“What time was it?” Agent McKendrick stood, pacing, his voice rising. “What time was the explosion?”
“Says here, 9:32 P.M. Eastern time.”
“Call headquarters right away—get them to call the networks and find out what time the commercial played that night!”
The young woman hurried out the door and was back in minutes, holding a cell phone. “Nine-thirty-two, boss. That’s it. There’s a signal embedded in those commercials!” She held out the cell phone. “Headquarters wants to talk to you.”
Agent McKendrick snatched the phone, glaring at his watch, giving orders to someone on the other end. “Find out when the next Speed Shoes commercial is due to air.”
He waited, tapping his foot, then his eyes widened as the answer came back. “One minute after midnight.”
Ronnie watched, tense, as Agent McKendrick demanded to speak to someone much higher up in the chain of command. With clipped sentences, he relayed the substance of what they had learned, what they expected, what needed to be done.
“We need to find a way to get every single network and station carrying that commercial to shut down, and shut down right away. Just pull the plug on the whole broadcasting industry. We can’t risk letting that signal get through, even once we pull the commercial. The signal might have been intended to be sent alongside the commercial, rather than embedded within it. And if that’s the case, the signal could still be transmitted on top of blank air. The only way to be sure of safety is if there’s nothing being broadcast!”
He listened to the other end of the phone line, sputtering with haste. “We’ve only got thirty minutes, man! I don’t care if the television networks lose millions; we’ve got to make them understand!”
More listening, lips pressed together. “We’ll do our best, sir, but there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to find out. We need to make the networks understand the risk even if we don’t know exactly what the signal will detonate.”
He waited through another long sentence, and shook his head. “We’ll try, sir.” He hung up and looked around the room. “They’ll see what they can do, but they believe it’ll be almost impossible to pull the plug in time. It’ll take time—too much time—to reach and convince all the decision makers. And it’s technically difficult to shut everything down with any speed. I need a better solution, team. We have thirty minutes. Anyone?”
The decoding expert had slipped back into the room. He slightly raised his hand. “We could create a dummy signal to overlay the other one, a signal that would counteract the original message.”
Someone else shook their head. “Too much time—”
“But it would only take two minutes to create a mirror signal—”
“But it would take them too long to e-mail it out to all the stations and have them upload it in the right place. We need something that’ll pull the plug on all broadcasting.”
The female agent had been drumming her fingers on the keyboard, her expression grim. Suddenly, she sat up.
“The old Emergency Broadcasting System—what are they calling it now?”
Agent McKendrick lifted his head, his eyes sharp. “The Emergency Alert System.”
“Isn’t that designed to transmit emergency messages to the public without the broadcasting industry doing a thing?”
Agent McKendrick lifted his phone. “I don’t know. We need to ask FEMA—”
“No, she’s correct!” someone else said. “That’s our solution! If we get a presidential order to initiate an alert, a bunch of television networks are required to broadcast the alerts. Actually, I think it’s all automated—we send the signal out, it trips a secret code in the broadcaster’s digital equipment, and the emergency alert is broadcast. It all happens within seconds.”
“We’ve rarely used that system, and I don’t think we’ve ever used it nationally,” McKendrick said. “That may cause panic, but we don’t have any other choice. What should the alert say?”
“The alert could even be blank if we wanted. The key is that it will replace whatever other signals would’ve been broadcast, and without alerting the perpetrators until that moment. Using the system might solve the panic problem, too, by the way. You could call it a test of the Emergency Alert System, although people would probably see through that pretty quickly.” He frowned. “There may only be one problem: I remember there being a bit of a flap over the fact that the new digital equipment was required to have a storage capacity of only two minutes. So we’d have to trip the system right after midnight and hope that’s the only time window the perpetrators can broadcast their signal.”
“Maybe we should use the EAS broadcast not just to counteract any other signals,” the female agent said, “but to warn people that there’s an attack planned and instruct them to turn off their television sets immediately.”
Agent McKendrick dialed his cell phone again, but shook his head as he waited for an answer. “You know people. They’d either panic or keep the television sets turned on just to see what’s happening. And since we still don’t know what the attack is, we can’t just create general national panic.” He straightened, listening to the cell phone. “Hello, sir, I think we have a better solution for you.”
Ronnie listened with a feeling of unreality as he rapidly outlined the team’s suggestion, fielding fast questions and objections. She felt a germ of terror begin to grow in her gut.
“At this point, I think we have to acknowledge that nothing is foolproof. And the EAS system is ready to go. Nothing else is going to accomplish the same level of penetration in time.”
When he hung up, McKendrick gestured to another agent. “Call Paul Jackson and make sure he knows that the EAS will go on at exactly midnight. If they’re going to extricate the hostages, it has to happen before then.”
He leaned on the table, his countenance heavy. “And we still need to figure out what the signal will trigger. I hope to God this whole thing works.”
Beside her, Ronnie could see Doug sitting quietly, head bowed, his lips moving in silent prayer. She wondered if God really did hear the prayers of one lone man … and whether God would hear the prayers of one scared stripper.
Fifteen minutes to midnight.
Sherry Turner shifted a little, wincing as the plastic cords cut into her wrists, and looked at the clock for the hundredth time.
Fifteen minutes until—what? Release? She knew better than that. She traded glances with Vance and Jo, white-faced and sober across the room, and saw the same knowledge in their eyes.
The madman who had suddenly emerged from Doug’s trusted boss, the unearthly hate-filled being who had swept through their home like a scythe, would never just let them go. She could still feel the anticipation, the lust that had quivered in the air with his presence. Not sexual lust, despite what he had said to Doug, but lust for destruction, for carnage. There had been an evil glee in his face that did not abate when Doug promised to draw off the FBI.
They would kill them anyway.
Sherry looked at her two children, sitting brave and quiet on the sofa beside her. Every time she looked at them—their sweet little faces, not fully comprehending, not fully grasping the situation—her heart felt as if it would shatter all over again. There had been moments of terror among the children, but few tears. Sherry had willed herself to not cry, to not let herself be anything but loving and strong for her kids.
Across the room, tied securely in chairs pulled away from the dining room table, Vance and Jo continually watched their son, gauging his reactions, trying to comfort him as best they could.
Sherry’s eyes flickered to the foyer, where one of Jordan’s henchmen sat stony faced, his eyes trained on the two families, a heavy-looking pistol across his lap.
At the window beside him, the other henchman stood still as a statue at the front window, watching the yard, scanning the street. Sherry had no illusions that they would not carry out their threat of quick kills at the first sign of the FBI.
Earlier, one
of the men had disappeared outside for a few minutes, and had come back telling his partner that the house was fully equipped with motion-detector lights. And, as Jordan had so clearly said, the hostages would be dead before the commandos reached the door.
If they were even coming. Sherry knew what her husband had promised—Jordan had told them of Doug’s capitulation, his eyes afire with glee—though she wasn’t sure she fully believed it.
The henchman in the chair got up and conferred with the man at the windows.
Sherry watched as Vance quietly tested his bonds. Each time their captors had drifted out of his sight, he had tried a new angle, with no success. His arms were securely tied behind the chair at his back. She watched, wincing at the inevitable little sounds, as he tried to stand, the clunky chair rising with him, fastened to his every move. He too grimaced, and sat back down, carefully lowering the back legs of the chair to the floor.
“Mommy?”
Sherry’s head snapped around at the soft whisper. Brandon was leaning toward her.
She glanced at the two men, still huddled by the window, half-in and half-out of sight. Perhaps it was safe. And if they were all going to eternity in a few minutes, she welcomed a quiet conversation with her son. She could feel the tears pressing on the backs of her eyes. After all, she didn’t know exactly what heaven would look like, didn’t know whether or in what form the parent-child relationship would last. So she looked at the beloved little face, memorizing every line, and whispered back, trying to smile, to be brave.
“Yes, baby?”
“Are you scared?”
She tried not to choke. “I am, baby, I am a little. But I know that God is looking after us. And no matter what happens, He’s with us.” She tried to smile. “You know that, don’t you?”
Brandon nodded, his eyes big. “But, Mommy, I don’t think you need to be scared of those bad people.” He turned his head and looked toward their large fireplace, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “The big man in the corner doesn’t seem scared.”
“What big man in the corner?”
“The big man over there by the fireplace. He’s been watching us for a while. And he looks pretty brave, Mommy.”
Sherry couldn’t help staring. She choked back tears. “Well, you just tell the big man in the corner thank you for watching over us, okay?”
Brandon smiled, and leaned back against the sofa, darting an impish grin toward the blank corner.
Sherry turned her face away and dropped her head so her children would not see her tears, continuing her almost constant petitions to her heavenly Father.
O Lord God, please do send your heavenly warriors to fight on our behalf. And give your earthly warriors strength and wisdom. Please, Lord, spare us …
Agent Paul Jackson stepped from his car and closed the door lightly, without sound. All around him, others emerged from cars and vans into the dark shadow of a residential cul-de-sac. The street lights had already been cut and the teams were ready to go.
Several men had gone ahead to scout the lay of the land, and they conferred in quiet voices, doing a last minute briefing, letting everyone know the score. Each member of the team was told precisely where to go, and their leaders could communicate any last-minute changes through their earpieces if necessary.
They set out, lithe and quick despite the bulkiness of their gear, and headed into the trees at the end of the cul-de-sac, making for the neighborhood next door.
“But the Super Bowl was originally intended to be the climax of the series, right?” Agent McKendrick paced the front of the room. “So I would think that would mean an explosion in the Super Bowl stadium, to kill a hundred thousand people at once. But if they’re doing it tonight, instead, that makes no sense.”
“No, Chief,” the decoding expert said. “The commercial’s the key, not the event. What do the Super Bowl and New Year’s Eve have in common? There are millions of people watching TV at the same time! They want as many people as possible watching that commercial.”
“Right, right. The TV set becomes the venue for broadcasting that audio signal. But if they’re going for the maximum viewership, then that must mean they’re targeting anyone with a TV. But how? How can they possibly harm someone via a signal into their own home?”
“It would only work if each house also owned something that the signal would set off. And that means they have to have been making and selling that thing—whatever it is—for months and months. Like maybe they’ve created innocuous-looking smoke detectors that have a little receiver inside that would be triggered to release poisonous gas or explode a bomb or something.”
Another person in the room—a newly arrived bomb expert—shook his head. “No, it would have to be something in the room with the TV set, to be certain of receiving a signal. You don’t get a lot of smoke detectors in the family room itself.”
“So what’s in the family’s TV room?” Agent McKendrick stopped pacing. “I think we’re on to something, but what’s the thing that gets triggered? It would presumably be related to television in some way.”
“How about the remote control?” the decoding expert said. “Everyone has one.”
“No, if it had explosives packed inside, it’d be too heavy.” The bomb expert put a hand to his head, thinking hard. “It would have to be something that someone would expect to be somewhat heavy, and would have enough room both for the explosives and for whatever its ostensible purpose is.”
Ronnie felt a memory pushing at the back of her brain and tried to push aside her fear long enough to concentrate and retrieve it. What was—
She gasped and sat up so sharply that everyone swiveled toward her.
Her voice was hoarse. “The … uh … that new kind of voice-activated remote control … that black box thing.” She fumbled to describe it with her hands. “My … uh … one of my regulars ran a company that sold those.”
“Could that be it?” Agent McKendrick looked at the bomb expert.
“It could. It really could. It’s the right size, and it would be placed near or on a TV. If there’s a shape charge inside, it would blow out the TV and use its flying fragments as the bomb. Most people aren’t killed by the bomb blast itself, you know; they’re killed by the shrapnel. That could really be it!”
“We’ve only got twelve minutes to midnight! Do we have one of those devices in use in this building?” Agent McKendrick looked around at all the negative responses and swore to himself. “How can we confirm this?”
“Wait!” Someone jumped up. “Hold on! I’ve got one in my car!”
The man ran out the door and returned, breathless, lugging a box, interrupting Agent McKendrick, who was reporting in to his superiors in Washington.
“It’s never been opened. We were going to return it to the store today.” He started to rip the heavy cardboard open, and three others reached out to help him.
He pulled out the black box, ripped off the interior packaging, and laid the box on the table. The bomb expert pushed him aside and stood the device on its end, his eyes intent. He pulled a tiny screwdriver out of a small belt pouch and unscrewed the cover. He looked at the mass of wires, then pushed a few aside and tensely turned a heavy black piece over and detached it.
His face white, he gasped out “X ray!” and ran out the door. A sizeable chunk of the agents followed. Through the open door, Ronnie could see them running down a long hallway and rounding a corner toward the security station.
Within a minute, they came running back. The bomb expert tried to gasp out the news to McKendrick, but the senior agent handed him the cell phone and said, “Speak!”
“It’s a—it’s an antipersonnel fragmentation device—a shape charge. Packed plastic explosives, probably C4, surrounded by ball bearings. It’ll blow out whatever TV set it’s attached to, and kill or injure everyone in the blast radius. There’s enough actual explosive to damage the house structure, if the TV is set against a load-bearing wall.”
Agent McKend
rick snatched back the phone. “Did you get all that! … Yes, sir! There have got to be hundreds of thousands of those devices out there! … I changed my mind. We have to use the EAS message to tell people to unplug those remotes and turn off their TVs!”
He looked at his watch, then clamped his hand over the cell phone mouthpiece and spoke to the others in the room.
“They’re doing that now—thank God for modern technology.” Something jarred his attention back to the phone. “Yes, sir!” He sagged in relief and found his way to a chair. “It’s done. The EAS message will broadcast in five minutes, starting immediately after midnight.”
The room was suddenly alive, the sounds of piercing relief and congratulations filling the air. Backs were slapped, hugs and handshakes exchanged.
Ronnie looked sideways at Doug, who was still sitting—as he had been for the last hour—with head bowed. She touched his arm, and he lifted his head, turning his tear-streaked face toward her.
“We only have five minutes. Five minutes for my family—” His voice broke and he could not go on.
“Let’s go.” Agent McKendrick stowed his cell phone at his belt and pulled on a jacket. He held a radio in his hand, its red power light seeming to burn with urgency.
Doug looked up in confusion. “Go where?”
“Let’s get you home.”
He pulled Doug up from the chair, and the three visitors and several agents began hurrying around corners, heading for—Doug discovered—the FBI garage. They piled into an unmarked van and sped north on the highway, watching as the dashboard clock clicked over toward midnight.
SIXTY-THREE
The great being was no longer shining. He was cloaked from sight by the Spirit of God. He soared, all his efforts focused on tracking with his charge, hurrying the little car’s progress, making sure the timing would be just right.