Countdown, page 25
Here, of course.
But where?
And when?
He digs deeper, finds a blue Kevlar bullet-resistant vest under all the wadded-up newspaper.
A shoot-out, then—but Patel isn’t going out as a suicide shooter. He’s planning on protecting himself.
Freddie thinks for a moment, then takes a couple of minutes to field-strip and examine the M4. When he’s done, he reassembles the M4 and replaces it among the crumpled newsprint.
Nestled about the crumpled newspapers is a slip of paper.
He pulls it out, unfolds it, and reads the carefully printed letters and numbers:
LIFT FOUR
6, 6, 8, 9
ACCESS ROOF
9, 8, 6, 6
Freddie memorizes the words and numbers, puts the paper slip back.
Replaces the floorboards.
Gets up, closes the closet door.
Heads out of the bedroom and into the living room—just in time to hear the apartment door being unlocked.
Chapter 82
IN A small corner office in the large bonded warehouse in Hoboken owned by one of Rashad’s companies, he shakes his head in amusement and says, “Are you sure? Are you certain Jeremy isn’t available?”
The American woman on the other end says, “Let’s see…yep, both eyes working. He’s not here. Can I take a message? Can he call you back?”
Rashad allows himself a laugh and says, “Who is this? His secretary? Girlfriend? Married lover?”
The woman laughs right back. “Sorry, Rashad, I’m his boss. And you’ve called at a bad time. You see, we’re on our way to kill you. How’s your day going?”
He stands up from the desk he’s been using in this windowless office. On the other side of the door are four of his associates, waiting for one last briefing. He’d been planning to use this call to taunt and upset Jeremy a final time.
Not this.
“Who the hell are you to say such a thing?” Rashad asks.
The woman laughs again. “Amy Cornwall, former U.S. Army, now an intelligence officer for the United States. How’s New York been treating you? Getting in the sights? Check out Times Square if you can…not many strip clubs left, but a loser like you could probably find one. I mean, that’s the only place you can get up close and personal with a naked woman, am I right?”
He swears at the woman for a long minute and—damn it—she laughs at him again!
“Oh, Rashad, come on, is that the best you can do?” she says when he pauses. “Didn’t you hear what I said earlier, or do you have desert sand clogging your hairy ears? I served in the United States Army. I heard better swear words from recruits who were so young they couldn’t shave. Jeremy and I know all about you, Rashad. We know how your dad hated you. How you’ve never married. I’ve even talked to your three half-sisters. They all said the same thing: you cried at night and wet the bed, even when you were a teen boy.”
“I did not!” he shouts, ashamed that he’s losing his temper.
“Rashad…come on, deep down, you know what’s going on, don’t you?” her calm voice says. “You hated Daddy growing up, when he had your balls in his back pocket, and you killed him. And with him dead, you thought you could start getting an erection on a regular basis. But even with all your money, you couldn’t even do that. Failure, start to finish. Even your precious organization is riddled with informants. Trains, I mean…trains? What are you, still ten years old?”
“Failure!” he says, then easing his voice. “You whore, I’m going to stand on top of my wealth and kill thousands of you. Do you hear me? Thousands. And there’s nothing you or Jeremy can do. Nothing.”
His breathing has quickened. He can’t believe how angry this woman has made him.
“Rashad?” she asks. “Still there?”
“I am, you bitch. I am going to find you and kill you and your family and—”
“Hey, Rashad, nice talking to you, but I’ve got something more important to do: I’ve got to go change out my tampon…and then Jeremy and I are coming after your sorry ass. Later.”
The American woman disconnects the call.
Rashad throws the phone on the floor.
Throws open the door.
Stalks right out.
In the dim light, crates and packages stretch into the darkness. Before him, sitting around a round table with paperwork and maps, are his four men: Mike Patel, Marcel Koussa, and two train conductors working for the Hudson Valley Railroad (which he secretly owns): Miguel Marcos, from the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and Alvi Dudin, from the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment of Chechnya.
All four of them are looking at him with a mixture of respect, fear, and curiosity about what just happened in that small office.
Rashad nods to them, goes over to the table, and removes a 9mm SIG Sauer pistol from his coat pocket. Then he grabs Marcel’s hair and tugs his head back.
Marcel starts to talk, but an enraged Rashad sticks the pistol barrel into Marcel’s mouth and blows his brains out with one quick snap of his finger.
Marcel’s body slumps to the floor.
The three other men stare at him.
Rashad’s anger turns inward. Damn that woman! He had planned to take away Marcel and spend long delicious hours with him, finding out how deep his betrayal had gone and how much he had passed along to British intelligence. But his anger took hold instead.
Marcel is dead. A loss, but still, he wasn’t a friend. He was just a worker, to be dismissed—or eliminated—when necessary.
Rashad takes a deep breath.
Replaces the pistol in his coat pocket.
It won’t do for these three others—who will help him bring down an empire tomorrow—to see him unsettled, unsure, filled with doubt or fear.
He smiles at his brave trio.
“That man was a traitor,” Rashad says. “We will not speak of him again. We have much more to discuss about tomorrow’s blessed day.”
Chapter 83
JEREMY WINDSOR leaves Captain Bloom’s office feeling worn out and exhausted. It’s one thing to break and humiliate an enemy to gain one’s goals, he thinks, but another to do it to a fellow service member. Still, he has to get Amy and himself to New York, even if that means disgusting his own self by telling Captain Bloom what he knows about the captain’s tastes when it comes to enjoying some illegal pleasures in Brussels while visiting NATO headquarters.
The ashamed captain had finally broken, but not until after a lot of threats and yelling. At any other time, Jeremy would need a stiff drink and a hot shower to put him right, but there’s no time.
In the small exterior office, Amy is on Jeremy’s iPhone and he hears something odd as she disconnects and returns the phone to him. He takes the phone and says, “Did I hear you right? Did you tell someone that Jeremy and you were coming after his ass?”
“That’s right,” she says, adjusting her slacks around her waist, the weight of the 9mm Beretta tugging them down. “You’ve got good hearing.”
“Who was it?” he asks, seeing that the two RAF officers—no doubt having heard the yelling from Bloom’s office—have left the building.
“It was Rashad Hussain,” she says simply.
Jeremy, putting his iPhone back in his jacket, freezes at what he’s just heard.
“Amy, for God’s sake, please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not,” she says. “I got hold of my husband, Tom; he’s busy at work doing research for us, and when our call was completed, a call came in saying it was blocked. I answered it and it was Rashad.”
“For God’s sake, Amy, why in hell didn’t you come get me?”
She says, “You told me not to interrupt your meeting.”
“Not if bloody Rashad Hussain called!”
Amy’s face hardens. “Sorry, Jeremy, but he was on the phone, and he wanted to talk. I wasn’t going to risk putting him on hold or disconnecting him.”
“You still should have gotten me.”
“Well, I didn’t,” she says.
Jeremy says, “Amy, for Christ’s sake, pulling shit like that almost makes me regret rescuing you back there.”
Her eyes glare. “Let’s stop rewriting history, Mister Windsor. You didn’t rescue me; I rescued me. You offered me a lift, a shower, some food and clean clothes. All greatly appreciated. But don’t go medieval on my ass because I didn’t go trotting to you when that son of a bitch called.”
Jeremy actually grits his teeth. “What did he say?”
Amy’s teacup is still on the coffee table. She picks it up, takes a sip, makes a face. “Ugh,” she says. “Tastes like dishwater. Rashad? Oh, yeah—he apologized for all he’s done and says he’s going to surrender to us in front of the Statue of Liberty. He asked that we bring some bagels and cream cheese. Damn it, don’t be dense. He barely said a word.”
If Amy had been a fellow squaddie from the regiment, Jeremy knows he would have coldcocked her, right here and now. “Stop it,” he says. “Tell me what he said.”
She takes another swallow, grimaces again, puts the cup down. “Nothing. I wouldn’t let him finish. He said he wanted to talk to you. I told him you were busy. Then I told him you and I were on our way to kill him. He didn’t take it graciously.”
“Anything else?”
“A bit of discussion about his lack of manhood, how he was still desperately seeking Daddy’s attention, and I told him I had talked to his three half-sisters, who all said he had nightmares and wet the bed.”
“You…you haven’t talked to his sisters.”
“I know that, and you know that, but he doesn’t know that,” Amy says. “Look, Jeremy, the little shit was calling you to taunt you. I just gave it right back to him. Got him angry. Upset. In a foul mood. That happens, he might do something stupid. Overreact. Be impulsive. All things that can work in our favor.”
“That was…”
“Not smart?” Amy asks. “Maybe, but what he’s going to do otherwise? Plan to kill people twice tomorrow?”
Jeremy shakes his head again. “You…enough. I’ve got transport to the United States—an American Air Force base in New Jersey. Two Typhoon jet fighters will be landing here in less than half an hour. They were designated to fly to Ramstein in Germany, but their orders are now being changed.”
“Good job,” Amy says.
“No, it was a rotten job,” Jeremy says, rubbing his eyes. “You know earlier, when I said that we in the service make steel-like bonds with others, and can rely on them for favors? There’s a dark underbelly to that when you find someone’s hidden shame, hidden weaknesses, and drag it out into the open to get what you need.”
“You had something on the captain, then.”
“I did.”
“What was it?”
“None of your business, Amy,” he says. “It got us two twin-seater Typhoons to America. Leave it at that.” He takes a breath. “Come along—we’ve got to get kitted out if we want to get there before he uses his trains to disperse the weaponized anthrax.”
He turns and takes two steps, then realizes Amy isn’t following him. He looks at her and sees her head is tilted back, watching a TV broadcasting the BBC World Service.
The news footage shows a park with NYPD personnel gathered around a fountain. There are lumps of something on the pavement, and yellow sheets, and little plastic triangles marking bits of evidence to be collected and recorded.
The slow-moving crawl at the bottom of the screen says:
DEADLY ANTHRAX ATTACK THWARTED IN MANHATTAN WHEN WOULD-BE TERRORIST KILLS HERSELF WITH A SUICIDE BELT…
With near admiration in her voice, Amy says, “That tricky, slippery, son-of-a-bitch eel! First the suitcase nuke, and now this. He spent all this time working with that Frenchwoman, getting her prepared with weaponized anthrax, and at the very last moment sacrificing her to keep his real mission secret. He’s very good at setting up red herrings, isn’t he?”
Jeremy says, “And MI6 and the CIA will now think Rashad’s been stopped.”
“Yeah,” says Amy, her voice tired. “But we know better, don’t we? And we don’t have the time or connections to convince our higher-ups otherwise.”
Jeremy keeps staring at the scene in Manhattan. Two investigators in large yellow hazmat suits with astronaut-style helmets are waddling toward the lumps on the ground.
“We still don’t know what he’s going to do,” he says.
Amy starts for the door. “Sure we do,” she says. “He’s planning to kill thousands of my countrymen within the next twenty-four hours. The rest is just details. Come on—we don’t want to be late.”
Chapter 84
FREDDIE FARRADY’S feet and shins ache something fierce, but his growing anger at Portia Grayson from MI5 is helping him ignore the pain.
They are sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Rector Street, just blocks away from where he saw the Frenchwoman get blown in half as the NYPD kept her at bay, but Portia refuses to acknowledge the evidence before her thin and disapproving face.
“Portia, don’t you see it?” Freddie demands. “A suicide bomber carrying enough weaponized anthrax to kill about ten thousand people…and Mike Patel is in the crowd, watching? You don’t think that needs to be investigated?”
They are sitting in a far corner of the coffee shop, on pink chairs. Freddie hates the color pink.
Portia takes a disapproving sip from her late-evening coffee. “There were scores of people near that deranged woman. Did you see Mike talk to her? Or approach her?”
“No, but earlier I saw Mike receive a phone call and make a phone call.”
“Do you know if she was contacted by Mike?”
Freddie wants to punch the tired but smug face in front of him. “Portia, there’s something going on with Mike, something big. Look, an hour after the bombing, I got into his apartment and—”
His MI5 supervisor puts her cardboard coffee cup down on the pink tabletop so hard that a little spurt of liquid spouts out from the plastic lid. “You broke into his apartment? Without my permission? Without the necessary documentation?”
“To hell with your permission, and to hell with your documentation,” Freddie says. “I found an American M4 automatic rifle with more than two hundred rounds of ammo and a bullet-resistant vest. Portia, he’s more than an HVAC tech. You know that.”
Portia picks up a brown napkin, gently wipes up the spill, and dabs the top of the coffee cup. “Freddie, you’re out,” she says, with ice and calm in her voice. “I’ll make the necessary arrangements to get a replacement. You’ve screwed up this job, terribly. Suppose you had been caught in that man’s flat?”
As if on cue, Freddie’s feet and lower legs throb in painful memory. After hearing Patel unlock the door, he had escaped the only way he could: Freddie thrust himself through one of the two open windows, hung down as far as he could by his fingertips, and then let go, hoping his years-old training in doing a drop-and-roll parachute landing would work.
His feet and legs throb again.
It did work, but it was sloppy. Freddie says, “If I had been caught in the man’s flat, then at least something would have happened. We would have brought in the NYPD, figure out what he is doing.”
“You would have threatened the investigation.”
Freddie keeps his voice low but sharp. “What bloody investigation is that, Portia? All I’ve done is trail him around Manhattan and New Jersey like some deranged internet stalker. What’s the investigation? Why is he being looked into?”
Portia says, “I’m under no obligation to tell you.”
Freddie sees his error and tries to walk it back. “Then, please. My boss back at the Yard will want to know what went wrong, in detail. Help me, then—what is the investigation?”
A pleased look flashes across that severe face. “Immigration.”
“What?”
A confident nod. “Immigration. Somehow Mr. Patel quickly got the necessary papers and funds to come here to the States. We believe he’s part of an organized ring—located here in New York and Manchester—that is part of a large illegal-immigration organization. And that, Mr. Farrady, is that.”
Portia picks up her coffee and leaves the little coffee shop.
Freddie checks his watch.
Fifteen minutes have passed.
His career has just taken a serious hit. You don’t screw up an MI5 op like this and not suffer some consequences.
But damn it, he knows he’s right!
He takes out his iPhone, starts scrolling through a directory.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he whispers, as he finds the number he’s looking for—745-0200—and waits for it to be picked up.
It doesn’t take long.
“British Consulate,” a cheery young man answers.
Freddie digs through his memory. Remarkably, he comes up with the name that was passed on to him a long time ago by a retired MI6 field officer giving a lecture on overseas operations and what to do in the event of an unanticipated, serious threat.
“Amanda Trevor,” he says. “Agricultural attaché, please.”
Chapter 85
AT THE Southern Terminal dispatch office for the Hudson Valley Railroad near Hoboken, Orrin Block tries to stifle a yawn as he leafs through that day’s manifest for his trip up to Albany. Orrin’s been an engineer for Hudson Valley for three years now and hates every minute of it. His father had been a train engineer, his grandfather had been a train engineer, and like a dope, he had agreed to join the family trade.
He takes a deep swallow of his coffee. It’s very early morning on May 29 and Orrin doesn’t care what the clock says, it’s the goddamn middle of the night. The dispatch room is crowded with other engineers, conductors, yard personnel, and there’s the smell of coffee, sweat, smoke, and always, always, the stench of diesel fuel, and he hates it so.
But Dad and Granddad had kept on yapping about the joy of being out on the rails, wind in your hair, watching the beauty of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Ocean, the Great Lakes, blah blah blah.
