Countdown to Mecca (30 page)

Jack found himself looking over at Doc, who was crouching beside him. “And he thinks we gave
him
something.”

“That's the way true heroes think,” Doc said. He made a point of changing the subject. “You ready to go on?”

“More now than ever,” Jack breathed. “Though I have to tell you—I feel like I've got the worst hangover of my life.”

Doc snorted. “That's a good sign. At least you're feeling something. Wasn't it the writer George Sand who said something like ‘It's better to feel something, even if it's teeth.'”

“When did you read her?” Jack asked, buying a few more moments to collect his wits.

“Those e-book readers are great and, man, I take a lot of long flights. You finished stalling now?”

“I guess so,” Jack admitted, now that he'd been busted. “My head is pounding. My stomach feels like a collection of cramps, but my legs are fine.”

“And there, ladies and gentlemen, is Jack Hatfield in a nutshell. The man who once told a nation it's all right to have different views now tells his body the same. At least you can string sensible words together now.”

“Compared to five minutes ago—or when I was on the air?” Jack asked, delaying one second more.

Doc grinned but did not answer. Jack focused his eyes on a flame in the distance. As it came into focus, Jack could see more pockets of flame here and there. Then the whole image came into sharp relief. His back was against the wall of the main building. There were fallen bodies here and there, but Jimmy was gone.

“Back in the real world, huh?” asked Doc, walking away from him, in the direction of the runway.

“If any of this is real,” said Jack. He started to get up.

“Hey, all kidding aside—why don't you just stay sitting for a while,” suggested Doc, returning to reinforce his suggestion with a hand on Jack's shoulder that kept him from rising. “You might have a concussion.”

“I don't think so.”

“Yeah, like you'd know. How many fingers am I holding up?”

Jack stayed where he was, feeling relief at the decision, and looked up at his tall friend. “One, wise guy. I see it rising proudly from the others.”

“Okay. What about short-term memory.”

“What about it?” Jack asked.

“What's the last thing you remembered?”

Jack thought. “Stop the plane,” he said, letting his mind slide backward. “I was yelling, ‘Stop the plane.'”

“Nothing after that?”

“Not really, no,” Jack said. “What happened?”

Judging Jack was finally aware enough, Doc told him. “You jumped, or fell off, before Jimmy crashed the car into the back of the plane. I can't tell whether he was trying to flick you off before he hit, or he was just turning the car to catch the back of the plane's tail. Either way, you rolled out of harm's way, and then both vehicles started to spin. You can see the result.”

He could indeed. By the marks on the runway, Jack could guess that the car skidded at the same time the plane did. Then the plane rolled right on top of the car, crushing its middle. Then both vehicles started to tear apart.

“You call this ‘out of harm's way'?” he groaned. But then he realized: the bomb was on board. Why weren't they all dead, and the area turned into glass? He rejected that thought. Although this place sure wasn't heaven, it wasn't miserable enough for purgatory, or hot enough for hell.

“The others?” Jack asked, his mind getting faster.

“All dead,” Doc informed him. “The ones Jimmy didn't run over or you shot, I took care of. Guess what? All Russians.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I found their passports and documents,” Doc said. “They were in a burn bag—you pull the tab down and the whole thing's supposed to go up in flames.”

“Obviously they didn't,” Jack added. Doc made a face that said,
With me pulling the tab? Hardly
. “Maybe they're forgeries.”

“Doubtful,” said Doc. “They already had one set of forgeries—Jordanian passports were in there as well. This was well planned … if not for us flies in their ointment.…” Doc stood and looked around at the so-called Saudi Air Force Base. “This whole place was wired for self-destruction. Explosive devices everywhere. They must have planned to leave nothing behind when they left.”

Jack, with some effort, all but crawled up the wall to his feet. He looked around, feeling frustrated and empty at all the foolish waste. “So what now?”

“We go back,” Doc told him. “Don't you have some interviews to do?”

Jack looked at his friend as if he were insane. Then he looked at the destroyed plane and car. “How?” he wondered. “Take the transport truck? Even if it had enough gas, we'd never get there in time!”

“Transport truck?” Doc echoed. “We don't need no transport truck!” He checked his watch. When Jack opened his mouth to complain, Doc held up a long, bony forefinger. “Wait for it—”

Jack was about to snarl at him, forefinger or no forefinger, when he heard a sound. It was a high-speed swooshing noise coming from the east. He turned to look at the distant hill just in time to see the tiny shape of a Gulfstream G650 appear.

Doc pointed at it. “Boom,” he said. Jack looked at him with recrimination and amazement. “What do you think I've been doing while you were busy ‘resting'?” Doc said with faux incredulity while holding up his military-grade smartphone for Jack to see.

“Reading a botanical book?” Jack hazarded.

“So happens I may have, you illiterate oaf. And
Gray's Anatomy.
It's always good to know what the enemy eats and looks like inside. But that's not how I spent
this
past hour.”

Jack stared. The plane, designed to land on short runways, touched down easily, debris or no debris. Then the pilots, both ex-military and old friends of Doc's, made quick work of it. One helped Jack on board while the other hauled on some items with Doc. Then they quickly turned the plane and took off again. It couldn't have taken more than five minutes.

They had only been in the air a few more minutes when Jack heard a
whomp
and saw a growing fireball out the window. He snapped his head over to Doc for corroboration, there seeing a small device in the man's hand. It had a red button and an antenna. Jack looked out the jet's window again to see the base disappear in fire and smoke. He looked back at his friend in wonderment.

Doc shrugged. “Place was covered in AN-M14 TH3 incendiary devices,” he said. Jack knew that they contained a thermate mixture that burned extremely hot. He could practically smell stinking slag iron all the way up here.

“I thought it best that the local constabulary not have any reason to charge us with espionage or murder,” Doc concluded.

Jack saw the cold-blooded logic in that, but there was more on his mind. “Jimmy?” Doc's expression grew sad. He remembered placing the telescope in Jimmy's crossed hands in the hole Doc had dug before shoveling dirt and sand back on him. “He's with his family.”

“But the evidence…?”

Doc shook his head. “We didn't leave any evidence behind.”

Jack's eyes widened. “You have the bomb?”

Doc looked at him evenly. “Yes. I have the device they were flying out.” Without another word, Doc got up, grabbed a long duffel bag, and slid it over to lay between Jack's feet.

“Why didn't it go off?” Jack blurted. “How did you…?”

Doc held up his forefinger again while unzipping the duffel. Jack looked down to see what he both recognized and dreaded. It was almost a textbook example of a homemade nuke—a capped silver pipe with a wide joint in the center, attached to what looked like a silver flask, as well as an exposed on-off switch.

“Oh, my Lord,” Jack breathed. “How do we—I mean, what the hell should we do with it?”

Doc shook his head again. “No need to do anything, Jack. Look.” He reached down, and, as easily as opening a safety seal from a jar of peanut butter, Doc removed a section of the bomb's surface.

For a second, Jack thought he had gone crazy, or he actually was dead back on that desert runway. For the “bomb” was hollow. It was just an empty shell.

 

41

San Francisco, California

“It's a double blind,” Sammy said as he jabbed his finger at the screen.

“What is a ‘double blind'?” Ana asked, looking apologetically at Boaz who—joined now by Sol—made a small semicircle behind them.

“It's a fake-out,” Sammy said. “A distraction. A diversion.”

“But that makes no sense,” Sol murmured, almost to himself. “Why would they do that?”

“I don't think they are doing that,” said a sixth voice—a strong, certain, female voice.

Dover Griffith stepped up from where she had been standing in the shadows.

“Who let you in?” Sol asked. “And why?”

“I admitted myself,” Dover replied, smiling. “Jack took the liberty of sending me the code in case I needed to see you all off-the-grid.”

“The FBI in my lap,” Sol made a face. “That's what I get for trusting a love-sick
shmendrick
.”

“Most men would not mind this FBI in their lap,” Ana observed.

“Actually, you've got the resources of the FBI in your lap, not it's eyes and ears … or anything else,” Dover said.

“That answers the ‘how' of your being here, not the ‘why,'” Sol said.

Dover ignored the question. She pointed a short, well-manicured fingernail at Ric's screen. “This e-mail evidence from General Morton's private hard drive clearly suggests that the conspirators were targeting Mecca and Jerusalem. Either at the same time or one after the other. Look—it's right there.”

“But that's from last year,” Sammy stressed. “That may have been the original plan. Since then, Morton has been bogged down in details and cover-ups.”

“That's part of the picture,” Dover agreed.

“What's the rest?” Sol asked.

Dover smiled lightly. She saw at once what Sol was doing: the way he made his demand let her know that her being here was provisional, that this was no quid pro quo situation. Either she put up or she would be put out.

Sammy missed all of that as he pointed at his screen.

“This account—Morton hasn't been using this platform for months. But it's still in use. Someone took it over and was making parallel, even alternate, plans.”

“You get all that from ‘Firebird alt feint'?” Dover asked him. But her eyes were still on Sol. There was more to him than he let on.

“Not just that,” Sammy responded. He nodded at Ric, who slipped back into his own chair beside Sammy. Ric's thick fingers flew across his own keyboard, bringing up previously secret correspondence. “Look,” Sammy continued, pointing at Ric's screen. “Samson doesn't want to blow up Jerusalem. But Pegasus says it's a go.” Sammy read from the conversation: “Thor decided a year ago.”

Dover continued to look at Sol. “Interesting, don't you think?”

“What is?” Sol asked.

“The Bible, Greek mythology, Norse mythology.”

“What's so interesting about that?”

“At the Bureau we call that ‘covering your fingerprints,'” she said. “People tend to use passwords or code words that reflect something in their lives. Partly vanity, partly an easy way to remember. That jumble of cultures makes it difficult to follow.”

“Unless we're dealing with a Jew, a Greek, and a Viking,” Sol pointed out.

“That would be dumb,” Dover said. “A person's heritage is easy to trace.”

“Morton,” Ana said thoughtfully. “I think Morton said something about talking to Thor one of the times I was with him.”

“Thor was a call sign General Brooks used when he was younger,” said Sammy. “He's Thor Actual in that division history I read. That's army slang. Let me find it.”

Before anyone could stop him, Sammy started typing furiously on his own keyboard, bringing the file of links he'd gathered on General Brooks. The division history was actually a webpage recounting the exploits of several companies during the First Gulf War and Panama. Brooks had been the commander of an ad hoc strike team known as Thor Company. Thor Actual would have been the call sign of the commander—Brooks.

“It sounds like an argument to me,” said Dover, “not a diversion.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Sammy implored, his fingers still flying, returning the original information to his screen. “All that was from the past year. The ‘Firebird alt feint' is from the past weeks. None of the original conspirators were involved, or even privy, to these newer communications.”

“Then who were?” Dover asked

Sammy pursed his lips, staring at the screen. “I don't know … yet.”

Dover stepped up and put her hands on Sammy's shoulders, eliciting a sharp glance from Ana that the FBI agent didn't notice. She kept one hand on one shoulder and slapped his other shoulder with the other. “I don't know,” she said regretfully. “It's all a little tentative.”

Sammy squirmed a little, but not for the reasons that made Ana react. Dover removed her hand—also not because of Ana.

“My brother used to do that,” Sammy said under his breath. “Doubted me.”

“I'm not doubting you,” Dover insisted quietly so the others couldn't hear. “Merely suggesting—”

“No,” he insisted, loudly. “This adds up.”

“But why?” Sol thought out loud. “What could anyone possibly gain by creating a false bomb plot? If I didn't know better, I'd think this was our doing—a way to trap the conspirators.” He looked at Boaz, who looked back with arms raised in a “We had nothing to do with it posture.”

“I'm guessing the ‘why' will become clearer when we know who the parallel conspirators are,” Sammy told them. “That's why I called you,” he said directly at Dover with a sidelong glance at Sol.