Six Seconds

83

Cold Butte, Montana

The choir’s first song ended; the pope clasped his hands together in approval.

The audience applauded and Samara raised her camera to her face. Her finger moved over the button.

In one minute she would rewrite history.

In one minute the world would know her pain.

In one minute she would be with her husband and child.

She would activate, wait one minute, rush to the pope with her camera, then detonate. Her finger touched the raised button, caressed its smooth surface during the loud applause as she framed her target one last time before-

Someone bumped her.

A hand clamped over her camera, seizing it from her as someone gripped her arms, lifting her from her chair.

Two big men in suits.

“Medical emergency, Samara. Come with us,” one said into her ear over the applause.

People watched as they took Samara away. News cameras recorded her escort from the gym. Most shrugged as attention turned back to the pope. The children commenced their second song.

From a steel chair in the command post, her wrists and ankles restrained in plastic handcuffs, Maggie Conlin watched events unfold.

The command post was housed in a customized RV equipped with banks of radios, computers, cameras and TV screens to monitor the papal event. Maggie had seen Samara’s arrest.

“Oh, thank God, they’ve got her!”

Agents in the truck were annoyed that Walker had placed Maggie with them rather than in a patrol car. Some suggested it was to keep her from the press.

“Please, you have to let me talk to Agent Walker!” “Ma’am-” a frustrated agent turned to her “-you need to be quiet, or we’ll remove you to a police vehicle.”

In an empty school hall, the agents placed Samara’s wrists in plastic handcuffs, leaving her hands in front of her. Walker then joined them to rush her out of the school to a cordoned area shielded with steel Dump sters. Explosives experts in protective gear immedi ately examined her.

News teams were kept back. Cameras were trained from a distance on the puzzling events rapidly taking place.

Colby called Walker at the scene, advising him that the weapon may be encased in fabric. Walker advised the bomb unit, but their search of Samara was in vain. Nothing was detected.

Members of the bomb squad then began walking

Samara toward a restricted area, beyond a far corner of the school parking lot, where the FBI and ATF bomb units were situated, along with the Montana Highway Patrol.

A specially built bomb hut, half buried and draped with blast mats, sat in an isolated corner. They would keep her in custody there.

But it was a long way off.

Walker didn’t go. He hurried back into the school and called Graham to alert him to search the house for a new fabric purchase.

“A flag, material, anything?”

Returning to the stage, Walker feared that Samara wasn’t working alone.

Half a world away, in Addis Ababa’s Mercato, in the secret bunker hidden under his fabric shop, Amir and his senior commanders also watched events.

Huddled before a bank of laptops and TV screens displaying an array of images, they studied live news coverage of the pope’s visit, a replaying of the grisly flag test, and a geo-display map showing the school.

Other images included Samara’s martyr video, which would be sent to news organizations after her mission was completed.

“Something’s amiss,” one of the commanders said. “She should have activated at this stage. And we can’t contact the security cell.”

“She’s been arrested, look.” One of the men touched the TV monitor showing Samara being taken from the gym.

“We must abort,” the first commander said. “This jeopardizes everything, the network. It could lead them to us. Do you agree?”

Amir blinked thoughtfully, then tapped his computer keyboard. He’d reviewed Samara’s reports and her notes on the agenda for the choir.

They would sing three songs.

Then the pope would thank the children. Personally.

“Patience. We’ll override and detonate from here.”

At the house, Graham watched Samara’s arrest on television with a sinking feeling.

Where’s Logan?

Graham searched the audience, then scanned the choir as it began the final song.

He called Walker.

“Walker, it’s Graham, I’ve got more information.”

“We’ve removed Samara.” Walker had returned to the stage. “We’ve removed the threat.”

“She should’ve had a boy with her, a nine-year-old boy named Logan Conlin, or Logan Russell.”

“Logan.”

“You should remove him, too.”

At that moment, in Addis Ababa, Amir nodded and a code was entered into a laptop.

The weapon’s one-minute activation count began.

Seconds raced by.

In Lone Tree County, in Jake Conlin’s double-wide trailer, a red light began flashing on Samara’s laptop and a digital clock began counting down.

Graham’s stomach twisted.

“Walker,” he said into his phone, “it’s started! There’s a countdown!”

Where’s Logan?

Maggie!

Graham had forgotten about Maggie! Maybe she’d found Logan?

Graham reached for the other phone.

Walker alerted the command post, requesting an agent enter Logan’s name into the event database.

His name came up.

“Logan is in the choir,” the agent in the truck said, jerking Maggie’s attention to the screen. It was split with Logan’s school photo and live pictures of him.

“That’s my son! That’s Logan!”

As the final song ended with applause, Walker alerted the SWAT commander to Logan’s position: third from the right, second row, dark suit, silver and navy tie.

“What are you doing with my son?” Maggie said.

Concealed in the ceiling, in the gym’s ventilation system, an FBI sharpshooter radioed that he’d locked “the target” into his scope.

Colby, on his cell, had just been alerted by Takayasu.

“We’ve got activity, we’re sending the pulse!”

Colby and Walker took Monsignor Paulo Guerelli aside.

“Monsignor, we must get the pope out of the building now! We have a serious threat!”

Guerelli’s smile at the choir dimmed, his jaw tensed with disappointment.

“A threat? As we did in Seattle?”

Cameras flashed as, one by one, the children ap proached the pope. He embraced them, gave them each a gift.

Six seconds with each child.

“Monsignor,” Colby said. “We must get him out!”

Guerelli nodded, then conferred in Latin with the other Vatican officials before responding. “We will leave when the Holy Father is finished giving gifts to the children.”

Walker still had Graham on the line.

“Walker, I found a receipt in the house. Samara and Logan got new tailor-made suits a few days ago in Seattle!”

Logan was approaching the pope.

Walker alerted Colby and the SWAT commander. “It’s the kid, Logan! Logan is the weapon, take him out! ”

Maggie heard the order to shoot her son. “No!”

Logan filled the sharpshooter’s scope, Logan’s face brightening into a smile as the pope opened his arms. The crosshairs met square between Logan’s eyes. “I’ve got the target,” the sharpshooter said. Maggie screamed.

In Addis Ababa, Amir’s detonation code left his bunker at the speed of light, hitting a satellite, then Montana at the same time Takayasu’s pulse shot to earth.

“I’ve got him.” The sharpshooter’s finger began to squeeze.

Time was up.

Walker and several agents rushed to the pope. At the house, the clock emptied to 00:00, the red light switched to a flashing green. Graham gripped the laptop and hammered it against the floor.

In the school, Logan’s suit suddenly heated and he vanished in white from the scope, disappearing into a papal embrace as the satellite signals struck.

The gym’s lights went out.

All radio contact died.

All live news coverage ended.

In the command post agents cursed as screens and monitors went black, radios and cell phones hissed with static.

“Damn!” A Brazilian TV crew outside the school had been following Samara’s arrest, walking directly behind her escort when their live feed to Sao Paulo was cut.

The crew member’s sudden cursing distracted the two agents who’d been taking Samara away from the school. When the agents turned to look behind them at the TV crew, Samara broke free and started running to the school, getting some ten yards ahead of the agents and crew before Amir’s satellite signal detonated Samara’s suit.

In the blinding, burning flash, Samara met her son, her husband, her mother, her father and smiled as the roaring moment of death hurtled her to communion in paradise.

The concussion wave sent the agents and Brazilian crew skimming over parked vehicles.

A terrifying thud rocked the gym.

The sharpshooter missed his target.

The gunfire triggered screams.

The death signal had reached Samara but the NSA’s pulse had stopped it from reaching Logan. Walker had tackled him, pulling him away from the pope, covering the boy with his body.

Dazed and on the floor, the pope stared at them. Agents, weapons drawn, whisked the pope from the school and into an armor-plated SUV.

Walker tore Logan’s suit from him; other agents and officers rushed to help.

Children cried in the chaos as school alarm bells clanged and all the gym’s doors were thrust open.

“Get everybody out!” Walker shouted, then pointed to sandbags behind the stage. “Get as many of those as you can!”

They buried Logan’s suit under sandbags, then hurried him out with the others, evacuating the building in under a minute.

In the command post, Maggie was hysterical.

“What happened! Somebody tell me!”

Agents tried frantically to restore power, switching on a generator. The console flicked back to life. Ig noring Maggie’s pleas, the agents worked on restoring order in the aftermath of the attack.

The papal motorcade was shrouded in dust as it raced down an escape route over vacant fields to the Lone Tree County Fairgrounds. The pope was rushed into a helicopter which lifted off to an undisclosed location under jet fighter escort.

Power returned.

A fire burned at the site of the explosion, giving rise to a small cloud. Paramedics aided the wounded agents and journalists. Miraculously, their injuries were not life-threatening.

Federal agents scrambled to assess the scope of the attack, while police officers helped get people away from the school area.

Colby ordered a controlled evacuation of the large gathering at Buffalo Breaks.

“Don’t let them panic. Do it section by section, be ginning with those closest to the large stage!”

News crews spoke to their desks, who had been trying repeatedly to reach them.

Two minutes and forty-seven seconds after the in cident, a NewYork wire service issued the first words: EX PLOSION AT PAPAL VISIT TO U.S.-CASUALTIES

The breaking news alert flashed in newsrooms around the world, to TVs, Web sites, and public crawlers in Times Square, Tokyo, London, Toronto, Hong Kong, Berlin, Shanghai.

Within minutes the world knew of the attack.

Amid the confusion, Walker got Logan into a deputy’s jacket and as they headed through the park ing lot, Graham called Walker. After they exchanged information, Walker ordered Maggie Conlin released, then took Logan directly to the command post truck.

As Maggie emerged from the RV, her eyes found her son. She dropped to her knees and opened her arms.

Logan ran to her.

Against the spectral cloud of Samara’s explosion, Maggie and Logan held each other, as the horror reeled around them.