Fulton walked quickly to where Karp had moved near the witness stand and out of hearing range of the public. "Boss," said the big detective, "we've got a problem."
42
"I've done it!" Omar Al-Hassan shouted. "The circuit breakers are bypassed!" Al-Sistani grinned. "Allah be praised and may he be happy with you, Omar Al-Hassan. Place the calls."
Picking up the land-line telephone next to the monitor, Al-Hassan quickly punched in a number. "There is no God but Allah, and the Prophet is his messenger," he said, reciting the Shahada to the person on the other end. Then he hung up and called another number.
Al-Sistani explained. "My people will now call the banks and trading firms, who will in turn place the orders to sell off Kingdom Investments. Omar is also calling our friend in Brooklyn. She will watch the Dow Jones Industrial Average; when it drops by 9 percent, they will blow up the backup computer in the MetroTech. The circuit breakers will not kick in, and by the time anyone reacts, it will be too late. Especially when this computer, too, is destroyed."
He pointed his gun at Omar. "I'm sorry, but you must now be martyred."
"But I don't understand! You said I would leave with you!"
"You will ... just not the way you thought. Amir Al-Sistani is going to die with all of you. Other than my most faithful of retainers ..." he pointed to the two farmer bodyguards of the former prince, " ... I cannot trust anyone to know the true identity of The Sheik."
"I promise I won't..."
Omar's last words were cut off by the bullet that tore through his heart. He felt at his chest and tried to speak, but then sat back down at the computer table, shivered once, and died.
"Oh my God," the vice president cried. "Please, I want to live."
"I can't allow that either. If the police get here before Suleiman's bomb goes off, I can't have you telling them the pass code to get into the room." The vice president ran for the door and was shot. Al-Sistani walked over to the body and ripped the chain with the key from his neck.
Another gunshot echoed elsewhere in the basement. Al-Sistani nodded to one of the bodyguards. "Go make sure the jihadi are ready to sell their lives dearly, then join us in the tunnel."
The Sheik walked up to Suleiman and embraced him. He entered a number code into the timer that would detonate the vest. "There ... the number to the center of the universe. You will not have to worry about wavering. Twenty minutes will be enough time for the market to tumble; then it will be over a moment after that... and you will enter the gates of Paradise."
"I am ready. Allah-u-Akbar."
"Goodbye, Lucy Karp." Al-Sistani walked past her on the way out the door. "Perhaps Suleiman will be kind enough to let you watch the numbers count down on the detonator's readout."
Al-Sistani motioned V. T. to move toward the door. "I'd rather stay and die with Lucy."
"A noble sentiment. But not one I can entertain. Although I believe it is impossible to stop the bomb without the pass code number, I wouldn't want to take a chance on you overpowering my jihadi."
"I'm not going!"
"I'm afraid you are," Al-Sistani said, nodding to a guard who stabbed V. T. with a hypodermic needle.
"What?"
"Just a mild sedative to make you more compliant," Al-Sistani explained as his man tied a rope around V. T.'s neck. "I'll need to talk to your uncle on the way to my jet to see what he wants done with you, and as I said, cell phones don't work here."
They walked out into the hallway, which was filling with a black smoke that made them cough.
"A new sort of tear gas?" asked one of the bodyguards.
"More like a kitchen fire," replied Mousawi. "You better get going. I can handle it from here."
Al-Sistani embraced Mousawi, who took a submachine gun from the bodyguard. "From the first day we met in Iraq and you refused to fight Muslims on behalf of the infidels, I have trusted you best; your place in Paradise is assured," Al-Sistani said quietly, handing him a piece of paper and the vice president's key. "If Suleiman wavers, this is the pass code number and key for the door. Enter and shoot him. It won't matter if he's alive or dead when the bomb goes off. Otherwise, remain here and stop any counterattacks."
"lnshallah, " Mousawi promised.
Al-Sistani led the way toward the supply room, pulling V. T. roughly by the rope while the bodyguard followed behind with a gun. Arriving at the room, he pointed to the tunnel entrance. "Hurry. I want to be through the tunnel and out before the bomb goes off."
The guard entered the tunnel first while Al-Sistani kept a gun on V. T. But the man quickly returned. "They're not here."
"What's not here?"
"The flashlights. Suleiman was supposed to leave two flashlights after he cut through the lock."
"Move," Al-Sistani replied impatiently, shoving his way into the tunnel. He peered into the dark. "It goes straight until it reaches the entrance to the church crypts. One of Newbury's men will be waiting for us there. It can't be too far. Let's go."
Al-Sistani went ahead, feeling his way along the wall, with V. T. behind him and the bodyguard following.
Marlene lay prone in the hallway as the smoke filled the space until only the last three feet were somewhat clear. She could hear her would-be ambushers coughing and yelling.
Then one of them emerged, choking violently and shooting wildly down the hall. The smoke cleared for a moment and she got a clear look at his face, his eyes nearly swollen shut from the effects of the burning cayenne.
She shot him just below the navel; the bullet striking the muscle forced him to double over. Her next shot struck him in the top of the head, killing him and knocking him back so that he struck the wall and then sank down into a sitting position.
Marlene was waiting for the second man to emerge when someone else arrived from the other direction, stuck his gun around the corner, and began blindly spraying the hallway with automatic rifle fire. The chance of getting hit was significant, so she snapped off a couple of rounds to cover her retreat behind the filing cabinet.
"Attack," the new arrival yelled to the other man. "Blow yourself up in the hallway and stop the infidels."
With a shout of "Allah-u-Akbar!" the second ambusher ran from his hiding place and shoved the burning cart aside while his comrade fired a burst down the hallway. Marlene risked a look around the side of the filing cabinet and saw the suicide bomber grab the detonator cord of his vest. He was fifty feet away and running right at her.
Eric Eliaso had been busy back at the stairs. Two shadows appeared on the wall beyond the landing, followed by two men in police uniforms. While one covered the hallway, the other jumped down on the landing, hit the grease, and slid headfirst into the wall where he lay unconscious.
The second faux cop, thinking his partner had merely fallen, stepped out onto the landing, his gun at ready. His feet went out from under him, too, and he dropped his gun as he fell to his knees.
"Hold it!" Eric yelled, stepping from his niche with both hands on his gun.
The bad cop hesitated and then grabbed his gun off the ground and shot. The bullet struck the wall next to Eric, who fired twice without looking. When there was no return fire, he saw that he'd wounded the second man, who was attempting to crawl back to the stairs.
Eric left his cover and moved cautiously toward the others. He looked at the first man, who appeared to still be out, and walked over to the fallen man, who lay on his back panting heavily and bleeding from a wound in his side.
A clicking noise behind him caused Eric to turn quickly. Too quickly, as his hard-soled shoes went out from under him. However, the stumble saved him as the bullet intended for his chest caught him in the shoulder and spun him against the wall. He slipped again, sliding down with his back against the wall as a second bullet cracked off the marble just above his head.
Yelling in fear, he pointed his own gun and fired rapidly until it clicked, out of bullets. When he worked up the nerve to open his eyes, he saw that the man who'd been trying to kill
him was dead, with two bullet holes in his forehead.
Eric relaxed only to hear the hammer of another gun being pulled back. "Not again," he sighed and turned to point his gun at the wounded man on the stairs, who was shakily pointing his gun at him.
"You out of bullets, muthafucka," the second man pointed out.
"Am I?" said Eric in his best Dirty Harry voice. "Do you feel lucky? Huh? Do ya, punk?"
"What the hell you talkin' about?" The wounded man scowled as he tried to hold his gun steady enough to shoot Eric.
"HOLD IT!" A booming voice froze Eric and the wounded man in place. They looked to the top of the stairs and saw an enormous black man with a handgun pointed. "Drop the guns, or I'll blow your fuckin' brains out."
"So that's how you do it," Eric said, letting his fall.
Clay Fulton stood at the top of the stairs at the head of a team of his men from the District Attorney's Office.
When he had received the call from Jaxon saying that a terrorist plot was going down at the NYSE and the MetroTech in Brooklyn, there wasn't a whole lot more to go on.
"I'm on my way to the Exchange, but you're closer, Clay," Jaxon had said. "I don't know who we can trust there. Apparently, some of the bad guys are wearing NYPD uniforms. But Marlene's over there and involved somehow...."
Fulton rolled his eyes. "Of course."
"... Otherwise, Lucy's there, too, and so is V. T. There are also bombs involved ..."
"Why not..."
"... and the action is in the basement, that's about all I got."
The next moment, Fulton, who had been standing outside the courtroom, burst in to explain what he knew to Karp, and they were both out the door of the Criminal Courts building thirty seconds later, jumping into the office Lincoln Continental with other members of Fulton's DAO team. Minutes later, they were running through the NYSE security gates, badges held high, shouting, "New York PD!" and "New York DAO!"
Once inside, Fulton yelled to the first security officer he saw. "Which way to the basement? We have a possible hostage situation and maybe a bomb. You need to get everybody out of here!"
A second security guard ran up. "Joe, handle the evacuation," he said. "This way to the basement."
As they ran through the trading floors, a few people yelled to ask what was going on, but most were transfixed in front of their monitors. Something was happening in the market. There were a lot of sell-short orders coming in for various equities and Treasury bonds and the Dow Jones was taking a hit. They couldn't be bothered with men running through the Exchange when the market was undergoing some sort of massive downturn.
The DAO team reached the top of the stairs just in time to hear a series of shots. With his big .44 Magnum held out in front, Fulton signaled for the others to stop as he moved cautiously forward to look down the staircase. There he saw a wounded uniformed officer trying to hold his gun steady enough to shoot a wounded white male.
"HOLD IT!" he bellowed. "Drop the guns, or I'll blow your fuckin' brains out."
The white man complied but the uniformed officer refused. "I'm NYPD," he yelled. "This man is a terrorist. He killed my partner."
"Like hell I'm a terrorist," Eric shouted back. "I'm from frickin' Queens, you asshole."
"I recognize that voice," Karp said, pushing to the front and standing next to Fulton. "Eric! What the hell's going on?"
"Hi Butch. Nothing much."
"Watch it!" Fulton shouted and fired twice, blowing the top of the 'police officer's' head off.
"Shit," Eric complained, wiping the other man's blood off his face. Fulton moved cautiously down the stairs. "Everybody back up a second. Got to make sure this asshole's gone. Dude was going for that little cord on his belt, which if I'm not mistaken, is probably attached to a suicide vest."
"Fuck me naked," Eric replied. "That would have been a hell of a thing. But you might not want to have a gabfest here boys, Marlene's back down that way taking on the rest of them."
As if in answer, there was the sound of a shot. Then many shots.
Fulton ran to the bottom of the stairs with Karp on his heels. "Be careful ..." Eric started to warn the others, who hit the grease and went down. "Oh man, that's got to hurt. Forgot to tell you, the floor is slick as snot."
"Thanks," Karp winced. He and Fulton picked themselves up as the rest of Fulton's team made their way gingerly across the greased marble.
"You going to be okay?" Karp asked Eric.
"Shit yeah, takes more than one bullet to kill a kid from my 'hood. This baby's gonna leave a nice scar and be worth a few drinks and a whole lot of sympathy from certain ladies I know."
Karp shook his head as Fulton and his team started moving down the hallway. Is everybody in Marlene's family insane? he wondered.
Malovo was starting to get nervous when the call from Al-Hassan finally arrived. After that, all she had to do was watch the stock-market report on her Blackberry, and when it fell to the magic number...
It was all a matter of timing. If she waited too long to give Azahari Mujahid the signal, the circuit breakers would kick in and the market slide would stop. However, if she blew it up too soon, trading would have automatically halted while the techies determined what was wrong. Waiting until the last minute would allow the market to start to crash, then when the circuit breakers failed to kick in, the techies would be up to their necks in trying to save what they could. The final blow would be the destruction of the main computer.
Time for a vacation, Malovo thought. Maybe Cuba this year.... Her eyes went to the monitor just as the camera view from the elevator carrying her men and the janitors should have appeared. It was dark.
A glitch? She flipped the switch to the monitor for the camera outside the elevator on the nineteenth floor. When the door opened, she gasped. It wasn't just the lifeless bodies of her men lying on the floor of the elevators, or that three of the "janitors" were obviously well-trained in house-to-house guerrilla warfare. It was the fourth man, a tall man with a black patch over one eye and a scarred face, who sent a chill up her spine.
"Ivgeny!" she hissed in fear and hatred.
Malovo hit the audio switch for the intercom in the investment firm office. "Mujahideen! You are being attacked!" she yelled. "Four men, hold them off! Mujahid, prepare to call the number!"
She glanced at her Blackberry. The market was starting to go down ... two percentage points already. Just a little longer, and the plan would still work. In fact, Ivgeny, my love, she thought, with you there, this will be like ... how do the Americans put it? ... killing two birds with one bomb.
What in the hell am I doing in this filthy tunnel? William White wondered as he waited for Amir Al-Sistani below Trinity Church.
Like most of the families connected to the Sons of Man, even though his had no seat on the council, the Whites had attended Trinity Church for more than two hundred years. And they were well aware of the coal tunnel located off a little-known passage beyond the old crypts in the basement. In fact, some of the more adventurous boys in those families had played in the tunnels. Legend had it that the old man, Dean Newbury, had once taken his brother, Vincent, into the tunnels and tried to lose him there. It was only after several hours of searching that other family members had located the boy.
White tilted his head and listened, thinking he heard voices coming his way from the dark. He pulled a small gun from his pocket. His orders were to escort Al-Sistani and maybe one or two others out of the church to a waiting limousine, which would take them to a private airfield in New Jersey where a jet waited. Anyone else, he was to shoot on sight. Who else would be stupid enough to be wandering around in this horrible place?
He heard the sound of footsteps, and two small figures emerged from the shadows. Not exactly what he was expecting. Maybe they're hostages. He'd been told to speak French to The Sheik. "Qui est la?"
The answer wasn't what he expected either. "It's the Coal Tunnel Ghost!" one yelled. The other started screaming so loudly that he decided
to shoot him just to stop the noise.
He was about to pull the trigger when something struck him hard in the back. So hard that it brought some warm sticky fluid into his mouth. He wiped the moisture with his hand and looked at it. Then he didn't care because he was dead.
"Hello boys," said a tall dark figure.
"Aaah, it's the Coal Tunnel Ghost!" Zak yelled for the second time.
"No it's not, you idiot," Giancarlo said. "It's David Grale."
"In the flesh," Grale said as he stepped on the back of the dead man to pull his knife out. "You want to tell me what's going on up there?"
Marlene stepped out from behind the filing cabinet as the young black man in the NYPD uniform and wearing a vest full of explosives and ball bearings charged toward her. She shot, striking him in the shoulder. Her next shot hit him in the chest and for a moment she cringed, fearing an explosion. Some part of her mind filed away the fact that the explosive was C-4 and hard to set off with a bullet, but not impossible. She aimed low and shot a leg.
It had the desired effect of stopping the charge. The black man fell against a wall, which he used to stay on his feet. Marlene aimed the gun at his head.
"Allah-u-Akbar," he said and yanked the cord to the detonator.
At the same moment, Marlene dropped the gun and pulled the filing cabinet over on its side, falling to the ground behind it. There was a roar and a sound like a sudden violent hailstorm as a thousand hard objects pinged off the walls, floor, and ceiling, with a couple dozen hitting the filing cabinet with a metallic "ponk." The force of the blast knocked the cabinet into Marlene and hurled them both ten yards down the hall.
It was over as suddenly as it had started. Marlene's ears rang and she felt like she'd been in a car crash. She got to her knees and surveyed the scene. Some of the ceiling had caved in, and the walls on both sides of the blast were buckled like someone had taken a giant hammer to them. Bits of ceiling tile, insulation, and, perhaps, clothing burned. But there was little left of the bomber, just a splash of blood, as well as pieces of flesh that she didn't care to look at long enough to recognize.
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