the balance, and that there’s a choice to be made: either you roll into a ball and wait for the footsteps to come and they stand over you and put a bullet in your head, or you stand and fight.

  Will you stand and fight, Joni?

  Her young face drawn into grim lines of determination, lines that, if she lived, would be with her for the rest of her days, Joni made up her mind. She crouched, then popped up, and even as the shooter with the rifle swung in her direction, she slowed down, Take your time, fast, as her instructor would have said, got a good sight picture and popped a fast double tap at center of mass, and saw the rifle man’s hand flinch back as one round hit, and then the other round popped high below his collarbone, and he stumbled back, his hit hand suddenly useless, and Joni realized she only had one spare magazine besides the one in her weapon, but she continued the fight, one careful shot at a time, popping up at different places along the axis of the car, using deception and surprise and keep moving, Joni, this is what it’s like in a gunfight if you’re a real gunfighter, take the offensive, don’t huddle and poke your gun out, aimed fire, that’s the ticket, make them huddle down, take away the initiative, bring it back on them, Joni, you’re an agent of the F-B-I, fidelity bravery and integrity, Joni, and right now you need all the bravery you can summon cause it’s just you with a handgun and 6 rounds + 13 rounds in your spare mag of 9mm against an unknown number of shooters with rifles and shotguns and pistols, but you’ve got them pinned down in the front door, they can’t get to their cars, even rifle man, he’s sitting down, he’s hurt, finish him off, Joni, and she popped up and took careful aim and her instructor’s would have been proud, she put one right in the brain pan from 15 yards and damn, just like they said, he just slumped over dead, just like that, and there was a scream from inside the house and a woman stood there with a pistol in each hand just like a John Woo movie, what the hell, both pistols blazing as she ran at the Cavalier, and Joni coolly put her front sights between those outstretched hands and pulled the trigger till the woman fell but Joni’s slide was locked back time for the speed load now it was down to thirteen rounds and the part of her that was observing the whole thing made a solemn promise in the face of God that if she lived through this she would never, ever venture out onto the street without two pistols and three reloads for each one, hell maybe even a M-4, there’s no such thing as too much ammo when your life is on the line and things go to shit, and the woman was down, twisting like a snake with a broken back, but there were still shots coming from the front door and now through the front windows, how many of these fuckers were in there, and then she heard the wonderful, blessed sound of sirens, lots of sirens, and the crackle of the radio “Hold fast, Joni, HRT is on the way, hold fast, Joni…” that was Basalisa Coronas, the big boss lady herself, hey, she just beat the boss’s body count today, and that was something, hell, she was bleeding, never even felt it, that was what was running down her face, bullets still hitting the car and then the sounds of sirens close, and the chop of a helicopter someplace close and she looked up and saw the HRT helicopter swing broadside like a warrior angel above her, with two of the best shooters in the world sitting in the door and the sound of their heavy rifles going off was better than the best sex she’d ever had, the boom crack boom crack of the big guns and then the squeal of wheels and she saw the armored Suburbans rolling towards her, big men in black jogging alongside behind the cover of the cars, big men coming for her and they were shooting on the run, they were coming for her, her brothers in arms, and yeah, she’d earned her place with them today, she’d done her part and then they were all around her MP-5s and M-4s and handguns blazing and the steady boom crack from the snipers on the helicopter platform and the front of the house pockmarked as though by magic, windows shattering, sheetrock and plaster sending up a white cloud, the overwhelmingly superior firepower of an enraged fighting machine, the HRT today come for one of their own, taking revenge for the fallen agent huddled and still beside the doorstep and the small wounded woman crouched behind the shattered car with the nearly empty pistol, and today, today their vengeance was mighty.

  12

  Basalisa Coronas stalked through the shattered front door of 1642 Mulligan, her small brown face set and impassive. The big men of the HRT moved and made way for her, except one young gunfighter, who almost gave her a challenging look, but was pulled out of the way by Ole.

  “Make room,” Ole said in a no nonsense voice.

  Basalisa fixed the young gunfighter with her basilisk stare, then stepped over the body of a middle aged woman dressed in leather pants and a blood stained white silk blouse. “What do we have?” she asked the Senior Forensics Investigator.

  “A bloody fucking mess,” the forensics man said. He’d been yanked from the first scene to this one, and had half his crew still at the first house, and the other half here, with reinforcements coming in from Quantico and the local office.

  “Agent Coronas?” Hunter said. “I think you should come back here.”

  Basalisa looked over at Hunter. “Just a minute.” She turned to Ole. “Where is Agent Mitchell?”

  “Ambulance, giving a statement while they’re patching her up. They’re going to take her in for head X-rays; she got grazed, some cuts on her face and arms. Other than that she’s okay.” Ole nodded. “She did damn good out here. Took out three of them, outgunned, outnumbered. Was down to her last mag when we got here.”

  Basalisa nodded curtly and went outside, stopped for a moment and looked at the body of Agent Field, now covered while the forensics people worked out the final angles, then strode to the ambulance.

  “Joni?” Basalisa said.

  The young agent had aged in the last hour. There were deep lines on her face, and her hair was in
a disarray as a paramedic taped a dressing in place.

  “Yes, ma’am?” Joni said.

  “You did what you were supposed to do,” Basalisa said softly. “It’s too bad about Shields, but…this is what we do, Joni. You remember that. When the wolf came to the door you were ready. You took care of business. You remember that, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I want you back as soon as I can get you. They’re going to take you and take care of you. But as soon as you’re ready, I want you back. I need women like you. You understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You can call me Lisa, Joni. You go now.” Basalisa hugged the young agent, patted her on the shoulder. “You boys take her now, get her there and get her taken care of.”

  Another agent said, “We’re not quite done with the interview.”

  “Then get your ass in the ambulance and ride with her,” Basalisa snapped. “I want her taken care of. Now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the abashed agent said. “Right away.”

  Basalisa walked back to the door where Hunter stood, watching. She stood at the bottom of the steps and stared impassively up at him, then brushed past him.

  “You have something to show me?” she said.

  “Yes,” Hunter said. “Down the stairs. Basement level.”

  Basalisa led the way down the stairs into the complete finished basement level of the house. One half of the space was walled off with a door and a big window looking into it. The other half of the space was crammed with big computer monitors, stacks of servers, coils of cable and power strips, video editing consoles and bank upon bank of DVDs and VHS tapes shelved neatly against the wall.

  “What is this?” Basalisa said.

  Hunter nudged a technician out of the way and pointed to a video monitor. On the screen a frozen image was locked forever in time: a young woman, dressed in a Catholic school girl outfit, fellated a grossly obese man in his middle forties.

  “Porn,” he said.

  She was good at control, Hunter decided, watching her face. The little signs were there: disgust, revulsion, anger, then cold rage, then icy detachment, all those little micro-expressions in a brief, fast array that only the well trained or extremely sensitive would pick up – and Hunter was both of those.

  “All of this?” she said, gesturing to the racks of tapes and DVDs.

  “Best guess,” Hunter said. “They’ll have to go through it. We called the hackers down; they’ll need to go through this. This is where the Ahmed Samir Said tape came from. We’re looking to see if we can find a hard copy, but the traces will be inside the computers, and the hackers say they can pry it out. There’s encryption and other safeguards, but they think they can get past it. These people had state of the art high speed broadband going out of here, the best telephony and cable stuff money can buy. Near as they can tell at this point, this was a distribution hub for an international child pornography ring.”

  “And this?” Basalisa said, walking over the walled off room, and looking through the window. Inside, the room was decorated like a bedroom, with a full sized bed the centerpiece.

  “The stage,” Hunter said. “There’s camera mounts and mini-cams all around it. Controlled by that panel over there.”

  Basalisa turned and looked Hunter directly in the eye. “Fucking bastards,” she said softly.

  He was surprised. “Yeah,” he said. “But they and their security bought it upstairs. Nobody got out alive.”

  Basalisa nodded, then wandered back to the banks of tapes. “This is Ahmed Samir Said?” she said. “Pornographers? This isn’t right, is it, Agent James?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  Chapter Four

  The man called Ahmed Samir Said stood behind three computer operators laboring over keyboards on tables dominated by multiple monitors, racked servers and thick cable lines.

  “Have they found the cameras?” Ahmed Samir Said said.

  “No,” said a computer operator, a middle aged man with florid features and brilliant red hair receding on his freckled features. “They’ll probably find the obvious ones, but the pinholes should be good for sometime. We got good take. Look.” He pushed a sequence of keys, and an image popped into being on a 30 inch monitor to his left. It was black and white, and showed the front room of the house on Mulligan Street as bullets ripped into the house and through the door way, the firepower of the enraged FBI Hostage Rescue Team tearing the house and the small group of pornographers and their security team to shreds.

  “Fucked them right up,” the red-haired man said. “Nice work.”

  “Good job,” Ahmed Samir Said said. “Send that to my terminal.”

  “Already done.”

  Ahmed Samir Said went through his safe house, a converted warehouse complete with sleeping quarters for his people, a ready room stocked with weapons and a highly trained security team on twenty-four hour alert. In his office/sleeping quarters, he sat at the table that served him as a desk and tapped a password into his personal work station. A series of files and file directories rolled up. He checked a sequence of numbers, then tapped out a short message on his communications program and hit ENTER.

  In Washington’s Dulles International Airport, a quiet, mousy looking man buying a ticket for a flight to Chicago at the United Airlines counter said, “Excuse me,” and reached into his breast pocket and plucked out a PDA. He looked at the message, then placed the PDA back in his pocket.

  “Here you go sir,” the ticket agent said. “Make sure and get through security as quickly as possible.”

  “Have to make the time now, don’t we?” the man said.

  The ticket agent smiled and nodded. “Yes, we do. Thank you for flying with us today, sir.”

  The mousy man nodded, took his single carry-on bag and ticket, then walked to a bench and sat down. He took out his stylus and tapped out a short message on his PDA: Phase 1 is complete and looks good.”

  On the computer monitor in front of Ahmed Samir Said a message beeped into existence: Phase 1 is complete and looks good.

  The terrorist leader nodded to himself, tapped in a different sequence of numbers and hit ENTER.

  In Pana, Illinois, a small agricultural town 4 hours south of Chicago, a burly man in dirty blue overalls watched as a fork-lift put several 50-gallon drums of diesel fuel into the back of his dual wheel pick up truck.

  “How you gonna get them off?” the salesman said.

  “Got me a lift at home,” the burly man said.

  There was a beeping from his pocket, and he took out a PDA.

  “Hey, fancy!” the salesman said. “You one of those high-tech fellas?”

  The burly man lifted his lip in an unconscious sneer that shut the salesman up and sent him back to his office. The burly man looked at the message, then fumbled with his thick, calloused farmer’s fingers to pluck out the stylus and slowly, laboriously, typed out a one word response: Yes.

  Ahmed Samir Said watched the three letters emerge on his screen.

  Then he tapped out a different sequence of numbers, hit ENTER. Two streaming images appeared on his screen, simultaneous tapings from two different angles on hidden cameras. He watched, with the omniscient eye of the voyeur, as the Hostage Rescue Team burst into the first house they raided, saw the door come down, the sad death of the pitiful old mute greyhound, and the entry of the forensics team and follow on raiders.

  When Hunter James entered the screen, the terrorist leader froze the screen, then worked a toggle and zoomed in on the image of Hunter’s face, blew it up full screen and close up, and spent a long minute studying it. Then he printed out a copy on his printer and weighed it in his hand before he set it down exactly in the center of his otherwise bare table top.

  Chapter Five

  “I’d like you to go back to the first house,” Basalisa Coronas said.

  Hunter watched the forensics crew working in the pornographer’s basement. The government hackers had just arrive
d, and the young woman hacker, KC Barch, was directing the forensics crew.

  “Don’t disconnect anything yet,” KC said. “Let us work on it right here…they might have logic bombs set up to go if there’s a power interruption and the right reboot sequence isn’t followed.”

  “Did you hear me?” Basalisa said.

  “Yes, I heard you,” Hunter said. “What would you like me to do there?”

  “You said that there was no sense of the man there. Why?”

  Hunter smiled slightly to keep the intensity of his look at her friendly. “You know how you just know, sometimes? When something’s not right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what really leads an investigation, I think,” Hunter said. “It’s that intuitive leap that puts the pieces together. Or else identifies the hole that defines the rest of the puzzle.”

  “They were using it as a safe house,” Basalisa said.

  “For just one operator, sure, it’s possible,” Hunter said. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

  “That’s why I’d like you to go back. Tell me, specifically, what doesn’t feel right. That may be useful information.” She turned away and stood at the shoulder of the young woman hacker and rested her hand on the younger woman’s shoulder.

  Hunter had to admire how she worked. First the stick, then the carrot. Beat them up with that formidable presence, then unexpectedly soften and give them the hint of something larger and warmer in her. A fascinating woman -- with a great talent for pissing people off. He shrugged, worked his way through the crowd and went outside. Ole stood sipping a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee.