“The bomb we stopped before was supposed to go off in New York City later this afternoon—at four o’clock, when the city is full of people working as well as tourists and rush hour traffic that would have the streets clogged. The more people outside, the more radiation and burn deaths there would be.”
“Angela, we stopped that from happening.”
“Yes, but there’s a second bomb. This one is going to go off in Washington, DC, later today at the same time—four p.m. The terrorists wanted two bombs to strike at the heart of the Great Satan—New York and Washington. We stopped that first bomb, but there’s a second one. It’s completely assembled, it’s in place in Washington, it’s live, and it’s ready to detonate.”
Jack almost felt as if he were having an out-of-body experience, as if he were looking down on himself having this conversation.
“Angela, how do you know this?”
“I saw it all in Cassiel’s memories as I held his dying brain in my hands.”
Jack took a breath to compose himself. He told himself that it wasn’t possible, that she was simply imagining the worst. And yet, he had already seen this young woman do the impossible.
“What did you see in these visions, or memories? Can you tell me exactly what you saw that makes you believe this?”
“I saw the leader of the terrorist group responsible for the entire mission, for both bombs. His name is Rafael. Rafael always had Cassiel stay close by him.
“Rafael and his team are Iranian, but they grew up speaking Spanish, eating Mexican food, and dressing as Mexicans so that they would be able to easily infiltrate the US. Mexicans can go virtually unnoticed here in the US. That was their plan: blend in as Mexicans.
“But make no mistake. They are Iranian, steeped in the Iranian goal of world dominance. They believe that the ISIS caliphate is illegitimate. They intend to bring about the real caliphate.
“They’ve spent their entire lives training for this mission. They’ve studied with not only Iranian nuclear scientists, but nuclear scientists from North Korea and Pakistan. Rafael knows enough to be a physicist, but this mission is his purpose in life, his only purpose. They want to die with the bombs they have built, the culmination of their life’s work.
“The first time I saw those four, I thought they were Mexican. The entire team snuck into the US illegally posing as Mexicans. Out of all of them, only three were caught. American lawyers helped get them out of detention and got them a court hearing six months from now. They vanished into America as the lawyer knew they would. The authorities didn’t stop any of the others, and some sanctuary cities and states even protected them, like my own state did, and like California did.
“Cassiel wasn’t raised with Rafael and his team. An Iranian commander named Hasan saved Cassiel from execution for murder and assigned him to go with Rafael. Rafael didn’t like it. Neither did Cassiel.
“Rafael left half of his team to complete the assembly of one of the two bombs. That was the bomb we found. That team was supposed to take that bomb to New York City when it was finished, but they all died in the explosion when they were attacked.
“When Rafael could no longer get in touch with any of that team, he rightly assumed that they had been discovered and were dead. He knew they would blow up the place and themselves with it to prevent any chance of discovery of their larger plan. They wanted Rafael’s part of the mission to go on to succeed. When they detonated those explosives, it left it all up to Rafael to complete the mission he and his team members were raised to do.
“That was why Rafael had split his group—to increase the odds that one of them would succeed. Once split, the two teams had minimal contact.
“Rafael built the second bomb at another location—on a long, backwoods loop off the main road not far from here. That loop, Duffey Road, only goes past a scattering of houses and camps. Most of the houses belonged to factory workers and have been long abandoned. Rafael’s team finished the construction of the second bomb in a barn on one of those properties. Anyone who saw them thought they were Mexicans who didn’t speak English.
“When it was finished, Cassiel rode in the cargo van with Rafael as he took the bomb to Washington, DC. The other members of his team went in separate cars so they wouldn’t all be together if anything went wrong.
“Yesterday they set up the bomb on the top floor of a tall building owned by a shell company owned by a series of shell companies owned by their Iranian-backed terrorist group. The building was selected to get the bomb as high in the air as they could to create the maximum destruction and death possible. Everything has been in the planning stages for decades.
“Cassiel was the one part of the mission that had not been part of the plan. Cassiel didn’t want to die a martyr with the rest of them.
“Once they got the bomb in Washington, Cassiel had time to kill, literally. So, he snuck away when they weren’t paying attention to him, stole a car, and came here to kill me.”
Jack pressed his hands to his head. “Where is this bomb? We need to call people who can stop it.”
Angela was shaking her head. “I can’t tell you where it is.”
“What? Why not?”
“I only know where they built the bomb, here, in Milford Falls, in a place on Duffey Road, because I recognized that road in Cassiel’s memories. But I’ve never been to Washington, so those snippets of his memories don’t tell me the location of where it is now.”
Jack gestured down at the brain in the bowl between them. “Can you touch it or something and get more information?”
Angela made a face. “It’s dead, Jack. It’s just gray mush, now.”
Jack stood, pressing his hands to his head again as he paced. “We have to stop it. We can’t let it go off.”
“That’s why I could use your help.”
He turned back. “What do you mean?”
“I need you to drive me. I don’t think I could stay awake the whole way if I drove myself. I’m totally exhausted. If you drive, I can nap a bit on the way.”
“Drive you? What the hell are you talking about? Are you out of your mind? How is that going to locate the bomb?”
“Don’t you see? If we go on the roads Cassiel took going to Washington from here in that van, and then back the same route from Washington in the car he stole, back here to kill me, I will see things I recognize from his memories.
“I will be able to use those memories I saw from his mind like a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back to the bomb. That’s how we find it.”
Jack was near to sputtering in frustration. “And then what?”
“And then I’m going to kill them.”
Jack gaped at her. “As simple as that. You’re going to kill them.”
“Yes.”
“You held a brain in your hands, and you saw a second atomic bomb that’s now in a building somewhere in Washington, DC.”
“That’s right. Are you going to help me or not?”
The whole thing was so crazy he could hardly keep his composure.
“Better yet, I’ll call in help and have a tactical force go with us. They will be able to handle the situation once we get there and find the place.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“You think I’m going to trust the same kind of people who had me in chains and wanted me to confess to being one of these terrorists? Fuck them. Fuck them all.”
“Angela, for god’s sake, this is different! We’re going to need a tactical team. They’re the only ones who can handle a situation like this.”
“Listen to me, Jack. I saw everything Cassiel saw. The bomb is ready. They have the electrical equipment attached to fire the exploding bridgewire to detonate the bomb. It’s ready now.
“They have observation points from windows. They have lookouts on the street. If they so much as see a SWAT team doing a drug raid down the street, they will blow the bomb. They will not risk failure. They will not delay. If they get so mu
ch as a whiff of something wrong, they will detonate the bomb.”
“But if the team—”
“They have a dead man’s switch—a man sitting on a metal chair that’s wired to the electrical supply. If an assault team rushes the place and he moves it will detonate the nuke.
“It’s all wired up and ready to go. They’re only waiting until the scheduled time of four p.m. to set it off because they want darkness settling over the scene in the aftermath to add to the terror, but if they need to, they will go earlier.
“If you call in anyone, they will fuck it up and that bomb will turn Washington, DC, to glass.”
“But the military can strike from a distance. They can send in rockets or if they have to, take down the whole building.”
“Rafael explained to Cassiel how even if the enemy sent in a rocket, the speed of that explosion is not as fast as the detonation of the exploding bridgewire. He said that in a race of microseconds, the nuke will win.”
“But—”
“Look, Jack, this group has been planning for this mission their entire lives. These are the point men. They plan to die in the glorious explosion against the Great Satan. This is the culmination of their life’s work.
“Their commanders have consulted with experts from North Korea to Pakistan on the construction of the bomb to make it as big as possible and they’ve gamed out every conceivable possibility of attack or countermeasure. They have it all thought out and every base covered.
“Those terrorist attacks all across the country were meant to cover what they were doing at the border crossing. They took out that border crossing with ease despite the power of the government arrayed to stop nuclear material coming in over the border. They made it look easy. No one, none of these experts you talk about, even realized that in that attack this group drove two nuclear bombs right across the border, did they?
“The only thing any ‘experts’ or tactical team or whatever you get to go in there are going to accomplish is to detonate that nuke a few hours ahead of schedule. They will get Washington, DC, wiped off the face of the earth.
“You’re thinking exactly like they expect you to think. You’re playing their game, just the way they want you to play it. You can’t win playing by their rules.”
“Jesus Christ, Angela, we have to get experts in there!”
“No, we don’t. I’m telling you that won’t work. I’ll handle the situation myself once we get there.”
Jack took a step back to stare at her. “How the hell do you think you’re going to do that?”
“I’ve already seen everything.” She tapped her temple with a finger. “It’s all in here. I know what the building looks like, inside and out. I know all the people with Rafael. I know Rafael. I will stop them.
“I’m the only contingency they haven’t modeled. I’m the only thing they haven’t planned for. Just like all the killers I find, I’m the wild card they hadn’t expected.”
“Angela, you have to listen to reason—”
“I’m telling you for the last time. I’m not going to cooperate with your fucking experts. They’ll get everyone killed. That’s not speculation, it’s a fact. I’m not going to allow that to happen.
“I’m not offering you a choice, Jack.
“It takes about six hours to drive from here to DC, maybe a little less. That will get us there late morning. We’ll have plenty of time—at least four hours. If something goes wrong, like I get killed, then you can still call in your government people. But I’m telling you, that will be the end of Washington, DC, and a lot of innocent people.”
Jack was shaking his head. “This is nuts.”
But at the same time he could see that what she was saying actually made sense—in a weird, crazy, psycho way. To Angela it made perfect sense. To her way of thinking, Rafael would be expecting the possibility of an attack by a tactical team.
What they would not be expecting, was … Angela.
SIXTY-THREE
“We’re wasting time,” Angela said. “Are you going to drive me, or do I drive myself?”
“No, no,” Jack said, waving off that idea. “With as little sleep as you’ve had since those federal goons picked you up, and then running around in the dark bashing in Cassiel’s skull, you have no business driving right now. We can’t have a nuclear bomb going off because you fell asleep at the wheel. We’ll be better off with me driving. Maybe that way you can get some sleep along the way.”
“That’s my thought,” she said.
Jack ran his fingers back through his hair. “I may be as crazy as you are for going along with this, but since you insist on doing this your way and you don’t have an actual location I could call in, I think it would be better if I was there to help you.”
“That’s why I called you,” she said with a smile.
“We can go in my car. It has a backseat, so you should be able to get some sleep.”
“All right, then, let’s get what we’ll need.” After blowing out the candles, she picked up the plastic casserole bowl with Cassiel’s brain. It was beginning to smell. Red fluid in the bottom sloshed around as she turned toward him. “Do you want this or not?”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I need it.”
She shrugged and took it with her.
Jack didn’t know what she meant about getting what they would need, but he followed her as she carried the brain in the plastic bowl to a door in the hall. She reached up on her tiptoes and retrieved a key from on top of the molding, then unlocked the door. When she flicked on the light, he saw that it was a basement.
At the bottom of the stairs he looked around as she set the brain down on a counter to the left. The floor was made up of strips of wood that looked to be teak. There were small gaps between each row. Oddly enough, there was a garden hose coiled up on a holder on the wall.
Angela opened doors on the lower cabinet and pulled out a pair of suede boots like the ones he usually saw her wearing. After putting them on, she opened a box from that same cabinet and took out a new knife, in a sheath. She checked the sharpness of the blade by shaving off some hairs on her arm, then slid the sheath with the knife into her boot.
When she opened the upper cabinet doors, he saw stacks of boxes, most of them brand-new boxes of Walther P22s. There were some Glock 19 cases as well. Next to the boxes was a row of suppressors standing on end.
She took a Walther out of one of the boxes and locked back the slide. With a little wrench from the counter she removed the ring that protected the threads at the end of the barrel. Once that was removed, she screwed a suppressor onto the end of the barrel. She laid the weapon on the counter.
“I have Walther P22s and nine-millimeter Glocks,” she said. “The Glocks have better stopping power, but I only have suppressors for the Walthers. Since the object is stealth and surprise, I think we should both use Walthers with suppressors. Suppressors keep the sound down, which makes it less nerve-racking shooting indoors, and you can hear someone coming for you. They also keep people from hearing us so easily. Also, if something goes wrong, if we both carry a Walther our magazines will be interchangeable.”
He was a little surprised at how tactically levelheaded she was. “I’d have to agree with you. Walthers it is.”
She took three new guns out of boxes, prepared two with suppressors, and handed them both to Jack. She added a suppressor to a second one for herself.
“If anything goes wrong with one of our guns, a backup gun could save our lives.”
“You’ll get no argument from me,” he said. He still had trouble believing that he was going along with this whole plan. “Besides that, we both have knives. They may come in handy.”
Eliminating people with knives was good in that if you did it right it could be silent. That provided a stealth approach. But it took precious seconds. If there were multiple targets and little time, a small-caliber gun with a suppressor was a good choice—as long as you were a damn good shot. With a .22, shot placement
was critical. If you missed even a little, you would only piss off the enemy and they could be all over you in no time at all, to say nothing of them shooting back.
Angela took magazines out of the boxes and pulled out more from the cabinet.
“They hold ten rounds, but don’t load ten rounds,” she said. “I’ve found that they don’t always feed reliably if they have ten rounds in the magazine.”
Jack was a little surprised that she knew enough to be aware of that. But he was beginning not to be surprised by anything she said.
They loaded several dozen magazines with nine subsonic rounds each, then a full ten rounds into magazines they loaded into their guns. Chambering a round left nine in those magazines. That would give them ten rounds in the gun the first time around, but nine thereafter.
She even had a couple of holsters Jack could use. The bottoms were cut out so the suppressor would fit through. She set out a couple of extra boxes of ammo to take along.
He had trouble imagining why she had all these things, but then again, she could recognize killers, and some of those killers would be able to recognize her.
When you hunted killers, killers hunted back.
He was beginning to see how she had survived. He wished more of the people he found had Angela’s sense of self-preservation.
Besides the holster at the small of her back, she clipped another just behind her hip to give her two guns, the same as he was carrying. She pulled her top over the one on her hip to conceal it. With her shape and size, it didn’t conceal very well.
After the magazines were all loaded, she picked up the bowl with the brain, then went to the far end of the basement and opened a hatch. Without ceremony, she tossed Cassiel’s brain, plastic bowl and all, down into the black opening.
Jack came up behind her and looked down. “What is this?”
“It’s where bad people go,” she said in a quiet voice. “It’s called the hell hole.”
He stared down into the darkness for a moment, his head spinning with everything he was learning. He usually had to work hard and long to try to convince people with the ability to recognize killers that they needed to take it seriously and learn to protect themselves.