Liberty

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

When he saw the brake lights on the vehicles ahead of him, Hamid Salami Mabruk became worried. He had armed the warhead, locked up the storeroom, and gotten out of the Convention Center without meeting anyone. He had had to cut the padlock on the gate to get the pickup out of the loading area, but an investigation of the broken lock wouldn’t lead anyone to the storage room for hours. By then it would be too late.

The cars in front of him halted, crept forward, then halted again. The second time they stopped they didn’t move.

He looked at his watch. Ten minutes … the weapon would explode in ten minutes. If he could get past the Beltway he should be okay, essentially out of the two-hundred-kiloton blast area, although to escape the radiation effects completely one would have to be several hundred miles away.

Yet the Beltway was at least six miles ahead.

He darted into the far right lane. The truck behind him honked, and he pretended not to hear.

Perhaps he should drive in the emergency lane, get around all these cars.

Nine minutes!

The traffic crept forward. Up to three miles per hour, now five … and the brake lights came firmly on. Everything came to a dead stop.

Eight minutes.

Sitting here he was going to be on the edge of the blast. The initial concussion would be terrific, would blow out car windows and fill the air with flying glass and debris. A few seconds later the thermal pulse would arrive — the heat would take the paint off cars, fry flesh from bone …. As the rising fireball consumed all the air around it, air would rush in from all directions to feed it, creating a hurricane. An explosion that size, two- or three-hundred-mile-per-hour winds could be expected. These winds would cause most of the damage outside ground zero. Buildings weakened and twisted by the initial blast and perhaps set afire by the thermal pulse would be destroyed by the hurricane rushing toward the vortex. The air would become a semi-solid, full of glass fragments, dirt, stone, metal, everything the hurricane could lift. That debris would sandblast structures, shred and abrade anything standing … rip flesh from bone.

Radiation … at this range the radiation from the initial blast might be lethal, so what did it matter what came after?

Seven minutes.

He should have armed the weapon inside the container. That would have been the safe and logical course. Moving it, trying to time the explosion to create the perfect terror strike, was hubris. He knew that now. What had he been thinking?

Mabruk turned on the radio, jabbed buttons, realized that the buttons were set for Philadelphia stations and began twisting the dial, looking for a radio station that would tell him about traffic delays. Had there been a wreck ahead? Or was this a police roadblock? Perhaps an army unit searching trucks for nuclear warheads?

Music, ads … talk, talk, talk. Someone talking terrorism from a telephone … more ads. A preacher ranting about hellfire … They’ll see hellfire soon enough.

He snapped the radio off.

Six minutes.

Why had he picked this route out of the city? Of all the possible ways to exit Washington, why this one?

His hands were shaking. He looked at his watch again. The second hand swept mercilessly on.

Five minutes.

Mabruk cranked the steering wheel to the stop and turned carefully out into the emergency lane. Began creeping forward, accelerating. Someone moved to the right to cut him off, so he jumped the curb and drove up onto the grass to pass, then dropped back onto the pavement. Kept going.

Doing fifteen miles per hour now. Not enough time … every mile between him and the weapon increased his chance of surviving the blast. Every car length was a victory.

Ahead of him was an overpass. Nothing, unusual about that, but as he approached it an eighteen-wheel rig moved right to occupy half the emergency lane. With the concrete abutments on the right, there was no way to get by.

He stopped, pushed angrily on the horn.

The tractor didn’t move.

Four minutes.

Now, at last, the tractor crept forward, still taking up half the emergency lane, yet the bank on the right was too steep for vehicles behind it to get around.

Mabruk jabbed the horn savagely, held it down. He cursed, roared his frustration.

Three minutes.

Another hundred yards farther on.

Two.

The kafir bastard … he should get out of the pickup and run up there and shoot him, so at least he would die first.

One minute.

The big rig stopped dead.

Hamid Salami Habruk stared at the second hand of his watch. Frozen, unable to think, he watched the tiny black hand march relentlessly around the dial.

At the very last moment Habruk remembered that the blast would smash the windows from the pickup. He lay down in the seat.

And waited …

Waited …

He held up his wrist, stared at the watch, mesmerized. The second hand continued to swing.

Another minute passed.

The bomb didn’t explode!

Oh, it will! It will! The timer was inaccurate — it had never been calibrated — it wasn’t a precision instrument. The weapon will detonate at any moment.

But it didn’t.

Another minute crept glacially by.

Hamid Salami Mabruk slowly raised himself to the sitting position. The big rig ahead of him inched forward. Automatically he allowed the pickup to creep along after it.

The weapon didn’t explode!

The stretch limo slowly entered the parking lot of the Waltham, Massachusetts, nightclub, the Naked Owl, precisely at midnight and crept between the parked cars. When it reached the far end of the lot, the chauffeur turned it expertly and put the car in motion toward the nightclub door.

A man came out of the nightclub, walked around the front of the limo, and opened the right-rear door. The interior was dark, lit only by the glare of the Naked Owl’s neon. The limo was moving almost as soon as the door swung closed.

Sonny Tran seated himself diagonally across from Karl Luck, who nodded and muttered something.

The chauffeur turned onto the street and accelerated. Sonny opened his briefcase as Luck said, “You’ve been watching the news, I presume?”

Sonny nodded. He had the sweep gear in the briefcase. He didn’t take it out, merely turned it on. It would have been impossible to use in the dark interior of the limo if the instruments hadn’t been backlit.

“One weapon recovered, three still out there somewhere.” Actually two had been found, but the news about the second one had yet to be released.

Sonny concentrated on the gauges of his instrument. Sonny turned the knob that changed frequencies.

“To be frank,” Luck said to fill the silence, “I’m worried that they might not find the other three bombs before the terrorists explode them.”

The needle hit the peg. A jolt of adrenaline shot through Sonny Tran. He refined the freq. The needle pulsated, went from zero to darn near off the scale, then swung back to zero. It did so once every two seconds.

A beacon! There was a beacon in or on the car.

He scanned every freq the device was capable of detecting. He got the hit on only that one frequency. He turned off the gear and sat looking at Karl Luck, who was rambling. “ … Corrigan’s feeling pretty damn good. He’s making money like he owned the mint, the president is going to make him ambassador to Britain, and if a bomb pops, it’s the victims’ tough luck. He’ll drop a check for the relief committee in the collection plate at church. The man has the conscience of a hamster.”

Try as he might, Sonny could think of no reason that Luck or Corrigan would want to track this vehicle. That left the feds. They were on to Corrigan. And Luck had led them to him.

Sonny put the briefcase on the seat next to him and moved over beside Luck. Now they were both facing forward. A curtain obscured the view of the driver’s compartment, and presumably his view of the passengers.

Luck went on in a conversational voice. “The other night Corrigan talked about hiring a Russian he knows to kill the Arabs who shipped the weapons here. He doesn’t want them squealing if they’re arrested.” Luck’s head turned, and he looked at Sonny. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he pays Ivan a few extra bucks to get rid of you and me. Maybe not. But maybe yes. Consider this fair warning.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re talkative tonight.”

Sonny shrugged. He rested his chin on his right fist and looked out the window, trying to look relaxed as his mind raced. Obviously the feds were tracking this car from a distance. Perhaps they had photographed him getting in, perhaps not.

Grafton! That bastard!

He had been in this limo before, of course, and if the FBI had already checked it for prints, they had him. The chauffeur probably washed it daily. It was a risk, but he could wipe the door handles and seats. That would have to do.

Luck was still talking. “ … The Arabs killed our man in Cairo, made it look like suicide. Threw him out the window of his apartment. Olympic Voyager is missing with all hands, including Vandervelt. They’re obviously going to kill everyone in the chain, given enough time.”

Sonny Tran reached for the briefcase, put it on his lap, and opened it. He extracted the knife with his right hand, then rammed it up to the hilt in Luck’s chest. Luck shuddered once, then collapsed.

Sonny closed the briefcase, put it on the floor. He left the knife in Luck’s heart until he was sure he was dead. He picked up his left wrist, felt for a pulse. Nothing. Only then did he extract the knife. It took quite an effort to pull it out. He arranged Luck’s tie and coat so the wound wouldn’t be obvious.

The limo was driving along a street in an industrial area. This would have to do.

He leaned over the dead man and pushed the intercom button. “Mister Luck has fainted. Perhaps a heart attack. Pull over and help me.”

“Certainly, sir.”

As the limo came to a stop, Sonny hopped out the right side and walked around behind the vehicle, holding the knife down by his thigh. No pedestrians. A truck passing, going the other way.

The chauffeur opened Luck’s door, leaned in. Sonny rammed the knife into his back, straight into his heart.

He pushed the man into the car, lifted his legs in, and closed the door.

The engine was still running. Sonny got behind the wheel and drove away.

Should he try to find the beeper? Even if he found it and got it off the limo, how much extra time would that give him?

Not enough, he decided.

Using a knuckle, he opened the glove compartment. Yes, it contained rags — chauffeurs habitually wiped these limos every time they stopped for any length of time.

As he drove he used a rag on the glove compartment and the shift lever and scrubbed the steering wheel, which was covered in leather.

He parked the limo on the top deck of the parking garage at the downtown train station. Not a soul around at this hour of the night. He took the keys, stuck them in his pocket. Working as quickly as he could, he wiped all the door handles and latches, inside and out. The knife was still in the chauffeur’s back; he wiped the handle and left it there. Finally he removed the briefcase, rubbed down the exterior door handles, then locked the car with the button on the key and walked away.

With the rag around his fingers so that he wouldn’t leave prints, he walked along the parked cars, trying each door. He found an older sedan that was unlocked. He got in, looked under the mat and in the cup holder and glove compartment for a spare key. No.

Hot-wiring the car took ten long minutes. The car started and ran strongly. Three-quarters of a tank of gas.

The ticket to get out of the garage was over the visor. He had the ticket he had taken from the automatic dispenser when he came in driving the limo, but he would owe no money on it since he had been in the garage less than thirty minutes. If he used it, the man at the booth would have a reason to remember him.

He presented the ticket from the visor and paid forty dollars. The man in the booth saw him, which was unavoidable. A video camera photographed the car’s rear license plate as the car sat at the booth; there was no camera pointed at the driver.

Out on the street Sonny Tran fed gas and rolled.

Hamid Salami Mabruk drove northeastward toward Wilmington at ten miles per hour below the speed limit, trying to figure it out. After the weapon failed to explode, he had needed another thirty minutes to creep by the off-ramp wreck. Since the off-ramp to the Beltway was closed, he found himself headed northeast on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, where it seemed as if every other overpass was being reconstructed. Traffic routinely slowed to twenty miles per hour, formed a single line, and crept by. Sometimes the pace dropped to stop-and-go as people raced forward as far as possible, then cut into the one open lane. He had finally turned off on an east-west road that took him over to 1-95. He found himself in another traffic jam going through the Harbor Tunnel in Baltimore. At two in the morning. He pounded the steering wheel in frustration.

He would never get to New York before dawn to arm the warhead. Impossible to do it during the day, so that meant he couldn’t arm it until tomorrow night, at the earliest. And the president talked about using the military to search. Someone might find the weapon between now and then.

Why didn’t the warhead in the Convention Center explode? It couldn’t be a problem with the batteries — they were new, and he had tested them repeatedly before he loaded them in the pickup. Not the timer, which he’d also tested repeatedly. Perhaps the capacitor was bad. Yes, that must be it, the capacitor. He had mated it to the weapon in the Red Sea weeks ago; no doubt the contacts inside had corroded in the salt-laden air.

He dismissed the possibility that the weapon had been found and disarmed before the timer ran down. Not that, surely. Once the security personnel determined the guard was missing — and it would take a while for them to reach that conclusion — then the search would begin. Even if someone unlocked the storeroom and found the body and the weapon, they wouldn’t disarm it — not Convention Center guards. They would have called the police bomb disposal squad, and it would take a while for them to arrive.

No, the problem had to be the capacitor.

Where could he get another? He should have a new one with him to install in the circuit when he armed the weapon in New York. The possibility of another failure was too bitter to contemplate.

The ringing telephone awoke Myron Emerick, the director of the FBI. Robert Pobowski, the deputy director, was on the line. He broke the news — Grafton had found a nuke in the Washington Convention Center.

Emerick took it hard. Ignoring his half-awake wife, he said a few dirty words.

Pobowski continued his narration. The man that apparently armed the warhead was proceeding northeast up 1-95. “He’s either going home or to arm another bomb. Grafton wants us to set up surveillance on his house. Grafton’s on his way to New York City right now in a Pentagon helicopter.” Pobowski told Emerick Mabruk’s name, where he lived.

“He wants us to follow this guy?” Emerick demanded.

“No. He thinks if he goes to New York the techno wizards in the Langley basement can track him on traffic cameras. He wants us to stay off him so that he’ll lead Grafton to another bomb.”

“That son of a bitch!” Emerick muttered. He wasn’t referring to the suspect, but Grafton. “He’s making us look like county Mounties, ordering us around so he gets the collar and the glory.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I got a call yesterday from a friend of ours on the White House staff. You won’t believe this, but Grafton’s people have hacked into our computer system. They’ve been reading every file entry on the Florida cell suspects. He knows as much about them as we do.”

Pobowski remained silent. He was also a veteran of Washington’s political maneuvering. Everyone was on the team, yet the promotions and budget dollars went to the people who produced results, not to role players. Like Emerick, he believed the future of the FBI was on the line. They couldn’t afford to let Grafton steal the spotlight.

“That explains a lot,” Pobowski said cautiously.

“Damn right,” his boss grumped. “From now on I want the files kept with paper. No more computer entries. I don’t want him stealing our work.”

“There’s been another development in Boston,” Pobowski reported. “Grafton asked us to put a beacon on Corrigan’s limo — he didn’t want Corrigan to know about it, for obvious reasons. An hour ago the limo was parked on the top level of the Boston train station. No one around it, apparently. Dark windows, but our man shined a flashlight in. Two bodies in there.”

“Nothing on the computers,” Emerick repeated. “Let’s see if we can keep this to ourselves and make something of it. Be sure and tell Harry Estep that he is not to volunteer FBI information to Grafton. If he asks a question, Estep is to answer it, but that’s it.”

“I understand, sir.”

Emerick hung up the telephone and rolled over, trying to get comfortable. He found that impossible.

Another nuke, in Washington, for Christ’s sake. And Grafton found it! That fact would play right into the hands of the people in Congress who wanted to reorganize federal law enforcement, put everything under one cabinet secretary. Damnation!

Emerick rolled out of bed, went downstairs to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. When it had dripped through he sat sipping a cup and ruminating on the situation. He couldn’t afford, he decided, to play second fiddle to Grafton. He called Pobowski back.

“If that suspect goes home, arrest him. Interrogate him on the spot. If he knows where another nuke or two are, get it out of him.”

“What if he wants a lawyer?”

The rules of criminal procedure, which the Supreme Court decided in the 1950s and’60s were mandated by the United States Constitution, were not designed for the age of terror, as Emerick well knew. He wasn’t going to let New York or Philly go up in a mushroom cloud because Habruk chose to exercise his right to remain silent. To hell with the lawyers!

“Trying to flatten an American city with a nuke isn’t a crime, it’s an act of war. Regardless of his nationality, this man is an enemy soldier — he doesn’t have a right to a lawyer. Do what you have to do, Bob.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was four in the morning when Nguyen Tran drove his rig into the yard of an old tobacco warehouse in rural South Carolina. A regular semi-trailer sat backed up to the loading dock, which was only large enough for two trailers. Nguyen put his rig into reverse and expertly backed the container into the empty spot.

A key on his ring opened the padlock. The interior of the warehouse was dirty, with opaque, fly-specked windows mounted high up. The glass in one of the windows was completely gone, so bird droppings were scattered liberally throughout. Nguyen used his flashlight to ensure there was no one in the building, then he opened the overhead doors of the loading dock with hand cranks. The wheels squealed in protest as the doors rose.

A bird disturbed on its nest overhead fluttered and squawked.

Nguyen unlocked the door to the container and began unpacking. The furniture he stacked out of the way. When he got to the soft chairs loaded with blown lead pellets, he walked back to one corner of the warehouse and started the forklift that sat there. After it warmed up, he used it to off-load the chairs, one by one.

He had to cut loose the duct tape that held the bags of birdshot in place and carry the bags from the container one by one. He stacked them neatly by the door.

When he got to the warhead he inspected it carefully with the flashlight. From the cab of the tractor he got a socket set, which he used to run out the bolts that secured the pallet holding the warhead to the container floor.

Satisfied at last, he opened the door to the regular cargo trailer and climbed back on the idling forklift. In three minutes he had the warhead positioned in the other trailer. Instead of bolts, he used adjustable cargo straps to secure it in place. Then the job of repacking the birdshot around the warhead began. He used two rolls of duct tape to secure the bags, then moved the chairs in. When all that was done, he carried in the light furniture to fill up the rest of the space between the warhead and the trailer door.

He parked the empty container under the trees behind the warehouse, where it would be partially hidden from the road. Then he unhooked the tractor from the chassis that held the container and maneuvered the tractor to pick up the trailer that now held the weapon.

After he had the air brakes and electrical connections hooked up, Nguyen wiped his hands on a rag from the tractor’s tool bin and carefully stowed his tools and flashlight.

He checked the warehouse one more time, then lowered the overhead doors and replaced the padlock on the personnel door.

The sky was growing light in the east when he drove out of the yard and headed northeast on the two-lane ribbon of asphalt.

The streets of the Bronx were quiet at five o’clock in the morning when Sonny Tran parked the stolen sedan under an elevated rail line and jerked the ignition wires apart. He got out of the car and walked to the back, where he took the license plate off with a screwdriver he had acquired earlier that evening at an interstate filling station.

No one was out and about in this neighborhood of burned-out tenements and blighted lives. Even the street-corner crack salesmen were in bed at this hour.

Sonny used the chauffeur’s rag to wipe his prints from the steering wheel, gearshift, and door handles. He was especially careful wiping the area around the ignition switch and pulling the dangling wires through the rag. When he had rubbed every surface he might have touched, he got out of the car. He left it unlocked. With a little luck, the car would be stripped by this time tomorrow.

Carrying his briefcase, he walked the three blocks to the stairs that led up to the subway station. After wiping the license plate, he bent it double and dropped it in a trash can on the platform. He only had to wait five minutes before a train came rumbling in.

Hamid Salami Mabruk lived in a quiet neighborhood just ten minutes’ walking distance from the university where he taught. He owned a typical older urban bungalow with an unattached garage on the back of the lot that one reached by driving down an alley. Large maples shaded most of the yard and brushed against the roof of the house. Six-foot-high board fences ran the length of the property on both sides and gave Habruk and his adjoining householders the illusion of privacy.

It was five-thirty in the morning when Habruk drove down the alley and used his remote to open his garage door. He eased the pickup through the narrow opening, killed the engine, and lowered the overhead door with the remote.

He sat with his head on the steering wheel, trying to think.

What a night this had been! The weapon had failed to explode, he had been in every construction traffic jam between here and Washington. A drive that should have taken two and a half hours had taken six.

Tonight! He would get some sleep, then go to New York and arm the weapon there tonight. He would get another capacitor from the hardware store this afternoon, just in case. The weapon would destroy New York City and alter the course of human history. Tonight!

He made a great effort to rouse himself and get out of the pickup. The garage was not large — he had to close the vehicle door to go forward to the door that led to the backyard. It was locked, of course — to keep neighborhood children and dope addicts out — so he fumbled with his key ring until he found the right one. Unlocked it and opened it and stepped through.

Three men stood there with pistols leveled. “Freeze! FBI — you’re under arrest!”

He stepped backward and slammed the garage door.

Without thinking he pulled the .22 automatic from his belt. The silencer was still attached to the muzzle.

He would get back in the pickup, drive out of here! Even as this thought went through his head he heard a vehicle come roaring down the alley and brake to a stop outside the garage door, blocking it.

Someone pounded on the door.

“You’re surrounded, Mabruk. Open this door and come out with your hands up!”

He fired the pistol through the door. The report was just a mild pop. He heard a groan.

He was trapped!

Enraged, he fired two more shots through the door, then placed the blunt round silencer against his head above the right ear and pulled the trigger.