Dead or Alive

  America could not be destroyed from without, of that Musa was certain. In that, the Emir had been prescient. Every fallen empire in history had rotted from within, and the same would be true for America. Fighting two intractable wars, an economy in shambles, banks and manufacturing giants going bankrupt ... Those conditions might change over time, and perhaps even improve, but future historians would mark these events as the first signs of decay. The sad truth was America couldn’t be destroyed, per se, from within or from without, and certainly not by mortal effort. If it was to happen at all, it would come from Allah’s own hand, and at a time of His choosing. And unlike all the leaders that had come before him, the Emir knew the truth of this and had adjusted his strategy accordingly.

  Four more days, Musa thought, and the terrifying world America fought so hard to keep at bay would come crashing in.

  Clark and Jack were booked on a six a.m. US Airways flight out of Dulles to Norfolk; Chavez and Dominic a Northwest redeye to Rio de Janeiro. They would be touching down at their respective destinations at roughly the same time.

  Ninety minutes after the Paulinia fire started and the skies over the coast began to blacken with smoke, São Paulo closed its airspace to all traffic. Hendley and Granger took this as a good omen: With luck, the perpetrators of the refinery attack hadn’t made it out before the airport closed. Almost certainly they would have a backup exfiltration plan, but how quickly it would get them out of the country was unknown.

  While the others sat in the conference room and watched the Paulinia news coverage, Jack found Dominic sitting in the break room, hands clasped on the table before him. He was staring into space. It wasn’t until Jack was standing beside him that Dominic looked up.

  “Hey, Jack.”

  “Ding bring you up to speed? São Paulo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you’re not up for the job, I’m sure—”

  “Why wouldn’t I be up to it?”

  This question surprised Jack. “I don’t think I would be, if I were in your shoes. Dom, he was my cousin and I loved him, but he was your brother.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, twentysome hours after Brian died, you’re going back out, and when I ask you about it, you give me some off-the-cuff answer. It’s just a little strange, is all.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m not looking for an apology. I want you to talk to me.”

  “Brian’s dead, Jack. I know that, okay? I watched the spark go out of him.” Dominic snapped his fingers. “Just like that. You know the first thing I thought after that?”

  “What?”

  “That if not for that Bari asshole, Brian would probably still be alive.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Not really, but it took everything I had to not climb out of that car and put a bullet in the guy’s head. I actually had my hand on the door handle. I wanted to kill him, then go back to Almasi’s house and see if any of those motherfuckers were still alive so I could kill them, too.”

  “You were in shock. You still feel that way?”

  “I don’t feel much, Jack. That’s what scares me.”

  “It’s called shock. You might feel that way for a while. Everybody’s different. You’ll deal with it how you deal with it.”

  “Yeah, what makes you an expert on this shit?”

  “You heard about Sinaga?”

  “The forger guy? What about him?”

  “I was watching the back when John and Ding crashed his door. He jumped out the window, then all the sudden he’s coming at me with a knife. We wrestled; I had a hold of his neck and tripped or something. When I looked up he was lying there twitching. Staring at me. I don’t know how exactly, but I broke his neck.”

  Dominic took this, but his face remained impassive. “I guess it’s my turn to ask you how you’re doing.”

  “Okay, I guess. I don’t think I’ll ever get his face out of my head, but it was him or me. I feel bad about it, but I sure as hell don’t feel bad about still being alive.”

  “Then you’re one up on me, cuz. If I could trade places with Brian, I would.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I need to hide all the steak knives next time you come over to watch football.”

  “No, Jack. But I will tell you this: Before this is all over, I’m getting some payback for Brian, and I’m going to start in São Paulo.”

  Jack opened his mouth to respond but was halted by Dominic’s raised hand. “Mission first, Jack. I’m just saying, if I get a gomer in my sights, I’m putting him down and notching it up for Bri.”

  Aside from odd looks from his fellow travelers who stared at the GA-4 cask as they passed him on the highway, Frank Weaver’s first day on the road passed without incident. As this was a trial run, this particular cask was merely a shell containing none of the neutron and gamma shields the real thing would carry. Nor did the cask bear any decals or stencils. Nothing to give away its purpose. Just a giant brushed stainless-steel dumbbell riding on a flatbed truck. The little kids had been particularly funny, pressing their wide-eyed faces to the windows as they passed.

  Four hundred eighteen miles and seven hours from the Calloway plant, Weaver took exit 159 off Highway 70 and turned south onto Vine Street. The Super 8 Motel was a quarter-mile down the road. He followed a sign, TRUCKS ENTER HERE, into the parking lot and braked to a halt between the yellow lines of a truck slot. Three other trucks had taken nearby spots.

  Weaver hopped out of the cab and stretched.

  Day one down, Weaver thought. Three to go.

  He locked the truck, then did a walk-around, checking each of the padlocked ratchets, then testing each chain’s tension. All were solid. He headed across the parking lot toward the lobby.

  Fifty yards away, a dark blue Chrysler 300 pulled into its own spot. In the front seat, a man raised a pair of binoculars and watched Weaver step through the lobby doors.

  As he had been doing four times a day for the past two weeks, Kersen Kaseke powered up his laptop, opened his Web browser, and went to the online file-storage website. He was surprised to see a file sitting in his inbox. It was a JPEG image of some kind of bird—a blue jay, perhaps. He downloaded the file to his hard drive’s documents folder, then erased the picture from the site and closed his Web browser.

  He found the file, right-clicked on it, and selected “Open with ... Image Magnifier.” Five seconds later a window popped up showing the blue-jay image, which flashed from color to black-and-white before going grainy. Slowly at first and then more rapidly, chunks of pixels began fading. After thirty seconds, all that remained were two lines of alphanumeric pairs—168 of them. Finally, Kaseke double-clicked on the day’s onetime pad to open it up. The decoding was tedious, taking almost ten minutes, but when he was done, he had two lines of text:Sunday. 8:50 a.m.

  Open Heart Congregational Church

  A Christian church, Kaseke thought. Much better than a library or even a school. He knew where the church was located and suspected that like almost every church in Waterloo, this one conducted several services throughout the morning. Eight-fifty would be about the time people were leaving the first service and arriving for the second. Give the members a few minutes to collect their things and head for the door ... In his earlier reconnaissance, he’d studied the comings and goings of the church’s members. They loved to congregate outside between services and shake hands and laugh and talk about whatever they talked about. Such frivolity. What passed for worship here was a disgrace.

  8:50. Yes, it was perfect. There would be a hundred or more people standing on the steps and sidewalk. There would likely be children present, though, and Kaseke didn’t especially like the idea of that, but Allah would forgive him. To sacrifice a few for a larger good was acceptable.

  It was Friday night. He would use most of Saturday to scout the locations, then Saturday evening to make sure the device was in o
rder. That wouldn’t take long, he knew. His job would be simple: Plant the device, set the timer, walk away, and find a vantage point to watch the results.

  76

  THE FIRE WAS MAGNIFICENT, Shasif Hadi thought. Even from three miles away, the sky over the treetops was almost as bright as the sun. And then had come the explosions, great mushrooms of flame and roiling black smoke rising silently into the dark sky, followed a few seconds later by a rumble so strong Hadi could feel it rise up through the road, through the tires of his car, and shake his seat. Through the four of us, Hadi thought, the hand of Allah has struck that refinery dead.

  After setting their charges, they had done as Ibrahim instructed and walked one by one back along the pipeline to the grove of trees in which they’d changed their coveralls. Offering no explanation, Ibrahim ordered, “Run!” then took off in a sprint. They were two hundred yards away from the cattle gate when the first charge went off.

  Staring out the car’s rear window, Hadi had watched the syncopated valve charges go off, followed by the larger main charge, then nothing for the next one minute and fifty seconds except for the refinery’s alarm Klaxon. Emergency response crews had probably just reached the shattered pipeline when the final charge ignited the ethanol spreading like a tidal wave into the complex. Those men had probably died almost instantly. A largely painless end, Hadi hoped. Brazil was a mostly Christian country, which made them enemies of Islam, but that didn’t mean they were undeserving of mercy. If they suffered, it was Allah’s will; if they’d perished quickly, Allah’s will also. Either way, he and the others had succeeded in their mission.

  Once at the gate, they drove the truck into the trees, then got back into the Volkswagen and pulled through, locking the gate behind them. Ninety seconds later, they were back at Hadi’s car. As per the plan, Hadi followed Ibrahim and the others to where Fa’ad had left his car on a dirt road a few miles away. When they pulled over, Ibrahim got out and waved for Hadi to walk up.

  “We forgot to account for a significant detail,” Ibrahim told them. “The weather.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ahmed said.

  Ibrahim pointed west, back toward the refinery. The flames were hundreds of feet high now, and topped by a ceiling of thick, black smoke. As they watched, they could see the smoke drifting southwest.

  “It’s heading toward São Paulo. They’ll close the airport soon, if they haven’t already.”

  “He’s right,” Hadi replied. “Still, of all the mistakes we could have made, this one is the least worrisome. If we make it out, so be it. If not, we die knowing we’ve done our duty.”

  Fa’ad chuckled. “You’re right, of course, but I’d rather be alive to see the fruits of our effort. May Allah forgive my vanity.”

  “What will be will be,” Ibrahim replied. “We still have a chance. You all know the alternate route.” He checked his watch. “We’ll meet tomorrow at noon in Rio at the Botanical Garden. If for some reason anyone’s delayed, we meet at the secondary location four hours later. Good luck.”

  Though neither of them had caught more than a couple hours’ sleep before leaving the airport, their flight’s departure time, on that cusp between the dead of night and dawn, left them both restless. The good news was that there’d been no coach seats available, so they were riding first class on The Campus’s dime. And the coffee wasn’t half bad, either.

  “You know, I don’t get it, John,” Jack said.

  “What’s that?” Clark replied.

  “The two we’re after ... the brother and sister. They’re barely out of their teens. What made them want to go to another country and kill people they’ve never met?”

  “First of all, we don’t know anything except that they came in on false passports.”

  “Maybe so, but odds are they aren’t here for beach volleyball.”

  “Agreed. My point is, in our line of work it’s best to take things as they come to you. Hunches can be damned handy, but they can get you killed, too.”

  “I hear you.”

  “To answer your question, I don’t think there is an answer. At least not a simple one. What you’re asking is: How are terrorists made? Poverty, hopelessness, misplaced religious fervor, the need to feel like you belong to something bigger than yourself ... Take your pick.”

  “Damn, John, you almost sound sympathetic.”

  “I am. Up until the point where those motivations lead somebody to pick up a gun or strap on a bomb. After that, all bets are off.”

  “So what, you just switch off the sympathy?”

  “That’s up to you, Jack, but part of doing this kind of work is the willingness to put on blinders. Deal with what’s in front of you. Every terrorist has a mother and father. Maybe kids, maybe people that love him. Hell, six days out of seven he might be a decent citizen, but on that one day he decides to pick up a gun or plant a bomb, he’s a threat. And if you’re the guy standing between him and innocent lives, the threat is all you can afford to worry about. You get what I’m saying?”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah, I think so.” While the real world existed mostly in shades of gray, when the moment of truth came, there was only room for black-and-white. Jack smiled and toasted Clark with his coffee cup. “You’re a wise man, John.”

  “Thanks. You get older, you get smarter. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. There’s always exceptions, though. Your dad, for one. He’s wise beyond his years. I knew that the first time I met him.”

  “Yeah, when was that?”

  “Nice try, Jack. Have you talked to him yet?”

  “About The Campus? Yeah, when we rode back together from Andrews. He was pissed at first, but it went a lot better than I thought it was going to go.”

  “Let me guess: He wants to be the one to tell your mom?”

  Jack nodded. “And just between you and me, I’m damned glad. My dad’s a tough SOB, but my mom ... She’s got that look—that look that only a mom can give, you know?”

  “Yep.”

  They sat in silence for a while, sipping coffee. “Been thinking about Dom,” Jack said.

  “He’ll pull out of it. You gotta remember, except for maybe you, his transition has been the toughest. He went from being an FBI agent to a spook. From an agency that runs on rules and regs to a fake brokerage house that hunts down bad guys outside the law. And now this thing with Brian ...” Clark shrugged. “No matter how you look at it, it’s a shitty deal.”

  “I’m just thinking it’s too early for him to be going back out.”

  “Ding doesn’t think so, and that’s good enough for me. For Gerry, too. Plus, there’s just four of us now, and a lot of bases to cover.” Clark smiled. “Hell, remember who he’s running with. I trusted the guy with my daughter, Jack, and never regretted it. He’ll make sure Dom comes through.”

  Though separated by less than four hundred miles, both Raharjo Pranata and Kersen Kaseke had been following virtually the same routine for weeks: Go to school, draw no attention to yourself, and wait for orders. Pranata’s had come only hours after Kaseke’s, during his final message check of the day. He was so surprised to see the text file sitting in his file storage’s inbox that he botched his first attempt to decode the message.

  The location they had chosen for him was less than a mile from his apartment. He’d passed by it almost every day. As targets went, it was almost ideal: large enough to accommodate hundreds of people yet hemmed in on all sides by buildings. The timing of the attack made sense as well. Pranata had seen signs advertising the event in question all over town, though he’d paid little attention to the specifics. A dedication of some kind. A statue or fountain. Not that it mattered.

  Of the three targets they’d told him to prepare for, this one offered the greatest potential for massive casualties. What was that American saying? A turkey shoot?

  The maps he’d used in his preparations had been easy to obtain, and several of them he’d even gotten at the town’s visitor center. The topographical map he’d d
ownloaded from a popular hiking website, and while he had no interest in the local trails, the elevations and distances were clearly marked, and a stroll around town with his portable GPS unit had confirmed their accuracy.

  Once he was sure he had all the necessary data, he’d simply punched the numbers into the appropriate equations and come up with the settings.

  Now would come the hard part: waiting. He would pass the time by practicing setting up and dismantling his equipment.

  Musa’s second day of driving was relatively short, taking him from Toppenish, Washington, to Nampa, Idaho, whose only claim to fame, according to a sign on the outskirts, was that it was not only the largest city in Canyon County, Idaho, with a population of 79,249, but also the fastest-growing. Yet another sign along the road, less than a hundred yards from the first, proclaimed that Nampa was also “a great place to live!”

  When planning his route from Blaine, Musa had decided his overnight stops must be in medium-sized towns—not too large that the police force was aggressive or particularly well trained, and not too small, lest the arrival of a dark-skinned stranger provoke any undue curiosity. Toppenish, with a population of only eight thousand, might have fallen in the latter category if not for its close proximity to Yakima. Of course, his encounter with Willie, Toppenish’s nosy chief of police, had placed a seed of doubt in Musa’s mind. The situation hadn’t escalated, of course, nor would it have, even if the cop questioned him further. Like the non-burned bogus documentation he’d shown the customs inspector in Vancouver, Musa was now armed with business cards, letterhead, and forms bearing the seal of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His cover story was essentially the same: a wealthy and neurotic horse owner in Bellingham who didn’t trust his local vet’s X-ray equipment.