Targets of Revenge

by Jeffrey Stephens

  “Who is he?”

  “A goon I saw in the jungle in Venezuela. He’s one of Adina’s henchmen.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

  NEW YORK

  SIX YOUNG MEN from the South Bronx were seated in the suite booked by Alejandro and Jorge. The two Venezuelans remained standing. The hard plastic cases containing anthrax were lying on their sides on the large glass cocktail table. Beside them were the six devices these men had brought with them.

  The detonators had been made for attachment to the base of the cases with a strong strip of adhesive that would bind the mechanism to the plastic. The suitcases each had four short, circular supports so, when the cases stood upright, the timers and explosive charges would not be visible.

  Jorge was going about the business of securing the detonators in place as Alejandro reviewed their plans.

  “The important thing is to switch the timer on only when you are certain no one is watching you. By the time you reach your destinations there will be a lot of activity in the streets, a lot of people running and a lot of police. You must make yourselves appear part of this panic, you understand?”

  They all nodded and one of them said, “This has been explained to us in great detail.”

  “Good. It is still important to review things one more time.”

  Again, the six nodded as one.

  “You should arrive at your designated locations before seven thirty this morning,” Alejandro told them. “We are setting all the timers for five minutes. This is not much time, but we cannot afford to have the bags discovered before they are ignited. Once you switch them on you will probably have to fight through a crowd to get clear.”

  “We understand,” another of them said.

  “Two of you will be going to Grand Central, two to Penn Plaza, and two into the main Times Square subway station. You all have your assignments?”

  They nodded.

  “Each of you knows the best place to leave the cases?”

  “We have been carefully instructed,” the first man told him.

  “Good.” Alejandro thought carefully about the next statement. “You all understand that this is not a suicide mission. There is no reason any of you should stay behind when this poison is exploded into the air.”

  This time they did not nod. They began nervously looking from one to the other. The first man, who was apparently the senior member of the group, spoke up again.

  “Our responsibility is to make sure that these explosives are ignited and the maximum possible damage done.” He stared at Alejandro, his eyes dark and unblinking.

  Jorge glanced up from his work on the cases, but said nothing.

  “Is it your plan to stay with the cases until they detonate?” Alejandro asked.

  “The devices have a button that allows them to be exploded, bypassing the timer,” the young man said. “We will assess the situation when we arrive at our designated positions, but each of us is prepared to die for Allah if we find it would be best not to risk leaving the bag behind.”

  Jorge looked up again. This time he said, “Once you initiate the timing sequence, there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it. Even if the case is found within the five minutes, the explosives are still going to blow.”

  The young Muslim said, “Unless the detonator is detached from the case. Then it will be nothing more than a small blast, not likely to harm anyone but the person disarming the bag.”

  Jorge shared a quick look with Alejandro. Neither man responded.

  “It won’t matter,” the Muslim assured them. “We will do what we must.”

  Alejandro thought it over. “You will make the decision, it is up to you. Just remember, even if someone finds the bag they are not likely to risk trying to remove the detonation device. They would have no way of knowing an attempt to disengage the mechanism wouldn’t cause the whole thing to blow up.”

  “Allah will be served,” the young man replied.

  This time when Jorge turned to Alejandro the message in his eyes was plain—let’s get this done and get the hell out of here.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

  NEW YORK

  FERRIELLO BROUGHT HIS car to a stop down the street from the hotel, just west of Broadway. It was after eleven at night, but in Times Square there is no such thing as darkness.

  He and Sandor got out and walked down the block for a meeting they had arranged in a quick call to the counterterrorism unit on site. They were greeted by two FBI agents and two uniformed members of the NYPD.

  After exchanging IDs, Ferriello asked, “What’ve we got?”

  The senior federal agent briefed them. “We showed the passport photos at the front desk. The two younger men in those pictures arrived about an hour ago and checked into a suite they have reserved for three nights. They went upstairs, forty-fifth floor. No phone calls out, both of them still in there.”

  “Any sign of the third man in the photos?”

  “Negative.”

  “Bags?”

  The agent nodded. “We spoke to the bellman who handled them. Said they had several matching hard-shell cases. All the same size. He said the guests were unusually anxious about how the bags were being handled, never let them out of their sight, forked over a large tip when he placed them in the room.”

  Sandor and Ferriello shared a concerned look.

  “We’re dealing with an incredibly toxic substance,” Sandor told them. “You remember when someone sent a gift of anthrax to that newspaper building in Florida about ten years ago?” The others nodded. “That place is still contaminated. You can’t even go inside to this day without wearing a hazmat suit.”

  “Understood,” said the senior FBI agent.

  “And that was a whole lot less of the powder than they have here tonight.”

  No one said anything for a few moments.

  “Our two friends have any visitors yet?” Sandor asked.

  “I was just getting to that,” the FBI agent said. “The six men from that mosque in the Bronx arrived together, two African-American, four Arab-American. Our men tailed them directly to this hotel. Got here about twenty minutes ago and began doing a lousy job of trying to look like they weren’t together. They walked through the lobby and outside again, circled around the front, then they all came back and one of them used a house phone. From there they stopped at the hotel security station in front of the entrance to the bank of elevators. One of the guards made a call, got an okay from the men in the suite upstairs so he let them pass.”

  “The suite on forty-five?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They all still in there?”

  “Far as we know,” one of the police officers said. “We have men posted on each end of the floor.”

  “Good. These six guys from the mosque, were they carrying anything?”

  “Not in their hands,” the FBI agent told them. “They were all wearing coats or jackets, but we were told not to approach them. No idea what they might have underneath or in their pockets.”

  Just then the radios on the belts of both NYPD officers buzzed. One of them grabbed it and hit a button. “Go,” he said.

  The voice that came through was a whisper, barely audible over a stream of static, the message one word. “Movement.”

  They all took off at a run toward the hotel entrance.

  ————

  The two plainclothes policemen who had been dispatched to the forty-fifth floor did not have much time to prepare. One of them rode the elevator to forty-six, got off, raced down the stairs, and remained in position, hiding in the stairwell at the end of the long hallway. The other officer was given a busboy uniform and a food cart. He made the quick change, took the elevator to forty-five, and was now doing his best to look busy, staying away from the peephole of the suite from which he might be spotted, but remaining in the corridor.

  They were ordered not to engage the suspects, advised that they were extremely dangerous and might be armed with explosive devices.
>
  When the door to the suite opened and Alejandro and Jorge emerged, the officer posing as a waiter turned his back to the Venezuelans and gave the one-word report into the mic beneath his lapel.

  “Movement.”

  Then, looking back in their direction, he offered a pleasant, “Good evening gentlemen.”

  But neither of Adina’s men was buying the act. Why had a busboy suddenly turned away from his cart as soon as they entered the corridor? Why was he just standing there in the hallway? And something about his pants and shoes were off.

  In response to the greeting, Alejandro showed off a broad smile and strolled toward the elevators. As he passed the undercover policeman he caught a glimpse of the bulge under his jacket, likely a weapon, and he was taking no chances. In one lightning-quick move he produced the razor-sharp knife he was concealing inside the loose cuff of his jacket, spun and grabbed the officer by the hair from behind, then yanked his head back and drew the blade hard and deep across the front of the man’s throat.

  The officer slid to the floor, blood pouring down his neck and onto his chest as the life flowed out of him.

  Jorge was reaching inside the busboy jacket for the officer’s gun when another man emerged from the stairway entrance at the far end of the hall. The second policeman had witnessed the attack and now instinctively stepped out, automatic in hand, and took aim. But battles involving life and death do not allow for indecision. Whereas a trained law enforcement officer is hindered by the rules he has learned about the use of deadly force, a cold-blooded killer such as Jorge had no reason to hesitate. He fired twice, and the second policeman was dead before he was able to get off a shot.

  The sound of the gunfire reverberated along the corridor. When someone opened a door and began to ask what was going on Jorge cut him off.

  “NYPD,” he hollered out in an authoritative voice. “Everyone stay in their rooms with the door locked. Someone call nine-one-one, we have an officer down.”

  Meanwhile, Alejandro let himself back into the suite, where the six young men were all standing, frightened looks on their faces. “Nothing to be concerned about,” he told them, “but you cannot stay here as planned. You must get out of the hotel and find somewhere else to wait. It should not be a problem.”

  The group leader, in a calm but firm tone, said, “They have found you, which means they will find us.”

  “No, Jorge and I will lead them away from here. They have no way of knowing about you. We will cause as much confusion as possible to give you the chance to get away.”

  “But . . .”

  “Listen to me. We’ll take the stairs to the right, it will buy time and give you the opportunity to escape. Split up, take the elevators or the other stairs, go to different floors, then begin to leave, one at a time. Don’t go to the lobby yet, and don’t all move together.”

  The young Arab shook his head. “The cases will give us away and our mission will be ruined.”

  “No,” Alejandro insisted, then hesitated. “If any of you are stopped, you know what to do.” He pointed at the bags containing the anthrax.

  Now the young man nodded.

  “Good luck,” Alejandro said, then ran back into the corridor to find Jorge, who had hustled down the corridor and was removing the automatic from the second dead policeman.

  “Here,” he said, tossing Alejandro the weapon as he also took the officer’s radio and extra ammunition. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER NINETY

  NEW YORK

  BY THE TIME Sandor and Ferriello reached the hotel lobby there had been no further word from either officer stationed on the forty-fifth floor. Sandor knew they could not take the chance of initiating contact—there was no telling if either officer might be near the hostiles and, in a building this large with its dense metal infrastructure, even the best radio system was likely to generate static. The risk of the communication being overheard was simply too great.

  Still, it had been too long since they got word that the suspects were on the move. Sandor crossed the lobby to have a look at the digital screen alongside the large bank of elevators. The NYPD officer who was monitoring that area confirmed that none of the elevators had stopped on the forty-fifth floor since they received their radio call.

  As Sandor worried over the delay, the FBI agent in charge and the NYPD antiterrorism liaison approached.

  “Report of a shooting on forty-five was just called in to nine-one-one by a hotel guest, said he saw two men on the ground before someone ordered him to close his door and call in the emergency.”

  “No one’s heard from either officer?”

  The head of the antiterrorism unit shook his head. “We have to assume they’re the ones in trouble.”

  Ferriello, who had positioned himself across this cavernous entry hall, joined them. “Bad news?”

  “The worst,” Sandor said, then told him.

  “What now?” the NYPD liaison asked.

  Sandor looked around, as if there might be an answer somewhere within this forty-foot-high lobby. “We’ve been watching the elevators, none have stopped at forty-five since we got word they were on the move. This is a huge hotel with stairs on both ends of the building and all sorts of exits.”

  “You think they’re all coming down forty-five flights of stairs?”

  “Maybe,” Sandor said. “They might split up, stop on different floors, try to force their way into another room and wait us out. Or try to get into one of the theaters on either side of the building and leave from there. We need to keep a strong presence in the lobby, with men at both stairwell exits. And the elevators of course. But we can’t all just sit here and wait for them to show up.”

  “I’m calling in my entire unit,” the man from the FBI said. “This is no longer an undercover op, Sandor. Whatever the joint task force thinks is going on here, we now have credible information of a terrorist threat, with the likelihood two police officers are down.”

  “Damn right,” the man from NYPD agreed.

  Two uniformed police officers standing near the reception desk came up to find out what was going on, just as Sandor was saying, “We’ve got to try and avoid causing a panic here. This mess could pour right out into the middle of Times Square.”

  “Nothing to be done about that now. We’ve got to respond with every available resource, and with all due respect for what you’ve done up to this point, this is an FBI matter now, with support from the NYPD and DHS.”

  “Okay,” Sandor said, “but remember that in addition to the two shooters, you’ve got six hostiles likely carrying anthrax that may be rigged to explode anytime and anyplace.”

  “Understood.”

  Now Sandor stared the man down as he said, “I’m still going to do my thing, you all right with that?”

  “Do what you need to do,” the lead agent from the Bureau told him.

  “Appreciate that,” Sandor replied, then reached out and unclipped the radio from the belt of one of the uniformed officers. “I’ll need to borrow this. We’ve got to assume they took the radios from your two men, so get word to everyone that you’re using a secondary frequency.”

  The policeman looked to his superior, who nodded. He then took the radio from Sandor, switched it to an emergency setting, and handed it back.

  “Thanks,” Sandor said. “I’m going up the north set of stairs.” He pointed to the rear of the lobby, then turned the radio off. “Don’t want this squawking once I’m inside.”

  “Understood.”

  “Your men can cover the other side, but I’ll take that one alone.”

  “The hell you will,” Ferriello said.

  Sandor shot him a glance that said this was something he had better think over. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”

  Ferriello returned the serious look. “I almost never do.”

  “Almost never is a pretty good track record. Let’s go.”

  ————

  Forty-five flights was going to be a lot of stai
rs to climb, but Sandor took off at a run across the lobby. Ferriello drew a deep breath and followed him to the stairwell entrance. Sandor opened the door, held it as they passed through, then shut it behind them as silently as he could. From there he led their ascent.

  Each of the first eight landings had metal doors with no handles. They were marked NO RE-ENTRY, emergency exits for the theater on the other side. On the first landing Sandor had a quick look at the door, confirming it would be easy enough to force open if the terrorists chose this way out of the hotel.

  Ferriello nodded his understanding, then the two men moved as quickly and as quietly as they could, guns drawn, taking two steps at a time. Sandor stopped and held out his hand when they reached the tenth floor. Ferriello nodded gratefully, leaning forward with his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.

  They listened, but there was nothing to hear except the detective’s wheezing.

  “You need to get to the gym more often,” Sandor whispered.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Without another word, Sandor took off again.

  When they stopped after ten more flights they were both winded, but this time they heard something other than their own panting. It was only a faint noise, coming from ten or more floors above them, but the sound was unmistakable. Footsteps. Moving toward them.

  Sandor held a forefinger to his lips, then pointed to the corner of the landing, beside the hinged side of the fire door. Ferriello nodded and took that position. Then Sandor slowly and silently climbed up the next set of stairs.

  The floors were separated by two flights, each consisting of fourteen steps, each running in the opposite direction of the one before. That created a small landing at the midlevel turn, the spot where Sandor chose to wait. He crouched in the corner beneath the dim light, his Walther in hand. However many of the eight men were coming, his plan was to draw their fire, take out as many as he could, then hope that the backup from Ferriello would be enough to finish the job.