Dead Reckoning, page 11
Achmed realized that the question was not directed to him but to another man in the room. When he saw the tiny Asian in the kimono over by the tables in the middle of the floor, Achmed suddenly understood precisely who he was dealing with and he let out a tiny squeak of sheer terror.
“Hold that thought,” Remo said.
Chiun was examining a heap of material that was spread out across several tables.
The rest of the fourth floor appeared to be abandoned. Daily life had been lived on the floors below. This one loft was the center of planning for as-yet unrealized terrorist acts. Nearby Colorado Springs Airport was the base from which the attacks would be launched. On the tables at which Chiun stood were spread maps, brochures and diagrams.
There were plans to hijack commercial jets from Colorado Springs Airport and fly them into Disneyland and the Golden Gate Bridge. There were plans to hijack commercial jets from Colorado Springs Airport and fly them into the St. Louis Arch and Boulder Dam. There were plans to hijack commercial jets from Colorado Springs Airport and fly them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Seattle’s Space Needle.
There was an aborted plan to hijack commercial jets from Colorado Springs Airport and fly them into the Grand Canyon. In the margin someone had doodled in Arabic: “Already hole. Need bigger planes? Pray question to Allah.”
One plan had apparently gotten the blessing of the local al-Khobar franchise.
An entire table had been devoted to Mount Rushmore. There were photographs of the great monument taken from every imaginable angle on the ground, as well as many from above. There were pictures of some of the men Remo had encountered downstairs wearing Mount Rushmore sweatshirts while standing amid the pines beneath the great granite presidential faces in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
There were plane schedules and four recently purchased tickets. Remo noted the date was four days away.
Remo turned back to Achmed Mohammed, who was still cowering on the floor. Achmed winced.
“Want to play a quick round of kick the terrorist, Little Father?” Remo asked, eyes dead.
“No,” Achmed shouted.
“I am not wearing the right shoes,” Chiun said.
“I can help you find him,” Achmed pleaded. “His lawyer called yesterday. She said he claimed to have a weapon. My brother is worse than an idiot, he is a dangerous idiot. And if he has some kind of weapon, he is even more dangerous. Please, I can help you. He trusts me. I will help you set a trap. I beg you, show mercy.”
“What do you think, Little Father?” Remo asked. “Guy’s willing to sell out his brother, but on the other hand, he apparently knows the definition of mercy. That puts him one up on everybody else around here.”
Chiun shrugged bony shoulders. “He grovels now but given a chance he will stick a dagger in your back. It is their way. But if you want him, he is yours to take care of. I am not feeding or walking him.”
The smoke was rising thick from the stairwell. Remo could hear the sirens from police and rescue vehicles in the street below. With locals muscling in on the scene, Smith could keep the FBI away for just so long.
“Okay, we got a deal,” Remo said.
“Praise Allah,” Achmed Mohammed sang.
“Yeah, well, you might just want to rethink that, Omar,” Remo said. Afraid Mohammed’s loose ear might come off, he dragged the terrorist out the door by his hair.
11
Hitchhiking was too dangerous. Mustafa had been lucky the first time but that luck would not hold. There were too many police on the roads in Colorado. Fortunately, the Almighty One was still on his side.
After the Wilcox family dropped him off in Kansas, Mustafa walked only a mile before he spied a little old lady struggling to carry groceries into her house from her car. He offered to help her cart her bags into her neat little ranch and she gladly accepted his assistance.
“Aren’t you nice. It’s so difficult to find people who are willing to help out others these days.”
Mustafa learned that she was a widow, with a daughter who lived in Oregon but who rarely called.
“What do I owe you?” she asked, reaching an arthritic hand into her ragged purse.
Mustafa strangled the woman at her kitchen table and stole her car. With luck, the old infidel’s body would not be discovered for days. By then New York City would be gone.
He had settled on New York while still in that insufferable family’s minivan. The Prophet had given him a choice of cities to destroy and he had decided that it would be best to revisit the scene of al-Khobar’s greatest triumph.
Mustafa had gotten as far as Missouri, the old Mohammed family Koran on the front seat beside him, when a police car flew up behind him, lights flashing. For an instant, he panicked. His instinct was to try to outrun the cruiser but his foot along with the rest of his body was frozen in place.
In those terrified seconds of hesitation, the state police car flew right past him and raced down an off-ramp, disappearing from sight.
His fear, he knew, had saved him. However, he might not be so lucky next time. He was a fugitive in an unholy land. Already he had nearly been caught by the two American killers of legend. New York might not be as easy for him to enter as he had hoped.
Mustafa realized that if he was going to succeed in his great mission, he would need help. And what better help than family? His brother Achmed was the answer. While they might have had disagreements in the past, blood was important and he knew that he could count totally on his brother in this savage land.
At a roadside diner he tried to phone his brother. He had learned from Constance Arnold that his brother had come to America on what she called “another great mission” and she had given him Achmed’s phone number. But when he called, Mustafa got only an automated message telling him that the number was currently out of service.
Desperate, unsure what to do next, Mustafa remembered another phone number Constance had given him after the Elite Incursion Martyrdom Brigade failed to liberate him eight months before. He had jotted it down inside his Koran. Mustafa cracked the book, found the number and stabbed it into the pay phone.
The male voice that answered spoke Arabic and offered no pleasantries. “Where are you?” He was cold and efficient. Mustafa had not realized the line his lawyer had given him was one that had been set up exclusively for his use. He told the forceful voice his location.
“Stay where you are,” Alawi Sulayam commanded. “I will be there shortly.” After he disconnected the call, Sulayam turned to his Iranian lieutenants with a smile on his face. “This Iraqi fool has turned himself in to us. Soon, we will have this magical weapon of his. And we will know what to do with it.”
Smith had made arrangements for Remo to get a special cell phone, its number the same as that of Achmed Mohammed’s number in Security, Colorado, so that if Mustafa tried calling his brother, the phone Remo carried would ring.
The first time the phone buzzed in Remo’s pants pocket he thought Achmed was trying to steal his wallet so he slapped the terrorist in his broken nose.
“It is your phone,” Achmed cried, his nose re-gushing blood.
“Oh. Yeah,” Remo said, fishing out the phone. He tried to open it. He had seen people on TV open cell phones a million times. There was a little bit that looked like the bit that should snap open. He snapped it open. The phone stopped ringing. That was because it was in two pieces.
“Crap,” said Remo.
“Dyou broke dyour phobe in happ,” Achmed said. He had pulled a Kleenex apart and was stuffing the pieces up his nostrils to stanch the flow of blood.
“Keep talking and you’re next, Abu Ben Bubbie,” Remo said.
When he called Smith from a pay phone to see if Mustafa had tried to contact his brother, the CURE director said that it was he who had been testing Remo’s phone.
“There was a problem transferring the line over after his brother’s building burned down. Pick up another from the nearest electronics store immediately,” Smith ordered. “I will reroute Achmed’s number to it.”
When that phone rang and Remo still could not open it, he told Achmed to go borrow a screwdriver from a hotdog vendor so that he could use it to jimmy open the side.
“Give me that, nitwit,” Chiun said, impatiently snatching the cell phone from his pupil. “The device works, Emperor Smith,” he said, answering the phone. “To ensure that it continues to do so, I will keep it.”
Chiun hung up the phone and it disappeared inside the voluminous folds of his kimono.
“Showoff,” Remo said. Pausing on the sidewalk, he sighed. “We can’t keep wandering around hoping to get lucky. I guess we should find a hotel or something until Smitty gets a handle on Mustafa.” He turned to Achmed. “You sure you don’t know what this weapon of your brother’s is?”
“Dno,” Achmed said.
“That’s getting real tired real fast,” Remo said. Reaching out, he pinched the bridge of Achmed’s nose between two fingers. There was a soft crack and a gush of blood that launched Kleenex fragments. Achmed didn’t have time to howl in pain before he realized that the pain was gone. His nose felt as good as new.
“Thank you, blessed one,” Achmed said.
“Only thank me on those days I might not kill you,” Remo said, tossing the terrorist in the backseat of his car.
“He calls you blessed now, but that is only because you were nice to him this minute,” Chiun confided to Remo as they drove. “The only thing shorter than an Arab’s gratitude is his memory, unless they are talking about the Crusades, and even then they still get everything wrong. Trust me, Remo, two minutes from now he will be cursing you for not worshiping as he does as he tries to crash our car into the nearest synagogue. Do not give him the wheel.”
“Not a problem, Little Father,” Remo said. To Achmed he said, “Now this weapon your brother, Dumbo the Magnificent, has … where did he get it from?”
“A weapons lab in Iraq. They were secret, buried under the sand, but they were there.”
“No kidding,” Remo said. “I was killed in one of them once. So what is it? Pills, injections? Did he keister something into prison and now he’s going to bran muffin us all to death?”
“I honestly do not know,” Achmed said. “At the laboratories there was much testing of many different things. There was a breakthrough or so they said but I cared not. I only wanted to escape. Mustafa knew. He is the one who made the deal with the devil that bought our freedom. He is an idiot.”
“So he made a deal with the devil but you’re the one planning to fly a plane into Mount Rushmore,” Remo said.
When he looked in the rearview mirror, Remo was surprised to see that Achmed was not shrinking from his tone. The terrorist was looking out the window.
Achmed was staring at the passing scenery without seeing it, a faraway look on his face. In the deep worry lines hidden in his five o’clock shadow was a glimmer of a fear greater than any Remo could inspire in Achmed Mohammed.
“There are devils greater than you know,” Achmed said softly. And the brother of the twentieth hijacker fell silent.
Mustafa Mohammed took a little booth near the restrooms at the back of Bill’s Diner.
The little old lady he had murdered had not had much money in her purse, so he ordered only one plate of french fries and two glasses of water. He picked at the fries as he watched the entrance.
Mustafa knew nothing of the Elite Incursion Martyrdom Brigade except that they had hoped to liberate him from prison. He wondered if they knew about the wonderful weapon in his possession. He tried to recall if he had told anyone about it.
Constance had told him that the first Martyrdom Brigade were Iranians and had come to rescue him from federal prison only in order to blacken the eye of the United States. Not even his fellow Iraqis in al-Khobar knew about the weapon until Mustafa had used it on the prison.
Mustafa was not certain if this great weapon in his possession would change the attitude of the Martyrdom Brigade. There was also a chance that he was being set up and it would be the FBI that would show up at Bill’s Diner. That was why he had ordered two glasses of water. One was for drinking with his french fries, the other was insurance.
In his sweating hand, Mustafa gripped a small scrap of parchment torn from his Koran. If things got difficult he would drop the parchment in the clean glass, and as the bodies fell he would get up and walk out the door.
There was one waitress on duty, an American harlot in early middle age. A fat man worked at the counter grill. A handful of people sat in booths and on stools. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. They all smiled big toothy American smiles and talked about the weather and about friends and family members. Every once in a while the waitress would glance in his direction and narrow her eyes and Mustafa would hunch down in his booth and gobble a cold french fry. When the bell over the door finally tinkled, the plate of fries was nearly empty.
Not one man but three had come to collect Mustafa Mohammed. The leader was a little man with powerful shoulders and thick forearms. A huge man shadowed him.
Mustafa had never seen a human being so large. The bodyguard had to turn sideways to fit through the door. The top of his shaved head dinged the hanging light fixtures, and he had to tip his neck to avoid them.
The booths were too small for the big man to sit. As Alawi Sulayam and the second bodyguard slipped into Mustafa’s booth, the giant remained standing. Alawi’s seated companion would have looked big in other company, but in the shadow of the massive bodyguard he appeared small. The big man obviously did not see Mustafa as a threat. He did not even look down across his barrel chest at the seated Iraqi. He watched the parking lot through the window where Mustafa saw a fourth man waiting behind the wheel of a sedan.
“Where is the weapon?” the Iranian agent demanded by way of greeting.
Mustafa had been watching the big bodyguard and was taken aback by the man’s directness. “Forgive me, friend, but that is not for you to know. You were sent to liberate me but I am free. Your mission has changed. I require your assistance in a new, great mission that will glorify Allah.”
Alawi snickered. “I was sent to this wretched land to free you, yes. I have spent seven miserable months washing the poodles of rich Americans while we awaited our opportunity to do so. But if you think that I care anything about you, you are grossly mistaken. I care about disgracing America as your liberation would have done. But now you are free and my superiors want to know how. They want your weapon, Mustafa Mohammed, so that it can be duplicated and used worldwide against the infidels. They and I care nothing about assisting you in some fool scheme.”
Mustafa gripped the parchment more tightly in his hand. He moved his leg and was comforted when his knee bumped the big Koran on the seat beside him.
“You do not know my mission or who has given it to me,” Mustafa said, “for if you did, you would be bearing me out on your shoulders and singing his praises.” He leaned across the table. “The Prophet himself has chosen me.”
Alawi glanced at the man seated next to him. The Elite Incursion Martyrdom Brigade foot soldier did not take his eyes from Mustafa across the table. He was particularly interested in Mustafa’s hand which had remained hidden from view since the three men entered the diner.
“Ah, yes, the Prophet,” Alawi said. He shook his head. “They told me you were like an idiot child. Why did you agree to fly the plane into the White House if you had this great mission?”
“I thought the Prophet had abandoned me,” Mustafa said. “But he came to visit me in my cell and told me now was the time. He is with me now again and will be with you if you but join me in our great cause.”
Alawi shook his head. “Enough of this. You will tell us where the weapon is or you will die.”
Mustafa shook his head. “I am sorry that you feel that way. It was a poor decision to contact you. When you see the Prophet in Paradise, tell him that I do not want you to be judged too harshly for your shortsightedness.”
When he started to lift his hidden hand, Mustafa felt something press against his belly. Across the table, Alawi’s bodyguard had lowered a shoulder and was leaning forward.
Alawi took a toothpick from a table dispenser and tore the wrapper off.
“That is a gun barrel,” the Iranian said. Sticking the toothpick between his front teeth, he looked out the window at the small parking lot and sighed. “You think, fool, we do not know when someone is holding a weapon? Let us see it. Bring your hand to the table. Slowly.”
Mustafa hesitated. The gun pressed deeper into his gut. Jaw clenching, he did as he was told.
Alawi was surprised to see that the Iraqi was not holding a gun. In fact, whatever he held in his hands was so small that none of it was visible. Mustafa’s hand was clenched so tight his fingers were white.
“Is this the weapon?” Alawi asked.
Mustafa said nothing.
“Watch him closely,” Alawi hissed to his man. “He is an Iraqi and therefore stupid by nature.” The eyes of the guard with the gun did not waver, did not blink. They bored through Mustafa’s skull. The gun under the table was pressed tight to Mustafa’s abdomen.
Alawi licked his lips. With eager eyes, he stared at the clenched fist of Mustafa Mohammed.
“Put the back of your hand on the table,” Alawi ordered. Mustafa did as he was instructed. “Now, listen to me, Mustafa Mohammed, for you do not want a bullet in your belly and I swear to Allah I will order you shot dead if you move suddenly. Carefully open your hand.”
Very slowly, Mustafa unclenched his fingers. When he saw the object in the twentieth hijacker’s sweaty hand, Alawi raised a surprised eyebrow at the piece of old parchment.
Alawi could not make out the words written on it. The scrap of damp parchment had turned a bright blue.
Alawi scowled and shook his head. “You pitiful little fool. Take him,” he ordered the man seated beside him.
The gun nudged deeper in Mustafa’s belly and the would-be hijacker got to his feet, the poisoned parchment still in his open hand. He slowly lifted his hand, making no sudden movements, until it was just above the glass. Alawi did not seem to notice. A scrap of paper could do him no harm.
