Soft Target

by Rachel Brune

  “Friendlies coming out!”

  “Friendlies coming out!” The security man echoed the call. Wright’s team piled out of the room and headed down the hall to kick in the last door.

  Upstairs, the small amount of ambient light that made it through the bay of windows illuminated a large, open second story. The entrance to the fire exit opened into the center of the room, and Mabry and his team split left and right to cover the entire room.

  “Door right. Looks like a small office!”

  “Door left. Says ‘STAIRWAY’!”

  “McLeon, cover the stairs. Rivera, you’re security in here. Marcus, with me.”

  Mabry scrambled to the door at the far right of the room. Marcus stacked up behind him, close to facilitate quick, violent entry.

  “Ready?” He felt Marcus shift.

  Mabry grabbed the door handle and slammed it open. He was through and aiming his rifle. In the split-second entry, movement behind a large object startled his reflexes. The bullet plowed into the soft, thick metal of the desk.

  “Shots fired, shots fired!”

  Wright led his team up the stairway, weapons pointing up and around corners. They reached the door. With a heavy fist, he pounded against it twice, paused, pounded twice.

  “Friendlies coming up!” McLeon shouted into the room.

  “Friendlies coming in!” Wright echoed the shout, opened the door, led his team into the room.

  “Where did those shots come from?” Wright demanded.

  “Office—other end!” McLeon pointed, then turned to cover the stairway.

  “Follow me!” Wright gestured, running across the room, ducking around support pillars to lead the way.

  “Friendlies coming in!”

  The call was not echoed.

  “Friendlies coming in! Damn it, Scott, what’s going on in there?”

  The door opened. Marcus appeared behind it, the NODs giving him a curious, alien appearance. Mabry stood before the desk, not breathing.

  “Scott! Mabry! What’s going on?”

  Marcus shook his head.

  “What the hell?” Wright followed Marcus’ pointing finger. Behind the desk huddled two figures. They raised their heads.

  “Don’t shoot, mister!”

  “Hold up, cease fire!” Wright became violently, acutely aware of the fact that the two kids hiding behind the desk were so scared they had voided their bowels. “Scott, you there?”

  Mabry shook himself. He lowered his weapon. “I’m here.” His voice shook.

  Wright put the radio to his mouth. “Breach Team to Control.”

  “This is Control. Send it.”

  “Control, this building is secure. We have two suspects in custody, no sign of additional weapons caches.”

  “Roger, Breach. Continue search, report back.”

  “Roger Control. We also have two juvenile indigents on the second story. How copy?”

  “Breach, this is Control. That’s good copy. Bring them down. See if you can find their information. I’ll have someone up to the front to take them in custody.”

  “Roger, Control. Breach out.”

  Wright looked at the two kids, who huddled against each other. “What’s the deal? You two live here?”

  They looked at him silently.

  “Come on, kid, talk to me. You live here?”

  The older kid looked around at the cops with their weapons and NODs and started to cry.

  Wright raised his NODs, took off his helmet, squatted down to eye level. “Come on kid, it’s not that bad. You’re not in trouble. No one’s going to hurt you. Just talk to me.”

  The kid shook his head, looking at Mabry.

  “Scott,” said Wright. “Go in the other room.”

  Mabry hesitated, then walked out.

  The younger kid raised his head. “We were just looking for someplace to sleep.”

  Abandoning any pretense at stealth, Mark and his cameraman had pushed right up to the entrance before Morris could deploy officers to back them away. They got clear video shots of the suspects being led from the building, as well as the task force members exiting, tired, nervous, highlighted in the strobing lights of the police vehicles. By now, other members of the press had arrived, but were unable to jostle Mark and his man from their privileged positions.

  “Sir! Sir! Can I ask you a question?” Mark’s voice penetrated over the din.

  “No.” Wright turned away to one of the patrol officers. “Get this damn camera out of here.”

  Mark and his cameraman dodged the officer’s attempt to manhandle them out of the way. Their feint put them in the perfect position to tape the door as two uniforms led the children out of the building, wrapped in blankets.

  “Sir! Were there children in the building?” No response. The camera zoomed in on the kids, and Mark ducked in closely to shove his microphone in the children’s faces. “Were you in the building, son?”

  “Yeah, we were there.” The older one was still crying, trying to stop. “That man shot us!”

  Another officer, a large man, physically pushed Mark away from the scene, beyond the reach of the crime scene tape cordoning off the area.

  Jostling, Mark followed the child’s accusatory glare. Excitedly, he pulled his cameraman’s angle back to the door. Perfectly framed, haunted, Scott Mabry stumbled out into the glare of the media spotlight.

  Chapter Five

  “Salami I lick’em!”

  Alan narrowed his eyes. The joke wasn’t funny the first time Dodger made it three weeks ago.

  Eddie caught Alan’s look and elbowed Dodger. “Show some respect, man.”

  Dodger shrugged. “Sorry, man.”

  Alan shook his head. His compatriots were still young in the faith, with nothing like his devotion. But then most people did not come close to his devotion, typified by his willingness to subject himself to the impurities with which he surrounded himself on a daily basis. He kept telling himself that they were nothing to him, but sometimes he worried that at the end, he would be so unclean that nothing would set him right.

  The three men were gathered around the kitchen table. Dodger and Eddie were cutting a tiny amount of cocaine into even tinier amounts, then beefing it back up to the original amount with some substitution. The customers they typically serviced were usually too messed up to notice the dilution.

  “Shit.” Dodger held up his hand, waved it around. Red flowed from the webbing between his thumb and his forefinger, where he had cut himself with the knife he was using. “This is bullshit.”

  He stomped off into the bathroom to find something to wrap his hand.

  Alan looked around. “What the hell is his problem?”

  “Nothing man.” Eddie kept bagging his product. “It’s just getting to him.”

  “What?” asked Alan.

  “Stress.” Eddie shrugged. “Crackhead stress.”

  “He’s getting nervous?”

  “Nah. Well…yeah. You saw what went down last week? Some cops busting into a warehouse, and my cousin in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gets stopped with a bunch of these little baggies, and they round him up too.”

  Alan made a noncommittal sound. The silence was broken slightly by a burst of activity from the police scanner that had taken up residence in the corner of the room. At Alan’s behest, Eddie had gotten it somewhere and brought it in the day before. The raid down the street the other night had been too close for comfort. Not only that, Alan needed the weapons those men had been procuring for him.

  “All I’m saying, man,” said Eddie, “is we were thinking we might try something a little more low risk.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Knock off a twenty-four-hour deli. Those things are always prime.”

  “And get our faces on videotape before we even begin?”

  Eddie laughed. He tapped some more powder into a bag, then brushed the rest of the dust off the table. He sprinkled that in the bag as well and zipped it up.

&nb
sp; “Nah man. It’s cool. Dodger and me have what’s known as ‘job experience’.”

  Dodger came back in the room. He sat down again, lit up a cigarette.

  “What I want to know is, when do we quit this fundraising bullshit and really start to do something?”

  “When I think you’re ready.”

  Dodger shook his head. “Who says we’re not ready?”

  Dodger didn’t see Alan’s fist until it rebounded from his nose. The punch didn’t break it, but the sharp pain seemed to justify the blood that poured down his chin. Alan fixed Eddie in his chair with a hard look.

  “Hey man, I’m sorry,” said Dodger, mumbling through his hand.

  Eddie shook his head. Dodger knew Alan was crazy. They both knew it. Their introduction to the man occurred in the laundry room of the prison facility in which they had previously resided. Alan had insisted on pausing in his work in order to pray. He was at first polite, then insistent, when the corrections officer supervising the work crew decided to forbid it. He had even gone so far as to explain the importance of praying five times a day for a devout follower of Islam.

  The corrections officer had responded with an ethnic slur that inclusively insulted Alan’s parentage, tribe, and religion.

  Eddie watched as Alan, without telegraphing a warning or even appearing to draw a deep breath, viciously attacked the guard. He kicked the man’s knee so hard it broke, grabbed the baton from his belt, and proceeded to beat him severely on the head and neck. The beating happened so quickly, Eddie and Dodger simply stood and watched in amazement until the quick reaction force responded, pushing them down on the floor. It took three of them to subdue Alan. Alan himself had taken the worst beating either of the two inmates had ever seen inflicted, without flinching or crying out.

  Alan had spent the rest of his sentence in solitary. Eddie and Dodger had drifted back to New York by then. He had shown up at their apartment one day with a suitcase full of product and a business proposition. That proposition had grown into an offer to help them make their mark on the city, and at the same time provide them a way to square their criminal pasts with a crusader’s future. To hear Alan explain it, under the banner of his Islam, violence against the “infidel,” which included most of the people Eddie and Dodger ever committed violence against in the first place, was morally acceptable, in fact, morally compulsive.

  Eddie didn’t quite buy all of Alan’s arguments. He had never been one to follow ideologies. Since his childhood, he had attached himself to the most violent alpha male in his nearest vicinity, and made sure that he was in good with that force. Dodger listened without interest to Alan’s reasoned theological harangues. He wasn’t ready to join any jihad. But the cocaine made money, and if it would lead the way to bigger and better ways of blowing shit up, he was all for it.

  Alan hadn’t ever visited the Smoking Joe Café before, and he had no intention of ever coming back. It wasn’t that the service or the coffee was bad. In fact, he was able to order a passable Turkish coffee, almost as strong as he liked it. The waitress who served him was a pretty Lebanese girl, dressed modestly in a long-sleeved tee-shirt and a patterned headscarf. He smiled at her as she set his order down next to his laptop.

  The first twenty minutes of his visit to the internet café were spent perusing the stock market online. He visited his fund-tracking site, browsed through the online New York Times Business Section, reading about the various foibles of the market. He shook his head at the steadily downward-creeping red line that typified the Nasdaq lately. He didn’t actually have any money in the stock market, but no one looked twice at a well-dressed businessman visiting online financial sites.

  Alan inserted his thumb drive into the computer. He opened his e-mail and clicked “compose.” Opening a file on the thumb drive, he pasted the text into the e-mail and hit “send.” He opened a new browser window, visiting another web e-mail site. Opening the e-mail he had just sent to himself, he clicked “forward” and sent it off to yet another e-mail address.

  The better part of Alan’s next twenty minutes was sent routing and re-routing the e-mail message around the internet. He looked back over his shoulder to make sure nobody was eavesdropping, but the patrons of the shop seemed preoccupied with their own, solitary online lives. He looked over his message one last time. The wording had to be perfect, incendiary, yet threatening enough to be taken seriously. He had read through enough jihadist tracts to be able to formulate the necessary phrases, but still worried that the message would get lost amid the incoming traffic on the other side.

  Satisfied as much as he could be, Alan clicked “forward.” A few nanoseconds later, the e-mail message hit the internet pipeline. The first step was complete. There would be no turning back from this.

  The last twenty minutes of Alan’s hour on the computer were spent on a movie-ticketing site. He was trying to get tickets for a show at the theater in Times Square, but any movie he would have been able to sit through was sold out. He purchased two tickets for a movie starring some wannabe hipster, and used his cell phone to call Eddie. He and Dodger could go, and get the information he needed. He had already sat through enough pop culture assaults on his sensibility, and his sense of sacrifice was done for the day.

  * * *

  “Why am I still here?”

  Mabry stood before Nina Morris’ desk. The office was enclosed in glass, which cut off sound from the outside, but did nothing to block the opaque stares of his colleagues sneaking glances into the panopticon.

  “Are you kidding?” asked Morris. “What would the papers say if I fired our hero cop?”

  Mabry’s fist pounding her desk carried even outside the ostensibly soundproof walls. The few men and women in the office who had been pretending not to notice gave up all pretenses and joined their colleagues in watching the scene. From his desk across the bullpen, Sergeant Wright shook his head. Mabry was a good man, but he was either going to be fired or riding a desk for the rest of his time with JTTF Eden.

  Scott’s outburst didn’t faze Nina. She folded her arms across her chest, and wished she hadn’t run out of cream for her coffee that morning.

  “Scott, you know I respect you and your work, but you fucked up.”

  “So cut me loose. Send me back to the force.”

  “I tried that. Your boss pulled in a favor. They don’t need you back yet.”

  “Need me, or want me back?”

  “You’re not going back to OCCB.”

  “And I’m off the tactical team.”

  “Yes.” Nina rubbed her forehead. Once she hit thirty-five, stress had implanted a permanent furrow that grew deeper every year. “Scott, I know what you’re going through. I’ve been there. Take the time. You need it.”

  Scott shrugged. He knew Nina was right. He wasn’t unfamiliar with the sense of alienation and ill adjustment that he was going through. It was just that after his last couple of deployments, he had gotten over it in a couple months, helped along by the fact that he was able to come back to a job that allowed him the same level of daily adrenaline he had found overseas.

  “So where’s my desk?” Mabry felt exhausted. He wanted Nina to cut him loose; was unable to walk out the door under his own power. He wanted to know why, this time, coming home was turning out to be such a pain in the ass.

  Nina pulled a folder from the top of a stack neatly squared-off in the corner of her desk.

  “Here.” She gave him the folder. “You’ll be sitting in with the TEW analysts.”

  “TEW?”

  “Terrorism Early Warning reports.” Scott began to shake his head, but she cut him off. “Listen, you have experience in recognition and analysis of early terrorist methods. They’re shorthanded over there, and they need someone who knows how these guys work. It’s not as sexy as blowing in doors and shooting at kids, but you can spend some time there and do some good.”

  Scott closed the folder.

  Nina picked up her phone and pressed a button. “Kyle? I’ve g
ot that agent coming down to you. He’ll be there in ten.”

  She hung up the phone. “They’re down on the second floor. You’ll be reporting in to Kyle MacAllister. He’ll show you around.”

  “Right.” Scott saluted her with the folder, turned and stalked out of the office. He walked past heads hastily turned away, and officers suddenly searching for something to do.

  “Hey Scott, it’s good to see you down here.” Kyle MacAllister was a large man, not as tall as Scott, but with the squat build of a professional wrestler.

  “Kyle. I didn’t realize they had you working down here. Thought you were still in Kuwait.”

  A picture on MacAllister’s desk showed a line of men and women in desert camouflage, standing against a backdrop of plywood shacks and military vehicles. He closed a file on his computer and stood up. “I heard you were back, but didn’t get a chance to come by.”

  “Yeah, got back in March. Haven’t been around much. Last two drills, I’ve been down at Fort Dix helping out with training.” The two men belonged to units located at the same Army Reserve Headquarters.

  “No worries, man, I know what it’s like. Good to have you.”

  “I’d say it’s good to be here, but you probably heard why I’m here.”

  “Forget it. Their loss. Listen, I gotta run to lunch. You hungry?”

  “You buying?” asked Scott.

  “Hell no, we’ll drop it on the Task Force,” said Kyle.

  “I’m in.”

  The two men didn’t feel much like eating inside, or frequenting any of the delis within walking distance and possibly meeting up with more of their colleagues. They settled for dirty water hot dogs, pretzels and an overpriced bottle of water from a street vendor, and found a convenient spot to stand and eat.

  “So, did Morris tell you anything about what we do downstairs?”

  “Nah, just some sort of analysis.” Mabry’s hot dog was smothered in sauerkraut and mustard. He wiped his chin.

  “Well, basically what we get is a shitload of information from various agencies, mostly statements, recent documents, chat traffic, that sort of thing.” Kyle finished his hot dog, plain, wished he had gotten another. They were pretty small. “Hell, we even got a bunch of jihadi hip hop downloads the other day.”