Capitol murder

Chapter Twenty

Ali met the three other members of his cell for the first time a few days before they were smuggled out of Pakistan. It soon became apparent that they were slow-witted. Nothing he had learned about them in the intervening months had changed his opinion. As soon as Steve Reynolds showed them how to work the cable television in the safe house, his companions had no trouble passing the time. Porn occupied a good part of each day, but action movies with a lot of explosions and car chases were a close second.

Ali found pornography offensive and the action movies mindless. He got out of the house on Sundays when the Redskins had a home game. If he went outside, he couldn’t go far for fear of being seen. Ali prayed and read the Koran, but he was going stir crazy. So it was a great relief when Steve Reynolds phoned one Thursday morning and told him they were going for a ride.

Ali heard the horn and was out of the house before it honked a second time. Reynolds was driving a white van decorated with a plumbing company logo. The American said very little during the ride, and Ali knew better than to start a conversation.

At the camp in Somalia, Ali’s intelligence had been recognized and appreciated, and he had been trained to construct bombs. None of the material he needed to build a bomb was in the house. He hoped that this trip was connected to the final phase of his mission.

As they drove, Ali had an unsettling thought. By killing unbelievers, he was serving the one true religion and guaranteeing an eternity in paradise. But carrying out his mission would mean that Ann O’Hearn would die. This was troubling, but it could not be helped. Maybe Ann would be spared. Allah was merciful. Then again, Ann was a heretic. Ali forced himself to stop thinking about Ann because it confused him.

An hour and a half after leaving the house, they were driving through farmland in western Maryland when Reynolds turned off a two-lane rural highway onto a narrow dirt road. Two miles farther on, he drove through a gap in a weathered slat fence and onto a gravel drive that led to a farmhouse. Next to the house was a barn covered in peeling red paint. Two horses and some sheep were grazing in a pasture behind the barn.

“We’re going to meet some people,” Reynolds said when he stopped the van. “They have the detonators and our explosives. I’m going to tell them that you don’t speak English. I’ll do all of the talking.”

Three men walked out of the house as soon as Reynolds parked in the yard. The man in the lead was shorter than the other two, clean shaven and slender with wheat-colored hair and narrow blue eyes that lasered in on the van as he walked toward it. He was wearing jeans and a faded Baltimore Ravens T-shirt.

The other two men resembled Baltimore Ravens. They were huge and bearded and looked like men who enjoyed violence. They made Ali very nervous.

Reynolds hopped down from the van and nodded at the slender man. “Hey, Bob, it was good to hear from you. I was starting to worry.”

“I said I’d get the stuff.”

“Yes, you did. So where is it?”

“First things first,” Bob said. He motioned toward Reynolds and Ali, and one of the behemoths walked toward them. Before he’d gotten halfway across the yard, Reynolds reached behind his back and pulled out a matte black Glock.

“Let’s do this the way we did it the first time we met. You show me yours, then I’ll show you mine.”

Bob’s features darkened, and the two giants tensed.

“You think we’re cops?” Bob asked.

“Except for what I’ve been told by some criminals, I don’t know shit about you, and criminals are notoriously untrustworthy.”

Bob turned to his bodyguards. “Business is business,” he said. “Let them frisk you.”

Reynolds turned to Ali. “Pat them down to make sure they’re not wired,” he said in Urdu.

“Speak fucking English,” Bob barked.

“He doesn’t speak English. I just told him to pat you down.”

Bob looked at Ali with distaste and spat in the dirt. Then he raised his hands. Ali went over the men very professionally, the way he’d been trained to do it in the camp.

“Satisfied?” Bob asked.

Reynolds nodded. He put away his gun and raised his hands. One of the giants patted them down. Ali thought he was excessively rough.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Reynolds said, “show us what you got.”

Bob nodded, and one of his bodyguards went into the barn.

“You have the money?” Bob asked while they waited.

“Every penny. Where did you get the stuff?”

“A coal mine in West Virginia.”

The bodyguard came out of the barn carrying a cardboard box. His eyes were glued to it, and he walked slowly. Warnings on the sides of the box identified the contents as dynamite. The man set the box down in the dirt and returned to the barn.

Reynolds knelt down beside the box and opened it. Ali looked over his shoulder. Inside were stacks of yellow tubes made out of heavy paper and surrounded by clear plastic to prevent leakage.

The man who had returned to the barn came out carrying a cardboard carton. He set it down next to the dynamite. Reynolds opened that box. Inside were several two-inch-long aluminum tubes with the diameter of a pencil. Reynolds looked up at Bob.

“I want to test one of the blasting caps and one of the dynamite sticks,” he said.

“Be my guest.”

Reynolds’s hand hovered over the detonators. Then it dipped down and plucked out one of the tubes. After examining it, he selected a stick of dynamite. Then he turned to Ali.

“Let’s see what you’ve learned,” he said in Urdu as he handed over the blasting cap and the stick of dynamite.

Ali’s chest puffed with pride. As he went to the van, he vowed to show Steve how much he appreciated the American’s trust.

Ali returned with a shovel and a length of lamp cord. He took one wire from the blasting cap and attached it to one portion of the two-part wire in the cord. Then he attached a second part of the cap to the other part of the lamp-cord wire and stuck the detonator into the dynamite. When he finished, he looked at Steve. Reynolds nodded his approval.

Ali walked far away from everyone into the field at the side of the barn. Steve followed. Bob and his bodyguards stayed near the entrance to the barn. Ali stopped when he found a spot in the yard where the dirt was soft. He dug down deep and buried the blasting cap and the dynamite. Then he carried the other end of the lamp cord to the van and popped the hood. Steve followed. Ali attached the ends of the exposed lamp-cord wire to the positive and negative terminals of the car battery. There was an explosion. A geyser of dirt flew into the air. In the pasture behind the barn, the horses panicked and the sheep froze.

“Have your boys get the rest of the goods and put it in the van,” Reynolds told Bob.

Bob turned to his bodyguards and pointed at the open boxes. “Seal that shit up and bring out the rest of the boxes.”

The bodyguards picked up the open boxes and returned to the barn.

Steve turned to Ali. “Good job,” he said in Urdu. “Now bring me the gym bag and the duct tape.”

Moments after Ali handed him the bag and the tape he’d taken from the van, Bob’s men reemerged from the barn carrying the first two boxes, which had been resealed with duct tape, and several other boxes containing dynamite and blasting caps. While Bob checked the money in the gym bag, Steve opened each box to make sure of the contents, then resealed the boxes with the duct tape.

“What you boys fixing to do with this shit?” Bob asked with a grin, knowing damn well that Reynolds wasn’t going to tell him.

Reynolds let his eyes flick across the Baltimore Ravens logo on Bob’s T-shirt and grinned.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out, Bob, but you’re going to be pleasantly surprised when the time comes.”

W hen they got back to the house, Reynolds parked the van next to the side door.

“Have the others help you unload the van, and bring everything into the basement,” Reynolds told Ali.

When the three other members of the cell came out of the house, Reynolds opened the back of the van. Stacked in the back were four trays identical to the ones the men carried around their necks when they sold food and drinks in the stands during the Redskins games. Reynolds told the men to bring the trays to the basement after they brought down the blasting caps and the dynamite.

When everyone was downstairs, Reynolds ignored the explosives and put one of the trays on a table. The men were silent, very tense, and totally focused on the tray. Reynolds removed the top and revealed a hidden compartment lined with ball bearings, which were glued to the bottom of the tray. Next to the ball bearings was a space large enough for two sticks of dynamite and a detonator. A nine-volt battery was already in place.

After Reynolds explained to Ali how to attach the dynamite, detonators, and battery so that the tray would be primed to explode, he slid aside two panels on opposite sides of the outside of the tray revealing two red buttons.

“Each of you must push both buttons at the same time to set off the explosives,” he told the four men. “This way, no tray will explode accidentally.”

Reynolds’s features hardened into a mask of hate. “During the game, you’ll carry your tray into the stands and inflict horror on the infidels. Remember, this game will be televised to American troops in their bases around the world. They will see the cost of their unholy crusade. We will bring their war home. We will make them suffer.”