Liberty (49 page)

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Authors: Stephen Coonts

BOOK: Liberty
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He would never get to New York before dawn to arm the warhead. Impossible to do it during the day, so that meant he couldn't arm it until tomorrow night, at the earliest. And the president talked about using the military to search. Someone might find the weapon between now and then.
Why didn't the warhead in the Convention Center explode? It couldn't be a problem with the batteries—they were new, and he had tested them repeatedly before he loaded them in the pickup. Not the timer, which he'd also tested repeatedly. Perhaps the capacitor was bad. Yes, that
must be it, the capacitor. He had mated it to the weapon in the Red Sea weeks ago; no doubt the contacts inside had corroded in the salt-laden air.
He dismissed the possibility that the weapon had been found and disarmed before the timer ran down. Not that, surely. Once the security personnel determined the guard was missing—and it would take a while for them to reach that conclusion—then the search would begin. Even if someone unlocked the storeroom and found the body and the weapon, they wouldn't disarm it—not Convention Center guards. They would have called the police bomb disposal squad, and it would take a while for them to arrive.
No, the problem had to be the capacitor.
Where could he get another? He should have a new one with him to install in the circuit when he armed the weapon in New York. The possibility of another failure was too bitter to contemplate.
The ringing telephone awoke Myron Emerick, the director of the FBI. Robert Pobowski, the deputy director, was on the line. He broke the news—Grafton had found a nuke in the Washington Convention Center.
Emerick took it hard. Ignoring his half-awake wife, he said a few dirty words.
Pobowski continued his narration. The man that apparently armed the warhead was proceeding northeast up 1-95. “He's either going home or to arm another bomb. Grafton wants us to set up surveillance on his house. Grafton's on his way to New York City right now in a Pentagon helicopter.” Pobowski told Emerick Mabruk's name, where he lived.
“He wants us to follow this guy?” Emerick demanded.
“No. He thinks if he goes to New York the techno wizards in the Langley basement can track him on traffic cameras. He wants us to stay off him so that he'll lead Grafton to another bomb.”
“That son of a bitch!” Emerick muttered. He wasn't referring to the suspect, but Grafton. “He's making us look like county Mounties, ordering us around so he gets the collar and the glory.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I got a call yesterday from a friend of ours on the White House staff. You won't believe this, but Grafton's people have hacked into our computer system. They've been reading every file entry on the Florida cell suspects. He knows as much about them as we do.”
Pobowski remained silent. He was also a veteran of Washington's political maneuvering. Everyone was on the team, yet the promotions and budget dollars went to the people who produced results, not to role players. Like Emerick, he believed the future of the FBI was on the line. They couldn't afford to let Grafton steal the spotlight.
“That explains a lot,” Pobowski said cautiously.
“Damn right,” his boss grumped. “From now on I want the files kept with paper. No more computer entries. I don't want him stealing our work.”
“There's been another development in Boston,” Pobowski reported. “Grafton asked us to put a beacon on Corrigan's limo—he didn't want Corrigan to know about it, for obvious reasons. An hour ago the limo was parked on the top level of the Boston train station. No one around it, apparently. Dark windows, but our man shined a flashlight in. Two bodies in there.”
“Nothing on the computers,” Emerick repeated. “Let's see if we can keep this to ourselves and make something of it. Be sure and tell Harry Estep that he is not to volunteer FBI information to Grafton. If he asks a question, Estep is to answer it, but that's it.”
“I understand, sir.”
Emerick hung up the telephone and rolled over, trying to get comfortable. He found that impossible.
Another nuke, in Washington, for Christ's sake. And Grafton found it! That fact would play right into the hands of the people in Congress who wanted to reorganize federal
law enforcement, put everything under one cabinet secretary. Damnation!
Emerick rolled out of bed, went downstairs to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. When it had dripped through he sat sipping a cup and ruminating on the situation. He couldn't afford, he decided, to play second fiddle to Grafton. He called Pobowski back.
“If that suspect goes home, arrest him. Interrogate him on the spot. If he knows where another nuke or two are, get it out of him.”
“What if he wants a lawyer?”
The rules of criminal procedure, which the Supreme Court decided in the 1950s and'60s were mandated by the United States Constitution, were not designed for the age of terror, as Emerick well knew. He wasn't going to let New York or Philly go up in a mushroom cloud because Habruk chose to exercise his right to remain silent. To hell with the lawyers!
“Trying to flatten an American city with a nuke isn't a crime, it's an act of war. Regardless of his nationality, this man is an enemy soldier—he doesn't have a right to a lawyer. Do what you have to do, Bob.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was four in the morning when Nguyen Tran drove his rig into the yard of an old tobacco warehouse in rural South Carolina. A regular semi-trailer sat backed up to the loading dock, which was only large enough for two trailers. Nguyen put his rig into reverse and expertly backed the container into the empty spot.
A key on his ring opened the padlock. The interior of the warehouse was dirty, with opaque, fly-specked windows mounted high up. The glass in one of the windows was completely gone, so bird droppings were scattered liberally throughout. Nguyen used his flashlight to ensure there was no one in the building, then he opened the overhead doors of the loading dock with hand cranks. The
wheels squealed in protest as the doors rose.
A bird disturbed on its nest overhead fluttered and squawked.
Nguyen unlocked the door to the container and began unpacking. The furniture he stacked out of the way. When he got to the soft chairs loaded with blown lead pellets, he walked back to one corner of the warehouse and started the forklift that sat there. After it warmed up, he used it to off-load the chairs, one by one.
He had to cut loose the duct tape that held the bags of birdshot in place and carry the bags from the container one by one. He stacked them neatly by the door.
When he got to the warhead he inspected it carefully with the flashlight. From the cab of the tractor he got a socket set, which he used to run out the bolts that secured the pallet holding the warhead to the container floor.
Satisfied at last, he opened the door to the regular cargo trailer and climbed back on the idling forklift. In three minutes he had the warhead positioned in the other trailer. Instead of bolts, he used adjustable cargo straps to secure it in place. Then the job of repacking the birdshot around the warhead began. He used two rolls of duct tape to secure the bags, then moved the chairs in. When all that was done, he carried in the light furniture to fill up the rest of the space between the warhead and the trailer door.
He parked the empty container under the trees behind the warehouse, where it would be partially hidden from the road. Then he unhooked the tractor from the chassis that held the container and maneuvered the tractor to pick up the trailer that now held the weapon.
After he had the air brakes and electrical connections hooked up, Nguyen wiped his hands on a rag from the tractor's tool bin and carefully stowed his tools and flashlight.
He checked the warehouse one more time, then lowered the overhead doors and replaced the padlock on the personnel door.
The sky was growing light in the east when he drove
out of the yard and headed northeast on the two-lane ribbon of asphalt.
The streets of the Bronx were quiet at five o'clock in the morning when Sonny Tran parked the stolen sedan under an elevated rail line and jerked the ignition wires apart. He got out of the car and walked to the back, where he took the license plate off with a screwdriver he had acquired earlier that evening at an interstate filling station.
No one was out and about in this neighborhood of burned-out tenements and blighted lives. Even the street-corner crack salesmen were in bed at this hour.
Sonny used the chauffeur's rag to wipe his prints from the steering wheel, gearshift, and door handles. He was especially careful wiping the area around the ignition switch and pulling the dangling wires through the rag. When he had rubbed every surface he might have touched, he got out of the car. He left it unlocked. With a little luck, the car would be stripped by this time tomorrow.
Carrying his briefcase, he walked the three blocks to the stairs that led up to the subway station. After wiping the license plate, he bent it double and dropped it in a trash can on the platform. He only had to wait five minutes before a train came rumbling in.
Hamid Salami Mabruk lived in a quiet neighborhood just ten minutes' walking distance from the university where he taught. He owned a typical older urban bungalow with an unattached garage on the back of the lot that one reached by driving down an alley. Large maples shaded most of the yard and brushed against the roof of the house. Six-foot-high board fences ran the length of the property on both sides and gave Habruk and his adjoining householders the illusion of privacy.
It was five-thirty in the morning when Habruk drove down the alley and used his remote to open his garage
door. He eased the pickup through the narrow opening, killed the engine, and lowered the overhead door with the remote.
He sat with his head on the steering wheel, trying to think.
What a night this had been! The weapon had failed to explode, he had been in every construction traffic jam between here and Washington. A drive that should have taken two and a half hours had taken six.
Tonight! He would get some sleep, then go to New York and arm the weapon there tonight. He would get another capacitor from the hardware store this afternoon, just in case. The weapon would destroy New York City and alter the course of human history. Tonight!
He made a great effort to rouse himself and get out of the pickup. The garage was not large—he had to close the vehicle door to go forward to the door that led to the backyard. It was locked, of course—to keep neighborhood children and dope addicts out—so he fumbled with his key ring until he found the right one. Unlocked it and opened it and stepped through.
Three men stood there with pistols leveled.
“Freeze!
FBI—you're under arrest!”
He stepped backward and slammed the garage door.
Without thinking he pulled the .22 automatic from his belt. The silencer was still attached to the muzzle.
He would get back in the pickup, drive out of here! Even as this thought went through his head he heard a vehicle come roaring down the alley and brake to a stop outside the garage door, blocking it.
Someone pounded on the door.
“You're surrounded, Mabruk. Open this door and come out with your hands up!”
He fired the pistol through the door. The report was just a mild pop. He heard a groan.
He was trapped!
Enraged, he fired two more shots through the door, then placed the blunt round silencer against his head above the right ear and pulled the trigger.
Jake Grafton was standing on top of the Met-Life Building in New York City when the sun peeped through the clouds to the east. He was leaning on a rail, out of the way, holding his cell phone in his right hand. The chilly spring breeze whipped at his light jacket and jeans and made him shiver a little. It had rained during the night, and the air was still cold.
The sun's appearance was spectacular, with the whole of the city at his feet. He was facing south. In the distance he could see the harbor and the bridges to Brooklyn and the Statue of Liberty. Behind him commuter helicopters came and went. The chopper that Jake had arrived in was parked on the helo pad farthest from the passenger terminal exit.
It was here that he learned from Gil Pascal that Hamid Mabruk had driven home. And it was here that he learned that Mabruk had shot himself when FBI agents attempted to arrest him. “They took him to the hospital in critical condition,” Pascal reported. “He shot himself in the head with a twenty-two about thirty minutes ago. I'm getting this on the other line from Harry Estep in the FBI command center.”
He called Harry. “I asked Zelda to tell you people to follow him, not attempt an arrest.”
“Admiral, I don't mean to sound disrespectful,” Harry
said, “but the FBI doesn't take orders from you.”
Jake thought about that for a moment. “I suppose someone in the Hoover Building gave the green light for an arrest.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Someone really senior.”
“That's a good guess.”
“Emerick, I suppose.”
“I can't confirm that. But I have no doubt that the order to arrest Mabruk came from the top.”
“Terrific. I hope Emerick knows where the other two bombs are and grabs them this morning. That would save all of us a lot of wear and tear on our stomach linings.”
He snapped the phone closed.
He shouldn't have made that last crack, but … Jesus H. Christ, he felt so goddamn frustrated!
The streets below were dark canyons. The rising sun, reflecting off buildings and acres of window glass, chased away the gloom. As he stood looking, a commuter helicopter came in to land amid a hurricane of noise and rotor wash. Grafton leaned on the rail until the buffeting air subsided.
New York!
When the helo shut down, he used his cell phone to call Sal Molina. He had the number memorized.
“It's Grafton.”
“Good work you did last night. Where are the other two?”
“That's what I called to talk about. The FBI just screwed up an attempted arrest of the guy who armed that one last night. He managed to shoot himself in the head. Still alive, but even if he lives, he isn't going to tell us anything.”
“Okay,” Molina said, sounding as tired and frustrated as Grafton felt.
“I've got our one Corrigan unit cruising Washington. Nothing so far. What I want to do is bring the thing to
New York. I have a feeling that this is the most likely target for the others.”
“Evidence to support that?”
“None. Just a gut feeling. Atlanta, Washington—they gotta have New York on their list. The Corrigan unit is the only thing that will find one of those warheads if it's packed in lead.”
“The White House is releasing the news about the warhead you found last night. If you thought the warhead in Atlanta got Congress and the public stirred up, wait until you see what happens today. I'll talk to the president, but I suspect he will want the Corrigan unit to stay in Washington. This city is the seat of our government. An attack in New York would be devastating, but one here would be catastrophic.”
“Yes, sir,” Jake Grafton said. He had spent his adult life taking orders, even if he didn't agree with them.
“Could you be available to talk to the press later this morning?”
“Not unless I receive a direct order to make myself available.”
The helo behind him came to life; Jake rammed a finger in his ear to hear Molina's reply. It sounded like “I'll get back to you,” but it might have been something else. Jake snapped the telephone shut and leaned on the rail.
After the helo departed Jake called Gil Pascal again. “What is going on with the FBI?”
“Zelda isn't having much luck. They aren't putting anything about those terror cells on their computer system. There's been an interesting development on the wire services about a shooting involving some Arabs at a golf course construction site in south Florida. Two of them are dead. One was run over by a tractor pulling a container off the site. Apparently the container had just been delivered by a local hauler. The driver shot the other one. The rig kept on going.”
“You don't say?”
“All this happened just after sunrise yesterday morning.
The police are trying to get more information on the dead men from INS. They're probably talking to the FBI, too. Of course, no one got the plate numbers on the truck. The witnesses can't even agree on the brand of tractor.“
“Uh-huh.”
“Yesterday afternoon there was another shooting involving Arabs in north Florida, west of Jacksonville. Place is a piney woods, I take it, on a dirt road off a state highway. Five Arabs dead in that one. No suspects. Again, local police are e-mailing details on the dead men to the INS.”
“What does Zelda think of all this?”
“She thinks the decedents may have been members of the terror cells the FBI was tracking. I thought of calling Harry Estep and asking, but I thought I should mention it to you first.”
“Don't call Harry. I think he's got orders from headquarters.”
“He's probably pretty busy,” Gil said. “The Boston police have two corpses on their hands, Corrigan's right-hand man, guy named Karl Luck, and his chauffeur. Both stabbed around midnight.”
“In Boston?”
“Yep. They were left in the limo at the train station.”
“How's Carmellini doing?”
“Called in about an hour ago. Everything is quiet. He wants someone to relieve him, LeRoy, and the driver so they can get some sleep. I'm working on it.”
“That Corrigan unit is gold,” Jake replied. “I want armed guards in an unmarked car following it everywhere it goes. No more wrecks.”
“I'll make it happen, Admiral.”
“Where is Sonny Tran?”
“New Jersey. A security camera got him boarding a subway in the Bronx at dawn. He changed trains at Penn Station and rode out to Newark. We lost him there.”
“Cell phone?”
“It's not radiating. It's apparently off.”
“Keep me advised.”
Jimmy Doolin had had his truck-driving job for three weeks; if he wasn't careful, he was going to lose it. He was running late with this load, which should have been delivered yesterday.
Yesterday! Ha! He parked the rig with the load on it so that he and Luellen could sign that contract on the condo. When he got back in the rig, he had a fenderbender with some old lady who wasn't sure what state she lived in, got a traffic citation—Oh, man! He was going to have to talk really fast to explain that to the boss.
That cigar-chomping fatty would probably fire him on the spot. If the boss canned him, the condo people were going to be all over him like stink on shit. They wouldn't let him out of the deal. And Luellen—what would she say?
The roads were still slick from the rain last night, and already traffic was loading up. Jimmy Doolin had his mind on things other than driving when he took the expressway off-ramp in the Bronx. The grade was steeper than he thought and the light at the bottom was red. He slammed on the brakes.
The truck chassis behind him fishtailed, the tractor slid through the light. The container on the chassis slid out to the right and wrapped itself around a steel power pole. The walls of the container split like a ripe melon, its contents gushed forth.
One of the things that came squirting out was a nuclear warhead packed in birdshot. The duct tape holding the bags of birdshot in place tore loose. Bags fell off as the warhead—which was really heavy with all that lead wrapped around it—caromed off a parked car and rolled a little ways down the street like an oversize bocci ball.
Jimmy Doolin was wearing his seat belt and wasn't hurt. He turned off the ignition and got out of the cab,
cursing mightily. The container was ruined, the contents spread from hell to breakfast. He had a cell phone in his pocket. He dialed 911 to get the police started this way, then called Luellen to break the news to her. The condo was history.
The army officer in charge of the troops searching New York was Brigadier General Tom Zehner. The helo carrying Jake Grafton landed fifty yards from Zehner's mobile command post in Battery Park and shut down. Grafton walked across the grass and showed his Pentagon pass to the uniformed guard at the temporary fence that kept the curious away, and was admitted.
Zehner was a medium-sized man who exuded an air of perpetual calm. He knew who Jake Grafton was, even if he was wearing jeans and a ratty light jacket. Three other officers were in the command post conferring with the general.
After the greetings, they got down to it. “What are your orders?” Jake asked Zehner.
“Search every container coming into the city. We're using Geiger counters. I'm having my men open every third one.”
“You are not searching every trailer and truck?”
“No, sir. There is no way. I've got three thousand men. The police are helping direct traffic, but my men are doing the searching. All the traffic crossing onto Long Island, Manhattan, and Staten Island has to cross tunnels, bridges or ferries. We're working them all. I've shut down all ferry traffic to the eastern end of Long Island. The people out there are bitching, but I did it anyway.”
Zehner went to the map on the wall. “I gave up on the Bronx. I don't have enough troops. We stop the traffic when it crosses into Manhattan.” Zehner looked Grafton in the eyes. “Right now the delay at the checkpoints is three hours. We're strangling the city. If we searched every vehicle, traffic would essentially cease to flow. The
city would be isolated. Kept up long enough, the people in the city would starve.”
“Railroads?”
Zehner showed him on the map.
“Airports?”
“No, sir. They have their own security.”
Jake parked his butt on a desk. Most of the chairs were stacked with office supplies. “How long you been doing this?”
“Two days, sir.”
“The warhead the FBI snagged in Atlanta was packed in lead shot and blown lead pellets. It's enough to fool a Geiger counter.”
Zehner threw up his hands.
“What if a nuke is already in the city?” Jake pressed.
“Admiral, I only have so many troops. They must eat and sleep. Unloading every truck coming into the city to inspect it would be the equivalent of putting up roadblocks and denying all access.”
“How would you use more people if you had them?”
Ten minutes later Jake's cell phone rang. Sal Molina was on the line. “The president wants you here for another meeting.”
“Yes, sir,” Jake said. “I'm on my way.” He turned to a major who was standing against the wall. “Tell the chopper crew to start the engines. I'll be out in three minutes.”
The White House meeting was crowded with senior military officers and the heads of federal agencies. Butch Lanham, the national security adviser, was the chair. Sal Molina sat in the corner cleaning his fingernails. Emerick belligerently acknowledged giving the order to arrest Mabruk. He insisted the Florida terrorist cells might still lead the FBI to the bombs, although that possibility became less likely with every passing hour.
The politicians in Congress were reacting to the army's
stranglehold on traffic going in and out of New York, and that had to be dealt with.
Everyone wanted more Corrigan detection units, which weren't forthcoming. Corrigan Engineering was doing its level best, but another operational unit was at least two weeks away.
They were arguing about using troops to search tractortrailers and about the Coast Guard's prohibition of pleasure boat traffic along the East Coast when someone came in to inform them that a warhead had been discovered at a truck crash in the Bronx. A sigh of relief swept the room.
“That's three,” Molina said fervently.
“One explosion would be more than enough,” General Alt snapped in reply.
Jake knew how Molina felt. He, too, felt a huge sense of relief, as if a great weight had been lifted from his back. Finding one was a labor for Hercules—finding two out of the question.

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