The Eighth Day (25 page)

Looking into the bag with its gizmos and colorful leads, Dennis realized he didn’t know which wires to pull or short out. He’d hesitated long enough. Disarming the bomb was not an option. It was time to remove the bag. He pulled on the bag, but it didn’t budge. He put more muscle into it. It slid along a little but he couldn’t move it up off the metal of the tanker truck. The magnets were that strong. He scrambled back down the ladder and got into the cab of the truck, a new goal in mind. The guard ran up.

“Do you know how to drive one of these?” Dennis yelled down from the cab.

“No.”

“Ahhhh, shit!” Dennis looked down at the eighteen gears and tried to find first. When he ground the gears into something like first then let up on the clutch, the truck lurched forward. Turning the wheel as the engine over-revved, he headed for open space.

Back at the front gate, Brooke pulled up to the guard, “Take cover. That truck’s going to blow!” She then peeled out to warn Dennis. The truck was already a half-mile away in an area where old oil drums were warehoused.

As she headed toward it, a silent flash burned her eyes as it split the night. An instant later, the earsplitting noise and shock wave slammed into the car. Reflexively, she hit the brakes and fell sideways as the windshield imploded, showering her with tempered safety glass like a cascade of diamonds. The heat of the blast poured through the open window and singed her hair and eyebrows. Suddenly big thuds started pounding all around her as the roof of the car dented in above her. A smoking fifty-five-gallon drum landed on the hood. Two more pelted the car. She covered her head and prayed.

A FULL SIXTY HOURS before the Sabot Society meeting, agents started arriving at McConnell Air Force Base. The bureau had left no aspect to chance. Most of the agents assembled at the base twenty-five miles from Bufford’s farm had rotated through at least two tours at Quantico, the FBI’s training academy.

Operation Homegrown had drawn a full FBI turnout. The HRT (Hostage Rescue Team) was here, as were the bureau’s head negotiators, SWAT teams, hi-tech weapons and surveillance technicians, the EI teams, air support and logistics, headquarters personnel, armored personnel carriers, medical and psych attachment, including drivers for the trucks and assault vehicles. To fill those support positions, the FBI would usually tap local law enforcement, but the director had been clear—bureau only. He wanted this operation contained until the moment SWAT “knocked” on the door with the battering ram.

In the morning light, the twisted, mangled wreckage was barely discernible as a tanker truck. News helicopters circled above, bringing the mutilated image to their national audiences as they awoke. The New Jersey Turnpike was closed for two exits around the plant, making that morning’s rush hour a slowly moving parking lot. The rest area was jammed with emergency support vehicles and news crews using long lenses to pull in the sobering pictures from almost a mile away.

Bill Hiccock had fallen asleep just after midnight, having flown back late to D.C. He was awakened at 3 AM by a call from Joey Palumbo to tell him of the thwarted attack. At 8:30 AM, he, Tate, and Palumbo briefed the president and Reynolds.

“Sir,” Hiccock said, “what we know right now is that the attack was to be carried out by Thomas Regan, against American Cyanamid at their chlorine processing station, up there in New Jersey. There was enough chlorine gas in those tanks to form a cloud twenty miles wide. The EPA estimates that with the prevailing winds last night, the cloud would have made its way to New York City within three hours of the blast. Five to seven million people would have been instantly gassed, most dying in their beds. The CDC adds another three million dead by week’s end from the lesser doses that would be inhaled as the cloud dissipated.” Hiccock closed his briefing book.

“My God! It would have been like a nuclear attack. How was it foiled?”

Tate continued the report. “An agent out of the New York office was following up on a lead when the perpetrator was observed planting the bomb on a tanker truck. She and a retired NYPD detective gave chase. The detective died diverting the truck away from the storage tanks.”

“A retired detective?” the president said in amazement.

“Yes, Sir,” Agent Palumbo said. “I was alerted that this detective was working for the CEO of a private company. The perpetrator was believed to have threatened the detective’s client. At the time of the blast, he was following him as a suspected stalker.”

“Wait, then why was the FBI involved?” the president asked.

Joey was thrown a little. “Sir, there was a slim chance that what the detective had stumbled onto was Homegrown connected, but I made the call to offer him some low-level assistance.”

“Well, you had the right instincts.”

“Actually, it wasn’t until right before the explosion that he or our agent Brooke Burrell knew of Regan’s true intention.”

“That detective saved millions of lives and this country from a disaster of unprecedented proportions,” Hiccock said.

“Was he married?” President Mitchell asked.

“Yes, Sir.”

“I want to talk to the wife as soon as she is up for it.” He then jotted something down on his notepad. Everyone waited until he was finished, then he zeroed in on the director. “So, is the bastard who attempted this another homegrown?”

“It appears he is a member of the Sabot Society,” Tate said. “We are checking that now. His computer and profile are being inspected.”

What’s the Sabot Society?
Hiccock wondered. He was about to ask aloud when Mitchell nodded and turned to his chief of staff. “Okay, Ray, you get all the facts and have it written up. I’ll address the nation at 11 AM.”

Everyone in the room assumed that this was the end of the briefing and started to leave. The president then called out, “What was his name? The cop. What was the man’s name?”

“Mallory, Sir. Dennis Mallory.”

“Ya got a minute?” Hiccock grabbed Joey’s arm and hustled him into an empty White House office before he could answer.

Joey pried Bill’s hand from his arm. “What’s this all about?”

“I should kick your ass, pal-o-mine.”

“Why you gonna do that?”

“Thanks for telling me about Operation Homegrown, you hard-on.”

There was a noticeable change in the color of Joey’s face. Hiccock knew he had hit a nerve. Bill pounded his finger into Joey’s chest to accentuate every word of his next sentence. “Share, you said, remember?” Hiccock then held up his hand, mocking the secret gesture from one Blade to another. “Ah, bullshit,” he muttered and stepped away.

Joey’s mind raced. “Okay, let’s share. Community colleges aren’t that bad.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Jeez, are you hungry? Let’s grab some eggs.”

Down in the White House mess, Joey and Bill sat over scrambled eggs and bacon. The FBI agent looked around. Hiccock could see that there was no one but food service people in the room and they were thirty feet away.

“It’s called Operation Homegrown,” Joey said. “It’s classified. The Homegrown Op is about to make a big play for the controlling council of the Sabot Society.”

“Sabot Society? I just heard Tate use that name in the briefing.”

“As near as we can tell, they are an anti-technology terrorist group that has been behind all these attacks.”

“You have proof of this?”

“Enough to ruin the party they’re planning.”

Hiccock was now dealing with a whole new set of circumstances. If this group were the bad guys, the search was over. He sat staring at a point on the wall for a minute, as the full ramifications sank in. Out of the twenty or so questions that immediately formed in his mind, the one that escaped his lips was, “Sabot? It’s a little obvious, don’t you think?”

“How so?”

“When the industrial revolution came to the Netherlands, it threatened to put many factory workers out on the street. One machine could now do the work of ten, twenty men. So the workers in Holland would jam the machinery and destroy it by sticking their wooden shoes in the gears and cogs. Those wooden shoes were called sabots. That’s where the term
sab
o
tage
comes from. They sabotaged the technology of their day.”

“Well, our modern day shoeless creeps are the ones behind all this. They’re web-based and have been in existence for at least seven years that we know of … how do you know all this crap about the Netherlands, anyway?”

“That’s one my dad told me.”

“How is the old IRT driver?”

“Doing great. He and my mom moved up to Roscoe. Pop gets his minimum adult daily requirement of trout fishing and my mother’s happy he’s not bitching.”

“I remember when we used to cram into his motorman’s cab and look down the track. That was cool. Hey, you know what I still think about? When your dad drove the number four train and he would let us stay at the 161st Street–River Avenue station.”

“How many Yankee games did we watch for free from that supply shed at the end of the platform?”

“Yeah, two bottles of Coke and the transistor radio and we were in heaven.”

“Dad retired from the MTA back in the mid-nineties. I’ll tell him you were asking.”

They both paused as the memories of hot summer afternoons in that tin shed, looking out the open door onto the emerald-green field of the house that Babe built, faded off into a smoky mist.

“You know, Joey, you’re just doing your job. I mean whatever shitty thing that egomaniacal boss of yours has you doing to me or against me, I know it’s your job. I don’t take it personally.”

Joey looked Hiccock in the eye. “Clean start from today forward.

When this is over, I want you to come out to the coast and meet Phyl and little Joe … spend some time. Maybe go fishing or catch a few ball games.”

“Yeah, that would be nice, when all this is over.”

Joey lifted his glass of orange juice, “To this being over.”

Bill raised his coffee cup and clinked. “To this being over.” He took a sip and put down the cup. “How can you be sure that these guys tonight are
the guys
?”

“We got them, dead to rights, front-to-back on the Sperling Chemical explosion. And we got the guy in last night’s Jersey blast chatting with them. ”

“Won’t nabbing him spook your play for the whole society?”

“We let it out that the bomber died on the truck. His cohorts will think he was vaporized, and, along with him, any connection to them.”

Hiccock nodded to the logic of this but something else rippled his brow. “Sperling is in the same kind of high-tech support business that Mason Chemical is in, so I can see the connection. But that yo-yo tried to blow up American Cyanamid. From what I know of them, they seem too low-tech … but maybe.” Bill took a sip of his coffee. “So are you saying the Sabot are the ones doing the subliminal work?”

“To be honest, I don’t know if we
have
connected it that far. But the web is their principal means of organization. It would seem logical.”

“So who’s the brains of this outfit?”

“We’ve been on the ass of Bernard Keyes, a postal employee from the Midwest.”

“Postal employee … disgruntled, I’m sure.”

“Enough jokes about that. This guy is real and he is the center of the ring.”

“But, Joey, one thing: what we found is a level of code-writing so sophisticated that it had your FBI geniuses and my cyber asshole stumped for days. You’re telling me a mailman wrote it?”

“He talks to his Sabots on the web. Maybe he also recruited that particular talent there. Hey, we busted a busboy in Brooklyn a few years back that got into the accounts and files of people on the
Forbes
“100 Richest Americans” list. A fucking busboy! He was a high school dropout and foreign national, as I remember. Computers are truly the great equalizer.”

“Yeah, now any idiot can be a crook.”

“Or terrorist.”

“Or, apparently, an FBI agent. So what, if anything, will you need from me?” Hiccock said cautiously.

“When we take these guys down, we’ll need to use everything you’ve learned as evidence.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“What?”

“I owe your boss an apology.”

“Tate? Why?”

“He was right all along. It was a known group. This isn’t going to be pleasant for me, you know.”

“Listen, let’s just be glad it’s over, okay?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Hiccock tried to take a sip from an empty cup.

Cynthia Mallory long ago resigned herself to the uncertainty hanging over each day of being a cop’s wife. All of that mercifully ended when Dennis retired. Since then, the one thing that never occurred to Cynthia was that she would survive him. She was the afflicted one. She was supposed to be the one who had the uncertain future. The irony was not lost on her that the very bargain Dennis made to save her life ended his.

The fact that Dennis Liam Mallory was a hero was not news to her. Now that the rest of the world knew it as well changed nothing about her grief. She declined the media’s requests for interviews.

Cynthia did, however, accept a call from the President of the United States. He was very nice and informed her that he was fast-tracking approval of the Presidential Medal of Freedom for uncommon valor and sacrifice in service to America for her husband. He told her that the nation owed her husband a debt that could never be repaid. In the same breath, he also vowed that she, her children, and grandchildren would never want or need anything ever again. It was a small price to pay, he said, for the continuance of the ten million lives her husband saved with one selfless act of courage.

Her daughter made a simple concise statement to the press. “The Mallory family wishes to thank all those who have expressed support and prayers for us during our time of grief. We plan a private family memorial.” Here’s where she choked up a little. “And we request that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to the National Institute for Neurologic Disorders and Stroke in my father’s name.” Looking up to the heavens she took a deep breath then spoke, “Daddy, you always were—and always will be—a hero to us all.” She steeled herself and, quelling the quivering of her bottom lip, dry swallowed then added, thank you and God bless America.”

Miles Taggert, shaken by the death of Dennis, did more than send a check to the NINDS. He endowed The Dennis Mallory Neurologic Disorders and Stroke Pavilion at NYU Hospital, fueling it with enough of his fortune to ensure that it would perpetually be the epicenter of the latest technology, techniques, and treatments for the disease that almost claimed Mrs. Mallory. A second grant, more quietly created, was the Dennis and Cynthia Mallory Endowment, which provided economic support for the families of police, firefighters, and other first responders to afford treatment at the facility.

Agent Brooke Burrell’s initiative in “interrogating” the prisoner by perforating his leg on the asphalt that night amounted to little more than a cautious footnote on “public discharge of a weapon” on her bureau commendation of service. At age twenty-eight, she was elevated in rank to Assistant Special Agent in Charge–New York office. She visited with the widow Mallory and found closure for herself and a genuine affection for Cynthia.

After extensive “legal” interrogation, Tom Regan could only tell the feds what they already knew: he was nuts and he chatted with other nuts online. His computer’s hard drive confirmed that he was well ensconced in the Sabot chain of communications.

The noose was tightening on Sabot.