Threat warning

CHAPTER TWELVE

“I still don’t understand why they did this to you,” Christyne said as she fussed yet again at the cut in Ryan’s left eyebrow. Upon returning to their sweltering cell, she had had the presence of mind to dangle two of the water bottles out of one of the ventilation windows, suspended by Ryan’s shoelaces. Now that one was nearly frozen, she pressed it against his eye.

He yelped and pushed her hand away. “That hurts, Mom.”

She persisted, swinging the bottle in the air to avoid his grasp. “You need this to bring the swelling down.”

He might be nearly blind from the swelling, but he could still do good interference. “Give it to me, then. I’ll do it.”

His mom surrendered the block of ice, and he held it against the side of his face, near the cut, but not directly on top of it the way she had done. At least the bleeding had stopped.

“You must have done something to anger them before they did this to you,” Christyne pressed. He was pissed that she didn’t believe his version of what had happened.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said again. “Five minutes after they took me out of here, we were upstairs, and one of the guards just hit me. I hadn’t said anything. My hands were tied, for God’s sake.”

Christyne shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. You must have done something.”

That was it. “I did nothing!” Ryan roared, his voice echoing off the walls. “I didn’t do a damn thing! They just hit me.”

He saw his mom recoil from his words, and he liked that, even though yelling made everything hurt worse. He thought they might have cracked a rib on his left side.

“We have to figure out how to get out of here,” he said. “At least I do. Those guys want to kill me.”

“There is no way out of here,” Christyne said, “so don’t even talk about it.” She started straightening up the cell. Cleaning was her body language for shutting down discussion.

Ryan pulled the ice away from his eye. “Whose side are you on? We have to talk about it.”

She stopped her work and pointed at him with her forefinger. “Stop,” she said. “Right now. Just stop.”

“Stop what?”

“You’ve got that Indiana Jones look in your eye. I want you to stop planning whatever dangerous adventure you’ve got swimming around that imagination of yours.”

He scowled and cocked his head. “You know I’m talking about getting out of here, right?”

Mom went to work fluffing a pillow. “I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s foolish and you’re going to get yourself hurt.”

“ Foolish? You heard what they said up there, right? The part about how they’re going to kill us in a week?”

She scoffed, “Nobody’s going to kill anyone.”

Ryan gaped. “Excuse me? They already killed people on that bridge, and all that other shit they were saying.”

She shot him an angry glare. “Watch your mouth.”

He didn’t back down. “We’ve been kidnapped by terrorists. Whenever that happens, I get to say ‘shit,’ okay? Language doesn’t count when terrorists are trying to kill you. Isn’t that in the Mom Rule Book somewhere?”

She smiled, but he knew she didn’t want to.

Ryan pressed on. “So, if they’re willing to kill all those people just for the hell of it, what makes you think they wouldn’t want to kill us? Especially since they, you know, said they were going to kill us?”

She continued to fluff, the conversation over.

“Jesus!” Ryan dropped the ice bottle onto the bed and stood. “Why can’t you see this? If there’s any way to get out of here, we need to try it.”

Mom slammed the pillow to the floor. “Ryan James Nasbe, you are going to stop this, and you’re going to stop it right now. This is not one of your video games. I will not have you endangering us both by trying to be a hero. I’m in charge here, and we will do what we’re told. Sooner or later, when they get whatever it is they’re looking for, they will let us go.”

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll just stay here and die. Why not? I’ve had a good sixteen years.”

“No one is going to die!” Mom barked.

Ryan picked up his ice bottle, walked to his bed, and eased himself onto the spread. The frame cracked ominously. Lying on his back, he closed his eyes, pressed the bottle against his temple, and tried to figure out what was happening.

What was today, Tuesday? He wished they’d let him keep his watch.

They had to get out of here. If Dad were here, he’d be spending every second trying to find a way to make that happen. But Dad wasn’t here, was he? No, he was saving the rest of the world.

The thought brought instant remorse. It was an honor to serve your country, and as much as it sucked, it was the family’s patriotic duty to understand these things. Family, God, and country. That was the patriotic trinity worth dying to defend.

Mom knew this, too, so what was she doing? Why was she being so difficult?

Ryan opened his eyes and shifted his head so he could see could see her. She sat on the edge of her own bed, elbows on her knees, staring at her hands. In a rush of awareness, he got it. He was on his own to get them out of here.

As evening approached, the temperature in their prison cell began to drop again. The wall that had been so impossibly hot was cooling now, and the windows they’d opened were driving a frigid breeze into the space. Without bothering to ask permission, Ryan rose from his bed and closed them. The panes were like smaller versions of the windows they had in his school classrooms, rocking inward on hinges along the bottom edge of the rectangular panels. Where the window frames in school were made of metal, though, these were made of wood.

He took his time pushing the panels shut, examining their feasibility as routes of escape. They were too small for either of them to fit through.

Except maybe. The angle of the tilted pane made it impossible to slide through from below, but how difficult could it be to take a window apart? The hinges were held in by screws, and screws could be turned by just about anything with the right shape. Even a butter knife would do. He’d just have to do something to shrink his head and shoulders.

“Ryan, what are you doing?” Christyne asked.

He pushed the window shut and twisted the latch into place. “I’m getting cold.”

“Why don’t you put your sweater back on?”

“I will,” he said. But not quite yet. After all the sweating he’d done today, it felt good to feel a little cold. “You said they had cards. Want to play rummy?”

Jonathan reassembled his team in the War Room, and from the way they all avoided eye contact, he pretty much knew what was coming before anyone spoke.

“I’ve been searching all day, and I’ve got nothing,” Venice said. Jonathan heard the frustration in her voice. “Their Internet guy is good. He’s covered all their tracks. He’s routed that signal through two dozen different countries before landing it at that poor kid’s computer in Michigan. If there’s a way to trace its origin, I don’t know what it is.”

Translation: There was no way to trace its origins.

Jonathan turned to Gail. “The bombing in Michigan,” he prompted.

She had already opened the speckled theme notebook that had long been her method for tracking cases she worked on. “Sarfraz Janwari,” she said. “That was the name of the bomber. Pakistani by birth, and a longtime legal resident of the United States. For years, he worked in the auto industry, but he was laid off twenty months ago when the economy crashed. Thanks to Venice, I was able to access ICIS, and from there hack into the ongoing FBI file.”

“Technically, it’s not hacking,” Venice corrected. “The credentials you’re using are all real. They just don’t belong to you.”

Gail shook her head. “How we stay out of jail is a mystery.” “I told you you’d get used to playing for our team,” Jonathan quipped. Not too long ago, Gail Bonneville had been the planet’s straightest arrow.

Gail continued, “Mr. Janwari was more or less vaporized in the explosion. Seventeen children and four adults were killed outright, dozens wounded. The dead included his daughter, Aafia, whom he had just dropped off at the school.”

“What is it with these jihadist assholes?” Boxers growled. “They murder their own kids.”

Gail continued, “Preliminary analysis of the explosives shows the typical terrorist recipe of ANFO derivatives. The Bureau will go through the motions of tracking the components to their sources, but that’s always hit-or-miss. On that kind of thing, you’re pretty much dependent on witnesses stepping forward, and after incidents like this, the salesman involved is usually not all that anxious to step forward.”

Everyone in the room recognized ANFO as the acronym for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil-a homemade explosive that miners had used for years, and was still used by some. Its popularity as a terrorist weapon had much to do with the fact that all the components were obtainable at the local hardware store-the ammonium nitrate as fertilizer and the fuel oil as, well, fuel oil.

“Have they served the search warrant on Janwari’s house yet?” Jonathan asked.

“That’s ongoing,” Gail explained, turning three pages to find her notes on that. “The preliminary results there are interesting, though. Their primary sweep didn’t find any bomb makings in the house. The dogs didn’t even pick up traces.”

“Nitrates are the easiest thing in the world to detect, aren’t they?” Boxers asked.

Gail nodded. “Exactly.”

“What about Janwari the man?” Venice asked. “Does he fit the profile of a bomber?”

“The media will think so,” Gail said, “and that means the pundits and the politicians will think so.”

“But not the professionals?”

Gail shrugged. “He certainly looks the part racially, and he was laid off after a long career. Communications in his personnel file show that he believed himself to be discriminated against in the aftermath of nine-eleven. He’s Muslim, he lives in Flint, which is the home of some of the most rabid imams, and he’s facing financial distress. That makes him a prime candidate for recruitment by radicals.”

“Okay, I’m sold,” Boxers said.

“As will all the other talking heads be sold.”

“What’s the other side?” Jonathan asked. “You don’t seem moved by any of that.”

“I won’t say I’m unmoved,” Gail said. When she got thoughtful like this, a thing happened with her eyebrows that turned Jonathan on. A lot about Gail turned Jonathan on. “I mean, you can’t ignore the obvious completely, but it’s all too pat for me.”

“As if Osama Bin Laden was about subtext?” Boxers asked.

“He doesn’t count,” Gail countered. “He’s the one who established the baseline for the other cliches to follow. At face value, Janwari could be our guy. What bothers me, first of all, is that he’s a Sufi, which is one of the truly peace-loving sects of Islam. As far as I know, there’s never been a Sufi terrorist.” She looked at Boxers. “And before you say it, yes, I know there’s a first time for everything, but it would be a really big jump.

“Next, there’s the fact that in all of his known correspondence-even the ones where he was alleging racial discrimination-there’s not a single threat to do harm to anyone or anything. But the single factor above all others that makes me doubt that he did this intentionally is the fact that his daughter was there.”

She paused for effect. “According to early interviews with school officials all the way back to elementary school, Sarfraz Janwari was the picture of the caring father. He was a regular at PTA meetings, he made most of his daughters’ sporting events, and he never missed an orchestra concert when she was playing. In fact, he even chaperoned a couple of the orchestra trips.”

“Did he do any of that in the twenty months since he was laid off?” Jonathan asked. “A lot can change with that kind of financial stress.”

“Not when it comes to loving your kids,” Venice said.

“Couldn’t he have assumed that he was doing a good thing by martyring her for the cause?” Boxers asked. “Though I’m not sure what a middle school girl would do with the forty-two virgins.”

Jonathan burned him with a glare, and Boxers looked at the table.

“The Janwaris were Sufis,” Gail repeated. “They don’t buy into that martyrdom crap. They’re all about loving their children and loving their God.”

“Let’s assume that Janwari is innocent,” Jonathan said. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that somebody planted those explosives in his car, and, I don’t know, detonated them remotely or something. Where does that leave us?”

“Obvious shit is obvious for a reason,” Boxers said. “If it walks and quacks like a duck, I’ll assume it’s not a fox.”

“Roll with me,” Jonathan said. “If some homegrown terror group was trying to frame Islamists for all this killing, what better way is there to seal the deal than having one of them detonate a bomb? At a school, no less.”

Venice held up her hand to command the floor. “There’s more,” she said. “This is just coming in from the wire services. The school where the bomb went off-Gerald Ford Middle School-has the smallest per capita enrollment of Islamic students of any in the area.”

Boxers held out his hands, as if to say, ta-da.

Venice wasn’t finished. “And the four major television networks are reporting that not a single known terrorist organization is stepping forward to claim responsibility for any of the events of the past three days. Not only that, five of the most active groups, including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, have announced that they had nothing to do with them.”

Boxers scoffed, “If al-Qaeda says it, then it must be true.”

“Close,” Jonathan said. “They have a long history of claiming responsibility when they own it, and they rarely lie about it.”

“Honor among murderers?” Venice asked.

“More like good public relations,” Jonathan said. “I guess if you kill and own up to it, people are more afraid of you.”

“Plus, you don’t want to piss off your competition by claiming credit for murders that don’t belong to you,” Gail said.

That this kind of political calculus-all of it built around the murders of innocent people-actually made sense, made Jonathan despair for the future.

“So let’s just make this logical leap,” Jonathan said. “Let’s say that this Army of Allah group is not what it wants us to believe. How does that bring us any closer to finding out where they are?”

Blank faces all around.

“Well, that’s the mission,” Jonathan said.

“No kidding,” Gail replied. “Just how do we do that?” He turned to Venice. “What spigots do we have running for intelligence?”

“We’re monitoring ICIS obsessively,” she replied. “And we’re monitoring all the news services. I’ve designed bots to seek out the key words that might mean something, but there’s not much more I can do. If they broadcast again, we’ll have another shot, but until then, or until we catch a break, we’re dead in the water.”

Jonathan thought about that, and then turned to Boxers, whose shoulders sagged.

“You’re gonna call Roleplay Rollins, aren’t you?” the Big Guy guessed.