Terminal Justice (42 page)

Warnings in English, Spanish, and Japanese reminded the occupants to remain seated at all times and to keep their hands in the boat. The warnings were soon replaced with the music.

As the craft entered the building, the travelers saw hundreds of cherub-faced dolls dressed in costumes from all over the world dancing and singing the song. As they moved, the clicking of the servos could be heard mildly echoing off the elaborate backdrops of plywood flowers and mountains.

The music was punctuated by giggles from Timmy. “Oh, look!” he cried. “Look up at the ceiling. There’s a doll riding a bicycle on a tightrope. I hope he doesn’t fall on us.” David patted his leg and motioned for him to calm himself—a task, David decided, akin to trapping a hurricane in a bottle.

DeWitt turned around and smiled at Timmy, then he turned to A.J. and said, “He’s a fine young man, Mr. Barringston, a fine young man. He reminds me of my youngest grandson, his behavior, I mean.” A.J. offered a limp smile and nodded. “Are you all right? You look pale. Surely you’re not seasick on this little bit of water.”

“No, I’m fine,” A.J. replied. “Lunch didn’t sit well with me.”

“Me either,” DeWitt said, patting his stomach.

A.J. had stopped listening. He turned back to look at Kristen, David, and Timmy. Kristen and Timmy were smiling, David’s face showed concern. He cocked his head in a silent question that asked about A.J.’s noticeable nervousness. A.J. winked and smiled to show he was all right. “Still a pretty impressive display, wouldn’t you say, David?”

“Always been one of my favorites.”

“Oh, A.J., this is great,” interjected Timmy. “Thanks for bringing me.”

David detected something different in A.J.’s eyes, something he had never seen in his friend—profound fear.

IT SEEMED AMAZING TO ROGER HOW CIRCUMSTANCES could change one’s view of a situation. When A.J. first proposed killing Mahli at Disneyland, and after he laid out the basic plan, Roger felt the idea was gutsy, bold, and daring. Now, as he was about to burst through an access panel from underneath the staging, he wondered if the plan wasn’t just plain stupid.

It wasn’t the killing that made the scheme difficult, it was the
not
killing. Roger knew that A.J. had no hesitancy about murdering killers, but innocents were another matter. If all Roger had to do was kill everyone in the boat, then the job would have been easy and could have been accomplished with a spray of bullets or even a well-placed remotely controlled bomb. But the situation was different. Mingled with the targets were nontargets like the Secret Service agents, Secretary DeWitt, A.J., and now Kristen, Timmy, and David. This was going to have to be a surgical killing, the most difficult kind of assassination. For the first time in his life, he had doubts that the innocents could get away unscathed.

The core idea of the plan was brilliant. Roger and Sheila would suddenly appear in the ride area and begin shooting, targeting the area around Secretary DeWitt and shouting several Arabic phrases. To investigators who would come later it would appear that two Arab terrorists had set out to assassinate DeWitt for his involvement in the Middle East.

What A.J. had insisted on, and what they had practiced a hundred times over the last few weeks, was that DeWitt come through
the attack unharmed. It took a great deal of practice to learn to shoot an automatic weapon like the Uzi and miss. In the bedlam of the attack, Mahli and his guards would be killed. If the scheme went as planned, they would be the only ones dead. Roger and Sheila would then race from the building. The Secret Service agents in the boat were tasked with the protection of their charges and would not give chase. They would be occupied with the wounded and with getting DeWitt out of immediate danger. This would allow several minutes for Roger and Sheila to egress out of the building through one of the emergency exits, dash through a hole cut in the chain-link fence at the perimeter of the park, and make their getaway in a van parked near the fence. From there they would travel Interstate 5 to Interstate 10 toward Arizona, changing clothes once and cars five times. Once in Phoenix they would fly back to San Diego. If everything went right.

The time for second-guessing was gone. Roger whispered breathlessly into his microphone, “Mask.” Then he removed his headset and wrapped a bandanna around his lower face, leaving everything above the bridge of his nose exposed so that witnesses could describe a dark-haired, dark-skinned attacker. He knew that Sheila was doing the same thing. The masks were meant to hide their identity, not only from the Secret Service agents who would be called upon to give a description to a police artist, but now from David, Kristen, and Timmy as well. Roger replaced his headset. “Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” Sheila replied evenly.

“On my mark, go. Three, two, one, and go!” Roger rolled out from under the staging and walked quickly along the service passageway behind the stage scenery; Sheila did the same on the other side of the building.

Outside, standing next to the Disney employee who operated the Small World ride, Agent Woody Summers leaned back against the thickly painted tubular rail and scanned the waiting crowd again.
Although a federal agent, he was not part of the official protection detail of the Secret Service. Instead, he was there to watch the warlord Mahli and A.J. Barringston interact. He didn’t know what he expected to see. At this point he was grasping at straws. Over the months, he had been unable to get even a simple search warrant to investigate the computer rooms of Barringston Relief or to recruit David O’Neal to help. He was getting no breaks.

He pushed aside his frustration and returned his gaze to the six video monitors neatly tucked into the employee’s console. Normally, a Secret Service agent would be stationed at the monitors, but Woody, bored and frustrated, persuaded the agent in charge to relinquish the job to him, allowing one more agent to be stationed at the ride’s perimeter.

All of the boats in the building were empty, just as they were supposed to be, except Sugar Bear’s boat.
Sugar Bear
was the code name for Secretary DeWitt. Mahli had been given the generic code name
Guest One
, and his two guards,
Guest Two
and
Guest Three
. Code names were a tradition in the service and were used here as part of standard protocol. Woody listened to the Secret Service agents’ brief, no-nonsense radio communications through an earpiece, which was the same issue as used by the Secret Service agents.

As he gazed at the monitors, he first saw the boat with his charges in it and the young man Timmy pointing excitedly about. Then he noticed something unusual. “What’s that?” he asked, squinting at the faded image on one of the monitors.

“What’s what?” the employee asked.

“Here,” Woody pointed at the screen with his finger. “Right here.”

The employee, a nineteen-year-old male college student, leaned forward and studied the screen. “Looks like a couple of maintenance workers,” he said nonchalantly.

“Maintenance? Did you call them?”

“No, but it could be routine. They often—”

“Move,” Woody commanded, pushing the young man aside.
Squinting, he studied the blurry movement of two people walking quickly along the perimeter of the building. As he looked closely, he saw that they were wearing masks. Allowing his eyes to carefully trace down the body of one of them he saw a familiar shape—a shape he had been trained to recognize in a second. “Oh, God,” he said. In one fluid motion he brought the flesh-colored handheld microphone up to his mouth and shouted into it, “Intruder, intruder. One right side behind staging; one left side. Gun! Gun! Gun!” Turning to the employee he ordered, “Stop all the boats. I don’t want any more boats in there.” As he spoke, he pulled his gun from his shoulder holster and raced toward the opening to the building, leaping into the canal when the path was too narrow for him to pass. Stephanie Cooper, who had stationed herself at the ride’s exit to observe A.J. and Mahli as they left the ride, watched as Woody ran to the ride’s entrance and disappeared into the tunnel. A second later she charged in through the exit.

David flinched at the sound of gunfire.

The reaction inside was immediate: The agents at the front of the boat stood and drew their weapons, taking, as best they could in the confines of the boat, a shooter’s stance. Behind them, Mahli’s guards stood, too, in reaction to the agents in front of them, causing the boat to rock. Before DeWitt could speak, the agent sitting next to him pushed him to the bottom of the boat, causing DeWitt to hit his head on the metal grab bar on the back of the seat before him.

The first burst of gunfire came from Sheila, who strafed the stage area to the left of DeWitt, firing over the hunched figures of the secretary of state and his bodyguard. A.J. leaped from his position in the middle of the boat to the back row, yelling at Timmy, “Get down, get down.” Before Timmy could react, David pushed him down, and A.J. covered Timmy with his body. David, a half-second later, grabbed Kristen behind the head and forced her down into his lap, then lay over her.

Roger popped out from behind a plywood facade of a Swiss mountain town and aimed his weapon on Mahli’s row. From his position to the left of the little craft, he had an unobstructed shot at his targets. Roger shouted the Arabic phrase he had rehearsed—“Death to sympathizers!”—and applied a steady pressure to the trigger until the Uzi came alive. The weapon’s report reverberated off the walls and backdrops, obliterating for a moment the ubiquitous theme music.

One of the agents in the front seat saw Roger and quickly drew a bead. He fired three shots from his 9mm. The first two shots struck Roger in the chest, but the Kevlar vest did its job. The impact of the bullets staggered him, however, causing him to step back. The impact also drove the air from his lungs. He had expected this and continued firing. What he had not expected was that the third bullet would strike him in the neck, severing his right carotid artery. Roger grabbed his neck, then pulled his hand away; his hand was coated in thick blood. He knew he would be dead before help could arrive.