Into the Crossfire Page 6

  “His name’s Mike Keillor and he’ll stop by tomorrow. I’ll give you his number.”

  “Perfect. I’ll—” She stopped. “Keillor? I thought you said he was your brother.”

  “He is, in every way that counts.” Well, that was intriguing. Sam didn’t elaborate.

  “Okay. Having him stop by a couple of times would be a big help. I think those two are dumber than they are nasty, but—”

  “You can be stupid and dangerous at the same time.” Sam’s mouth tightened. “The world’s full of very stupid and very dangerous ass—men.”

  “I grew up all over the world,” she answered. “I know that deep in my bones.”

  She smiled at him. He was still turned toward her, a set expression on his face. However grim he looked, he’d actually been very kind, finding a good solution to a thorny problem while allowing her to save face.

  Instead of putting the car in motion, as she expected him to, he leaned forward and gave her a kiss. A peck, really. But Nicole somehow found it hard to breathe. She huffed out a little breath of air, opened her mouth—and nothing came out.

  She could object, of course. It was beyond forward to assume that he could simply up and…and kiss her. Just like that. But Nicole knew herself and knew that pretending to be outraged wouldn’t work, because it would be a lie. The brief kiss had been far from unpleasant. Unsettling and unnerving, but not unpleasant.

  It had been like coming into fleeting contact with something immensely powerful, something that could burn if the contact was too close. She could almost hear the hum of power coming from him.

  He started up the engine and was pulling out before she could react. He was staring straight ahead but she felt he was aware of her every move. Soldiers developed good situational awareness, as they called it.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that since I first saw you moving in.” The deep voice was matter-of-fact, stating something obvious. He slanted a quick glance at her, not grinning like a male who’d made an advance. No, he was deadly serious, as if stating a military objective. “It was better than I imagined.”

  Nicole huffed out a breath from a suddenly tight chest. She had no comeback, none at all.

  New York

  June 28

  He was tall, blond and blue-eyed. Very fair, prone to freckling in the sun. Courtesy, no doubt, of a Crusader who had raped one of his ancestors in Acre, bequeathing the cowardly genes of the West. The cowardice had been bred out of him by centuries of Arab warriors, but the coloring remained.

  He didn’t mind. It was a gift from Allah. His weapon against the infidels, to be used to the fullest, imshallah. He’d been born for this. Born to fit in with the unclean. Born for revenge.

  Muhammed Wahed, aka Paul Preston, had the perfect cover. A Manhattan stockbroker, one of the tens of thousands toiling in the money mills on Wall Street. It was a genuine cover. He’d studied economics at Stanford and had made more than $10 million in the past five years investing in futures. He was one of few traders to profit in the recession.

  Most of the money had gone to “the Cause.” Freedom for Palestine. The destruction of the Jews. And where better to make the money for that destruction than in the belly of the beast, Manhattan?

  His brethren in Hamas had worked hard on this. Twenty years training him to blend in, and three years of planning, of procurement, evading the sensors of the NSA and the spies who were everywhere.

  Muhammed had worked a lifetime for what would happen over a few hours in five days’ time. The day before the celebration of the Fourth of July. An apt moment to bring America down. By the Fourth of July, Manhattan would be a wasteland and America brought to her knees.

  The plan was perfect. Forty martyrs in a secret hold of a ship. Several canisters of cesium 137, to be apportioned in equal parts to the martyrs. Forty martyrs wearing shaheed explosive belts laced with radioactive cesium, detonating at the same moment on July 3 throughout Manhattan.

  Muhammed knew Manhattan, knew exactly where the financial nerve points were. He’d pinpointed forty buildings, the very nerve centers of the American and the world economy. Banks, brokerage houses, hedge funds. The SEC. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

  The martyrs didn’t have to go up to the offices, necessarily, though Muhammed had made appointments under false names with the CEOs and directors and presidents for all of them. But if they couldn’t make it to the heart of the buildings, it would be enough to enter the lobbies and blow themselves up to make the buildings uninhabitable. The tens of thousands of workers in the buildings would have to exit from the irradiated lobbies and would never go back to work again. Only hazmat teams would ever enter the buildings. By the next day, all of Manhattan would be evacuated.

  All the paperwork, the computers holding the economy together—gone. Completely unusable. All the drones working in the financial mills—dying of radiation poisoning.

  Perfect.

  Finishing the work begun on September 11 and making the entire island a radioactive desert for thirty years, the way the West had made his homeland a desert.

  Western capitalism would be no more.

  Bringing the West to its knees has been his dream since he had been recruited into the organization at the age of ten.

  They’d found him in the camps, a homeless orphan, scrounging scraps from the destitute, dressed in rags, this blond, blue-eyed, light-skinned freak.

  They had taken him in, given him a family and a purpose. He was like an arrow, aimed straight at the heart of the corrupt and licentious West. Hamas had brought in tutors, instructing him not only in the language of the West, English, but in its ways.

  At times, he had sensed that they were afraid that he would succumb to its lures, but there was no risk of that. None. There was no honor and no solidarity to be found among the infidels. Muhammed’s heart and soul belonged forever to Hamas and to his people, to the day of his death.

  They’d fought, his handlers and him. He wanted to become a warrior, shaheed, a martyr. It was the purest life he could imagine, exacting vengeance against the countries who were trying to crush Islam. Giving his life up seemed like the noblest purpose he could imagine.

  But it was felt that the gift of his coloring, his looks, was too precious to waste. So Muhammed watched with sullen jealousy as other young men in the secret training camps were dispatched to meet a noble warrior’s death while he spent his days and nights with tutor after tutor, instilling in him the ability to infiltrate the enemy with ease, the better to destroy him.

  English, French, literature, music, math, science. And the terrible pop culture of the West, filled with shameless movies and music, whoreish women and soulless men. His head was filled with the useless knowledge necessary to pass as one of them. It turned out that he even had an aptitude for studies, which in his secret heart filled him with as much shame as his appearance. His young heart had ached to be just like his brethren, to move and live with them as one. But he’d been told over and over again that Allah had singled him out for a special mission.

  That which had singled him out as a homeless boy in the camps, made everyone look at him with loathing and suspicion, was to be used in the name of Allah to slay their enemies.

  So Muhammed studied hard, becoming well versed in the ways of the West. An identity was created: Paul Preston.

  One entire edge of the Strip borders the Mediterranean. It was easy enough to smuggle him out and get him into Italy, where he emerged in Rome with a new US passport and a business-class ticket to California.

  He was sent to Stanford to study economics, where he ex-celled. It was his way of combating the enemy, by studying its face, understanding its corrupt black soul.

  He became Paul Preston, born of an American father and an English mother. He graduated summa cum laude in economics, with a network of future movers and shakers to use.

  He was set up in Manhattan with a million dollars and orders to join a brokerage firm. Hamas’s backers had plenty of money, and h
ad been willing to write the sum off.

  But it turned out that Muhammed was clever in the ways of the Great Satan. The million soon grew to five, then ten. He developed a solid reputation as a very good, very careful steward of money.

  They bought him an apartment on the Upper East Side that was perfect for someone of his socioeconomic status. Muhammed—now Paul—had a season ticket to the Met, wintered at Vail and summered at Martha’s Vineyard.

  And all this time, his brethren’s plans were developing, all the pieces being put in place. Equipment bought or stolen, martyrs recruited. Radioactive material slowly acquired.

  Finally, finally, the time had come. Muhammed had begun despairing of ever being of use to the Cause, when suddenly a message arrived. An encrypted DVD in his mailbox, with instructions on how to destroy it once he had absorbed its message.

  How his heart had pounded, how proud he had been of his brothers, of the plan a hooded brother had laid out on the disk. It was sheer genius.

  Forty men, walking dirty bombs.

  All those years of study and work would finally pay off. The Brotherhood needed Muhammed’s help in knowing where to aim these human daggers. They needed names and places. Names and places only someone on the inside of the finance industry could know.

  Muhammed knew them, oh yes. Knew exactly where the dagger’s point should thrust. Which businesses to destroy—a surgical strike at the very beating heart of the economy.

  The entire financial district, gone, destroyed, rendered a wasteland. Manhattan emptied, its inhabitants rendered radioactive lepers, condemned to die a slow and painful death.

  Perfect. A plan that would bring the West to its knees, in submission to the Prophet’s will.

  It was all in place, all perfect. And now this. Muhammed frowned at the printout of the decrypted email he’d just received.

  Trouble.

  A crew member of the Marie Claire, the ship carrying the martyrs, reported that a member of the Marseille Port Authority saw the secret hold, had seen the men, the shaheed belts and the canister with its universally understood biohazard symbol and had grasped the significance. Luckily, the man had been terminated but had been alone in his office with his computer for a good five minutes.

  Checking the server log, one message with attachment had been sent to pearce@wordsmith.com in the time frame between the clerk’s arrival at his office and his death.

  Close examination of the attachment showed merely a technical text pertaining to plans to expand the harbor, but the message and its recipient had to be destroyed.

  Google told him that www.wordsmith.com was a translation agency based in San Diego. Its owner’s name was Nicole Pearce.

  Something had to be done fast. The Marie Claire was on its way. It would stop a hundred miles from the port of New York. The martyrs would be offloaded at night to four fast boats that would land in New Jersey, and from there would be bused to Manhattan. The Marie Claire would land briefly in port and be on its way to Panama by the time the bombs exploded. No one would ever suspect her.

  It was all in place except for the wild card of Nicole Pearce, potential trouble.

  Twenty years of planning was coming to fruition. It was unthinkable that they fail. Even more unthinkable that they fail because of a Western woman.

  They wouldn’t fail. Muhammed had a plan.

  At the topmost levels of American finance, in the heart of America’s softness, Muhammed had been astonished to learn that there were hard men. Money was defended as fiercely as land in this arcane world, by the iron laws of warfare, if necessary. Like all overlords, the kings of finance required warriors to deal with problems. A whistleblower threatening to bring down a lucrative deal, a divorcing wife threatening to report hidden assets to the IRS, the head of a rival company whose plane had to go down…these required warriors to deal with them. And the men of money knew where to go.

  Several times, late at night, after a luxurious meal and over the thousand-dollar bottle of cognac or brandy Paul had learned to consume, a man was mentioned. He had many names and no one knew his background, save that he had been trained to be a ruthless but efficient killer by the US Army. It didn’t matter what his name was, what was important was what he could do.

  Anything.

  He could do anything at all for you, if the price was right. He also commanded vast resources and highly trained men. No matter what the mission, he could deal with it.

  The world of high finance guarded its wealth ferociously when threatened and it had its enforcer—shadowy, fast, smart. Paul only knew his code name: Outlaw. He knew nothing else, except that there was a cell phone number.

  He did not have it but he knew who did.

  Muhammed picked up his phone and began the long process of arranging a meeting with one of the most powerful men in the world.

  It was a humiliating process but Muhammed swallowed his pride.

  Soon enough, the world of dishonor would be wiped out, and Umma would rise from the ashes of the West.

  Chapter 4

  San Diego

  To Nicole’s surprise, Sam Reston hadn’t booked at one of the top ten most expensive restaurants in San Diego, or one listed in the food guides, preferably one that had been recently reviewed by Lauren Spitz, the trendiest San Diego food guru, whose word was more authoritative than that of God.

  Men have very simple thought patterns. Nicole had learned that fact through long exposure to the gender.

  Sam Reston knew perfectly well that she had thought he was some kind of a low-level hired hand, one step up from a bum, where instead he was the proprietor of a successful company and probably earned ten or twenty times what she did.

  A normal guy would go all out to prove just how wrong she’d been about him and just how successful he was, how powerful. Rub it in. Make her suffer a little remorse for thinking badly of him.

  The easiest way to do that was to spend a lot of money on dinner, the more exclusive and expensive the restaurant, the better.

  But it looked like Sam Reston had hidden depths.

  The light kiss had shut her right up. She had no idea what to say. So she spent the car trip gratefully mulling over the fact that maybe Sam had engineered her an escape from Creepy and Creepier.

  There was silence in the car as they drove south, to an outlying part of town she’d never been to before. She looked around as Sam started slowing down. This was definitely not expensive restaurant territory.

  It was, however, a lively area, with a great deal of ethnic diversity, mostly Hispanic but with strong Asian flavors. Sam drove by taperias and taquerìas and Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, finally pulling into the parking lot of a low, sprawling building surrounded by gardens. BALADI, announced a big billboard, and if that wasn’t enough, there was a beautifully rendered cedar tree covering half the billboard.

  Nicole gave a delighted laugh. She turned to Sam as he parked the car in an overflowing lot. “Oh my God! A Lebanese restaurant! How on earth could you know I love Lebanese cooking?”

  His hard mouth turned up at her excitement. “I confess I checked your website. It said you spent some time in Beirut. No one can live in Lebanon and not love the food. I love it, too. This is one of the best Lebanese restaurants I’ve ever eaten at, so I hope you enjoy it.”

  He was a miracle worker. Already, her muscles were relaxing. However the night ended, she’d have had a fantastic meal and a rare evening dining out.

  It occurred to her that she really needed this evening. She hadn’t eaten out in, what? Six months, maybe? No, more like seven months. And then it had been to an extremely boring restaurant with bland, forgettable food. She’d ignored her instincts and accepted a client’s dinner invitation. His conversation had been blander and more tasteless even than the food. He’d been appalled at how ill her father was, though Pops hadn’t even been fully confined to a wheelchair yet. It had been a disastrous evening and she hadn’t been out since.

  No time. No money.

&nbs
p; Whatever company Sam Reston turned out to be, she was really looking forward to the meal.

  There was a long gravel walkway and he put a hand to her back as they walked up. She was actually grateful for that hand as her sandals had been chosen more for looks than function. The heat of his touch penetrated the material of her jacket and the dress.

  She looked around as they approached the entrance. The building wasn’t luxurious, but looked well tended and friendly. The big picture windows showing happy-looking diners inside sparkled in the evening light. The décor was simple and functional, waiters bustling to and fro.

  The grounds were extensive. Off to the right she could see—

  “Oh my gosh. Are those tomato plants?” Row after row of perfectly spaced stakes with small green knobs hanging off the plants. And now that she looked more closely, she could see tiny, tender tufts of baby lettuce, brightly colored peppers, zucchini.

  Sam looked down at her. “The proprietor grows most of his own produce. He says that way he knows what he’s getting. And it’s delicious, which is an added advantage.”

  She smiled. “It reminds me of the hillsides outside Beirut. All those truck garden allotments.” You could always count on seeing an elderly member of the family, carefully weeding and watering, a kerchief on his head to protect against the hot Mediterranean sun.

  “Yeah.” Sam smiled. “We used to go up into the hills and picnic with the guys we were training. Picked figs off the trees, it was great.”

  Sam was known here.

  When he opened the door for her, a handsome olive-skinned man wearing a long apron came out of the kitchen and rushed toward him. They gave each other one of those manly thumps on the back where women would have kissed, and the man turned dark, intelligent eyes to her.

  Sam did the honors. “Nicole, meet the best chef in the state, Bashir Fakhry. Bashir, this is Nicole Pearce. She lived in Beirut for a few years.”