Angela shook her head as she sat back. “I’m still not convinced I believe all this.”
“Why attack a border crossing?”
“I don’t—” Angela snapped her fingers with sudden realization. “Islamic terrorists know that they may not be able to blend in very well or go unnoticed, so having all their people pose as Hispanic would allow them to be practically invisible in America. They could come and go as they please. Blowing up a border crossing would destroy the detection equipment that surely must be able to detect nuclear material.”
Jack was amazed at how quickly she had made the critical jump to what was going on, and why.
He turned in his seat to face her. “Angela, if you delivered the EBW here, that means they’re probably building the bomb here before transporting it to a major city. If they wanted to use it in LA, they would have built it in on the West Coast. That means they likely intend to set it off in New York City.”
“Milford Falls isn’t that far from New York City.”
“Where was the place you delivered that package?”
“I’ve already been there looking for those four men. They’ve cleared out.”
“Take me there. I want to see it for myself.”
She looked out the windshield, almost as if she could see the place. “I was going there now anyway. I suppose I could take you along.”
“Why would you be going there now, in the middle of the night?”
“I made a promise. I intend to keep it.”
Jack thought he knew what she meant. “Is it far?”
“Not too far. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. It’s in a massive, deserted industrial area. It’s easy to get lost in there. I suspect those men are still there, somewhere in those deserted buildings. Now I know why. I’ve been going there a lot, spending time learning the layout of the place.”
“Looking for those men?”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but so far I haven’t seen any sign of them.”
Jack rubbed a finger along his lower lip. Such a deserted industrial complex sounded like the perfect place to build a bomb without being disturbed or discovered.
“I need to find out if this is just a scary theory, or if we could really be on to something. There might be a clue at the place where you delivered the package.”
“I’m game.”
Angela turned the key, and the engine roared to life.
FIFTY
They had to drive back through town first before they could to get to the old industrial area. The main streets were mostly deserted. Jack’s familiar sense of paranoia was beginning to set in. With so few cars on the streets, he felt like anyone could be watching them.
At one traffic light some guys in a car pulled up beside them on the driver’s side. The driver revved the engine as some of the men opened their windows to make lewd offers to Angela.
Angela glared at them as she gave them the finger. They all laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world.
“Jerks,” she muttered as she pulled away when the light turned green.
They stayed next to her. She abruptly cut around a corner to the right. She had turned too late for them to follow without stopping and backing up. By then she was gone. She took side streets for a while until returning to her course through downtown. The men were nowhere to be seen.
Jack knew that she could have ignored them. It said something about her nature that she didn’t.
They wouldn’t think it was so funny if they had followed her and stopped her truck only to find themselves looking down the barrel of her gun. She might not look it, but this was a woman you messed with at your own peril. The fact that she went out all alone to a deserted area late at night hoping to find the guys who had tried to kill her also said a lot.
Jack had only met this woman, and already he felt a bond with her. It was rare to encounter another person who shared an understanding of the things he dealt in, and more than rare that she was prepared to handle them alone.
As they left the lights of Milford Falls behind, they drove for a time down a lonely, winding highway. Trees in the darkness to either side of the road flashed by in a seemingly never-ending procession until the road eventually emptied them out in the middle of a vast, deserted, commercial landscape. It was an eerie scene.
Lit by moonlight, the place felt like life on earth had died out long ago and they were the last people alive in the world, wandering among the crumbling remains of civilization.
Angela drove slowly into the maze, looking left and right around every building. He could see windows broken out on most of the buildings. All of them were dark. After they made their way through the tangle of deserted buildings, stacked industrial equipment, and fenced implement yards, she turned down a road going past a long building and then parked at a door along the side. The door had a hand-painted address on it.
“This is where I delivered the package,” she said as she cut the engine. “If you want to look around inside, I’ll keep watch out here.”
Jack thought that wasn’t a bad idea, but at the same time he didn’t think it was a good one, either. “All right. I’ll try to be quick.”
“It’s pitch black in there,” she said.
He pulled out his small light and clicked it on briefly to show her how powerful it was.
The door wasn’t locked. It scraped on the ground as he opened it. Inside the enormous building there were walls for several rudimentary offices. Between several of the office spaces stood gray metal shelving. Some of the shelves had crumpled, dirty blankets left on them, but there was nothing underneath.
There was a filthy, greasy moving pad on the floor. He knew why Angela hadn’t wanted to come inside.
Jack looked around for a good ten minutes, trying to find a clue as to what the men had been doing. He found a variety of milling machines back beyond the shelving, but they had been cleaned and the floor vacuumed. A specialized search team could probably find a speck of something, but he couldn’t. Since the site had been abandoned, at this point, with the clock ticking, whatever had been there was irrelevant. They needed to find where whatever they had been making had been taken.
As he climbed back up into her truck, she said, “Told you.”
Jack sighed. “They appeared to have been using milling machines for something. Like you said, they’ve cleared out. It was worth a look. I don’t know what else we can do out here.”
She started the truck but didn’t answer. She pulled out and drove slowly on through the maze of crumbling buildings, chain-link fencing, and razor wire guarding piles of rusted junk. There were broad concrete areas as well and streets of sorts, even alleyways between clusters of the old buildings.
“Aren’t you going to turn on your headlights?”
“No. The moon is out. The moon is enough to see by if you don’t drive too fast. Your eyes will adjust.”
Jack didn’t object. He knew what she was doing and he couldn’t say he blamed her. Besides that, those men were the only clue they had. If by some stroke of luck she was able to find them, they might be able to provide some answers.
The problem would be getting them to talk.
They drove slowly for almost an hour, weaving their way among the ruins of what used to be a thriving complex. Angela didn’t say anything. She was intently focused on surveying the moonlit ghost town.
Jack hadn’t had much sleep on the plane the night before and he was exhausted. The low rumble of the engine was making him even more sleepy. He slumped down in his seat. He could feel the engine’s low drone through his whole body. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open as she drove slowly onward into the decaying ghost town.
“Shit,” Angela said under her breath, “I don’t believe it.”
Jack sat up, suddenly wide awake. “What?”
She rolled to a stop and turned off the engine.
“There,” she said, pointing through the windshield.
Jack squinted into the distan
ce and finally saw a small orangish glow get brighter, then dim. It was a man smoking a cigarette. He was coming out of an alleyway and across the road they were on. Jack then spotted another man walking beside him. He was smoking, too. The two glowing dots moved along with the shadowy shapes of the two men crossing their path, their faces briefly lit whenever they took a drag.
“That’s them,” Angela said in a whisper.
Angela reached up and turned off the switch for interior light before carefully opening her door. Jack got out with her. They both pushed their doors closed quietly just enough to catch but not letting them latch so they wouldn’t make a noise.
“Do you really think it’s the men you’re looking for?” he whispered.
“It’s Miguel and Emilio.”
“Two of the men who attacked you? Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
She sounded convinced. He didn’t know that he was. He thought that it might simply be two vagrants. He couldn’t make out any features of the two dark shapes silhouetted against moonlit concrete and brick of abandoned factories.
Angela was convinced, though, and she was already moving out ahead of him. Jack pulled one of his knives out of a pocket and popped the blade open. She walked on the balls of her feet, making virtually no sound.
The way she moved reminded him of a large cat advancing in on prey. She would freeze in place, watching, motionless, then move again in short dashes. Jack stayed close, trying to mimic her movements. As he started to hear their voices chattering in Spanish, she moved slowly as she kept her eyes locked on the men.
When they talked and laughed and looked the other way, pointing off at something, she moved more swiftly.
Jack was surprised that she still hadn’t drawn her gun as she closed the distance to the men.
He was alarmed when she suddenly broke into a run. As fast as she was moving and with her long legs, before he knew it she had opened some distance out ahead of him. He was even more alarmed that she didn’t have a weapon in hand as she rapidly closed the distance to the men.
Both men halted abruptly when they saw her coming. They flicked their cigarettes off to the side and drew big knives. Jack could see the moonlight glint off the combat blades.
They started running toward her.
It seemed insane. A girl in cutoff shorts and boots with no weapon to hand, her platinum-colored hair flying out behind her, her arms pumping as she charged at a dead run toward two men with knives.
Jack didn’t think this would end well, and it was too late to stop her.
FIFTY-ONE
Just before Angela reached the men, she bent down without slowing and snatched up something.
Jack thought that it looked like a metal rod of some kind—possibly a length of rebar—about three feet long. She must have seen it lying there in the moonlight when she broke into a dead run. She had been trying to get to it before the men with large knives reached her.
As the men charged toward her, she abruptly stopped. She twirled the rebar in her fingers like a high school cheerleader twirling a baton.
Just before the men reached her, she tossed it up in the air and caught it by one end. Holding it like a baseball bat, she took a mighty swing as the man out in front reached her.
Her swing connected with the man’s hand as if she were knocking a ball out of the park. His knife flew away into the night. He let out a cry of pain as he crumpled to a knee. Angela used her swing to spin herself around and slam the rebar into the other man’s forearm just as he tried to stab her. Jack could hear the bone break. Holding his broken arm, the man staggered back a few steps.
The first man had scrambled back to his feet and recovered his balance. He lunged at her to catch her in his arms. Gripping the rebar in both hands as he came at her, she rammed it, end-first, into his face so hard that it speared all the way through his skull and broke out the back. The man’s dead weight twisted as he toppled, ripping the metal rod through his head from her grasp.
Angela ducked into a squat as the second man leaped toward her. His arm reaching out for her went over her head.
Angela pulled a large knife from her right boot. As the man was still staggering past her after missing, she pivoted and with two lightning strikes sliced through his Achilles tendons. He howled in pain and shock when the tendons snapped back up into his legs, the calf muscles pulling up into fat knots of unconnected muscle. He tried to walk on stilted legs but toppled to the ground.
He sat up, trying to reach his crippled legs with his one good hand.
Angela threw a side kick into his face, slamming him back down onto his back. Without an instant’s hesitation, she landed on him, straddling his chest with her bare legs. She pressed the point of her knife to the fleshy spot just below his left eye right above the cheekbone. Blood ran from his broken nose. It was clear to Jack that if he moved, he would gouge out his own eye. The man knew that as well and froze.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Miguel, leader of his merry little band of rapists.”
“Sorry. I am truly sorry, señorita,” he pleaded, holding his hands up to the side in surrender.
Angela smiled. “I seriously doubt that you’re the least bit sorry, at least not yet, but you will be.”
“Where did you take the material you made?” Jack asked from over her shoulder. “The Semtex explosive you were working on? Where did you take it?”
Jack put a hand on Angela’s shoulder, not knowing for sure what she had in mind. “Angela,” he cautioned in a low voice for her alone, “we need to get information from this man.”
She shot a look of fury back over shoulder. “Oh, he’s going to give us information. You don’t need to worry about that.”
She turned back to the man under her. “Isn’t that right, Miguel? You’re going to give us the information we want, right?”
“Please, please, señorita! I am so sorry!”
“Answer my friend’s question. Where is the material I saw when I delivered the package to you? Where did you take it?”
“I don’t know! I swear!”
At his denial, and without hesitation, Angela pushed the knife in under his eye and levered it underneath, popping the eyeball out enough for her to rip it out with her other hand. She held the mess of it in her bloody fingers up in front of his good eye as he shrieked and flopped under her.
“Stop screaming, or your tongue is next.”
She didn’t raise her voice. She was so calm, so dead serious, that it made her words far more frightening.
The man wept in terror but he stopped shrieking. “Please! No more!”
He suddenly reached for her hair with his good hand to try to gain control of her. Jack was just about to intervene to protect her when with two swift slashes she cut the tendons in the crook of his arm and then at his shoulder.
The nearly useless arm dropped to the concrete as he shrieked in pain. She put the point of the knife in his mouth to make him go quiet.
“I’ll ask you again. Where is the material I saw when I delivered the package to you? I want you to think very carefully before you answer because if you lie to me again I’m going to start cutting things off you, things you would not like to be without.” She put the point of her knife against his cheek and with a quick circular motion cored out one of his larger moles. He cried out. “I’m going to cut off something more important if you don’t tell us what we want to know.”
To make her point, she moved back, stabbed her knife into his leg, making him gasp, and then pulled the double-edged blade up the length of his pants. The blade was so sharp it cut through his pants, underwear, and leather belt. With the tip of the blade, she flopped the front of his pants and underwear to the side.
“There’s your disgusting little balls now.” She leaned closer. “Why Miguel, this little dick of yours is all shriveled up. Not so much fun like the last time you showed it to me, right Miguel?”
The man was trembling in agony and fright. Tears streamed from h
is good eye. Blood ran from the empty socket as well as his broken nose.
As afraid as Miguel was, in as much pain as he was, he rolled his head from side to side to let her know he wasn’t going to talk. He looked prepared to let her do her worst, to die for his beliefs, but he was not going to reveal any information.
His willingness to die before revealing anything was where interrogations usually hit a wall. This was already well beyond the bounds of civilized men.
But Jack believed these terrorists were assembling a nuclear bomb. If this man didn’t talk, Jack was going to have to call in help. It could easily be too late by the time they searched the entire complex. Or worse, for all Jack knew, they could have already loaded that bomb into a truck and be driving into a major city. There was simply no time to waste.
Jack would normally have stopped her long ago from what she was doing to this man, but this was that hypothetical situation come to life of what you would be willing to do to get information out of a terrorist if you knew hundreds of thousands of people would die if you didn’t get him to talk.
This was no longer about what was proper or right, but about the survival of untold numbers of innocent people.
Jack contemplated having Angela move aside to let him try, but she was locked on to this man in a way that was profoundly frightening. Something told him to stay out of it.
Angela scooted back up to again sit on his abdomen to hold him down—not that he was going anywhere. She placed the tip of her knife under his right eye. “I think that by now you know I don’t believe you and you also know that I’m not playing games.
“Maybe you had some grand vision of dying a glorious death striking a blow for your idiotic cause. Maybe you even thought that if you got caught, you would be put in prison and that no one would hurt you because Americans always treat terrorists with respect and they don’t believe in behaving in the same barbaric way you do.
“Well, Miguel, here’s your problem. If you would have been caught by the authorities it’s true that they would likely take you to some nice, cozy prison cell in Guantánamo where you would be given prayer rugs and time to pray to Allah every day, food to keep away the pain of hunger, medical care, and outside playtime in the sunshine with the other killers being held there so as not to offend your dignity.