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Authors: Mack Maloney

BOOK: Strike Force Charlie
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Ozzi searched under the bed—another graveyard for used hypodermics. But he also found a duffel bag full of the necessities of a terrorist these days: inside were 20 new cell phones, about two thousand dollars in small bills, and a collection of credit cards with different names, all stolen or probably counterfeited by Al Qaeda's ID masterminds. But there were other treasures underneath here as well … .
Hunn still had his foot on Ramosa's throat. Crumpled up against the wall, the Filipino henchman was now having trouble breathing. His eyes were red, indicating that some of the needles here might indeed belong to him. Not that long ago, back in Manila, Ramosa had ordered his henchmen to kill most of the ghost team, Hunn and Ozzi included, this after they'd unwittingly found themselves trapped in a warehouse where the Stingers missiles had been temporarily housed. That had been a very close call. Too close.
Now it was payback time.
Hunn produced a newspaper photograph he'd been saving since the first few days in Washington, D.C. It showed Palm Tree's car, or what was left of it. Blood could be seen splattered all over the burnt upholstery, the windshield and fenders perforated with hundreds of gaping holes.
“See what happened to your friend?” Hunn taunted him.
Ramosa looked at the photo but said nothing.
“Yeah, too bad you didn't get to say good-bye,” Hunn went on. “But I think you two will be seeing each other again, real soon.”
For emphasis, Hunn forced his boot even deeper onto Ramosa's throat. Bones started cracking.
Now Hunn had a printout of the napkin drawing dangling in front of Ramosa's eyes.
“Recognize this?” he bellowed at the cutout. “That's how we caught you, you dumb shit. You should really eat at better places. That junk food will kill you.”
Blood started running out of Ramosa's ears and nose. Hunn just pushed his boot farther into his gullet.
“Now, if you want to explain this little picture here,” Hunn said, still in a growl, “then maybe the way you're going out won't be as painful.”
Ramosa laughed, and strangely, so did Hunn. He knew there was no way Ramosa was actually going to decipher the drawing for him. But he was interested in how Ramosa reacted to seeing it. What came next, though, threw both ghosts for a loop.
“You Americans are all psychotic,” Ramosa gurgled, fixated for a moment on the napkin. He obviously recognized it. “You think you're all so clever that you'll go to any lengths just to prove a point. Whether it's a scribble on a piece of paper or invading an entire country. You people
are
crazy!”
Hunn just leaned his boot onto him a little more. More cartilage snapping.
“You're not making this any easier on yourself, pal,” Hunn snarled at him.
“Nor do I intend to,” Ramosa shot back in a gasp. “Can't you see the irony, you big lug? I know you people were floating around the Persian Gulf, in that ship that had every new invention in the world able to listen in on people's lives, invade their privacy. All those satellites and spaceships, Stealth bombers, and things that see in the dark. And yet, here we are, with this little scribble—and you don't know what it is. And all your technology and snooping gear and supercomputers and the rest
can't help you.
It's precious!”
Hunn put his full weight on his boot now. “You should have stayed back in Manila, pal,” he said through gritted teeth. “With all those ugly women.”
But strangely, Ramosa just kept laughing at him, between snorting up rivers of blood.
“Good speech, my fat friend,” he spit back at Hunn. “But you wouldn't know how to find your ass with your elbow. You think you can beat them? These Muslims? You're nuts! You'll
never
defeat them. There are more of them born every minute of every hour of every day than you and the almighty U.S. Army can ever hope to find and kill. They are breeding faster than you can eliminate them. Don't you get it? It's in the numbers, man.
That's
why I joined them. They have money. They have great friends, and they paid me well. That's the new reality. Not loyalty—
money.
You and your pretty flags and your movie star heroics. You are the old way.
They
are the future. You're already coughing up blood.”
Hunn became infuriated. Finally Ozzi came up next to him, one hand behind his back. Ramosa was grinning like a madman through bloody teeth—a heroin high, maybe, or just the lunacy of a person who knows he's going to die.
“You're both pathetic,” Ramosa told them, in one last gasp. “You're too white. You're a dying breed. And when it comes to the little things, you're really,
really
stupid.”
But that's when Ozzi revealed what he'd been holding behind his back. It was Ramosa's laptop. He'd found it among the needles under the bed.
“Well, the joke's on you, pal,” Ozzi told him. “Before you started crowing, you might have wanted to step on this thing a few times.”
Ozzi pushed the laptop's on button, hit the keyboard a few times, and was quickly into Ramosa's files. He lowered the screen to Ramosa's eye level so he could see just what they'd captured: a load of secret documents the Filipino middleman had been keeping, with few, if any, security barriers in place. Just like his long-lost associate Palm Tree, he'd been too clever, too lazy, for his own good.
A look of real horror came across Ramosa's face now. It
was true. He'd started taunting the Crazy Americans while forgetting his laptop was holding a wealth of information.
“Remember that next time,” Ozzi said.
Voices approaching in the hallway told them it was time to go. There was nothing else for them here.
Boot still on Ramosa's throat, Hunn took a pillow from the bed, put it over the man's face, and stuck his gun barrel into it.
Then he pulled the trigger three times, sending bloody feathers everywhere.
“Sweet dreams, asshole,” Hunn said.
“Coffee is made up of phenolic polymers, polysaccharides, chlorogenic acids, caffeine, organic acids, sugars, and lipids … .
”
Li felt her stomach do a flip.
No wonder the stuff drives people crazy,
she thought
.
The words scrolling across her computer screen seemed more like a formula for car wax. Definitely
not
something to put in one's body. Good thing she liked tea.
It was nearly four in the morning. Outside, the fog had rolled into her backyard again, arriving like the tide from the reservoir beyond. Li was upstairs, in the old house's master bedroom, the place that had been turned into the
ad hoc
operations center for “ghost team east.” Her computer was here, along with two other laptops and a snake pit of wires. Her TV, her DVD player, and her Bose radio were here as well. She had her cell phone close by, too—and her pistol. Neither was very far from her side these days.
She was in this thing deep now.
Very
deep. Harboring federal fugitives. Possession of classified material. Possession of military weapons. Accomplice to murder … . She'd wanted Fox to put her in the loop, and in the loop she certainly was. She'd even skipped work all week—not that
there was anyone around to notice, not with the way D.C. had been these past few days. It still seemed so crazy, though. She felt like she was at the center of a storm, looking out at everything swirling around her, as if she'd bypassed that iceberg and sailed right into a hurricane. God only knew what kind of a prison sentence awaited her if and when they all got caught. What would her parents think of her then?
But she was cool with it all. Remarkably so. Even when the crap hit the fan and the copter team started showing up on TV and in the newspapers, she was cool because by now she knew the score. She'd viewed both the
“Fast Ball”
and
“Slow Curve”
files many times over. She'd seen what had been found inside Palm Tree's PDA, too—and yes, the French intelligence agent got what he deserved; she was now in total agreement with that. She knew what the ghosts knew, knew what they had done and how General Rushton had pulled them back, at the worst possible moment, thus allowing the Stingers to get into the United States in the first place. She knew it all and was learning more every day.
At the same time, though, she knew that with one phone call she could spill her guts and probably get off on any charges she might be facing. Was it a temptation? Damn straight it was … . After Hunn and Ozzi left for New York the first time, she'd sat for an hour with her finger poised over her cell phone, ready to blow the whole thing out of the water. Who would she call exactly? The FBI? Pentagon CID—the Criminal Investigation Division? The NSC itself? At that point any number would do. With all she could tell them, the ghost team members would be rounded up very quickly and shipped back down to Gitmo. Or worse … .
Strangely, though, it was Fox giving her pistol back that made her decide not to drop a dime on the ghosts. Fox trusted her. He was counting on her. He believed that like the rest of the team, she was a true patriot. That when she saw irrefutable evidence that something was critically wrong, security-wise, at the very top of the government, she would help those who might be able to save the country anyway.
Yes, it was a heady place to be, in this loop. Historical even. But scary, too.
Very,
very
scary.
 
Hunn and Ozzi had been gone for nearly nine hours now—longer than their first trip up to the New York-New Jersey area. She missed them. That was another odd thing—and so unlike her. They'd invaded her space just a week ago, but it seemed like they'd been here forever. And yes, at first she'd felt violated, betrayed, a prisoner in her own haunted house, even though these particular ghosts were friendly. But now that they were all gone, the place seemed so empty without them. And she felt so alone. How strange … .
She had the TV on in the background. It used to be her only true friend, but it, too, had turned on her lately. Just about every channel she cared about was carrying an unceasing slate of Special Reports, nerve-rattling “Crisis in America” stuff that came across more as reality shows than coverage of a national emergency. At the center of them all, the still-stunning footage of the rogue Coast Guard helicopter, with the three men in the cargo hold waving the old Revolutionary War flag and giving the V for Victory sign. Was this really an unauthorized secret ops team running loose in America? the pundits asked. Or was it a fraud, or a goof, or a stunt? And if they were real, should the government be trying to help them or trying to stop them? That was the debate, along with whether a nuke was going to go off sometime soon inside the homeland.
But Li knew the footage was not a fake. She knew who the masked men were: Fox, Puglisi, and Bates. She recognized their masks. And when the camera pulled back she saw the pilot—or one of them anyway—in the copter's driver's seat, and that was obviously Gellant.
But every time she saw the footage, which was dozens of times by now, she wondered the same thing: why couldn't she see Ryder?
 
It was creeping up on 4:30 now. The fog in her backyard got thicker.
While she liked the sound of the TV to drown out all the creaks and groans of the old house, the all-night news was bothering her again. She pushed the DVD button to play and her favorite movie came on: Marlene Dietrich's
Blue Angel.
She turned the sound way down, though. It was actually her favorite movie to fall asleep to, but she wanted to stay awake now. She had things to do.
She went back to her coffee analysis page, wondering if it was going anywhere or she was just spinning her wheels. Fox's last request to her was to see if she could somehow clear up the image of the mysterious napkin drawing. No matter what happened with Hunn and Ozzi up in New Jersey, she knew this was a crucial thing to do. All those chemicals were the reason for the stain that was obscuring most of the drawing; it was her job to try to get rid of them, and more than anything, she wanted to come through on this. Then, at least, when they finally caught the ghost team, she would be more than just a casual bystander. She would have contributed. She would be one of them.
She'd been at it for three days now, and by this time the image on the napkin was burned into her brain. The gaggle of arrowlike shapes, all going in one direction. Thousands of people looking up from a city with no buildings below. The bus in the lower corner, the damnable coffee stain clouding up what might be important clues. Once more she called it up on her computer screen.
“‘Ducks'?”
she said to herself now, almost laughing, like when Ozzi first told her what the firefighter from Queens had said. “There's no way those are ducks.”
But what the hell were they?
It always came back to the coffee stain.
That
was the problem. There seemed to be some kind of writing underneath it; everyone agreed on that. But trying to determine what it said was almost impossible.
It's like the Shroud of
Turin
, she'd thought more than once.
You think you know what you're looking at—but then again, maybe you don't.
Was this the most important piece of intelligence of the new century? Or was it simply a piece of trash? She didn't know.
Since midnight she'd been working on a new strategy; she called it the Archimedes principle. The ancient Greek scientist wrote one of the greatest books on mathematics, only to have it lost for centuries after some monk, thinking it was scrap paper, scribbled prayers over it. When Archimedes' book was eventually found again, some brilliant minds used a computer to get rid of the monk's writing on top, finally revealing the great man's words beneath. Li's thought maybe this could be done to the napkin.
She'd spent two hours just downloading different types of software, hoping one could lift one layer off the napkin, that being the coffee stain, and reveal what lay underneath. It was a good idea, but nothing clicked. It was not the fault of the software. The best of them could do many different things to photographs: enhance certain parts, change colors, textures. They could also erase parts of an image or edit new parts in. The problem was, this wasn't a real napkin she was dealing with here. It was only
an image
of one: the original. It was impossible for her to strip away any layers, because it was all one layer.
But how she tried. As long as it took the moon to cross the sky and for her to count 20 different times that fighter jets passed over her house. (She heard them all the time now, almost around-the-clock.)
Archimedes, hell,
she'd finally thought as the clock struck 4:30. She didn't need a genius from 200 B.C. to solve this problem. She needed Superman—and his X-ray vision.
And that's when it hit her.
Maybe she didn't quite need X-ray vision—but only to flip the image.
She went back to the Net and found a software package that allowed JPEG images to reverse polarity and turn a positive image into a negative of itself. It took her a while, as she had to make copies of the original photo. But when all was set and she pushed the enter button, the napkin drawing flipped and became a bizarro inside-out version of itself … .
That's how she found what she was looking for.
“Damn,” she whispered. “How about that?”
By turning it to a negative she'd succeeded in dissipating about three-quarters of the coffee stain—and revealing the written scribble below it.
It was a number: 74. With a circle around it.
“Seventy-four,” Li said now, rolling it off her tongue. “What could that mean?”
But there was more. At the same time she could read the number, she realized she could see there was also
more
writing underneath. There was not much, maybe just a shaky line or an ink stain. But she'd never been able to see it before, and even though the image was flipped, it was not clear enough to read now. So by solving one mystery she had created another.
She studied this new problem for a few moments. Maybe if she zoomed in a little and …
Suddenly the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. A glare, moving across the glass of her laptop's screen. Someone was behind her.
Oh God … .
She whirled around, picking up her pistol and pointing it straight ahead of her in one swift motion.
“Jesus, no!” someone cried out.
Li began to squeeze the trigger … .
“It's us!” another voice shouted.
She stopped one millimeter from firing.
Hunn and Ozzi standing in the bedroom doorway.
“Christ …
don't do that!”
she screamed at them.
But we had to, they said. And they were right. There was no way for them to know if the security of the house had been compromised while they were away. They had to come in quietly and check it out for themselves. That's what people did in these circumstances.
But Li had already forgotten about it. She was so glad to see them, she almost jumped up and hugged them. As crazy as it was, at least she wasn't alone anymore.
“Where have you been!” she yelled at them instead, putting her pistol away. “I was about to go nuts … .”
Both of them looked exhausted and dirty and sweaty. But she detected the faintest twinkle in their eyes, especially Ozzi's.
“We had to dump the van, at least for the night,” Ozzi said. “We might have been tagged by a couple people, so we left it down in Washington and walked the rest of the way here.”
“But what happened up in New Jersey?” she finally asked them.
They both smiled darkly. “We got Ramosa,” Ozzi told her wearily.
“Got him good,” Hunn added.
And this time she did hug them. Both of them. She was
that
happy. Finally some good news. Ramosa was scum—as bad as Palm Tree. And she knew the prime mission of the team was to eliminate anyone connected with the various Al Qaeda schemes against America. Now they could add one more number to that tally.
But Ozzi couldn't stop smiling. “And better yet,” he said, “we got this.”
He held up Ramosa's laptop. Li knew what it was right away.
“He was reading that damn thing the whole way home,” Hunn said. “And it's a gold mine. Times, dates, people involved. And lots of stuff on the first bus … .”
“The
first
bus?” Li asked excitedly. This was unexpected. One other reason for going after Ramosa was that they suspected he had dope on the second bus.
“But we got nothing from him on the napkin,” Ozzi said. “He wouldn't give anything up—just laughed at us when we asked.”
Now Li smiled and hugged them again.
“Well, then I've got a surprise for you,” she said. “Take a look at this …”

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