Rogue Threat (7 page)

He took the Qualcomm satellite phone from her hand, his fingers lightly brushing hers.

“I wanted to kill Matt Garrett while Zachary Garrett watched,” he said, blankly staring past her at the television screens. “I can still see that man killing my brother every day. It never leaves me.”

“Zachary Garrett is dead,” Virginia said. “Someone else took care of that for us.”

“That was
my
mission,” he spat. Then he forced a half-smile. “But it is done.”

She paused. “Did you ever think that we would be able to get all of the weapons out of Iraq and to their destinations?”

“I always believed it was possible.” Ballantine saw that the Americans had fallen for everything. Saddam’s last stand would go down as a strangely reversed Trojan horse. Instead of offering a gift, Saddam lured the Americans into his own country after Ballantine and the others had positioned his WMDs elsewhere.
Brilliant
, he thought.

He turned toward his executive officer and said, “Chasteen, are all cells ready to go?”

A burly, blond Canadian parolee from the Quebec province, his head almost touching the low-hanging beams in the command center mineshaft, Chasteen had proven crucial to helping Ballantine get his ersatz fishing guide service up and running two years earlier. Since then, the Sherpa had been invaluable in running supplies across the Canadian border into a small airfield in Vermont.

“Yeah, boss. They’re set. All met their reporting windows this morning,” Chasteen said. All of the groomsmen had notified the best man that they were attending the wedding.

Ballantine felt the cool air of the damp mine shaft crawl across his skin. He turned and walked toward the center of the room. A few of the other staff members were monitoring radios and satellite communications. This was a state-of-the-art command and control center.

“Okay, team,” Ballantine said, “today it begins. This is Phase Two.”

They nodded.

Ballantine pressed the green button on the phone and transmitted.

CHAPTER 7

Charlotte, North Carolina

Groomsman No. 1 felt the weight of his cell phone in his pocket as it vibrated against his leg. Opening it just outside the Charlotte Sting locker room in the coliseum, he said, “Hello?”

“What does the attendance look like tonight?”

“Looks like a full house,” the groomsman replied.

“The groom appreciates the tickets.”

“Anytime,” he said into the small handset.

The groomsman flipped the phone shut, took a deep breath, and moved toward the first concession stand.

The benefactor of one of the most controversial presidential pardons ever, Groomsman No. 1 had been released fourteen years early from a mandatory, no-parole, sixteen-year prison sentence at San Quentin. He had been caught by DEA and FBI agents, operating the largest cocaine ring in the Southwest. His father had laundered and funneled his drug money into massive political payoffs that wound their way up the channel, resulting in said pardon.

It had been nearly seven years, and the groomsman had been a model citizen, obeying the speed limit, paying his taxes, avoiding the gangs and cartels—except for being caught within Jorge Cartagena’s long reach. Cartagena, baron of the infamous drug cartel in Colombia, was a key player in the Central Committee. He was leveraging the fact that when Groomsman No. 1 had gone to jail, he was nearly one million dollars in debt to the organization. Supply chain problems. Cartagena gave the groomsman one option, which was to get a job in North Carolina as a concession manager.

The groomsman wiped the sweat from his forehead, reasonably confident he could get away with what he was about to do. Hell, if his father was able to bribe the president of the United States, well, then, that added a whole new perspective to things.

The groomsman was dressed in his typical work attire: an old Hornet’s No. 12 shirt, baggy, black dungarees, and Nike high tops. He kept his hair cropped close to his glistening black scalp and wore black wraparound sunglasses.

He walked up the ramp to his first concession stand, which he found stacked with lines twenty-deep. Each concessionaire was doling out popcorn, hotdogs, and beer. Keg beer fed through taps, each keg containing forty gallons of beer. Five hundred such kegs, thirty of which the groomsman had personally delivered in his coliseum work truck early that morning, were emptied by thirsty fans every game. He had driven right through security, tipping his hat at the attendant he had known for five years.

Cartagena had put the groomsman in touch with the keg supplier, an oily-looking man who nervously stacked and secured the kegs inside the extended Chevy van sporting a large, teal and indigo Sting symbol on a white background. “Most are loaded with a hundred pounds of explosives. Three contain enough VX nerve gas to kill the first responders. Should kill just about everybody,” the supplier said. “Be careful, bud. Watch those speed bumps. Oh, and make sure you keep the remote with you, or nothing will work,” Cartagena’s contact added, handing him a box of remote-controlled fuses as if it were a box of doughnuts.

Groomsman No. 1 had driven the short way from the link-up point at no more than twenty-five miles an hour, palms sweating the entire way. He off-loaded the kegs one at a time and used a modified golf cart to move them in pairs to each of the fifteen concession stands. He tucked these special kegs into the back of the storage coolers so that that they would be the last to be used.

He inserted the fuses and armed them, only needing the radio-frequency-delivered code to start the clock ticking toward a simultaneous explosion of 3,000 pounds of explosives, all conveniently stowed beneath the upper bleachers and near the support columns of the arena.

He whistled as he walked toward the first concession stand and pressed the small, black remote control that looked similar to the average television handset. He then negotiated his way past the assembled crowd, opened the stanchion, and nudged his way through the concessionaires into the storage locker.

“Hey, baby,” the sound of a voice startled him, “good to see you.” Charlene Pierce worked the concession nearest the best courtside seats because she was attractive. She had smiled her way into the position where she now waits on the wealthy patrons that would occasionally wander out and mix with the commoners.

“Hey, Charlene. Good to see you too,” the groomsman said, completing his task. Normally he would have kissed her on the cheek, but he was on a mission, and he knew that he didn’t want to be caught in the coliseum when the business went down.

But she didn’t let him off the hook. She grabbed his arm, her hand wrapped around his large biceps, and said, “Come here, baby, and give me a big kiss.”

“Not now.”

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“Nothing, baby. Just got lots of checking to do, you know?” But he acquiesced and stopped, spinning around to give her a quick peck on the cheek.

She pressed her body up against his and started to push him into the storage room.

“Maybe we should just check this stuff out together,” she said, her long eyelashes fluttering close to his face.

He stared into her large brown eyes, pushing her away. “Baby, let me check you later. Boss man is really upset,” he said.

She grabbed his crotch playfully and said, “You my boss man, big guy. Come back and see me.”

“Sure thing,” he said, giving her another quick peck on the cheek. He thought to himself that he had always wanted to pursue Charlene, even though she was only nineteen. Too bad he would never have the chance.

He found the kegs and leaned over the two in which he was interested. He saw that, indeed, the timer was working:
28:15
. . .
28:14 . . .

He had wasted precious time with Charlene, but now that he was sure the remote worked, he could cruise past the others and simply press the button. He had calculated fifteen minutes to make the full circle and get outside. He would be pulling onto Interstate 85 about the time the explosives cut the building in half.

As he walked, he heard the announcer’s voice bellow over the loud-speaker system. “And we have 12,000 in attendance today. Congratulations on another smashing day of attendance for our own Charlotte Sting!” He dragged the last word along until it was dwarfed by the roar of the crowd.

The groomsman quickly proceeded around the main corridor, pressing the remote as he passed each concession stand, briefly catching a glimpse of the red light flashing, indicating the radio signal had been delivered.

It took him twenty minutes to complete his rounds. He had run into three people who wanted to shoot the breeze with him, and two concessionaires had flagged him down from a distance to complain about one issue or another. He eventually found himself looking from a distance at Charlene, back where he had started his journey. Her eyes caught his and she winked. He waved, then trotted down the ramp toward the locker rooms and out past the security guard to the employee parking lot.

Charlene smiled as
she thought about the possibilities. She pulled the beer tap forward, and foam started spitting out at her.

“Time out, time out,” she shouted, laughing. Her customer stepped back, smiling. “Gotta get another keg,” she said.

Charlene opened the storage-room door and walked to the back of the keg room. As she walked, she made a mental note that she and the keg-man could do a quickie if everyone were really busy out front. She grabbed the dolly at the rear of the storage room, and instead of moving to the front row of kegs, neatly lined two-deep along the cooler wall, she slid the dolly beneath the keg nearest the back.

As she nudged the platform of the dolly underneath and pushed with her hand on the upper lip of the keg, she noticed a small black box with red flashing numbers situated where she would insert the tap in a few seconds. Not understanding either the weight or the black box, she edged the keg back onto the floor and leaned over to inspect it further.

“What the hell is this?” she whispered to herself.

The flashing light read
00:08 . . .

00:07 . . .

00:06 . . .

00:05 . . .

Even her simple, uneducated mind figured it out with about two seconds remaining.

“Oh, my–” she said, backing away.

Groomsman No. 1
was pulling onto I-85 when he heard a dull thud in the background. In his rearview mirror he saw dust pouring out of the coliseum in a large, billowing cloud. Oddly, he felt no guilt. Yet for some unexplained reason, the use of nerve gas seemed unfair to him. He had placed 30-minute time-delay fuses on the VX nerve gas aspirators that would release a fine, toxic spray just as the first responders were arriving to help those unfortunate few who might have survived the blast.

Regardless, it was not a bad day’s work. It would be nice to have Cartagena off his ass. The groomsman blended anonymously into society, never to be heard from again.

CHAPTER 8

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Groomsman No. 2 felt the sweat trickle down the base of his spine. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. The basement tunnels of the Mall of America were deathly quiet. The only noise was the water moving along the miles of plumbing and air-conditioning pipes.

He clipped his cell phone to a small wire that ran through one of the ventilation ducts to the roof of Macy’s department store. He had installed the wire the previous week in preparation for the “wedding.”

The groomsman’s job as an inspector working with McGraw Maintenance Systems over the past six months allowed him unlimited access to the maintenance tunnels under the mall. He engineered his route, covering nearly a mile of passageways beneath the huge complex, using the blueprint he had downloaded from the
Architectural Digest
Web site.

Two years earlier, after his release from the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, he was contacted by an old Earth Liberation Front buddy, who invited him up to do some muskie fishing. After a week this friend, Chasteen, had sold him on Ballantine’s plan. It sounded like a good thing—a second chance. Besides, he had grown tired of spray-painting sport utility vehicles and setting fire to new housing developments, clearly the minor leagues for eco-terrorists. And Chasteen’s offer to strike a blow against the largest symbol of capitalism in the Midwest held an additional attraction for him. It would graduate him to the next level.

Moreover, knowing Chasteen like he did, the groomsman understood that once he had been made aware of the plan, he would either accept the invitation onto the team or wind up as mulch around Ballantine’s boxwood hedgerow. He preferred option A.

He opened his cell phone as he watched the green flashing light turn red, indicating an incoming call.