Day of Reckoning (10 page)

It was also illegal for private ownership, but that hadn’t stopped him yet. The same with the eight “flash-bang” stun grenades in the mesh bag nestled beside the gun case containing his Mossberg 500.

He stood there for a long moment, mentally reviewing the list of supplies, a list he had memorized so many times. The day was here.

Finally satisfied, Harry replaced the false floor and walked back into the house. The bedroom door was closed, and he was starting to turn away when he heard low voices.

“Carol?” he asked, a sudden alarm filling his heart. Nothing.

One hand on the door and the other on his Colt, he tested the knob. Unlocked.

“Carol?” Still nothing. Just the voices. The Colt slid from the polished leather of its paddle holster and he turned the knob, throwing open the door and entering with the gun leveled.

Carol was sitting on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chin, her eyes focused on the TV screen across the room. “…correspondent Roger Ginsburg and we’re here in front of the CIA’s Langley campus, where initial reports indicate a bomb went off just over ten minutes ago. Emergency vehicles have flooded the scene and there are reports of fatalities—but we’ve not been able to obtain details from the Agency…”

Harry holstered his weapon and walked to Carol’s side, his hand brushing gently against her shoulder. Her eyes were glistening with tears.

“You’re going to be okay,” he said, gently kneading her shoulder with his hand as he sat down on the bed beside her. “It’s going to be okay.”

She looked up at him and then back at the TV and he could sense that she was on the verge of breaking. “Why is all this happening? Dear God, they said people are dead at Langley.”

“We’ll know,” Harry whispered, drawing her towards him as her body convulsed in dry sobs, holding her close to his chest as the tears fell. “We’ll know soon enough.”

8:31 A.M. Pacific Time

Law Offices of Snell & Kilmer

Las Vegas, Nevada

Work never seemed to stop at Snell & Kilmer, the young man thought, at least not when you were an attorney still trying to make a name for yourself. And that was hard to do when your current focus was tax law. It hadn’t been his dream when he’d moved from Pakistan five long years before…but here he was.

And yet the mood was different this morning as he walked onto their floor of the Hughes Center—his co-workers clustered around a small television. “What’s going on?” he asked, setting down his latte on his desk, right beside the small brass plate bearing the words
Samir Khan, Attorney at Law
.

No one seemed to hear him, except for his friend Cathy, standing at the edge of the group, her thumbs moving anxiously over the keyboard of her phone. “They’re saying that there’s been a pair of bombings in Virginia. And Dave isn’t answering his phone.”

He glanced from the black woman’s eyes to the screen, feeling his breathing quicken as he heard the anchor speak. Could it—could
this
be the beginning? “
Ya Allah
,” he breathed, barely even realizing he had spoken aloud—the Arabic coming easily to his lips. Oh, God.

“What did you say?” Cathy asked, her head coming up from her phone.

He forced a smile, moving back toward his desk. “Nothing, Cathy…it is just such a shock. I pray you can reach your husband.”

Powering on his computer, he leaned back in his office chair, staring at his fingernails. It had been so many years…so long that he had almost lost faith.
I seek forgiveness from God
…

Yet there was nothing in the Drafts folder of his e-mail when he opened it, no matter how many times he refreshed the account. As if their time had not yet come.

And as he looked around at his co-workers, as his gaze shifted back to the screen, he found himself wondering if he would be ready when it did.
Insh’allah
.

11:42 A.M.

CIA Headquarters

Langley, Virginia

The corner of the parking garage where Chambers’ car had been parked had taken on the appearance of a charnel house.

Five dead. Ames, and four members of the Security team. Another four men, including the K-9 handler, had been taken away in ambulances. One was critical.

Flashing lights cast an eerie reflection against the blood-stained concrete as emergency crews worked to repair one of the support beams of the parking garage.

It was nothing he hadn’t seen before. Too many times. A mounting fury grew in Kranemeyer’s chest as he surveyed the scene and he fought it back, only too aware that he had to retain control.

Michael Shapiro stood a few feet away, a handkerchief over his lips, his face drained of color. “How could this happen?” he asked, shooting a frightened glance over at his DCS.

“Clearly, we underestimated our opponent,” Kranemeyer observed, forcing an icy calm into his voice. He had to clear his mind. At that moment, Ron Carter materialized at his side.

“We lost another on the way to the hospital,” the analyst announced. “He bled out before they could stabilize him. And that’s not all.”

“What?”

Carter hesitated. “Our surveillance cameras place Nichols here in the garage less than twenty minutes before he abducted Chambers.”

Kranemeyer swore softly. “Where’s Parker?”

“Should be at Dulles. He was due there to collect Richards.”

“Place a call and tell him I want them both back here. ASAP.”

11:57 A.M.

Dulles International Airport

Virginia

Waiting. Intelligence work was often described as long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror.

For Thomas, waiting in the terminal at Dulles, it was some combination of the two. He was sober now, stone-cold.

Harry dropping off the CIA’s radar had sufficed for that. And now, six dead at Langley itself.

The morning had gone from bad to worse. He found his hands trembling and shoved them deep into the pockets of his coat. Last thing he needed was TSA agents escorting him from the building.

Waiting. Thomas found himself wishing for a smoke. He’d been a cigar man, himself, back in his days on Wall Street, but he’d finally kicked the habit. Didn’t really have any choice, not after he had tried and failed to pass the physicals his first time at the Farm.

Still, the craving was there, every now and again. He drew in a deep breath, forcing himself to turn away. As he did, he saw a tall figure walking across the terminal toward him. “Everything ready?”

“Thought you were never going to get here,” Thomas said in exasperation.

The Texan’s expression never changed. “Word of the attacks is snarling air traffic. We spent forty-five minutes waiting for clearance to land.”

“I thought government flights had priority.”

“They do,” Tex replied, casting a sharp glance in the direction of his old teammate. “The sky’s swarming with feds.”

“Yeah, well, the ground’s not any different.”

“Figures. Let’s get moving,” the big man admonished, “the sooner we get to the safehouse, the better.”

“No dice—we’ve been ordered back to Langley, right away.”

“Why?” Tex asked, turning to look Thomas in the eye.

“Forty minutes ago, a bomb went off in the parking garage at Langley. Six fatalities. Kranemeyer wants you on-site.”

The Texan reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Harry’s going to go blacker than black, you know that as well as I do. Intercepting him at the safehouse is our best, maybe even our only, chance.”

“I know.”

12:04 P.M.

The safehouse

Culpeper, Virginia

There was an address book in the middle drawer of the bedroom’s dresser. Inside, on the third page, there was a list of numbers. No names, just numbers. It didn’t matter—he had committed the names to memory long ago.

Harry palmed a prepaid cellphone and started entering the fourth number from the bottom. The phone had only been activated within the last five minutes, but it would be best to keep the call short all the same.

He pressed SEND and listened as it began to ring. Once, then twice. He cast a glance toward the closed bathroom door behind him. Carol was dressing.

They needed to move. On the fourth ring, it was answered, a woman’s voice, her tones rich with a Jamaican accent. “Hello?”

Harry allowed himself a faint smile. “You’re as cautious as ever, Rhoda. Haven’t forgotten a thing, have you?”

“Why are you calling?” the woman asked, punctuating her words with a French oath. “Your name’s out to law enforcement—they’re already throwing out a net over northern Virginia.”

“If you know that, then you know why I’m calling.”

A long pause. “I’m good at what I do, but I can’t work magic, Harry. Not really. All the voodoo in the world couldn’t save your butt now—what did you do to get this reaction?”

“Not over the phone. You know that,” Harry responded, clearing his throat. “You’ve forgotten Kingston?”

Another pause, and then the woman sighed. A long, heavy sigh of resignation. “No, I haven’t. What time should I expect you?”

“We’ll be on your doorstep within the hour,” Harry replied, closing the phone. The old Hollywood myth of the lone spy was just that—a myth. Nobody out in the cold survived without a network. It was just a matter of doing whatever it took to activate it. Sometimes that meant calling in favors and stepping on more than a few toes.

11:32 A.M. Central Time

Dearborn, Michigan

It was perhaps one of the greatest ironies of Dearborn that in this city, once home to so many of America’s autoworkers, most of the residents now relied upon public transportation subsidized by the federal government.

But it did help ease traffic problems. The black man let out a snort of disgust as he glanced into the rear-view mirror, checking for any signs of the police.
How have the mighty fallen.

Now, the state and federal governments subsidized well nigh the entire police force of Dearborn. The only choice, really—for it was a safe bet that half the city’s population didn’t make enough to pay taxes, and the other half had no interest in a police force.

Abdul Aziz Omar fit squarely in the second category, particularly on a day like today.

He glanced into his rear-view again, catching a glimpse of his passengers. Names? He didn’t know theirs—but the man in the middle, the young man with the faraway, almost ethereal gaze, he knew simply as the Shaikh.

What he was doing here in Dearborn was also a mystery.

All of which would be revealed in due time, the black man mused, reaching for his thermos of tea in the center console.
Insh’allah
.

12:34 P.M. Eastern Time

U.S. Route 211

Virginia

He’d had the feeling once before—chasing a serial killer across five states, back in the days before he’d joined the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division. A sickening feeling of being just one step behind, always too late.

Vic Caruso rounded the end of the SUV to find Marika Altmann standing there, holding a clear plastic baggie up to the sunlight.

“Any luck finding the casing?” he asked, zipping up his coat against the wind.

Altmann replied with a shake of her head, placing the baggie containing the deformed .45-caliber slug back in the evidence tray on the floor of the vehicle.
“If he’s Agency, he probably picked up his brass. My guess is this guy is good.”

“He is,” Caruso responded quietly. His partner shot him a sharp, piercing glance.

“You know him?”

“After a fashion,” he replied, turning to look her in the eye. “In mid-September, I was assigned to head up an investigation into a CIA leak. He was one of the targets.”

“And?” Marika pressed, a shrewd look in her eyes.

“And that’s a long story.” Long story indeed, Caruso thought, looking out across the highway to where the bodies had lain. He’d looked down the barrel of that 1911 Colt .45.

The investigation had been blown when Nichols had come back and found Caruso in his home searching through computer files. He’d seen death in Nichols’ eyes, and lived. The two out on the highway hadn’t been so fortunate.

“What do you think of this Russian immigrant—the guy our briefing ID’d as the bomber?”

The woman didn’t answer for a moment, her face strangely unreadable as she stared out across the snowy countryside. A wisp of silver-gold hair escaped her ball cap and she tucked it back over her ear.

“I think we’re being played for mushrooms,” she said finally, her voice cold as the wind that whipped around the SUV. “Kept in the dark and fed horse crap.”

12:48 P.M.

Graves Mill, Virginia

He was never more frightening than when he was silent. Carol regarded her companion for another long moment, then turned her attention back out the window of the SUV, to the dirt-brown piles of snow shoved brusquely against the side of the roadway.

He hadn’t spoken five sentences since they had left the safehouse. She could still see the expression on his face when he had executed the Russian—a look devoid of emotion. Calculating. Ruthless.

The same look he wore now. The man who had held her close and comforted her as they sat on the bed of the safehouse was gone, replaced by…
this
. “What makes you so sure this woman will help us?” she asked finally, glancing over at him. His leather jacket was unzipped, gaping open to expose the bulge of the Colt holstered to his side. A weapon, just like the man himself.

“Because she doesn’t have any other choice,” came the cryptic response. “Spend enough time out in the field and you learn that people will do things out of fear that they’d never do for love.”

Blackmail
. Carol had worked long enough at the Agency that it didn’t surprise her. Still, she found the reality unsettling, out from behind the protective walls of Langley.

“How did you end up at the Agency?” she asked, watching the countryside speed past.

He looked over at her, surprise glinting in those steel-blue eyes. “Why?”

“No reason, really,” Carol replied, taken off-guard herself by the intensity of his response.

Silence fell once again between the two of them as Harry turned the SUV onto a side road. When he spoke again, his voice was heavy with irony. “Sometimes you have to lay down your dreams and pick up a gun…just because it’s the right thing to do and there’s no one else to do it. Not much point in looking back.” He pointed up the road at an off-white double-wide trailer nestled in a grove of leafless trees. “We’re here. Do me a favor.”

She hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “What?”

“Let me do the talking.”

11:57 A.M.

The mosque

Dearborn, Michigan

Words of purity. Words of truth. The words of God,
subhanahu wa ta’ala
. The most glorified, the most high. Tarik Abdul Muhammad’s fingers traced over the flowing Arabic calligraphy, reading the sacred words of the Qur’an.
Who doth more wrong than he who inventeth a lie against God
…

“
Salaam alaikum
, my brother,” a familiar voice greeted, interrupting his thoughts. Blessing and peace be upon you.

A smile crossed Tarik’s face as he turned, looking into the eyes of the mosque’s imam, a grey-bearded man in his late fifties. He was dressed in Western clothing, as were they all. There was no point in drawing attention to themselves.

“
Alaikum salaam
,” he replied, placing both of his hands on the shoulders of the older man and drawing him close as they kissed on both cheeks in the traditional Arab greeting. “Is everything prepared for my brothers?”

“Arrangements have been made,” Imam Abu Kareem al-Fileestini replied, turning and giving a warm smile to Tarik’s four companions. “They will be provided for,
inshallah
.”

“And the scientist?”

“At hand,” was the imam’s response. Abu Kareem turned and beckoned to a swarthy young man standing in the doorway, a can of Mountain Dew clutched in his hand.

About five or six years younger than himself, Tarik thought, taking the measure of the man in one sweeping glance as the imam kept talking. “Our brother from Lebanon, Jamal al-Khalidi, an honor student at U of M.”

Tarik smiled, reaching out to enfold the young man’s hand in both of his own. “Wolverines…”

1:19 P.M. Eastern Time

Graves Mill, Virginia

As the camera’s shutter clicked crisply, taking picture after picture, they all showed basically the same thing: a smiling, happy couple—family snapshots—a doting husband, an adoring wife.

Who said pictures never lie?

“I’ve got enough,” Rhoda Stevens announced at length, laying down her camera and retreating behind her laptop. In her mid-fifties, she still moved with the grace of the runner she was.

Carol reached up and firmly removed Harry’s hand from her shoulder as she stood and stretched.

She walked over to where the Jamaican woman sat, now diligently working away in a photo-editing program. The green screen that had served as their background had now disappeared from view, replaced by a glorious vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Smoke curled upward from the cigarette clutched tightly in the woman’s ebony hand, wispy tendrils filling the air with the pungent smell of marijuana.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

Rhoda chuckled, a rich, throaty sound. “Thirty years, both sides of the law. Wish I could do the same thing in real life—wouldn’t look so old.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Carol saw Harry cross the room, cautiously glancing out the window. “How soon can you have the documents ready, Rhoda?”

“Forty minutes, give or take.” Another long drag on the joint. “When did you get so nervous, Harry? I don’t remember that from before.”

The look Harry shot back across the room could have frozen stone. “Just do it as quickly as you can. They’re going to throw the net wider with every passing hour.”

The black woman was unfazed, her gaze never leaving the screen of her laptop. “Then wait in the next room, will you? Nerves can be contagious.”

12:23 P.M. Central Time

Dearborn, Michigan

One of the benefits of Dearborn’s crime rate was that there was no difficulty disposing of an unwanted car. Leave it unattended long enough, and it would disappear. No muss, no fuss.

Abdul Aziz Omar reached back into the car one last time, wiping the steering wheel with a cloth. There was no sense in leaving his prints—having spent eight of his thirty-one years behind bars in the state penitentiary meant that the cops had them on file.

He closed the car door and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, fingers closing around the curved grip of a Smith & Wesson Model 27 revolver. It wasn’t safe to walk these streets unarmed, the tall black man thought, looking cautiously both ways as he exited the alley where he’d left the car.

The gang-bangers and crackheads preferred semiautomatics when they could get them, which was far too often these days. After all, they were the guns you saw on TV and in music videos.

Omar’s choice of the .357 Magnum was more prosaic, based on a simple bit of advice from a fellow inmate. The man had been an unrepentant infidel, serving a life sentence for rape and murder, but his advice had been sound.

Revolvers don’t eject their shell casings. Keep your shots few and effective and you can walk off the crime scene with half the evidence the cops usually depend on.

It made sense. His eyes continued to rove the desolate street as he made his way back toward the mosque several blocks away. A paradise of tranquility in the middle of hell.

The same could not be said of the bar to his right as he moved down the street, his long legs covering the ground in smooth, powerful strides. Right now it appeared innocent, almost harmless in the bright rays of daylight, but he knew different.

Another five, six hours and it would be transformed into a noisy, raucous den of iniquity.

He should know, for that had once been his trade. He closed his eyes in remembrance and could once again feel the discs spinning beneath his deft fingers. DD Cool, they’d called him in those days, those heady, sinful days of drugs, sex and music.

The
Cool
was self-explanatory. As for the double
D
, well he’d had his own proclivities back in the day.

Before…he took a deep breath of ice-cold air, shamed that even now his body stirred at the memory. Before he had found the peace of Allah,
subhanahu wa ta’ala
.

In the afterglow of
peace, in the dark enclosure of that prison, he had been given a new name. Abdul Aziz, the servant of the Magnificent, one of the hundred names of God.

His steps quickened as he neared the mosque. That’s all he was now, a humble servant. A servant on a mission from God…

1:56 P.M. Eastern Time

Graves Mill, Virginia

Nerves. Rhoda’s perception had been accurate, as usual—she’d been in the business a long time, longer than him, and not much got past her.

The nerves. When had they started? Harry didn’t even need to ask the question, he knew.

Hamid Zakiri
. All roads led there, to that devastating moment of betrayal there in Jerusalem. Because, in the end, it didn’t matter that Zakiri had eluded detection from everyone else at Langley.

All that mattered was that
he
had failed to see it, and people were dead because of it. One man in particular: Davood Sarami.

His man. One of the team.

With an instinct born of training, Harry pulled himself from his thoughts to cast another cautious glance out the front window of the trailer. A car sped by, its wheels spinning up icy slush.

Too fast for a surveillance team. He felt eyes on his back and turned his head to see Carol staring at him.

At his glance, she looked away, the silence hanging awkwardly between them. “I’m sorry…” she began slowly, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jacket.

Carol still wasn’t looking at him, but he could see her chewing hesitantly at her lower lip as she considered her next words. He had to build her confidence, prepare her for what lay ahead. Whatever it took, whatever he had to say. Whatever she needed to hear.

“For what?”

“For breaking down—earlier. You don’t need that, not now.” There was anger flashing in those blue eyes now, anger shining through fresh tears. “I just feel so helpless…so
weak
. I’m ashamed of myself.”

Harry crossed the room to stand before her, looking down into her eyes. She started to speak, but he put a finger to her lips. “There’s nothin’ for you to be ashamed of, nothing in this world. No one does well their first time out in the field—and there’s no way to do well at losing someone you’ve loved.”

No way
. And as he held her gently against him, even as tears rolled down her face, a part of him was shocked to realize that he actually meant it.

1:59 P.M.

NCS Operations Center

Langley, Virginia

“Any progress on Harry’s known associates in the greater D.C.area?” Carter asked, arriving back in the op-center.

Lasker looked over the top of his cubicle and shook his head in the negative. “Most of the people Nichols has worked with over the years are overseas contacts—and they’re not the type of people who get handed a green card.”

Carter rubbed his forehead. “Is there
anyone
that looks like a possible? Someone he might turn to at this time?”

“There was one.”

“Does he live within the current projected search quadrants?”

Lasker cleared his throat. “It’s a
she
, and she’s dead.” He hit a couple buttons and an image came across the screen of his workstation. “Rhoda Stevens, a private ‘contractor’ for the Agency in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Skilled forger, twice arrested for identity theft and falsifying passports, involved with some of the drug traffic in and out of Jamaica. We used her for much the same work, just more…legitimately.”

“So, what happened?”

The young CLANDOPS comm chief tapped his screen. “In addition to her more illicit ‘talents’, Ms. Stevens was a marathoner of no mean stature. She was in the final two miles of the 2012 Boston Marathon when she collapsed. Paramedics responding to the 911 call pronounced her dead of a massive heart attack.”

Carter eyed the picture thoughtfully. “Anything else?”

“Matter of fact, yes,” Lasker replied, grabbing a print-out off the stack in front of him and handing it back to the analyst. “This from the boys at Ft. Meade. They’ve spent the last few hours running a fine-toothed comb through the hundreds of cell calls made from the area of the bombing this morning, back-tracing a couple hours before the blast.”

“And?”

“A call was placed just five minutes after the bomb went off—the conversation was short, and scrambled, but they finally managed to reconstruct part of it. The caller, a Caucasian male, used the word
Eaglefire
.”

Carter’s eyebrows went up. “Any idea what that’s supposed to mean?”

“It’s why the NSA flagged the call—it’s one of our codes, or used to be, at least. I remember them phasing it out shortly after I took over Comms last year. It’s a call for back-up.”