Aim and Fire (7 page)

Kate had gotten what she wanted; now the only problem 60

was trying to find a nuclear needle among the world’s haystacks. But that was why she had the world’s best analysts on her payroll.
At least, I hope that’s the case,
she told herself. She was about to slip the viewscreen glasses back on and dive back into the virtual world to see what her Web scourers had brought up when there was a knock at the door.

“Kate, you really need to take a break.” The slip of a girl who peeked into the room was Arminda Todd, Kate’s live-in housekeeper and, she often half joked, her link to both the outside world and sanity. Dressed in a red-and-black-plaid pleated skirt and a white boys’-cut button-down shirt, with her normally dark blond hair accented with streaks of black this month, she looked exactly like the moonlighting college student she was.

“Hi, Mindy. Come on in. I assume it’s lunchtime?”

Kate asked.

“Do you ever look out those fabulous windows of yours? Try about three hours past dinnertime. I made you a plate.” She set a tray down with a heaped plate that gave off a spicy, heavenly aroma. “I was cooking with Grandmama, and of course, anything she makes will feed twenty, with leftovers.”

The main course, what looked like zucchini halves stuffed with ground lamb and baked in tomato sauce, didn’t look all that appetizing, but the smell was irresist-ible. It was accompanied by a small green salad and still-warm flatbread. Once Kate dug in, the first bite awakened a ravenous hunger. “Thanks,” she mumbled around a mouthful.

“Oh, I should warn you—” Mindy began just as Kate’s eyes widened, and she grabbed the glass of ice water, downing half of it in huge gulps “—Grandmama likes things spicy.”

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“If that’s ‘spicy,’ I’d hate to see what she considers hot.”

Kate paused, took another drink and eyed the plate dubiously. “It is good, once my tongue recovers from, what was that, a pound of paprika?”

Mindy shook her head, making her long pigtails swing back and forth. “Grandmama’s secret recipe. She says she will give it to me only on her deathbed, and that I can never write it down, but can pass it on to my own daughter when the time comes.”

“That sounds like her, all right.” Kate tried another bite, and was pleased to find that her mouth had grown accus-tomed to the pungent blend of spices. “Delicious.”

A soft chime from her computer brought Kate’s head up. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Give me a minute to see if I’m right, and I’ll quit for the night, I promise.”

Mindy scrunched up her face in what passed as a stern expression, but only made her young face and china-blue eyes look even more adorable. “All right, five minutes, but that’s all. Otherwise I’m coming in here to drag you out.”

“Deal, cross my heart.” Kate wolfed another bite while sliding the glasses down over her eyes. With precise movements, she navigated to the new message and opened it.

Hey K,

This slid into a DHS server twenty minutes ago. It isn’t much, but it’s the best lead so far. With the Rio Grande still leaking illegals like a sieve every day, maybe some homies from a bit farther east—like Mideast, if you know what I mean—are making a run for the border, too, before it really gets closed up?

Let me know if you need follow-up or anything else, okay?

B2S

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Kate smiled. She’d figured that Born2Slyde, as the hacker called herself online, would come up with what looked like a solid lead first. The eighteen-year-old girl could whiz in and out of supposedly secure mainframes and security systems with unparalleled ease.

Room 59 had been organized as a decentralized operation, with no main ops center, like other agencies worked from, the better to not find it. Kate’s New York City town house, where she lived and worked, was the closest thing to one, and that was primarily because she hardly had time to leave the luxurious suite of rooms. Terror and threats to world security rarely took days off, so she didn’t, either.

She opened the triple-encrypted, compressed data file.

That brought up two e-mail messages, along with an itemized list, including plutonium, that had been highlighted by the sender. B2S had also included current sta-tistics for incidents of violence or large drug caches coming across the U.S.-Mexican border. The name of the sender caught her eye, and a quick check of a top secret deceased-terrorist list confirmed her first suspicion—that the man using the alias Arsalan Hejazi was supposed to be dead.

A deceased man placing an order from beyond the grave? Someone wanted to make a bomb, but what if they got the chance to pick one up that was assembled and ready to blow? All they’d need to do was get it across the border, which, while difficult, wasn’t impossible, accord-ing to the most recent border security review, Kate thought.

She used one of the installed back-door programs that enabled her to access any government network without being detected. Bringing up the network for the U.S.

Customs and Border Protection department of the DHS, she entered the keywords
Mexico, nuclear, border, kill
and Aim and Fire

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terrorist,
and directed the system to scan all files accessed within the previous forty-eight hours.

Hundreds of messages back and forth between station offices and Washington filled her screen. Kate sat back and used a trick she had learned during grad school. She let her eyes wander over the long list, relying on her subcon-scious to home in on the message that would be most useful. Her gaze alighted on one subject line. Two Border Patrol Agents And Multiple Illegals Killed North Of Border Outside El Paso. Opening the message, Kate read a concise summary of an incident involving a pair of Border Patrol agents and twenty-three illegal immigrants, all shot at what should have been a routine stop. What was strange was that the coyotes had been killed, as well, and everyone had been shot multiple times, many in the back of the head at close range. The Border Patrol SUV had been found several miles away, a burned wreck, but the truck that had been carrying the human cargo had disappeared. It wasn’t just a random murder; it had been a massacre.

Who would go to such lengths to kill everyone at the scene? she wondered. The answer came to her immediately. Someone who had something to hide, and when their cover was compromised, they didn’t hesitate to kill everyone to insure that they wouldn’t be seen. What could be that important? A suitcase nuke?

Kate leaned forward again and brought up the e-mail from the Border Patrol agent, putting the two side by side.

She felt a familiar strange fluttering in her stomach that heralded a leap in her intuitive logic. She knew the two incidents were connected, although she couldn’t explain why. It just felt right; that was all. But that was enough to start on, anyway. The proof would have to come later.

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She looked at where the agent’s e-mail had ended up—

the in-box of an analyst named Tracy Wentworth.
My dear,
I think you may be doing a lot more than you expected
tomorrow,
Kate thought, letting the rest of her dinner grow cold as she made preparations to travel to Washington the next day.
Hope you’re up for the challenge.

The man known as Narid al-Gaffari had driven more than twenty-five hundred miles over the past three days, but instead of exhausted, he felt more and more invigorated as he neared his final destination.

Traveling down the highway at a steady seventy miles per hour in his nondescript Honda Accord, Narid took a moment to marvel at the diversity of the land he had spent every waking hour driving through so far. This was a far cry from his first visit to America, more than a decade earlier. Then he had been much more cautious, seeing enemies around every corner, the specter of police surveillance on every block. Now he looked back on those days as the easy times. After 9/11, there were still plenty of opportunities to sow the seeds of fear throughout the bloated American infrastructure—seeds that were still bearing fruit. But the paranoia, even if justified, had increased, and then the U.S. agencies had also started getting things right, so much so that al-Gaffari had resorted to what some might have considered desperate measures to rid himself of the 66

surveillance. Desperate but effective—after all, few people spent time looking for a dead man.

This time, he had landed on the rugged coast of British Columbia in the dead of night, transferring from a freighter to a fishing boat that had dropped him off on shore. From there he had driven east, through the thick forests and the Cascade Mountain range and over the Rockies into the Great Plains, where the elevated beauty of the mountains that reminded him of home was replaced by the endless, flat grasslands that reminded him of the arid plains of Af-ghanistan that bloomed briefly in spring.

His map had been clearly marked, and when he’d reached the correct point, he turned south and followed a small maze of back roads to find what his contacts had said was an unwatched route into the United States of America.

Although he had initially expressed doubt about this plan, he had been delighted to discover that it was exactly as promised—unrestricted access to the U.S. Although the passport and identification papers for his alias would stand up to determined scrutiny, he had decided to enter the country this way, not willing to risk being matched to a watch list and compromising the entire reason he had taken this trip in the first place.

As it turned out, he hadn’t had much reason to fear.

After the crossing, his trip through the former breadbas-ket of America had been uneventful, even dull. The next few days had followed the same pattern—driving inter-spersed with sparse meals—halal food was hard to come by out here—brief breaks for his daily prayers until stopping at small, privately owned motels off the highway that were just glad enough to have a customer prepay in cash that they would overlook the securing of the room with a credit card. The fact that Narid spoke impeccable English, Aim and Fire

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with a genteel British accent, did much to put the propri-etors’ minds at ease.

For his part, he was a model tourist—quiet, neat, polite and minding his own business. Even when three drunken good ol’ boys had tried to play “rag the raghead,” as they had jeeringly called it before being stopped by a sheriff’s deputy—which gave Narid his only real fear of discovery during the entire trip—he had thanked the khaki-clad officer and declined to press charges. He had, however, gotten out of town immediately, and hadn’t stopped driving until he was three hundred miles away. Allah would certainly not have looked favorably upon him had he let the entire operation be jeopardized by a chance encounter with those uncultured thugs.

Winding his way through the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, Narid had passed plenty of empty land, and the peace and quiet he experienced while driving through those areas reaffirmed his determination to carry out the mission. He knew that the dividing line of the Mississippi River bisected this country to the east, and on the other side were tens of millions of people, crammed into their sprawling cities, half-clad in their revealing clothes, eating their artificial food, watching their mindless enter-tainment, listening to their banal music, smug in their com-placency because they lived in what they thought was the most powerful nation on earth. It was a notion Narid would be only too happy to disabuse them of soon. But in a way, he was glad to see that this heartland wouldn’t be as affected by what he was about to set into motion. The people out here had been unassuming and friendly, men who worked the land and the women who stood by them. For the most part, they had let him go about his business with hardly a raised eyebrow, even given his obvious heritage.

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Crossing the border into Texas had lifted his spirits im-mensely, and now, only a few dozen miles from his goal, Narid’s pulse quickened as the city of El Paso appeared in the distance. He resisted the urge to press the accelerator down, but left the highway and headed east instead, traveling on a series of progressively smaller roads until he turned down a narrow dirt road surrounded by featureless brown plains, broken only by an occasional small rise or hill. He followed it for another five miles, pulling up to a small complex of buildings on ten acres, ringed by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Large signs in English and Spanish warned that the fence was electrified. But what truly made the business unique was the white, three-story rocket that rose like a narrow finger on a launch pad in the middle of the buildings, pointing toward the heavens. A sign on the hill outside the perimeter proclaimed the company’s name—Spaceworks, Inc.

As he approached, Narid looked up at the clear azure sky, imagining the path the rocket would soon take over the eastern United States, and of the mass destruction and terror it would sow when it reached its final destination.

And although he was not doing this for fame, everyone around the world would soon be speaking of a new mas-termind who had wreaked an even more devastating assault on the world’s last remaining superpower than the destruction of the Twin Towers.

The front gate of the grounds had a small guardhouse, manned by a pair of guards, both of Middle Eastern descent. Narid pulled up to the post and lowered his window.

“
Assalamu Alaikum.
I am Narid al-Gaffari. I have an appointment with Joseph Allen.”

“One moment please, sir.” The guard closed his window and spoke into a microphone on his shirt. Narid had no Aim and Fire

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doubt that both men were armed, and doubtless had access to more than just pistols. With the flood of illegal immigrants coming over the border, the fence, guards and other methods to dissuade people from trespassing were simply the cost of doing business out here on the plains.

The guard slid open his window again and handed Narid a small static sticker. “Thank you for waiting, Mr. al-Gaffari.