Fuse of Armageddon (5 page)

He’d pledged to join the Crusaders while a single man only to discover that the pull of his own new family was a stronger force. No wonder, he often told himself now, Jesus had never married. Jesus, the ultimate man of love, must not have wanted to cause pain to a woman and child the way that Patterson was by serving here. Of course, Jesus would have never sinned, let alone sinned in passion as Joe had, and Joe knew he was paying the price for it with his agony.

“If I can’t call my wife, I walk,” Joe said.

“You can’t walk. There’s a hundred miles of desert in every direction.”

“I’ve got two legs until you shoot them out from under me,” Joe answered. “You don’t know how bad I need to talk to her.”

It was bad. Joe was no lawyer or car salesman, but he’d thought this through over the last few days. There would be an opportunity, he’d believed, when the threat of walking away would be the most powerful. This seemed as good a chance as any. And he wanted to talk to Sarah bad enough to take a bullet in the back.

“Look, grunt—“

“There’s no looking involved. I talk to my wife, or I walk. Maybe you shoot me; maybe you don’t. But I’m guessing you don’t want to make a bad impression on the other guys. Not here. Not now.”

“Do you have any idea what’s at stake here?” Saxon asked. “Your wife can wait until the rest of the world knows about us.”

“She can’t. And won’t. One minute. That’s all I need with her. She’ll swear to secrecy. All I need to do is tell her it’s part of the Lord’s work.”

A vein pulsed on the side of the commander’s head.

“All right then,” Patterson said when the answer didn’t come. “I’m walking. Nice and slow. Enough time for you to shoot or call me back. Your choice.”

“This is not the time for a showdown, Patterson.”

“That,” Patterson had said, earnest and dead serious, “depends on your viewpoint.”

That’s when Saxon had handed him the satellite phone, accomplishing the resurrection of Private First Class Joe Patterson. Ten minutes after Patterson ended his call, the last of the pigs had been prepared.

It was go time.

Hoover Dam, Nevada • 14:42 GMT


The cube van with the upside-down dead body was parked in a tourist lot, well away from the Hoover Dam. Even so, someone would have called for a routine check first thing in the morning. Homeland Security and all that. Of course, whoever came down from the dam to check the license plate would have seen the body. The van door had been open when Kate and Frank arrived.

“You know what I don’t like,” Frank said. “The flies.”

Kate snorted.

“What I meant was that I don’t like the fact that the flies are here already.” Frank knew about Kate’s near phobia of flies. “What are the chances this van’s been here for a day or two?”

“Zilch,” Kate said. Homeland Security again. The Hoover Dam had long been closed to 18-wheelers, forcing drivers to take a route that cost them seventy extra miles. A vehicle parked near the dam for more than two hours was red-flagged for close inspection. After three hours, it was towed. Nobody wanted a big bomb wiping out the dam and every town and city downstream for a hundred miles.

“So the van hasn’t been here long,” Frank said. “This many flies couldn’t have shown up during the night.”

“Flies have superpowers. I’m not kidding. They’re evil. They don’t need light.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Frank said. “Gonna file that in the murder book? ‘Flies appeared instantly because they’re evil and know how to use their superpowers.’”

“Whoever did him did him out in the desert, then. Maybe yesterday or the day before—during the daylight, when the flies were active. The flies were already in the cube van when they drove it here.”

“Then called it in.”

“Yeah,” Kate said flatly, thinking about the number the caller had told them to try once they found a body, a number with a DC area code. Kate and Frank would eventually get all the information they needed on it, but it had only been a fifteen-minute drive to the dam, lights flashing, sirens silent. During the drive from Boulder City, they had debated whether to get someone to run the number down immediately but finally decided to wait until verification of a body. There was always a chance the person making the 911 call had hoped to sucker the cops into calling the number to hassle the person’s friend—or enemy—as a practical joke.

“What about the number?” Frank asked. They’d been partners awhile. Some days, Kate figured he could read her thoughts by the way she twitched her nose or scratched her chin. “It’s obviously not a practical joke. Call it now?”

Kate checked the signal strength on her cell phone. “I hate being set up, but how much choice do we have now?”

Frank shrugged. “By the book, Kate. The dispatcher’s got it all recorded. You don’t make the call, someone will wonder why.”

Kate gave the body one last flash with the beam. A few more flies rocketed off the body and threatened Kate’s airspace. She grimaced again and dialed the number.

Kate expected the cell phone reception to quit midway through the ringing of the number she’d just dialed. She hated the unpredictability of cell phones, hated that she’d grown dependent on them despite her mistrust of the technology. She didn’t like being dependent on anything or anyone.

The signal was strong. A woman’s voice answered. “Yes.”

Kate was mad at herself for assuming it would be a man on the other end. Gender stereotyping at its best.

“Hey,” Kate grunted, hoping to get some identity without having to reveal herself. She stepped back from the van as she spoke. Now flies were coming in from all around, over her shoulders, headed straight to the dead body. Superpowers. This early in the day and every fly within a hundred square miles knew about it.

“Who is this?” the voice on the other end said.

“A friend.” Kate was playing this one blind.

“Who is this?”

“You don’t have any friends?” Kate said, lifting her eyebrows in Frank’s direction.

“Why are you calling?” No friendliness in the woman’s voice. As if Kate were clairvoyant about the woman’s lack of friends. With attitude like this, Kate could understand why the woman was so lonely.

“It’s a long story,” Kate said. In the background, she could hear a sound like the clicking of a keyboard. Was the woman on the other end in front of a computer?

“Make it about five seconds longer.”

“Huh?” Kate said.

“Caller ID.”

Kate shook her head. Her cell was unlisted. No way the person on the other end could—

“Katherine Louise Penner,” the voice said. “Boulder City. Interesting. Phone owned by the police department. That mean you’re a cop? How’d you get this number, and why are you calling?”

“How in—?”

“Faster computers than anything you have in the sticks.”

“
You
start talking,” Kate said, going from bewildered to mad in a hurry. “If you have anything to do with what’s in front of me, we’re on you like a ton of bricks.”

“Bad cliché aside, you really have no idea, do you?”

“No idea about what?”

“See what I mean?”

Kate rode her temper like a wave. “Start talking, lady, or—”

“Recognize the DC area code? That should be a clue.” The click, click, click of the woman’s keyboarding continued. “By the way, don’t call me lady.”

“Look,” Kate said, “I’ve got someone who looks like a dead Arab in front of me covered in blood, and you’re the number I was told to call when I found it. I can track you down and then we’ll see how much you like playing these games. Can you spell
accessory
?”

“Hang on.” The woman’s voice lost its edge. “Dead Arab? Covered in blood? Upside-down?”

“Yeah.” Kate got quiet too. How’d the woman on the other end know the body was upside-down? Why was she more curious about the body than the fact that her number had been included with the tip that led to the body?

“What’s on his back?” the voice asked.

“What?”

“His back. Can you see it?”

“No,” Kate said.

“Find something to spin the body around.”

“What?”

“If I’m going to have to keep repeating myself, I’m going to get in a lot worse mood. Trust me, Katie, you’re not going to like that. Not—” more clicking of the keyboard in the background—“with a résumé like yours. Seems like you managed to make every official with any weight in Vegas want you dead. I guarantee if you mess with me, this is the one stunt that will put you off the force without a pension.”

The voice let the implications of what she’d said sink in, then continued. “Look for something to turn the body around. I’m going to describe to you what you’ll see, and that alone should be enough reason for you to listen to everything else I’ve got to say.”

DC area code. Computer and connections with enough juice to run the name and number of an unlisted cell in less than thirty seconds. Enough juice to learn in another few seconds how much Kate’s dislike of politics had hurt her career. Kate decided to listen.

As the voice on Kate’s cell described what she would find, Kate walked five paces, broke off a dried branch from a tree at the edge of the parking lot, and walked back to the body, ignoring Frank’s puzzled look. She poked the body to turn it, and flies swarmed in his direction at the disturbance. Kate fought the gag reflex, then forgot her hatred of flies when she saw the back of the body.

“No way,” Kate said.

“Thought so,” the voice said. “Got a pencil?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to give you a number. Call back. Ask to be transferred to Ali Noyer. That way you’ll know I am who I say I am. Because you’re going to have to do everything I tell you. No questions asked. If this shows up in the media, you lose your pension.”

“But—“

“Can you spell
obstruction
?” the voice asked in the sarcastic tone that Kate had used earlier asking about
accessory
. “If this leaks, I can make the charges stick. You ready to listen?”

Kate listened, wrote down the new number, and disconnected the cell. She stared at Frank, who was staring at the body.

Kate flashed another beam at the body in the van, at the man’s back.

The light showed that the back of the man’s shirt had been cut wide open. A golden piece of paper formed a cross on his flesh. An American flag on a stick—the kind that kids waved during a Fourth of July parade—stuck out at a jaunty angle from a belt loop of the man’s pants.

“Not good,” Kate told Frank. “We’re in this deep. Whatever it is.”

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 14:44 GMT


When the knife first plunged into his hand, Quinn managed to reduce his scream to a grunt as shock waves of pain fired along his nerve synapses.

The man with the machine gun stepped forward, pulled the wires loose from the computer, and yanked the headset from Quinn’s head.

“Now we talk,” he said. He handed the knapsack and machine gun to Zayat, who remained standing while the masked Palestinian sat across from Quinn. “Or, at least, you listen.”

Quinn fought waves of nausea by trying to assess the situation. It didn’t feel like the knife had penetrated bone but had slid between instead, in the center of his hand. He couldn’t guess at ligament damage, however, and doubted it would be of any relevance in the short or long term.

“Afraid, American?” the masked Palestinian taunted. “You will not leave this room alive.”

Quinn had wondered when something like this would happen. A person could survive the lions’ den only so many times. Every time he’d wondered about when he’d finally pay the price, he’d told himself that relief would outweigh the fear. He was pleasantly surprised to discover he’d been right.

“I’m terrified,” Quinn said blandly, trying to float above the pain on this mild relief. It didn’t seem that there was a way out of the lions’ den this time. If so, he would have felt obliged to try. But with no escape, he could push aside the immediate pain and try to relax and wait for the inevitable. A part of his mind was objectively curious about the process of dying. He found it interesting that time had already seemed to slow down. Part of the physiology of shock?

The masked man snapped his fingers and Zayat leaned the machine gun against the wall, then dug into the knapsack. He came up with a small tripod, which he extended and set up at the far end of the room. He then mounted a camcorder on it.

This gave Quinn enough time to think about the implications. A camcorder meant this scene would be recorded. The usual video propaganda for Internet broadcast. An execution. Another triumph for the holy jihad.

Quinn could accept this. In the end, did it really matter how he died? In a way, it was a mercy that death would happen so quickly. With this resignation came the sensation that he was sinking into an oasis of infinitely deep water.

“It was not coincidence that the woman and girl were kidnapped,” the Palestinian on the other side of the table said. Casual, smug conversation. “Nor coincidence that you became the negotiator. They were bait. Zayat is merely a hired man, betraying Abu.”

Quinn shrugged. He was in a quiet place now, allowing himself the luxury of happy memories. He didn’t want the squalor of this room to fill his last earthly thoughts.

“Abu is dead,” Zayat said, obviously anxious. “Tell me that now.”

“By my own machine gun. In front of my own eyes.” The masked man spoke to Quinn. “Yet I too work for someone else.”

Quinn shrugged again. He didn’t want distractions, not with the oasis so close.

“Safady arranged this,” the masked Palestinian said. “Does this get your attention?”

Quinn flinched.

“I see it does. You have been an irritation to Safady long enough. He ordered me to make you bow your neck to a Muslim sword. It is not enough of a price to pay for how you hunted and killed our brothers, but sadly a man like you can only die once.”

The masked man moved to the table and crouched to reach beneath, coming up with a huge scimitar that had been taped to the underside of the table. He pulled the strips of tape off the blade.