WASHINGTON, D.C.
ACOMMAND CENTER HAD been established in the Hoover Building, and agents from various national security agencies were working computers and telephones. Printers and faxes churned through reams of paper. Wiring curled around the floor to power the armada of electronics. Maps were pinned on cork boards along one wall, and white greaseboards marched side-by-side down another wall. There was clatter enough to make everyone look busy. All looking for Juba.
Kyle was in an adjacent room with the Trident team, away from the main force of civilians but watching the operation on several television sets. The Lizard complained that the equipment that was being used was practically antique, but Kyle had been impressed by how Dave Hunt and Carolyn Walker had pitched in and mobilized their massive resources so quickly. Things were moving fast now that they were all on the same page and knew who they were looking for.
With Kyle’s identification of the man who got away in Paris, British police swooped in and arrested Dr. Allen Osmand and his wife, Martha Goodling Osmand, at their home. A montage of photographs was built of their son, Jeremy, from his sports days at school through the time in the Royal Marines to the fuzzy picture from the house in Paris. A computer smoothed out the details, made comparisons with key points, and created an accurate and up-to-date image.
That was fed into a database of facial recognition software that examined the image against the airport photographs of everyone who had entered the United States in the past few days. The computer did its work at blazing speed, but it still took time to check the digitized photos of tens of thousands of newcomers.
Meanwhile, a nationwide alert was issued for Jeremy Osmand, a known terrorist who was to be considered armed and dangerous. The Department of Homeland Security photograph was given to all of the television networks.
“We’ve got a hit,” said Agent David Hunt as he entered the Trident enclave and closed the door behind him. “He came in at Dulles three days ago as a businessman on a Dutch passport. The customs officer and the airplane’s crew will be interviewed, but it is doubtful that they will remember him unless he did something to attract attention, which is unlikely.”
The Lizard pulled up the security camera picture of Juba passing through the gate. “Looks ordinary,” he said.
“That’s the point,” said Kyle. “He disappeared into the background. Nobody would have noticed him.”
“Now we’re switching the computer to scan domestic flights to see where he’s gone.”
“Good luck with that,” said Kyle.
Hunt took offense. “We caught you, didn’t we?”
“But you got the wrong guy.”
Dave Hunt left the room, muttering beneath his breath.
General Middleton shook his head. “Play nice, Gunny. What are you thinking?”
Swanson walked around the table and looked out of the only window to the street, where civilians were going about their daily routines in the heart of Washington. Behind him, the image of Juba was still on the three television screens. “This is all out of some James Bond movie. Those people out there have all the toys, but they still don’t know who they are really dealing with. Juba is a damned good sniper. He is not running away to avoid prosecution, he is moving with great speed and deliberation toward a specific objective.”
“He’s stalking a target,” Sybelle added.
“And he knows I am coming after him, which is why he had that investigator in Connecticut checking me out.” Kyle picked up the transcript of the exhaustive FBI interview with private detective Chris Lowry, who had been totally cooperative. Discretion was one thing in keeping a client’s confidentiality, but a federal subpoena was much different. He gave them everything he had.
“Look down where Lowry reported back to his ‘client,’ who has to be Juba using another false front. He listed everyone he spoke with during the day and a brief outline of the conversations. When he was talking with my old high school buddy Mikey McLaughlin, the detective also mentioned that I was godfather to his nine-year-old daughter, Mary Elizabeth. Juba sent an e-mail right back to thank him and added that he would talk with Michael and the girl, Mary Elizabeth, personally.” Kyle dropped the transcript. “Now why would he do that?”
Carolyn Walker from the DHS had been following the conversation without adding anything, but now she spoke up. “He did not have to respond at all, and in fact, he did terminate that entire e-mail link after sending that message. The conclusion is that he intends to attack that little girl in order to draw you into the open.”
“And how have you responded to that threat?” Swanson asked.
“Boston is being flooded with extra agents to help secure the area, and some HRT countersniper teams are standing by. He won’t get near her.” Walker looked steadily across the table. The routine was in place, concentrating overwhelming manpower on a trouble spot, building a protective web around the target.
“It is a waste of time, money, and resources, Agent Walker,” said Kyle. “Juba has no plans to go after my goddaughter and couldn’t reach her even if he did. What you people aren’t mentioning is that you have a file a foot thick on Mikey. His uncle Tim runs some of the healthier criminal enterprises in Boston, everything from gambling and girls to dope and supplying money for what’s left of the Irish Republican Army. Mikey is Tim’s chief enforcer. No, Mary Elizabeth is quite safe.”
“So why did he send the message, if that is indeed what happened?”
“A diversion. It is a sniper’s habit to make pursuers chase their tails instead of him. He took an action with minor risk that caused you people to have a major reaction.”
Dave Hunt came back into the room. “We now have him in the domestic air system, flying from Washington to Tampa.”
SAN FRANCISCO
Juba’s warning antenna was quivering. He had rented a spacious, fully equipped automotive garage in a small industrial park on the outskirts of San Francisco, and while he was working, he kept an eye on a small black-and-white television set perched on a workbench. His picture was on part of the screen, and he walked over, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, to turn up the volume. A colorful SPECIAL ALERT logo was imprinted below the woman news reader giving the report. National security authorities had issued a request for all citizens to watch for this man, Jeremy Osmand, a known terrorist believed to be somewhere in the United States at the moment. Do not approach him by yourself, she said. Call the police.
Juba had purchased a 2004 Ford Excursion, the biggest sport utility vehicle ever produced in the United States, for a 20 percent cash down payment and his signature on a lot of legal papers. It shone dull silver beneath the overhead lights of the garage, where he had been clearing out everything behind the front seats to create a long, flat deck. Now he got in, rolled up the big front door, and drove to his motel, a nice mid-priced facility. He parked two blocks away and walked down a narrow alley, with a dirty 49ers cap tilted low on his face. At the corner, he went into a health food store, bought a cup of vanilla chai, and sipped it as he scanned the area.
He had been there for two nights but had only been seen by the night clerk. Had the young man already recognized the picture on the screen and called the authorities? It did not seem that way, because there were no unmarked police cars in the neighborhood, no vans with tinted windows, and no strong young men pretending to do work. No cops, but they would find this place sooner or later. He had to take the chance.
The pistol was snug in the waistband of his jeans, beneath the floppy T-shirt, but he needed the contents of a plastic bag that he had left in the bathroom and the big gun that was hidden in the air-conditioning vent of his room.
It was difficult to buy a good weapon in the People’s Republic of San Francisco, but back in the late 1980s, American law enforcement had turned a blind eye toward al Qaeda representatives who had made many open purchases at gun shows around the country. Those guns were believed to be for export to Afghanistan and the war against the Soviets, but a number of them went into secret caches such as the one that had been stored in northern California. He had picked up an Armalite civilian knockoff of the famous.50 caliber Barrett, which had been purchased from a gun show in Sacramento. There was a little.22 Bushmaster, too, but Juba wanted the big kick.
He dumped his drink and circled the block to approach the motel from a direction that could not be seen by the front desk, sauntered up the single flight of stairs, and was quickly into the corner room. The maid had already been by to clean up and prepare the bed, and the room had fresh towels and the smell of pine aerosol. He stole the towels and pushed them into the plastic bag with the box of Clairol Nice’n Easy hair coloring, then unscrewed the wall vent with a tiny screwdriver on his army knife and pulled out the Armalite in its carrying case. Four minutes after entering the room, he was out. Time mattered now, and he still had chores to do.
A hospital located twenty miles from the baseball stadium was commonly known as “the Saints.” It had been founded by Mormons as a business and charitable venture; the Latter-day Saints sold it to the Catholic Church in 1993, and it was renamed St. Mary’s Hospital. Sick people did not care which saints were in charge as long as the doctors and nurses took care of them. The Saints encompassed four floors of a modern building and had earned a reputation as a top-rated trauma center.
The previous day, Juba had picked out an apartment about two hundred yards away from the Saints, and now he drove there and parked in an empty space behind the low building. He went up the inside stairwell and needed only thirty seconds to pick the lock. It was the middle of a sunny afternoon, and the dead bolt had not been engaged by the young mother watching television. She only had time to turn in surprise when she heard the door open; Juba shot her before she could scream. He carefully went through the apartment and found a little boy playing in a bedroom. The kid looked up just before the trigger was pulled. Juba pulled the dead woman into the light blue bathroom that smelled like daisies and dumped her in the white bathtub. Her four-year-old son was placed atop her body. The gunman dipped a washcloth in the boy’s blood and wrote his name on the tile: JUBA.
In the refrigerator, there was some leftover chicken in a covered bowl, which he heated in the microwave and brought into the living room with a dish of cold potato salad. As he ate lunch, he studied the unobstructed view from the window: a large white sign with EMERGENCY ROOM printed in large blue letters and a concrete ramp that jutted into the driveway to allow ambulance drivers to back right up to it and wheel their gurneys smoothly from the vehicle and straight into the trauma unit.
Then it was back to the garage.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“About seven hundred and fifty million passengers flew on some eleven million flights from U.S. airports last year,” said Lieutenant Commander Freedman, surging around the Internet. “That’s a lot of faces for the computer to look at, and they won’t find anything if he rented a car and drove somewhere.”
“Damn, Liz. Don’t even think like that,” said Sybelle Summers. The Trident group was bored. They liked answers crisp and quick. The coffee was stale and so was the air.
“We have people on it down in Florida,” said Carolyn Walker. “If he’s there, we’ll find him.”
“That means Juba has split our resources yet again,” Kyle said. “First Boston and now Tampa-St. Pete.”
“Not much down there,” said Walker.
General Middleton looked up from working the New York Times crossword puzzle. “Right. Nothing at all. Just sunshine and MacDill Air Force Base and the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which runs the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve jacked security to the max around them.”
The doorknob turned and Special Agent David Hunt came in. “He is still on the move. Flew from Tampa to Denver.”
Middleton swept the newspaper from the table and stood up. “Oh, fuck,” he growled. “That’s Cheyenne Mountain. Lizard, get me a secure voice link to the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon so they can lock ’em down.”
Walker knew the incredible importance of the system that was the electronic heart of the nation’s defenses. “That facility is buried two thousand feet underground. It’s heavily guarded and can be completely sealed off. Those people are totally safe from any gas attack.”
Kyle Swanson grimaced. “Their families aren’t. Even so, I can’t see that as the attack point. Not a big enough crowd, and the security level is always high throughout that area.”
“Then where is he going to hit?” asked Walker. “What is drawing him to these places?”
“Think about targets,” Kyle answered. “Juba wants a huge splash, something bigger than London. We don’t see it yet, but he does. He is not moving at random.”
SAN FRANCISCO
Xavier Sandoval found the garage address without difficulty, stopped the yellow Diablo Gourmet truck, and honked his horn. Juba pushed a button inside and the main garage door rolled back. Sandoval steered the truck inside and parked beside a huge SUV.
“Welcome, brother,” said Juba, embracing the man as a friend. “How do you feel after such a long drive?”
“Tired, but not too bad. I have grown to hate talk radio.” Sandoval laughed. He drank from a cold bottle of water offered by Juba. “You are aware of the police bulletins that are out with your name and description.”
Juba pointed to the little television set. “I have been watching most of the day. My parents have been arrested, but the Crusaders still have not figured out what is going to happen. We remain in control, but we must hurry. I hope you have a few more hours of work left in you.”
“That is why I am here, brother.”
They put on coveralls and stacked four fifty-pound sacks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer across the width of the SUV cargo compartment, which could handle up to a ton of payload. A small fork lift was used to hoist a single, heavy fifty-five-gallon drum of liquid nitromethane and carefully nudge it forward against the barrier of bags; then they packed four more sacks of fertilizer along the near side of the drum. Their work was fast and silent, and they moved with determination, climbing inside the Excursion to secure the deadly pyramid of explosive components with strong fabric straps. A blue and white striped awning, common at tailgate parties, was arranged over the stack and anchored by several plastic picnic coolers, lawn chairs, and a folding table. The forty-four-gallon gasoline tanks were topped off with a series of five-gallon cans. Then both took quick showers and washed off the stink and any residue from the dangerous mixture.
Once Juba and Sandoval were clean and dressed in fresh clothing, they pulled a rug from the little office area and spread it out, knelt down facing toward the east, and offered prayers to Allah. Two hours until game time.
Juba tested the circuit of a digital detonator, set it for four hours, and plugged it into four bricks of C-4 explosive that were tied together.
“Let’s go to the ballpark,” he said. The big door rolled up, and Juba drove away in the Excursion, followed by the Diablo Gourmet truck. The smells inside the SUV were overpowering and forced him to crank up the air conditioner all the way. He sprayed a couple of cans of air freshener back over his shoulder. Even that wasn’t enough, and he reluctantly opened the front windows for circulation, but not the blackened rear portals.
At the stadium, he joined one of the lines entering the parking lot, and the nineteen-year-old cash collector twitched her nose at the odor coming from the big SUV. “Gosh, mister, that’s some kinda smell!”
“Uh-huh. I run a lawn service,” said Juba. “Ordinarily I would have cleaned it, but I wanted to get here early to set up the tailgate. Me and my buddies got seats right by the Yankee dugout.” He smiled at her. “Hey, you looking for another job? Pay you good wages to muck out this truck every day.”
She took the money and gave him a ticket to put on his dashboard. “No way. Not with, like, that smell. You ain’t got that much money. Enjoy the game.”
He followed the striped lines until he found a parking spot near the edge of AT &T Park, where he got out and closed and locked the door. The truck had an American flag decal on a heavily tinted window, and a green bumper sticker proudly announced: MY DAUGHTER IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT TURNER MIDDLE SCHOOL. Juba considered those signs to be urban camouflage. The Excursion weighed seven thousand pounds, was almost nineteen feet long, and stood six and one-half feet tall but would not draw a second glance in any parking lot.
Still an hour before the first pitch. Beautiful evening. Sellout crowd.
Instead of entering the stadium, Juba walked across the parking lot and found a taxi heading out after dropping off a passenger. He gave directions to go to the apartment building across from the Saints. When he was in position, he called Xavier Sandoval, who was parked about a mile from the ballpark. The game was about to begin.
“ANOTHER MATCH! HE’S HOPSCOTCHING all over the place,” said Dave Hunt. “He went out of Denver on a flight to San Francisco. Anything of great military value out there, General?”
“No, not anymore.”
“We are scrambling the West Coast people to check the hotels and motels, and the cops are getting a readout that he might be in their area. Maybe he’s just passing through there, too.”
“Could he be going after some other government installation, say, a courthouse, like in Oklahoma City?” Sybelle didn’t believe it but was just throwing out ideas.
“Every city has government buildings. He would not have to keep moving around so much to attack one.”
“Maybe a big mall? A theme park.”
“Anywhere in the U.S.A., but none that are unusual or noteworthy in those three cities.”
Kyle Swanson was barely listening. There was nothing he could do but wait and try to think like a sniper stalking a target. He picked up the sports section of the Times. The newspaper was great at covering the rest of the world but totally hometown oriented when it came to sports. The lead story was the pitching rivalry for today’s game between the Yankees and…Tampa-St. Pete. Denver. San Francisco. The cities tumbled around in his brain like dice in a cup, and when spilled onto a table, dice always form a pattern.
Stalk the target. Forget a hit on any military installation because the word was out and the guards were alert. Tampa-St. Pete. Denver. San Francisco. What do they have in common? No huge conventions going on. No presidential visit. Vacation time in the summer and people in a laid-back mode. Old people in Florida, modern cowtown in Denver, political antiwar nutcakes in San Francisco. Nothing remotely connecting them there. Denver Broncos, San Francisco 49ers, and Tampa Bay Bucs in pro football, but in separate conferences because they were spread across the country. The Devil Rays, the Rockies, and the Giants in major league baseball. Big stadiums. Can’t-miss targets. Yes. That’s what I would do.
Swanson poked his finger onto the newspaper story. “The game. I’ll bet that he’s going after the baseball game between the Yankees and the Giants. More than forty thousand people will be there, sitting around peacefully in neat rows, waiting to be killed, with hardly any security to protect them.”
The room went silent for a few heartbeats as they stared at each other. Then Carolyn Walker and David Hunt crashed out of the door and started yelling orders to their people.
THE BOMB IN THE Excursion exploded during the third inning, raking the parking lot and shattering the broad edge of the urban ballpark, collapsing part of the wall into a pile of bricks. The first thought for San Francisco residents was that it was an earthquake, a feeling that lasted only a moment, until some people recognized the explosion and started yelling, “Terrorists!” Ballplayers ran from the field, and fans stormed the exits, leaping over seats, pushing up and down the stairs, and trampling the slow, the infirm, and the small. The stampede steered away from the destroyed side of the stadium, and there was no thought by those in the outfield bleachers of waiting for a slow ferry-boat to take them back across the bay. Run! They poured across the green field and out through the concrete tunnels looking for a way out, fighting for a place in the mob to reach a front exit, and adding to the panic.
Police warnings were ignored. Arguments flared, fists and elbows were thrown, and several shots rang out and people fell, ignored by those who were still running. Safety was at the end of the tunnels. Just get out of the stadium and everything would be okay. Screams howled behind them, rising from the stands.
Two minutes after the big car bomb explosion, Xavier Sandoval drove his yellow truck away from the vendors’ loading docks at the stadium and stalled it in the path of the fleeing crowd. He ripped out the ignition wires and activated the roof vents and fans, jumped from the cab, and ran for the street. With a hissing sound that could not be heard above the noise, the aerosol spray rose from the poison canisters in the truck bed and spewed into the air, riding the slight breeze into a slow, lazy arc as it settled onto the frightened men, women, and children who were running right into the misty veil that was softly falling across the kill zone.