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They spent the next two hours going over their plan—studying a layout of the park and discussing contingencies. The director would send more people if he could, if the intel warranted it. Twenty different disaster scenarios in twenty different towns at the same time. Dash hadn’t been bluffing. Confirmation of sites similar to the fishing shed was coming in from all over the country. Once again, the agency was running a step behind.
Chances were that help wouldn’t be coming. They should proceed as if they were on their own.
They arrived back in town two hours before the concert was set to begin, splitting up and observing the park site from every angle, looking for anything suspicious, anything that would indicate exactly where or how he planned to detonate the explosive.
They came up with nothing. The park was clean.
The sketch artist had finished working with Miriam and had forwarded a composite sketch of Dash. Nora uploaded it to her phone, and they showed it to anyone who might have seen him.
Her director had shared pertinent information with the local police, along with a warning that a dangerous suspect was in the area. Nora didn’t bother providing those details to the people she showed the sketch. They didn’t need to know, and she didn’t want to alarm them when this could be a mere distraction perpetrated by Dash. The director thought it was real. The intelligence confirmed it was real, as did what they’d found in the shed.
But Dash was wily. He could have planted all of this and killed Tate. He could also be far away by now, planning something much worse. No one had seen a man fitting Dash’s description.
No one had seen anything out of place.
Nora released the clip from her gun, checked that it was full, slapped the clip back in, and racked the slide.
“We’ll find him,” Ben assured her.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” He nodded as if it were possible to become more convinced by saying it. “We will.”
They’d met back at the buggy and taken a moment to arm up, which equaled Nora checking the gun she’d been carrying all day and slipping an extra clip into the back pocket of her jeans.
“Still have your radio?”
Ben held it up and wiggled it back and forth. “You?”
She patted the front of her denim vest. She’d feel better in her Kevlar, but you couldn’t walk around a Saturday night concert in Kevlar and not alarm people. “Let’s go.”
They were running out of time.
In spite of the information her director had shared with the local police, the decision was made to go ahead with the evening’s festivities. Local officials were skeptical that any sort of terrorist attack could happen in their town. They’d put their entire police force on duty for the event, but other than Tate’s dead body they’d found nothing to concern them. Perhaps he’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Someone was making announcements over the large speakers set up around the park. “Music starts in twenty minutes, folks. Get your refreshments, grab the kids, and find your seats. We’ll start at seven o’clock sharp.”
Nora exchanged a glance with Ben. Twenty minutes. Whatever was going to happen would happen soon.
They walked side-by-side through the crowd and stopped near the center. Standing back to back they pivoted in a circle, watching, looking, needing to separate the madman from the crowd.
He was there.
She knew it as surely as Ben knew they would find him. Why couldn’t she see him? Why couldn’t she stop what was about to happen? She hadn’t been able to save Tate, but she would avenge his murder. All her training ached to fire the shot that would stop this.
As her frustration built to a near crescendo, she found herself doing something she hadn’t done in many years. In her heart, she cried out to God. Surely He would save these people. He wouldn’t allow such destruction to happen.
Would He?
If she’d hoped to hear a still small voice, she was disappointed.
No angel appeared at her side directing her right or left.
No heavenly chorus broke into song declaring what her path should be.
She broke out of her reverie when a small boy standing next to her grabbed his mother’s hand. Amish, wearing the same clothes as his father only in miniature, he looked up at his momma—his mamm as Ben said. The smile on the child’s face was practically angelic, and his voice, though pleading, hadn’t slipped into a whine. “You promised. Remember? If I ate all my dinner, if I was good, I could have a snow cone. I’ve been good. Right?”
The mother laughed. “Ya, you’ve been very gut.”
“Snow cones,” Ben said, his voice a whisper in her ear.
“What?”
“Snow cones.” He turned south. “I’ve never...I’ve never seen a snow cone truck in Shipshe before.”
They broke into a run at the same moment, dodging families, feinting left and right.
The snow cone truck was parked near the stage. A long line of children waited patiently for their turn. Nora nearly tripped over a toddler. A parent called out, “Hey, slow down before you hurt someone,” and Dash looked up from the trailer’s window. His eyes met hers, and even from the distance of thirty yards she saw a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth.
Then he was gone.
Adrenaline coursed through her veins and she ran harder, faster, hitting the back steps of the trailer at the same time that Ben did.
No one was there. Dash had fled. She scanned the room and saw jars of syrup, chests of ice, a cash drawer, and beneath the counter a box flashing three minutes.
Not enough time.
She couldn’t call in a bomb squad. She didn’t know how to dismantle it.
Ben was standing behind her, his breathing ragged.
“Get them out of here, Ben. Get them all away from this trailer.”
She darted out the back, spotted Dash crossing the main road, and took off after him.
🙛
The red numbers flashed 2:55, 2:54, 2:53.
Ben’s life had come to this. His purpose was in the small faces looking up to the window, waiting for a cold syrupy treat on a summer evening in August.
The woman standing at the front of the line with three children looked up in alarm as he tore around the corner of the trailer. He picked up the smallest, tossed the child into her arms, and tucked the other two under his arms as if they were no heavier than the scarecrows his mamm once kept in her garden.
“There’s a bomb! Run! Everyone run!”
Later he would puzzle over why they believed him—an Amish man, snatching up children and screaming of Armageddon.
He would never completely understand the why or even the how of it, but they did believe him.
People started running—Amish and Englisch— helping one another to their feet and urging each other to move faster. A great wave of humanity all seeking a safe harbor. They left behind blankets and dinners and baskets and baby strollers. They left behind the things of their lives that didn’t really matter, the things that could be purchased again. They grabbed their loved ones and their friends and the strangers beside them, and they moved with great urgency to the opposite side of the park.
He’d stayed toward the back after handing the children over to their father and pushing them to the north, telling them to go—to run. Ben’s mind tried to calculate how much time had passed since he stepped out of the trailer.
What were the red numbers flashing now?
Had they moved everyone in time?
His eyes scanned the sea of possessions in front of him, needing to be sure that no one was left. A woman’s voice came over the speakers telling everyone to remain calm, and sirens were blaring in the distance.
And then the red, glowing numbers on the small black box must have reached zero because there was an explosion, and people were screaming, and something was running down the side of his face. And the spot where the snow cone trailer had been was nothing more than a wall of flame.
🙛
Nora kept up with Dash until he ducked behind the Davis Mercantile.
She had gained a lot of ground, but he was a few seconds ahead of her, and when she turned the corner she saw only a quilt shop window, closed stores, empty parking spaces. Everyone was at the park. She’d heard the explosion as she was running but hadn’t turned back. She couldn’t turn back. He would do it again, and it would be worse. She was not going to let that happen.
Her radio squeaked—Ben asking where she was. She reached up with her left and turned the volume all the way down. She led with her right, the bicep once again throbbing, the gun in front of her and chest high. She walked down the alley behind the building, heel to toe, silent except for the sound of her beating heart raging in her ears.
He’d stashed a car there, an old beat up Volkswagen. He looked up as he slipped the key into the lock, and again he smiled.
“Step away from the car.”
“Shouldn’t you be over there? Saving people?” The smile slipped away, like a mask might fall off an actor, and she saw him for what he was—a bitter, frightened, and angry man.
“I said, step away from the car.”
“You people. Your money is so important to you that you’d rather risk the lives of hundreds, of thousands...”
“Both hands in the air.” She closed the gap between them to ten feet and pointed the gun like they’d first trained her—center of mass.
“I was trying to keep you safe. I was trying to wake you up.”
“With a bomb in a public park?”
“You should be thanking me. Now you see how vulnerable you are. Now everyone will see. These people think they’re safe because they’re in a small town, but no one’s safe. Not anymore.”
“Dash, I need you to step away from the car.”
“A terrorist doesn’t need to show up at a park in a snow cone truck with a bomb. All he needs is a laptop and a programmer smart enough to hack into your systems and drop the grid.”
“So why the bomb?”
“To wake you up, and so you’d know that what I do next, I do not do lightly.”
“You’re not going to do anything. It’s over.”
“That bomb might have killed a few hundred, but when I hack into the electrical grid in the northwest or the dam controls at Hoover or the 9-1-1 system in New York, thousands will die, and that will be your fault, agent. You should have just paid the ransom.” And with his smile firmly once again in place, he reached into the pocket of his jacket.
She didn’t even hesitate. She pulled the trigger.