Critical Mass (41 page)

“The house plans are downloaded.”

He turned in his seat and viewed them. He noted the date, August 13, 2002. No legal alterations had been recorded since then. But if there was a plane in there—and he was certain that there was—there were going to be major internal changes. He concentrated on the basic outlines, the street-facing rooms. What was it like deeper inside? Too bad he couldn’t know.

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” he said into his radio.

There was a brief silence while the coordinator checked the many levels of response. There were four SWAT teams on the ground, which would now all move to drop-off points just out of sight of the target location. Overhead, the entire airborne response force was targeting this immediate
area. Bomb neutralization teams from Homeland Security and three police forces were deploying.

And, as Jim knew perfectly well, it was all pretty much useless, because no matter who was in there, all they had to do would be flip some switch or push some button and the entire region would go up in flames, centered on the crater that would be all that was left of Alexandria.

The radio beeped. “This is the president,” came Fitz’s familiar voice. “I wish all of you the very greatest success in this endeavor. May God be with us all.”

Then, a young man’s voice: “Radio silence now, please.”

The frequencies they were using wouldn’t be picked up by even the most sophisticated retail scanning equipment, but who knew what these people might possess? Fitz should have kept off the damn horn.

An image flickered onto one of the screens that lined the packed walls of the van. It was a bright shot of the house in full color, looking like day.

Jim busted radio silence. “Pull that damn Global Hawk out
now
!” he snapped.

“Global Hawks are invisible from the ground,” Nabby said.

They were indeed equipped with transference technology camouflage, which displayed a continuous picture of the sky above the plane off its lower surfaces, but at low altitude a small amount of engine noise would reach the street. Normally, not enough to matter. “The city’s too quiet,” Jim said.

The image flickered off. The Hawk was gone.

Jim took a deep breath, let it out. He did not want to take Nabby with him, but he saw no choice. If Rashid was in there and he had his finger on the button, she was the only hope—and a faint one—of getting him to change his mind. “Eleven forty-six,” Jim said. “Are we in place?”

The FBI explosives team was there. These men had suppression equipment that could prevent blasting caps from detonating. Wonderful technology, but they would need to get close to the bomb, and they would need time.

Jim opened the door of the van onto what had become a cold, windy night. There was a suggestion of rain in the air. Low overhead, clouds had begun racing down from the north. Jim would have liked night-vision equipment, but there was no use in calling further attention to the operation.

He’d hoped for alternate entry to the house, but there were only the two doors. Nabila came out beside him.

“I’m going to need to go in through the back,” Jim said.

“I can distract him. Knock on the door.”

“No! The least sign of activity, that bomb is going off.”

As he began to move away, Nabila grabbed his arm. “Don’t just leave me here!”

“Nabby—”

“I can help you. I have to, Jim.” Her fingers tightened around his wrist.

“You job is here. You control these people. You do it right.”

Her eyes bored into his. “It’s not going to work. Any of it. And you know it, don’t you?”

Drawing away from her, he stepped out into the alley.

SISTER AND BROTHER

The SWAT teams that surrounded this place had already confirmed that there
were no spotters or snipers posted anywhere. The house was meant to seem totally innocuous, and so was unguarded.

The house was a different story, though. The house would be bristling with guns.

He moved down the alley, staying close to the walls of buildings, careful to never expose himself to a sight line from one of the back windows. In his life, he’d done hundreds of entries like this, but never with stakes this high, of course. Not only did an entire city depend on this working, but that city was Washington, D.C.

He came to the back door, which was approached by two concrete steps. As he mounted them, he kept below the line of the window in the door. He crouched, listening against the wooden door. The urge to just smash the damn thing to kindling and get in there and try to kill the guy was almost more than he could suppress.

The lock was simple enough, but it would need a lock pick, not a credit card, which meant that there was going to be a slight click. He listened harder, pressing his ear against the wooden door. There was dripping, that was all. Of course, there could be a guard in there, somebody with the skill
to remain silent. Could be Rashid, even. He wasn’t a man easy to anger, but he found himself eager to kill Rashid.

He inserted the lock pick, felt for the slight resistance of the tumblers, was momentarily stopped by a shield in the cylinder, then got past it. The lock dropped open with a noise so loud it actually echoed. The damn thing sounded like a bullet!

Or rather, this was one very quiet place—of course, it would be, a safe house in an evacuated city that was waiting to die.

Nothing happened, so he pushed the door open. In the stuffy fetor that emerged, he smelled the unmistakable odor of blood. It was not brand-new but not old, either. So violence had been done here. He thought he was about to find out why the bomb had not been detonated.

He penetrated deeper into the kitchen. The clock on the microwave oven offered the only illumination. He watched it change to 11:47. Vegas at midnight. Rome at midnight . . .

Jim closed his eyes, inhaled deeply. Blood, the dressing of salad eaten sometime this evening, still full of the volatile scents of seasonings . . . more faintly, oh yes, that would be aviation fuel, and the fuel can would have been opened within the hour or the fumes would be gone.

The blood was older, so whoever had cracked the fuel can was probably still very much alive. They would be with the plane, and he did not think it likely that he could reach them in time to prevent their flipping their switch. In fact, the moment they detected the least sign of his presence, this city would be destroyed.

The door to the garage, he recalled, would be on his left. It was so dark, though, that he couldn’t be sure of his bearings. He moved ahead with extreme care, sliding his hands along the floor as he proceeded. All he could do here was get as close to them as humanly possible. To try.

Explosives suppression was a difficult business. There were no ray guns; that was for damn sure. To prevent a cap from detonating, it needed to be surrounded by a group of devices with highly specialized properties. This was slow, careful work for experts. If they were looking at a plutonium implosion bomb, it would be a sphere arrayed with many such caps, all timed to explode at precisely the same instant and compress the plutonium core so that it would go critical—and the rest would be history.

He found the door and slid his hand along it until he grasped the handle.
The knob was cool beneath his fingers. Very carefully, he moved it slightly. The door was unlocked.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, preparing himself for what was beyond question the most important moment he had ever known or would probably ever know. It was a warrior’s moment, and he forced his attention to leave his screaming, jabbering mind and focus on the beating of his heart, the sensation of his muscles, on his hearing and his eyes.

He turned the knob until the tongue was fully retracted.

His life was punctuated by moments like this, which involved sudden, violent movements into dangerous places. He did not allow himself to consider death. That was for peaceful nights under the stars. He was aware, instead, of every muscle wound tight. You needed to be ready to act faster than thought, like an animal.

To minimize any squeal of hinges, he drew the door open fast, causing a gust of fuel-soaked air to hit him in the face.

He found the place lit thin blue by a fluorescent lantern, and also found that there was nobody immediately visible. Quickly he scanned the space. The wall of the family room behind the garage had been knocked down to create a makeshift hangar.

Before him stood a small airplane, its broad wings folded back against its fragile fuselage. He thought it was kit built, perhaps even specially designed. From its configuration, he could see immediately that it was able to take off in a very short distance.

The evacuation had played into their hands, because on a normal night pulling this thing out into the middle of traffic, setting the wings, and taking off would have been all but impossible.

They must have counted on a curfew, even an evacuation. This was a symbolic strike, after all. They weren’t after people here; they were after a way of life, and the city that organized it and enabled it to unfold.

Wreck Washington, break the will of America . . . and, icing on the cake, throw the country into political and economic chaos from which it would never recover, not in its current form.

What the evacuation had done was give them their runway. Poor old Fitz had been so proud of it, too. “All those lives being saved,” he had said. For what? To people who had lived in freedom, death would appear better than the life the Mahdi was going to force on them.

Jim was beside the tail of the plane, standing in the doorway from the kitchen. The room was entirely silent, or so it seemed at first. But rooms were never silent. No place was silent. He looked from the bloodstained workbench and the meat-encrusted chain saw lying on it to the garage door. He listened for breathing, heard none.

There was what seemed to be an earsplitting click and the garage door began to open. For the first time in his professional life, Jim was so surprised that he almost cried out.

An instant later, the plane’s engine screamed into shattering life. He hadn’t heard anybody because the pilot was already inside the plane, invisible behind its folded wings. Jim stepped down into the garage proper, went to the plane, and grasped the tail.

Then he felt weight—somebody on his back. The weight didn’t stop him; it felt like a child. Jim shifted, intending to scrape the kid off him. In that moment, the plane bounded forward—and the kid was gone. Jim started after the plane, which had gone down the short driveway of the row house and was now in the street.

He jerked to one side and ripped at a thin shoulder, tossing the skeletal child off his back. The kid hit the wall hard and slid down it. He was a human skeleton. Horrible. Had he been a prisoner? Or no—the bomb probably ate up all the lift the plane had to offer. He had starved himself so that he could fly it.

Had he gotten cold feet? Was he somehow incapacitated? And who was the pilot?

None of it mattered. What mattered was preventing that plane from taking off and at the same time not allowing the pilot to see him.

But how could it take off? The wings were still folded. There was a two-man job ahead, but now there was only one man.

The plane idled. The pilot was waiting for his accomplice. A glance at the kid told Jim that the accomplice was done.

The only problem now was the surrounding mass of personnel. If anybody made a mistake and showed themselves, that pilot was going to detonate his bomb immediately. The only chance they had was to disable the plane just as it was taking off, to crash the thing before he could push the button.

The plane’s engine continued to idle. The pilot wouldn’t wait long, and indeed the fuselage began to rock, as he twisted and turned in the cockpit, trying to see behind.

Jim stepped back into the shadows, dropping down beside the tool bench.

The pilot came out, bending low under one of the folded wings. He looked back toward the garage. “Hani!”

Jim saw that it was Rashid. Nabby would see this, too, on about four different monitors in the van. Moving with the greatest care, Jim drew the M9 he’d been issued at the White House. But Rashid was at least two hundred feet away, standing just behind the folded wing. If Jim missed and hit the bomb, Rashid would earn his heavenly virgins and so would everybody for twenty miles around. Normally, Jim would have no problem, even though the pistol’s rated effective range was about 150 feet. But he had never fired this particular weapon, and if you were going to stretch range like that, and at night, you needed to know your pistol very, very well.

Rashid turned to the plane and quickly unfolded and locked the wing. Then he walked around the fuselage.

Taking advantage of fact that the bulk of the plane hid him, Jim moved quickly across the garage. Now he was perhaps eighty feet from Rashid. Close enough, no question. As soon as the head appeared in the cockpit, Jim could squeeze off a shot that would not miss.

He knelt and braced the pistol.

Rashid appeared in the cockpit.

“Rashid!”

The voice blasted in Jim’s ear. Instinct swung him fast. Before he could stop himself, before he could think, he squeezed off four fast shots, sending Hani crashing against the back wall of the garage in a haze of blood and smoke.

The plane was on its way down the street, its wingtips just clearing obstacles such as light poles and a public mailbox.

Jim ran, his legs hammering. There was no longer any chance of preventing Rashid from pushing his button. He was going to detonate the bomb, no question. Now all that mattered was that he do it here on the ground and not achieve a far more damaging airburst.

The plane gathered speed slowly, and Jim gained on it. Closer. Closer still. He aimed the pistol. It didn’t matter anymore what he hit. Keep the damn thing on the ground; that was what mattered.

He’d done four rounds. He had eleven left. Properly placed, they could tear the little aircraft apart.

Then he saw, coming from ahead of it, another running figure. He saw white clothing; he saw black hair.