Name of the Devil (33 page)

A
HUNDRED THOUSAND HEADS
turn to the blue sky and see it . . . a hell-bound meteor spewing curls of smoke, red flames licking its surface as it streaks toward the stadium.

First it was a speck, pointed out by the crowd in the highest seats, and as it moves it grows larger, an angry plume arcing through the air from the sun.

First we could see it. Now we can hear it.

The sound is so loud that I feel its echo in my chest.

People are stunned and confused. Some shriek in fright. Others think this is some kind of pyrotechnic display. The pope, standing onstage at the far end of the stadium, pauses his speech to look up. Calmly, he cavalierly remarks, “I guess they started a little early.”

His comment reassures the audience that this is all part of the show.

They begin to cheer.

I run to my assigned position and ask myself what if this is how the world will end, with a stadium wave?

The black ball of fire and ash closes in, flying low over the heads of the audience. Opening his arms wide, the pope is engulfed in flames.

The roof of the stage collapses in a massive inferno. Flaming debris falls into the buffer between the crowd and the stage.
Fire-retardant foam shoots out from a specially placed sprinkler system. People begin to panic.

Over the loudspeakers, a prerecorded message from the pontiff politely instructs spectators to leave in an orderly manner. Orchestral music plays in the background, as if this is a routine announcement.

“Is he alive?” a woman near me shouts.

“Crazy show,” replies her boyfriend.

I'll say.

Uniformed police officers line the aisles, guiding the crowd with illuminated batons as they make a somewhat orderly rush for the exits. Disabled and elderly audience members, culled from the vulnerable exits before the event began, are ushered out through the stadium's back corridors. No one is getting trampled or hurt, at least that I can see. But it's still chaos.

I look back at the collapsed stage. The whole structure was designed to contain whatever came at the pope. Underneath its floor is a deep vat filled with water, designed as a scaled-up version of the explosion buckets used by bomb squads to suppress an explosion. There's no earthshaking tremor or spray of steam.

The pope-killer missile is dead.

But there's still no word over the radio about him, or about his would-be assassin.

I know Marta is here somewhere.

This was supposed to be her moment. This is what she's been waiting for ever since the night her brother was killed.

“Unit five, are the exits covered?” I anxiously call into my radio headset.

The only response is an ear-splitting warble. I switch to the open channel. It's filled with the strange noise as well.

I run to the nearest uniformed officer, who is still steering people out of the stadium. “Does your radio work?” I call out.

She shakes her head and mouths, “No.”

I wind my way through the stadium and put on the orange vest I'd been concealing in my backpack. I'm disguised as another festivalgoer in T-shirt, a light track jacket and jeans, with the aim of flushing Marta out from her hiding spot—so far to no avail.

“Bentler!” I yell at an FBI field agent keeping a careful watch on the tunnel leading to the parking lot. “Your radio work?”

“No! We're being jammed!”

Christ. This was something we hadn't accounted for. I've got no way to contact any of the other people working with me. I don't even know if the pope survived our stunt.

The goal was to use Grandfather's Dead Man Walks illusion to create the effect of vulnerability. The problem is that it's too effective from where I'm standing. I have no way of knowing if it worked. All I can do is count on everyone else doing their jobs. The papal protection detail has their assignment. The crowd control units are effectively shepherding the confused people out of the stadium and into the overflow area we've made in the parking lot.

I only had one job: to find Marta Rodriguez. And I failed.

Our plan—my mission—was to arrest her before this all began. For the last five hours I've been combing through the stands, section by section, and walking the floor. I must have looked at a hundred thousand faces. More than a few resembled hers. I even had our security team discreetly approach a half-dozen women that could have been her. None of them panned out. When the fireball roared out of the sky, I knew my best chance had passed.

I push my way through a corridor leading toward the exit, keeping close to the walls so I don't cause a fight. Of all the options for a quick and anonymous getaway, this would be an ideal one. Thousands of cars are parked just a few yards away, and the street beyond leads to US 1, which goes all the way to New York. If Marta wanted to make a covert exit, she could have a driver
pick her up here and transfer her to a spot near the gate, from where she could make it to the outside streets without waiting hours for all the cars to leave. And this is just one of a hundred different scenarios. She could just keep walking on foot. She could get into a vehicle and stay hidden for hours. Maybe she never even came here at all.

I'm counting on her being motivated by her desire for personal satisfaction. She
needed
to be here. I also think she'll do anything to avoid being apprehended. She's not a risk taker who would chance getting caught in the open or during a random vehicle search. Those are the kinds of odds you pay underlings to take for you.

To the left of the main vehicle exit is a roped-off area where the media village is located. A dozen news trucks are parked in a semicircle, their frustrated crews trying to figure out why they can't speak to their headquarters. The jammer has affected everything.

The only purpose of disrupting our communications would be to enable her exit. She's got to be here.

Somewhere.

I search the sea of thousands of faces.

I look for the unusual.

Across the parking lot I notice five tall Hispanic men walking quickly in a tight pack. Evenly spaced apart from each other, they're moving in a cluster pattern—the way you would move to protect someone in the middle.

I run after them. A cop on a Segway yells at me to slow down, but I flash my badge and tell him to follow me.

The bodyguards are almost halfway across the parking lot. Somehow I have to fight my way through the throngs of people without letting Marta or her security detail know that I've spotted her.

I'm just a hundred feet away when one of the men sees me. He pulls a gun from his belt and aims it in my direction.

“Get down!” I shout at the top of my lungs.

G
LASS SHARDS SPRAY
my chest as Marta's bodyguard fires through the windows of the GM Yukon standing between us. I dive to the ground and return two rounds into his ankles underneath the chassis. Blood spurts onto the pavement and he crumples with a scream.

“Get back!” I yell to a group of college kids walking toward their cars. They look at me, confused, then see the pistol in my hand and run the other way. I spring to my feet and bolt around the truck to see my shooter still writhing on the ground. Dressed in cargo shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, he looks like any other concertgoer—with the exception of the Glock he's gripping in his right hand as he tries to stem the flow of blood with his left. I stomp down hard on his arm, pinning the gun to the asphalt and probably breaking his wrist.

The cop on the Segway comes to a stop behind me. I rip the gun from the wounded man's fingers and hand it to the officer. “Take this! Hold him!”

Marta and her entourage, now one short, are almost at the far end of the parking lot. Two of her men peel off and take defensive positions behind parked vehicles, ready to shoot if I continue my pursuit. There are thousands of people swirling around us. A stray bullet stands a better chance of hitting someone than not, and I can't keep up this chase without expecting an innocent person to get hurt.

I holler into my radio, “This is Blackwood! I have the target in sight! Anybody read this?” The continued garble of the jammer is the only reply.

Damn!

In none of our scenarios did we think about losing the ability to talk to each other. We can't even call an ambulance! We need roadblocks. I need backup. But I can't reach anyone!

Marta will be on US 1, headed toward I-95, in just a few minutes. The arena is far enough from civilization that we could trap her between here and the Everglades, but we're running out of time. Damn it. The jammers are a clever idea, I have to give it to her. She knew pandemonium would erupt when the pope was killed, and to assure her escape she blocked our radios, effectively shutting down our entire ability to respond. Military units have practical contingencies for this. Civilian agencies do not. The last thing anyone expects is a bad guy who drops a half million dollars on a black-market Russian jamming system.

Everything about Marta is unconventional. I shouldn't be surprised. If I can't speak to the other agencies soon, she could disappear forever.

A wind kicks up as a news helicopter flies into position overhead. A cameraman, buckled to the door, leans out to aim his high-power lens at the wounded shooter and the cop standing over him.

He's got a better point of view than I do.

I shout and wave my gun and badge at the Channel 8 copter. The pilot swings it around so his camera operator can get a better view. I furiously gesture to an empty patch of grass at the edge of the parking lot. He gets it and gives me a thumbs-up.

Landing here probably violates a million different FAA rules, but the pilot doesn't seem too bothered as he brings the craft down with the passenger-side door opened toward me. My long black hair tumbles wildly in the downwash as I charge across the
grass to hop inside. The chopper climbs up fifty feet as soon as I close the door. I don't think the pilot has to be told we're a danger to the swarming crowd on the ground.

“You call an Uber?!” he shouts over the roar of the rotors. He has the rugged good looks and cocky grin of a test pilot or a race-car driver. I can see why he went ahead with the risky landing.

I pull on a closed-circuit headset to talk to him. “Do you have radio?”

“Negative!” he replies. “We can't receive or transmit.”

“Put an empty channel on the intercom.”

He flips through a row of switches and my earphones are filled with the annoying warbling. Even out here at the edge of the parking lot, we're still blocked. A military-grade jammer can blanket several miles. As long as Marta's machine is operating, we're out of the game.

For a fleeting moment I entertain the notion of telling the pilot to chase after Marta. Without ground support to make an apprehension or any means of communication, however, this could prove stupid, possibly deadly. Even if we do spot her, we could quickly escalate into a hostage situation with no units nearby. At the moment, public safety is my priority.

“Fly a loop around the stadium!” I shout to him. “Look for anything antenna-like!”

“Affirmative!” I can tell he's had combat experience, and realizes what's going on with the jammer. I'm pretty sure he also knows what I intend to do.

The helicopter banks to the side as he twists the stick, taking us on a circular path around the structure. I put my gun back in my holster and listen closely to the noise coming through the radio. As we change direction, the pitch alters slightly. I swear it's getting louder. I scan the ground below us for the jammer. It could be disguised in anything: a box truck, a large SUV. We'd screened the parking lot vehicles for explosives with dogs
and radiation detectors, but there was nothing stopping someone from driving a work van into the lot with a hollowed-out industrial-sized air conditioner strapped inside.

The warbling changes in pitch again and starts to recede. “Go back!” I yell over the noise.

The pilot turns us around, and I continue to search among the cars and trucks for something that could contain a jammer. Hundreds of faces below stare up to watch us circle the area.

“What about that?” calls out the cameraman from the back. He points toward a tall light stand attached to a portable generator. A suspicious cable stretches from the metal casing to the top of the mast without connecting to any of the lights.

This might be it. I can't call it in. I have to take care of it myself. “Drop me as close to the ground as you can!”

The pilot lowers the skids a few feet above the roof of an Escalade. I yank off the headset and open the door. It's still a long way to the top of the truck.

I jump anyway.

I
HIT THE ROOF,
skid down the windshield and hit the ground, barely managing to land without diving face-first into the pavement. The crowd gives me confused looks. I catch my balance and my breath and run toward the suspicious piece of equipment without the foggiest notion of how I'm supposed to deactivate it. I ignore the screaming pain in my ankles. I don't even know how to tell if this is the jammer, or just a piece of construction gear.

Up close, the generator looks like any other. A keyed switch is in the on position and a green light is glowing. The control panel is locked behind a metal door. There's no way for me to know if I've found it, so I have to make an educated guess that, because the motor is running and the lights aren't on, this is the jammer. I circle the machine, looking for a vulnerable spot. At its rear there's a punched metal grill where the exhaust is located. I stand back and shoot three rounds into the engine compartment.

Defiantly, the motor keeps humming. Two muscle-bound men in cut-off shorts and tank tops flip-flop over to check out the crazy bitch with the gun. I flash them my badge, about to tell them to step back, and get an idea.

“Help me turn this over,” I command as I holster my weapon. “Grab the trailer hitch.”

“Whatever you say, darling. You're the one with the gun,” replies the tanner of the two.

Together we lift the metal hitch and tilt the entire generator backwards. The weight from the light mast, thirty feet in the air, begins to work in our favor. With one last shove, the entire tower topples, crashing into the trunk of a blue Hyundai.

“Stand back!” I yell. I don't know if the thing will explode into flames from the spilled fuel. I grab the cable that runs along the mast and yank it free from its connection inside the housing, realizing too late the smart thing would have been to use my jacket as an insulator to avoid electrocution. Thankfully, I'm not shocked.

“This is Blackwood. Copy?” I call into my radio. The warbling sound is gone.

“Blackwood, this is Knoll. We were having a comm problem.”

Thank God it worked. I give a thumbs-up to my muscular helpers, who probably have no idea what our act of vandalism accomplished.

“I think I fixed it. I spotted Rodriguez. She was heading east on 122nd Street with four Hispanic males. I think she's headed toward a vehicle. Copy?”

“Affirmative.”

The news helicopter still hovers overhead. “I'm going to try to make visual contact. Copy?”

“Roger that.”

I run back toward the Escalade and flag down the pilot, who had clearly been watching the whole thing. He swings the door open and once more brings the chopper down as close to the top of the vehicle as he can. I grip the inside handle and place a foot on the skid, then pull myself inside.

“Head due east!” I tell him. “We're to pursue at a safe distance until Miami-Dade can get a copter here. Understood?”

“Affirmative,” replies the pilot as he guns the craft in the direction I'd last seen Marta heading.

A sea of people below us floods through the parking lot and
into the auxiliary lots. The lines of departing vehicles stretch half a mile into the stadium parking area. I can't see Marta letting herself get stuck in that.

“Head toward there!” I point toward a residential area on the other side of the highway. One of my working theories is that she has a car waiting there so she can avoid the packed onramp and get on the freeway somewhere else.

We fly over the highway, above the hordes filtering through the traffic jams toward the neighborhoods where they parked.

“Keep a lookout for anyone driving across medians or going the wrong way to get out of here,” I say over the intercom to the cameraman and pilot.

Row after row of houses roll past underneath us. I search the streets for some sign of Marta and her protectors. If they made it to a car already, she'll be almost impossible to find.

“There!” shouts the pilot. He's clearly been involved in enough high-speed pursuits to know what we're looking for.

A black BMW has just blown through a stop sign and is now racing down the opposite side of the street to get past a line of cars waiting their turn at an exit. It could be some random asshole, but it's the only lead I've got.

“Black BMW heading east toward Hyacinth,” I report into the radio.

“Roger. What is your position?” asks Knoll.

“In pursuit in the Channel 8 chopper.”

“Of course.” I can imagine Knoll shaking his head on the other end.

“BMW just made a left turn onto 42nd Avenue. Heading north now,” I update.

“North?”

“Affirmative.” The nearest turnpike onramp is in the other direction. So are the main arterial roads that will take her into Miami. Where the hell is she headed?

“We've got ground units in pursuit,” Knoll explains.

I look below, but don't see any police cars on the road. “Keep following. Not too close,” I tell the pilot.

“Roger.”

The BMW turns into an industrial area. I flip through my pocket map, trying to see where she might be going. I'd circled down a number of contingent situations.

One pops out. “This is Blackwood. Set up a roadblock at Exeter Executive Airport. I think that's her destination.”

“Roger that.”

“Can you get a phone line here?” I ask the pilot.

He points to an iPhone connected to the console. “Just dial in there.”

I pull up the FAA direct number for the airport control tower on my phone, then dial it in on his.

“Exeter operations.”

“This is Agent Blackwood with the FBI. What craft do you presently have cleared for takeoff?”

“We have a Cessna trainer taxiing and a private jet prepping now.”

“Is the hatch still open on the jet?”

“Affirmative. They radioed in and said they're waiting for a crew member before departing.”

“Tower, do not let them leave! Ground all craft. We're going to be making a landing.”

“Who is this again?”

“I'll tell you in person,” I respond, and end the call. Then I turn to the pilot. “You mind going the extra mile?”

He flashes me an adventurous grin. “What do you need?”