The Wrong Man (42 page)

The car in front of Olsen was next up, pulling up to the intersection with Miller Street. The police officer walked up to the driver’s side door and spoke to the driver. He pointed to the left and then stepped away from the car. The car drove on through the intersection.

The traffic cop then motioned Olsen forward, wiggling his fingers. Olsen took a breath and eased the You-Ride forward. The cop walked up to Olsen’s window, avoiding eye contact. Olsen lowered the window.

“So listen,” said the cop. Then his hands quickly raised up, a firearm in his hand. He fired a rubber bullet directly into Olsen’s face, knocking him unconscious.

It happened in coordination: Army tanks came from each side of Miller Street to cut off the You-Ride’s forward route. U. S. Special Forces converged from behind buildings on each corner of the intersection and charged both the You-Ride and the vehicle behind it, Briggs and Roscoe. The satellites had been following the You-Rides long enough to know that there was a backup car immediately behind.

Briggs and Roscoe grabbed their assault rifles but didn’t even get out of the car before a barrage of rubber bullets pelted them. The Special Forces subdued them almost instantly, without firing a single incendiary round of ammunition.

The process was identical for the second You-Ride truck driven by McPike, except that the Special Forces had approached from the rear. Before the two team members backing up McPike knew what had hit them, assault weapons crashed through the front windows and fired rubber bullets into their temples. McPike hadn’t fared much better, reaching for his sidearm instead of trying to access the fuse to his feet to begin
ignition of the bomb. In any event, the Special Forces had smashed through his window and knocked him unconscious before he could spell his own name.

They didn’t know what to expect in the cargo area, other than the incendiary devices, but it turned out there were no humans inside, just the bombs. Specialists jumped inside each cargo area and detached the fuses from the blasting caps, so that even if the drivers had managed to engage the time-delayed fuses before being subdued, the fuses wouldn’t be connected to the blasting caps anymore.

“Truck number one clear!” the specialist in Olsen’s truck shouted into his microphone.

“Truck number two clear!” said the one in McPike’s truck.

The bombs were defused. The trucks were in custody. The terrorists were subdued.

Two trucks down, one to go.

The time was twelve forty-four
P.M.

I stood in the plaza of the state building, looking up at the all-glass building, wondering if it would still be standing in fifteen minutes, when my cell phone rang. It was Lee Tucker.

“Two trucks down, no casualties,” he said. “You were right, Jason. You were right all along. They had enough material to take out half the downtown. Time-delayed fuses hidden under the seats, state-of-the-art blasting caps, very sophisticated stuff. But we got them. We fucking got them!”

My heart pounded. Relief swept over me, followed by the churning of my stomach as the obvious statement hung out there between us: “Where the hell is the third truck?” I asked. We’d thought the third truck was destined for the Hartz Building, but that hadn’t come true. So where was it?

“I don’t know. Satellite hasn’t picked up anything. We don’t know. I’m out.”

I hung up my phone and stared, helplessly, at the screen. It showed a missed phone call from eleven fifty-one this morning. Right, I remembered that. I was pretty sure it was another call from Dr. Baraniq, asking about scheduling of the trial this week. I’d forgotten to call him yesterday.

I stared a little longer.

Dr. Baraniq had been concerned about the scheduling this week because he had a conflict.

A religious obligation, he’d said.

My body went cold. I clicked on the number that had called me at eleven fifty-one as my heart started pounding.

“This is Sofian Baraniq.”

“Dr. Baraniq, Jason Kolarich.”

“Yes, Jason, oh, I wanted to know when you—”

“Doctor,” I said. “Doctor. Is today that religious obligation you had?”

“Yes, it is, as I mentioned.”

“What is that religious obligation?” I asked, as I started walking.

“You want to know—what is the particular obligation?”

“I do.”

“Well, it’s the first day of Muharram, which is the first month of our calendar,” he said. “We have a different, shorter calendar than the American calendar. This year it’s December seventh on your calendar.”

I broke into a jog. “What are we talking about, Doctor? Some big deal?”

“To some, yes,” he said. “Not so much for the Shia—”

“Where are you, Doctor?”

“Where—well, I’m parking my car near the mosque.”

“That giant one on the west side where they protested after Nine/ Eleven? The al-Qadir mosque?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There’s some kind of service?”

“Yes, Jason. But why—”

“Starting at one o’clock?” I asked, the panic unmistakable in my voice.

“Yes,” he said, picking up on my concern.

“Tell everyone to get out, Doctor! There’s a bomb! Do you hear me? Tell everyone to evacuate
right now
!”

I punched out the phone and dialed Lee Tucker. By now I was in a full sprint westward.

“Lee,” I said when he answered. “That giant mosque… on the west side,” I managed, panting as I ran. “On… Dayton?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s truck number three, Lee. Get over there now!”

“How do you know?”

“It’s the largest mosque in the entire Midwest, Lee—”

“But how do you know the attack is there?”

I split through two people on the sidewalk and ran over the bridge that spanned the western leg of the city’s river. I was now about two miles away from the Masjid al-Qadir.

“Because today isn’t just Pearl Harbor Day,” I said. “It’s the Islamic New Year!”

I ran with everything I had, but my knee wouldn’t permit my best effort, no matter how hard I tried. I cut across plazas and diagonally across streets but I couldn’t run two miles in ten minutes or so. I wasn’t going to make it by one
P.M.

The Islamic New Year, a different day every year of our American calendar. How did I miss that? I didn’t even know that was celebrated. It was the perfect day for Randall Manning. Two birds—the government and a large gathering of Muslims—in one coordinated attack.

I hit Dayton, which was one-way east—the opposite direction from my route—and came up to an intersection where traffic was idling. A guy on a motorcycle was two cars back from the front of the intersection. I didn’t have the element of surprise, as he saw me approach, so I compensated with aggression. I barreled into him high, up at the head and shoulder area. I’d hoped to keep his bike upright but failed. The guy fell off the bike, but it toppled down on top of him, and me on top of it.

“I have to take this bike,” I said. “I’ll kill you if I have to.”

The guy was stunned a moment, not sure of what he was getting with me.

I righted the bike, hopped on, threw on the spare helmet for passengers, and sped away as he called out in protest. I drove forward and then did a U-turn and went onto the sidewalk and took off westbound.

My watch said it was four minutes to one. Surely they would wait
until all of the Muslims had entered the mosque before they’d hit it. Why not maximize casualties?

But maybe my watch was slow, or theirs fast.

It had been a long time—college—since I’d driven a bike, and I surely didn’t know all the ins and outs of this one, but I knew how to go forward, and that was about all I needed to master. I sped through traffic, narrowly missed an oncoming car traveling northbound at an intersection, and silently prayed that I wasn’t too late.

Randall Manning pulled his truck out of the storage unit he’d rented, in cash, over six months ago. The unit was directly north of the target, ten blocks away. He was about two miles directly west of the commercial district.

The first intersection he hit was Rovner Street. It was a red light. Manning stopped the vehicle, saw nothing unusual ahead of him, and reached between his legs, under the driver’s seat, and engaged the first fuse, the five-minute fuse.

He hit the timer on his watch to correspond: 4:59… 4:58… 4:57…

He closed his eyes for just a moment and thought of each of them, one last memory that lingered above all others. His son, Quinn, at a Little League baseball game, crashing into the catcher at home plate and crying when he realized he’d given the catcher a concussion. His wife on their wedding day, so pure and sweet in her white gown, the way her eyes lit up when she squeezed his hand and said, “I absolutely do.”

He remembered Langdon Trotter, back when he’d just been elected governor, and how he shook Manning’s hand and said, “Randy, I couldn’t have made it here without you. If you ever need anything, I’ll be there for you.” That was before he became the big-shit U. S. attorney general, where he breathed the Washington air that polluted a man’s soul, turned him into a coward, allowed him to forget the debt he owed to Manning and led him to decide not to chase a jihadist who had murdered Americans, including Manning’s son.

Payback is a bitch, Lang. Let’s see how you feel after your son is blown to bits today.

The light changed and Manning moved his You-Ride truck forward. Unlike the other trucks, which were canary yellow, Manning had painted this one fire-engine red and put a corporate logo on the side. But he wasn’t delivering flowers today.

If, in fact, the government and that lawyer had gotten far enough to be on the lookout for an assault today, Manning hadn’t given them anything to play with. His vehicle was disguised, and it hadn’t appeared in the open until just now, just five minutes before the truck was going to explode. Even if they were on top of their game, they probably couldn’t stop him.

He did wish he had Cahill and Dwyer, though. The others were three-man teams and he’d wanted one, too. Especially him. Because unlike the other teams, which would try to escape before the bombs detonated, Manning had no intention of leaving. He—and if they hadn’t been arrested, Cahill and Dwyer—planned to pick off anyone who tried to escape, just as the Brotherhood had done to Manning’s family and others at the Adana Hotel.

He’d even brought a machete.

The five-minute fuse having been triggered at Rovner, all that remained was the two-minute at Dodd Street, just a block away from the mosque at Dayton Street.

His heartbeat ratcheted up as the truck passed street after street, catching a couple of lights.

“I understand that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. I understand that revolution is not only a right but an obligation. I understand that bigotry and hate cannot be answered with tolerance, but with intolerance. I understand that those who take up arms against us cannot be answered with peace but with like arms.”

When Manning hit Dodd Street, a red light, he began to lean down to access the two-minute fuse. Up ahead, movement caught his eye. The mosque, a block away.

People were running away, fleeing as if—

As if someone had called in a bomb threat.

“No!” he cried. He slammed his foot on the accelerator, driving
through the red light at Dodd and picking up speed as he headed toward Dayton Street and the Masjid al-Qadir. There was another red light at Dayton. As he got closer, Manning could see more clearly than ever the congregants fleeing from the mosque, running onto the grass and up the sidewalks.

There were still plenty of them to hit. And the blast—well, it wouldn’t kill everyone, but the numbers would be high enough.

Then he made a decision. Forget the fuses. Forget about picking them off as they fled. He was going to crash the You-Ride directly into the building and blow the whole damn thing up in an instant.

He floored the accelerator and held his breath. He steeled himself as the truck ran the red light at Dayton. As he approached he saw a spattering of people pouring out the front door of the mosque, a man carrying an elderly woman in his arms—a white man—

Kolarich?

Kolarich.

Manning pushed down with all his might on the gas pedal and cried out for his wife, his son, his entire family.

I woke up in the hospital with a start. Two beautiful women stood in my room. And Joel Lightner was no Robert Redford, but it was nice to see him, too.

I tried to take a deep breath but it hurt. Every part of my body hurt. But I still had two arms and two legs, and I could feel all of them, so it could have been worse.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did the… bomb go off?”

They looked at each other. “You don’t remember,” said Shauna.

Tori was hanging back, letting Shauna and Joel hover over me. Actually, it seemed like Shauna had sort of boxed her out.

“The bomb went off,” she said. “The mosque was leveled.”

I took another pained breath. “Casualties?”

Shauna shook her head. “Lots of injuries. A few people in critical condition. So far, no deaths.”

My head fell back on the pillow. I closed my eyes and felt myself spin. “That’s… amazing.”

“They have a theory,” said Joel. “He didn’t use as much firepower in that truck as in the others. He didn’t need to take down some huge government building. Just a one-story mosque. Just a really big house, basically. And they think he didn’t want to blow it to smithereens, anyway.”

“He wanted people… to survive and… try to escape,” I mumbled. “So he could pick them off… as they fled.”

“Just like the hotel in Adana,” Shauna said. “But apparently he
changed his plan when he saw everyone evacuating the mosque. So he drove the truck straight into the entrance. The truck was three-quarters inside the foyer of the mosque when it detonated. The blasting radius—that’s what these guys call it—the blasting radius wasn’t particularly wide, especially when the mosque itself absorbed much of the blow.”