Authors: Boyd Morrison
Present Day
“E
xcuse me,” Carol Benedict said as she raced to the Starbucks counter. “You’ve got my drink.”
The man who was holding her latte already had the lid off, ready to put sugar into her pristine cup of coffee. After her daily six-mile run, no one—but no one—got between her and her caffeine.
The man, a young guy wearing a Redskins cap and a dopey expression, looked down at the coffee and back at her.
“You sure?”
She smiled at him. “Did you order a tall double-shot latte?”
He shook his head and gave her a sheepish grin. “Sorry, seven a.m. is early for me,” he said. He put the lid back and handed it to her.
“No problem,” Carol said, and opened the door to a blast of heat.
By the end of her ten-minute walk back to her apartment, Carol was drenched with sweat. Washington was known for its summer humidity, but Carol had never experienced it until now, her first year taking graduate-level summer classes at Georgetown. She was astounded that it could be so muggy this early in the morning in the middle of June, but her moisture-wicking jogging top and shorts did an admirable job of keeping her from being miserable.
Carol wasn’t a breakfast person, one of her strategies for staying thin. When she entered her one-bedroom apartment, she cranked up the AC, turned on the news, and drained the last of her latte in between her stretching exercises. In the shower, she turned the water as cold as it would go. The cooling spray made her shiver with goose bumps and even get a little light-headed.
She picked a tank top and shorts and put her hair in a ponytail, but she’d have to put a sweater in her bag for class. The classrooms at school were always overly air-conditioned.
A knock came at her door just as she was putting on her shoes. She stood up too fast at the surprising sound, and the headrush nearly made her keel over. She steadied herself against the bureau. The feeling didn’t go away, but it subsided enough for her to walk.
Who could be at her door at 7:30 in the morning?
She peered through the peephole and saw a white man in a suit, stocky frame, not much taller than she was.
“What is it?” she asked without opening the door.
“Ms. Benedict, I’m Detective Wilson with the Arlington Police Department. I need to speak with you.”
“Can you please show me your identification?” Living alone, Carol had learned to be cautious.
“Of course.” He held up an open wallet displaying a badge and an ID with the Arlington PD logo. It looked all right to her, so she swung the door open. She suddenly felt unreasonably fatigued, so she leaned against the doorjamb, her head swimming. If she was getting sick, she’d have to power through it. Missing class could hurt her GPA.
“What’s this about, Detective?” She really had no idea why the police would be here. She hadn’t gotten so much as a parking ticket in her entire life.
Wilson, who had a thatchy unibrow, stared at her with an unreadable expression. “It’s about your sister, Stacy.”
A shot of adrenaline cleared Carol’s head.
“Stacy? Oh, my God! Has something happened?” They had talked just last night, and Stacy seemed fine.
“There’s a hostage situation at her hotel in Seattle. I need to take you down to the station, where we can coordinate with the Seattle police.”
“Is she hurt? Is she okay?”
“She’s unharmed for now, but you’ll need to come with me. I’ll explain the situation on the way.”
“Sure. Sure. Let me get my purse.” She snatched up her keys and her phone, threw them into her bag, and locked the door behind her. Her heart was thudding at the thought of her sister being held at gunpoint.
As she went down the stairs, she stumbled and Wilson caught her.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look pale.”
“I just feel so tired all of a sudden.” Her vision was getting blurrier by the minute.
Wilson held her arm the rest of the way to the parking lot, and she was glad he did, because her knees buckled twice.
Instead of an unmarked car, Wilson steered her to a white panel van. Another man jumped out of the passenger seat and slid the rear door open. Carol’s stomach lurched when she saw that he was wearing a Redskins cap.
It was the man who had taken her latte at Starbucks. The dopey expression had been replaced by the dead-eyed stare of a cobra assessing its prey.
She sucked in a breath to scream, but Wilson’s hand went over her mouth.
“I see you remember my partner,” he said into her ear.
She tried to struggle, but her arms and legs felt like over-cooked spaghetti, and her mind was getting cloudier by the second.
Wilson shoved her into the van, and the door slid closed behind her. He snapped cuffs onto her wrists and ankles as the other man started the van and drove off. She tried to scream again, but it came out as a weak mewl. Her tongue lolled in her mouth as if it were coated in syrup.
“You drugged me.”
Wilson nodded. “Rohypnol is easy to get, with so many university campuses in DC.”
Rohypnol. Otherwise known as roofies. The date-rape drug. He had put it in her coffee.
“Oh, my God—”
“Don’t worry. That’s not what it’s for. We just need you out for a few hours while we take care of some other business.”
“What do you want?”
“We need your sister to do something for us,” Wilson said.
“What have you done to Stacy?” Carol said, slurring out the
S
in Stacy. She couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer and rested her head on the floor.
“Nothing. She’s going to be more worried about what we’re going to do to you if she doesn’t cooperate. Or if she isn’t able to …”
Wilson kept talking, but Carol’s eyes could focus no longer, and darkness swept her to oblivion.
Answer your phone, Dr. Locke. You don’t have much time left.
T
yler Locke peered at the text message and tried to decide whether it was a joke or some kind of marketing gimmick. He was ten minutes into his one-hour ferry commute to Bremerton, and three times his cell phone had rung with an unknown number. Tyler had ignored the calls, but the text message came soon after, again from an unknown number. The only people who had his cell number were in the phone’s contact list. As a rule, he didn’t answer calls from numbers he didn’t know, figuring that if it was important the caller would leave a voice mail. So far, no new messages.
The boat was only half full, so Tyler had the bench to himself, with his long legs propped up on the facing seat. Any other morning, his best friend, Grant Westfield, would be next to him playing games on his phone, but Grant was planning to beat the afternoon rush hour for a long weekend in Vancouver, so he’d taken an earlier ferry. They’d been making the trip from Seattle to Bremerton three days a week for two months to consult on the construction of a new ammunition depot at the naval base.
The phone rang again. Same number. Tyler drank his coffee and looked out at the receding Seattle skyline. It was eight-forty in the morning, and even though it was June sixteenth the sun was nowhere to be seen. Low clouds and drizzle made it a typical “June-uary” day, as the locals called the cool, overcast weather that usually preceded a sunny July.
Couldn’t be a cold call, Tyler concluded. A telemarketer wouldn’t call him Dr. Locke. Tyler wasn’t an MD. He had a PhD, and the only time anyone called him doctor was on one of his consulting gigs. None of his co-workers used the honorific unless they were making fun of him.
The call might be work-related, but he had fifty emails to plow through before he reached Bremerton, and he didn’t want to be sucked into a long conversation. He again let voice mail handle it and put the phone away. Eventually, the caller would get the hint to leave a message.
A minute after he began working on his laptop again, the phone beeped with another text message. Tyler sighed and pulled the phone from his pocket.
Dr. Locke, unless you answer my call you will be dead in twenty-eight minutes.
Tyler had to read the message three times to believe what he was seeing. He closed his laptop and sat up straight, taking his feet off the seat. He slowly scanned the passengers around him, but no one seemed at all interested in him.
The phone rang. Same number.
Tyler tapped the screen and said, “Who is this?”
“This is the person who is going to kill everyone on that ferry if you don’t do what I say.”
Tyler couldn’t detect an accent in the gravelly voice on the other end. “Why don’t I just hang up on you and call the police?” he said. “Should make your day when the FBI drops by.”
“You could do that, but what would you tell them? My number? It’s a prepaid phone bought with cash. Believe me, I’ve thought this through.”
For a moment, Tyler considered doing just what he’d threatened: hanging up and calling the cops. But the man was right. He had little to tell them.
“What’s this about?” Tyler said.
“It’s about you, Dr. Locke. Actually, that sounds pretentious. I’ll just call you Locke.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“It may seem like that now, but it won’t in a few minutes.”
Tyler paused. “Why are you calling
me
?”
“Because you’re exactly who I need. Bachelor’s degree from MIT in mechanical engineering. PhD from Stanford. Former Army captain in a combat-engineering battalion, which makes you an expert in demolitions and bomb disposal. Now chief of special operations at Gordian Engineering. And all of that before you’re forty. You know, you sound very good on paper.”
“So you know who I am. I should take all of this seriously because …?”
“Because I just emailed you a couple of pictures that show how serious your situation is. I know the ferry has Wi-Fi. Take a look at them. I’ll wait. Better hurry, though.”
With the phone propped in one hand, Tyler reluctantly opened his laptop and checked his in box.
One new message from an email address he didn’t recognize. The subject line read
27 minutes left.
Tyler opened the message. The body of the email had no text, just two images.
The first showed a two-axle truck with the name
SILVERLAKE TRANSPORT
on the side.
The second showed a refrigerator with its door open. Inside was a transparent plastic canister the size of a beer keg filled with a powdery gray substance. Cloth concealed an object on top. A digital timer was mounted on the front of the canister. The water was dead calm outside, but Tyler felt seasick.
“I’m listening,” he said, his mind already racing to how he could warn the passengers to get to a life raft.
“I thought you might. You know a bomb when you see it. In case you didn’t get it, the fridge is inside the truck, which is on the vehicle deck below you. And don’t call the police. I’ll know.”
“You couldn’t have gotten it on board.”
“You think I’m bluffing? Tell me about binary explosives.”
Tyler sucked in a breath before responding. “Binary explosives start as two separate inert compounds, but when they’re mixed together they become highly volatile. They’re often used for target practice by shooting clubs. The explosives can only be set off by a high-powered rifle round or a detonator. You can buy them on the Internet.”
“See? You
are
good. There’s a hundred pounds of binary in the fridge. Enough to blow a thirty-foot hole in that ferry and set half the cars on fire. I doubt there’d be many survivors.”
“The bomb-sniffing dogs at the dock would have detected it,” Tyler said.
“I took precautions to make sure the taggant odor was sealed in, and I paid some jobless college kid three hundred bucks to drive it on board. What’s bad for the economy is good for me.”
“If you want to blow up the ferry, why warn me?”
“Listen and find out. I want you to go to the truck. It has a padlock on the door. The key is taped inside the left wheel well. Go there now, or the ferry will never reach Bremerton.”
Bremerton. Suddenly, Tyler had a horrifying thought:
the naval base.
This guy wanted Tyler to drive the truck into a US Navy port using his credentials.
“So you want me to become a suicide bomber for you?” Tyler said, furiously thinking of a way to ditch the truck before he reached the entrance to the base.
The man laughed. “A suicide bomber? Not even close.”
“Then what
do
you want?”
“Locke, you’re going to be a hero. That bomb is set to explode in twenty-four minutes and thirty seconds. I want you to disarm it.”
A
s Byron Gaul waited for the elevator in the lobby of the Sheraton Premiere, he checked his surroundings. He was relieved not to find unexpected security alterations for the conference being held in the hotel. He’d scouted the location thoroughly the week before in preparation for the mission, but given that the hotel was in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just outside Washington, there was always the chance security had been beefed up, especially for a Pentagon-sponsored conference called the Unconventional Weapons Summit.
Two Army majors approached, deep in conversation. When they saw Gaul, he nodded to them, and they replied in kind. Because they were inside with their hats off, his lower rank didn’t require a salute. Gaul was dressed in a class-A Army service uniform with the rank of captain and a name tag that said Wilson. The uniform and all its ribbons and adornments were purchased off the Internet. The hardest part had been finding a size to fit his below-average height and above-average musculature.
He readied himself for questions, but the majors went back to their discussion, ignoring him. Gaul didn’t know if he’d have to use his prepared backstory, but he was ready in case anyone asked. He would say that he was a liaison officer to a Washington think tank called Weaver Solutions, one of hundreds in the city. He was attending the summit to learn about the newest technologies and tactics that might be used against military or civilian objectives. These kinds of military conferences were held virtually every week in the nation’s capital, but this was the only one his target was scheduled to address.
The elevator opened, and Gaul got on with the majors. At the first stop, the door opened to a buzz of activity. It was just after 11:30, the morning sessions over, including his target’s keynote speech. The participants would be breaking for lunch. The majors got off, and two men in civilian attire entered. Gaul glanced sideways at their name tags, which said Aiden MacKenna and Miles Benson.
Both of them seemed to be enhanced by technology out of a science-fiction movie. A black disk was attached to MacKenna’s skull with a wire connected to his ear, as if it were a hearing aid with a direct pipeline to his brain. MacKenna was walking, while Benson was driving a motorized wheelchair like nothing Gaul had ever seen. The chair was balanced on two wheels, apparently in defiance of the laws of physics, so that the eyes of the man in the chair were almost even with his own.
Though Benson wore a suit, Gaul could see that the man had the upper torso of someone who spent time at the gym. He had the intense gaze and close-cropped hair of a former Army officer, so Gaul guessed that he’d been injured in Iraq or Afghanistan. MacKenna looked more like Gaul’s idea of a research analyst, with tortoiseshell glasses and a physique that suggested nothing more strenuous than typing in his daily routine.
“Think he’ll take you up on your offer?” MacKenna said with an Irish brogue.
“I don’t know,” Benson said. “Depends how good my sales pitch is.”
“It was a good keynote.”
“That’s exactly why I want him.”
The elevator door opened at the mezzanine.
“Where is the Capital Club?” Benson said as he drove out of the elevator.
“To the left, I believe,” MacKenna said.
“Okay, we should have a table reserved. We’ll save a seat between us for the general.”
Gaul trailed them around the corner. MacKenna and Benson went through the restaurant’s glass doors, but Gaul didn’t follow. He stopped abruptly, as if he’d gone in the wrong direction, and turned back toward the mezzanine’s conference rooms.
Attendees were streaming from the conference seminars to their lunch destinations or milling about in the hall to chat after the sessions. The dress was a fifty-fifty mix of military and civilian clothes. Gaul blended right in.
Gaul wandered down the hall, pretending to study a conference program. He passed by the glass doors of the Capital Club but didn’t see his target. He found a spot near the elevators and had to remind himself not to lean against the wall so that he would stay in character as a ramrod-straight military officer.
His cell phone buzzed. The text message was from Orr.
We’re under way here. You?
Gaul texted back,
Everything’s in place
.
Have you spotted him?
Not yet. But he’s here and scheduled to attend the lunch.
Good. We’ll know in 20 minutes. Be ready.
K.
With nothing more to do but wait while keeping an eye on the elevators and stairs, Gaul went back to scanning the program. He smiled when he saw the title of the keynote address by his target, the former military leader of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The speech was called “The Dangers of Asymmetric Threat and Response: How to Combat Improvised Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Gaul thought the speaker would be surprised by how personal that danger would become.
The elevator emptied three times before Gaul saw who he had come for. The newly retired major general looked a little grayer than in the photo he’d memorized, but the intense gaze and the wrought-iron jaw were still the same. All eyes followed the general as he strode toward the restaurant.
Gaul took out his cell phone to text Orr with the confirmation that he now had Sherman Locke in his sights.