Drone Games (31 page)

Sunday, May 24

AKIL PULLED off Kettner Boulevard into one of five empty parking slots and turned off the Camry’s engine. He yawned deeply. He approached the side entrance of the Russian Star Tattoo Parlor, walking past what he thought was old bedding strewn next to a blue recycle dumpster. An arm suddenly rose up, holding a filthy styrofoam cup. Akil ignored it.

Inside the Parlor, a young woman appeared. She was a heavyset Mexican-American with long black hair and a deep brown complexion. She wore a white frilly top and designer blue jeans.

“Do you need a tattoo,
señor
?”

Akil was mesmerized by the wall photographs of prison inmates displaying their ink.

“Thanks, but I’m actually just looking for Viktor Karkula. My name is Eddie.”

She contemplated that for a moment. “Are you the Eddie who keeps leaving messages so early on our answering machine?” Akil nodded. She glanced at a clock on the wall. “I’m glad to meet you. Viktor is in the back. He’s usually up by ten, but now that the airport is closed, he can sleep a little longer.”

A name was tattooed on her arm. “You’re Marissa,” Akil announced, extending his hand and noticing her finely manicured nails. Each featured shimmering metallic polish. “I knew it. I could tell by your voice that you were a nice-looking lady. Who’s Alejandro?”

“A mistake,” she answered unapologetically. Her smile returned. Compliments were rare here. Most clients were from eastern Europe, and they seldom spoke English.

Two faces peeked through thin bamboo strips hanging in a rear doorway. Marissa whispered something in Spanish, and the strips split open.

“My kids,” she said sheepishly. “Viktor doesn’t mind as long as they don’t bother the customers.”

The children filed into the room and stood politely.

“This is Amber. She’s seven. And this is little Jo-Jo. His real name is Jeremy. He just turned five.” Marissa combed the boy’s hair with her nails. “Say hello to Eddie.”

Amber blushed. Jo-Jo lurched forward and hugged Akil’s leg tightly.

“He likes you,” Amber announced. “He only does that to people he likes.”

Akil whisked him into the air. “Hey, little dude. How old are you?”

“We live next to McDonalds, and we have a swimming pool,” Jo-Jo said, pressing five fingers against Akil’s nose. They were sticky and smelled sweet. “It’s called a Travel Inn. Are you going to marry my mommy?”

“Jo-Jo,” Marissa called out a mild reprimand.

Akil smiled and lowered the boy.

Marissa clapped her hands twice. The children scurried away.

“I come from a big family myself, and I love kids,” Akil remarked, noticing the sound of a musical toy in the background. “I guess I just haven’t found the right woman.”

Marissa’s smile faded, and she actually took a step back. Too many men appeared in the neighborhood under court-ordered placement.

Akil sensed her wariness. “I’m sorry; I’m from Minnesota. I’m finishing up my degree. I’ll be living in the apartment upstairs.”

“A degree in what,
señor
?” Marissa’s smile returned. So did her interest.

“Business, actually. Someday I want to open my own music store. You know, sell instruments and equipment, give lessons.” He smiled. “And you are Marissa . . . ?”

“Sanchez. It’s good to have goals,” she said. “Amber likes music too. She got a keyboard organ for her birthday. She takes it everywhere. Maybe she could play it for you sometime?”

“I’d like that,” he said. “I don’t know much about San Diego. I wish I could find someone who could—”

“I would be happy to show you around,” she quickly offered. “I’ve lived here all my life. Seaport Village is really nice, because you can walk along the ocean. There are lots of shops and restaurants. And our zoo is one of the best.”

“That sounds great, Marissa. I really appreciat—”

“What you want?” a deep male voice interrupted. “Tattoo special, sixty dollars. No stars. Stars only for Russians. You pick from book. Cash or credit card. No checks.”

“Hello,” Akil said. “I’m Eddie Ginosa. I rented the apartment.”

“You pay for whole May and now show up?” the man said, extending his hand. “Viktor Karkula.”

A thick-necked Russian in his mid-fifties, Karkula had unkempt hair, and a face covered in gray stubble. His stained T-shirt exposed a carpet of body hair. His eyes were thin slits, and his face was puffed and round, which made him seem almost teddy bear–like. His disposition was grizzly.

He let out a resounding belch.

“You’re such a pig,” a woman’s voice sang out from another room.

Karkula moved closer to Akil and lowered his voice. “My wife, Tamara. She crazy in head and pain to my neck. She just get out of hospital. It was actually nuthouse, but I no can say that. If she act crazy, you let me know, okay? I send her back.”

“I’ll try and remember that,” Akil said, dodging the man’s foul breath. “Did you get my money order?”

“Sure, I get it. I cash it; I spend it. But first I make copy, so I know who to throw out on street if you make damage like last pigs. I sleep late. You break window, you pay. No drugs, no parties.” He noticed Marissa in the next room. “Hey, you got no customers, you clean. And tell your little mice to make quiet that TV.”

Karkula produced a key.

“Door is outside. Keep locked or street pigs find your bed. You no touch Marissa; you can do better. I don’t move your stuff; don’t try sell me anything because I don’t buy nothing. You pay first of month, not after. Don’t ask for loan and don’t ask for ride—I no do that. Call taxi. If you have car, park in back, or a pig steals it tonight.”

“Thanks, I’ll be fine,” Akil assured. “Some friends from school might come by later this week to help me move in. I just wanted to get a few things settled before—”

“Ya, ya, ya,” Karkula said, turning away. “No parties.”

“Pssst.” Marissa appeared with a scented candle. “You might need this. Don’t worry. Viktor calls everyone a pig. If someone steals your car, then I’ll give you a ride. Nobody bothers my minivan.”

Upstairs, a stained uncovered mattress reeked of urine. Akil lit the candle and slid a window open. He smiled at how effortless it was to entice and befriend seemingly helpless American women living in poverty. Unmarried and vulnerable, they were raising fatherless children who were also starved for the affection and companionship of a caring man. He shook his head. One compliment, one simple hint of caring or politeness, and a small amount of concern for the well-being of their children, and these women would do and believe anything. They were like puppies craving affection and direction. They were eager to follow their new master, ready to do his will—and Allah’s.

Akil lifted his binoculars. He had a clear view of deserted San Diego International Airport Runway 27, three hundred and sixty yards away.

US No-Fly Zone, Day 7

Courtyard Marriott

Milwaukee, Wi

Monday, May 25

RILEY WAS sitting in his office, free-throwing Shaitan into a large makeshift net rigged to the wall behind his desk. It was Memorial Day, and his phone messages had dropped dramatically. He actually felt a small amount of respite. The president was busy performing his annual duties at Arlington National Cemetery. Those duties consisted of a wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns followed by a speech at the adjoining Memorial Amphitheater. Earlier in the year, Riley had several meetings with the US Secret Service regarding a credible foreign terror threat/assassination plot set for this very day. With help from the NSA, an Embassy liaison—a.k.a. a CIA section operative in Madrid—has uncovered a plot involving a vacuum bomb of nitrogen octaiodide complete with metal shards soaked in dimethylmercury.

Set to explode on contact with air, the device would have been encased in a meter-long rectangular box that perfectly matched the Arlington Amphitheater’s marble façade and placed on an overhanging ledge ten meters above a central walkway.

The assassins had discovered a potentially fateful security weakness in the president’s itinerary—a weakness called repetition. The president
always
conducted the wreath-laying directly in front of the Tomb of the Unknowns, a lone bugler
always
played Taps thereafter, the president
always
crossed that center walkway en route to the Memorial Remembrance Ceremony in the Amphitheater, and the wreath-laying event
always
occurred on the last Monday in May between 11:00 a.m. and 11:05 a.m. EDT.

Placed twenty days beforehand, the device was set to awaken via a simple mechanical timer, and then roll forward and fall to the walkway below just as the president was within both the scheduled time frame and the blast radius. According to several senior members of the president’s personal protection detail, the device was extremely lethal and perfectly capable of taking him out and killing or injuring many of the five thousand onlookers.

The assassins, needing just a few minutes to physically lift the bomb to the ledge, had even devised a brilliant late-night mugging distraction of the lone Tomb guard as he paced back and forth. The tactics forced wide-scale reviews of all presidential schedules and physical surroundings.

There was a gentle tap on Riley’s door. Tom Ross peeked inside.

“Where have you been hiding?” Riley asked, banking Shaitan off the ceiling and missing the net completely.

“Neela and I have been analyzing the cockpit voices from Flight 771. Neither of us can figure out the relevance of the captain’s last word. It sounds like he was trying to say
Starbucks
. As far as I know, it’s not an aviation term or code word. She wants to do a human interest piece on it. Have you ever heard it before?”

“Yeah, whenever I need caffeine,” Riley quipped. “You like her, huh?”

“I do,” Ross admitted, pausing thoughtfully. “I like her a lot. We’ve become friends.”

“And what about your tenant friend?”

“Funny you should mention that.” Ross took a seat and crossed his arms. “Neela and I have had some heart-to-heart conversations, and we both enjoy each other’s company. It’s amazing how much we have in common, especially with bad relationships. Your marriage is obviously successful. What’s the secret?”

Riley shrugged. “There’s no single recipe, pal. And I’m certainly not an expert. But if I had to narrow things, then I’d say hard work and honesty are at the top of the list, along with faith, morals, and traditional values. The usual stuff. The question is, can a news reporter have morals?”

Ross rolled his eyes. Riley picked Shaitan up from the floor and slammed him into a drawer. “Does she like kids?”

“She loves kids, but she can’t have any,” Ross answered. “It’s a shame.”

The conversation abruptly stopped. Riley stared out his window.

“How could they do it?”

“Do what?” Ross asked.

“Kill kids. It just doesn’t make sense. Did you know that there were fifteen high school drama students on board that Delta flight? They were headed to Atlanta to research
Gone with the Wind
, their fall play. They raised the production money themselves through car washes and bake sales. Terrorists are more cowards than anything else. What I don’t understand is how they can live with themselves afterwards. Indiscriminate subways, buses, marathon races, and all those restaurant and hotel suicide bombings in Israel . . . then there was that Russian-Chechnyen school hostage situation a few years ago. When some of the terrorists balked because kids were involved, their compatriots shot them. Talk about deranged. And speaking of Russia, remember those two Tupolev airliners that crashed south of Moscow? Both were confirmed as coordinated terrorism.”

“Impossible to determine,” Ross said flatly. “The wreckage was scattered over thirty-five kilometers. That was nothing but a guess.”

“Who needs wreckage?” Riley asked smugly. “You’ve got to give the Russians credit. Their Federal Security Service—formerly the KGB—made that call based on a single circumstantial fact, but it’s one great fact: a RESURS-DK-R imagery satellite owned by Sovinformsputnik Company in Leningrad detected dual heat fluxes from the Tula and Rostov-on-Don crash regions at precisely the same instant. That, my friend, was coordinated.”

“Are you thinking that our terrorist is Chechnyen?”

“I’m not sure what to think, other than that there’s a timing element involved.”

“You seem pretty confident,” Ross observed.

“I’m confident of two things in life: I’m going to catch that mystery cell-phone terrorist, and I’m also going to catch my fish.”

“You and that fish,” Ross chided, removing an evidence bag from his briefcase. “What did he ever do to you? Speaking of confidence, we found traces of potassium in the burn residue off of Flight 605’s gear piston.”

“Potassium? Did you do a lab test?” Riley asked.

“There was no need. Our portable scanner took accurate measurements at the scene. It uses an ion spectrometer to spot TNT, Semtex, PETN, and a whole range of nitrates. Potassium is one of the major flags for unstable explosives not common to the elements you’d expect to find on or near jet fuel burns.”

Riley lifted the evidence bag.

“We also found some type of a wing,” Ross noted. “One of our techs picked it up from the Fontenelle crash site. It’s made from a molded composite. Nothing unusual: it’s probably from a kid’s toy. The configuration doesn’t fit with any known explosive model because it’s too thin. These are sketches of what it might look like if it were whole.”