HOUSTON, TEXAS
Houston PD Senior Officer Seth Barnes had been in the force for over two decades. Most of his old graduating class from 1995 had moved up to become detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, or even captains. Some had left the force altogether to join agencies like the DEA and the FBI, or the more lucrative private security business.
Barnes remained in uniform and in the streets, where he could make a difference, where he belonged. His patrol car was his home. His partner of twelve years, Officer John Parker, was the closest thing he had to a family after his wife died in a car accident four years ago because some asshole couldn’t wait to return a text.
Barnes, who’d stopped smoking a year ago and now constantly chewed nicotine gum and wore patches, drove while Parker sipped from a paper cup of steaming coffee.
They cruised by the large parking lot belonging to the Compass BBVA Stadium at the intersection of Dowling and Texas Streets, in the heart of the downtown area. The lot was leased on weekdays to accommodate commuters, but today was Sunday afternoon and there was no game scheduled, meaning it was supposed to be empty.
Only it wasn’t.
“What do you think?” Barnes asked while pointing at the large white van parked in the middle of the lot next to a blue sedan.
Parker put down the coffee, peered across the street, and shrugged. “They shouldn’t be there. But after the week we’ve had, are you really going to worry about issuing a couple of fucking tickets?”
Barnes sighed. His partner had a foul mouth, but he also had a point.
Thanks to President Vaccaro’s Recovery Act, this was the first day since the bomb went off that the downtown area was clear of anything resembling an angry crowd. And thanks to the city’s efficient cleanup crews, most of the mess had been swept away. Only a few boarded-up windows remained. And now with the National Guard also patrolling the streets in numbers, he hoped the city would return to some semblance of normalcy by tomorrow, when businesses and schools were due to reopen. The mayor and the governor seemed quite aligned with President Vaccaro’s message to get everyone back into their routines as soon as possible.
Your job is doing what you were doing the day before the bomb. Do your part to get the nation back on its feet. My job is to catch those who did it while doing everything possible and impossible for the people of New York City.
Barnes stared at the two vehicles, recalling the quote from the president while she stood on a podium at the edge of the quarantined zone around ground zero. The day before the bomb he had been patrolling these streets, responding to typical dispatches, from domestic disturbances to traffic accidents.
And issuing parking tickets.
“You fucking kidding me?” Parker cursed when Barnes turned the cruiser around and stopped at the corner.
“It’s our job, Johnny.”
“Whatever, Mr. Nicorette. Though I speak for the whole department when I say we all liked you a heck of a lot better when you were smoking.”
“Don’t start. I’m still the same damn guy.”
“Yeah, in your damn mind. But hey, why don’t you call this one in? Maybe the Guard can assist since they’re ‘Always Ready. Always There.’” Parker made quotation marks with his fingers.
Barnes frowned. Sometimes his partner could act like such an idiot. “Do you really think we could have brought this city under control without them?”
He sipped more coffee and slowly shrugged. “All right, all right. Look, I love the Guard. I just don’t want someone pissing in our pond. And I’m still a little on edge after … Hey, look.” Parker pointed at the parking lot.
Barnes turned back and saw a man getting out of the van and into the passenger side of the sedan, before it accelerated toward the exit.
“Well,” Parker added, “I don’t know about you, partner, but I can’t imagine a scenario where that can be any good.”
Barnes floored the cruiser while Parker tossed the coffee out the window and turned on the lights and siren. He then called it in, both on the standard HPD channel as well as the channel preselected for National Guard emergencies.
Rather than decelerating when spotting the incoming patrol car, the sedan, a Toyota Camry, tried to outrun them. It reached the street and fishtailed while heading straight for the highway entrance ramp two blocks away.
But the Camry was no match for the police cruiser.
Barnes easily caught up to it within a half block and hit the Camry’s rear quarter panel with his heavy-duty front bumper push bar, sending it into a spin.
The Camry whirled twice across the wide street, its driver obviously not experienced enough to know how to counter the rotation. The passenger-side wheels struck the curb, the car nearly flipped, then crashed against a large oak.
Barnes stopped his car a couple dozen feet from the Camry’s front grille. He jumped out seconds later along with Parker, weapons drawn, using the open doors as shields.
“Show me your hands!” he shouted, his Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol aimed at the passenger while his partner covered the driver.
The men inside seemed in shock, dazed, almost nonresponsive. But they appeared conscious. He could see their eyes blinking, their heads moving.
But he could not see their hands.
“Your hands!” Barnes shouted again.
MAC-10s materialized out of both windows. Their muzzle flashes pulsated with gunfire, the sound cracking down the street.
Barnes reacted quickly. He jumped back in the front seat as a barrage ripped into the door, shattering the window, peppering metal with the sound of a dozen hammers. Parker was pushed back by the fusillade, his figure vanishing from view as he fell back on the street.
Instincts took over.
Barnes put the cruiser in gear and floored it while remaining below the windshield. The heavy patrol car leaped forward, tires screeching, accelerating, building momentum. It rammed the much lighter Toyota, crushing its hood, shattering the windshield. The momentum lifted the sedan and tossed it sideways against another oak a dozen feet away, the frame nearly wrapping itself around the wide trunk.
Rolling out, Barnes aimed his gun at the wreck. Steam hissed from the radiator, a rear tire still spun, and the men no longer moved. One of them had fallen out the side window only to be crushed by the weight of the car when it landed on its side, limbs twisted at unnatural angles. The second gunman lay on top of his comrade, his face covered with glass. But his right hand still held the MAC-10, and he began to turn it toward Barnes.
For the first time in almost a decade, Barnes fired his service weapon. Three times, all shots hitting the man in the face.
He ran back to Parker’s side as two Humvees from the National Guard turned the corner, accelerating toward them. Barnes reached his partner, noting blood pouring from a shoulder wound, as soldiers leaped out, surrounding the Camry. One of them was a medic who knelt next to Barnes, opening his kit and applying pressure to the injury.
“That Ford van!” Barnes shouted, stepping back to give the medic room to work just as a young National Guard lieutenant rushed to his side. “They were trying to get away from that van!”
Within fifteen minutes a dozen more Humvees, twice as many HPD patrol cars, two ambulances, three fire trucks, and probably a combined hundred soldiers and police officers arrived at the scene. The city’s best bomb squad had cordoned the entire parking lot. TV crews set up shop beyond the police perimeter as three black Suburbans drove up to the bomb squad. Men and women in FBI SWAT gear as well as in business suits jumped out and conferred with the bomb squad chief, the captain of the Guard, and two HPD captains.
While paramedics tended Parker’s wound and Barnes held his partner’s hand, the low, pulsating sound of a helicopter echoed off the surrounding skyscrapers.
A Black Hawk materialized over the parking lot. Its camouflaged silhouette hovered off to the side, landing softly on the asphalt near the FBI SUVs.
A woman jumped out first, tall, slender, her light olive skin suggesting a Hispanic descent. She also wore an FBI SWAT uniform. Her long hair swirled in the downwash as she ran from the chopper directly to those who appeared to be in charge. Five men dressed for warfare and wielding sound-suppressed MP7A1s followed her. Their camouflaged faces blended them with their dark battledress. One of them, a bald and stocky man with hard-edged features, appeared to be in charge, and he engaged the heads of the other groups.
Before long, a pair of bomb disposal robots maneuvered to the sides of the white van. Their tall booms positioned cameras to provide clear views of the interior to the personnel behind laptops a hundred feet away.
Barnes watched from a distance as paramedics sedated his partner, patched him up, and rolled him into the rear of an ambulance before speeding away.
Sighing, he joined a group of HPD uniformed officers and detectives in suits gathered just beyond the Black Hawk, his captain among them.
“Good reaction, Barnes,” HPD Captain Pete Dawson said while several colleagues patted him on the back. “Saved your partner’s life.”
“Thank you, sir. Will our boys get a chance to work this one?” He motioned toward the detectives conferring in a circle a dozen feet away.
“Nah,” Dawson replied, pointing at the group that had just arrived via helicopter. “This one’s for people with a higher pay grade than us.”
“But it’s our city,” Barnes said.
“Not today.”
“Who are they, anyway?”
“Hell if I know, Barnes,” Dawson said. “Hell if I know.”
* * *
“This is bullshit! We’re wasting time with those stupid toys,” Monica said, standing next to Colonel Stark and Hollis Gallagher, the ranking DHS officer. He happened to be the same guy running that ill-fated cross-agency task force at the Port of Houston that she’d walked away from three days ago.
For Monica it was hate at first sight. Gallagher was tall and well groomed, wore expensive suits and shoes, and probably spent more on haircuts than she did.
The three of them observed the bomb squad robots humming around the van. Ryan, Larson, Danny, and Hagen stood to the side but were obviously within earshot, because they seemed amused at her outburst.
“Why’s that, ASAC Cruz?” Hollis asked.
“Because if this was the real thing, we would be standing in the middle of a fucking crater the size of three football fields surrounded by square miles of smoking rubble. That’s why.”
“So … you don’t think this thing—”
“If this thing were going to go off, it would have already done so. My gut’s telling me this ain’t it.”
“Last time we listened to your gut we lost a dozen agents, so if you don’t mind, this time we will—”
Gallagher found it hard to continue when his throat was being squeezed expertly.
“Let him go, Cruz,” Stark said.
Monica released him and said, “If you ever say that again, I will put a bullet in both your knees and you will forever remember who did it and why you’ll never walk right.”
Gallagher stepped back and massaged his throat while Stark slowly shook his head. Ryan whispered something to his buddies along the lines of Monica making new friends. She ran a hand behind her back and flipped him the bird.
“ASAC Cruz,” Gallagher said in between coughs. “You cannot … put your hands on and threaten … a federal agent, and this … this is the best lead we’ve got since you lost them in Mexico.”
“Wrong,” Monica replied. “I did just assault and threaten a federal agent, and this event where we are all standing and jerking each other off … is a diversion, and meanwhile the bastards are taking the real bomb to the real target.”
“Yeah? And where’s that?”
“Disney fucking World for all I know. But we sure as hell aren’t going to figure it out standing here … and I don’t have the time to prove you wrong again.”
“That’s enough. Both of you,” Stark said before Gallagher could retort. “Let’s just see what the man has to say,” he added, pointing to the bomb squad chief walking toward them.
“Bots detected radiation inside the van,” the chief reported. He was a man in his early fifties with a raspy voice that suggested years of smoking.
“I knew it!” said Gallagher.
“But … that’s the problem,” the chief added. “The levels are wrong.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gallagher.
“It means,” interrupted Stark, “that a real gun-type device based on uranium-235 would not give out much radiation in its predetonation form, certainly not in any harmful levels, and most certainly not enough to be detected outside a van.”
“That’s correct,” said the chief.
“And what does that mean?” pressed Gallagher.
Faced with the choice of slugging this idiot or counting to ten, Monica chose the latter. She parked her tongue and waited for technicians to access the rear of the van and expose an opened yellow barrel marked with a radiation hazard symbol under the words:
MD ANDERSON CANCER CENTER
MEDICAL RADIATION WASTE
And it was surrounded by plastic explosives.
“Need everyone to move back another two hundred feet,” said the bomb chief after estimating the blast radius based on the amount of explosives.
“Still think it’s a diversion?” asked Gallagher as the bomb squad secured the lid back on the barrel and went to work on the bomb section.
Monica shot an exasperated look at Stark and Ryan. As she was about to put the DHS man in his rightful place, Stark put up a hand.
“Mr. Gallagher,” said the colonel while Monica crossed her arms and turned away, unable to even look at him. “We’re in the middle of a massive parking lot. We were just asked to move back a couple hundred extra feet, which still puts us over a thousand feet from the closest street.” He paused and looked around for effect, before adding, “Meaning that even if it goes off, all that would be damaged or contaminated is … well, asphalt.”
“What about the explosion releasing radiation into the atmosphere?”
“Minimal,” said Stark. “Certainly nonlethal, and again, contained pretty much to this parking lot. So yes, we’re being played.”
As Gallagher was about to reply, his phone rang. He answered, listened for a minute, hung up, and said, “Just got word of another van parked illegally in downtown Austin. Perhaps ASAC Cruz is right after all and that’s the real one.”
Before anyone could reply, Gallagher’s phone rang again. This time he listened for thirty seconds, hung up, and, leaning closer to Cruz and Stark, he lowered his voice and said, “May I speak with you both privately for a moment?”
When they were out of earshot, Gallagher said, “That was John Wright saying that everyone in on this effort, including me, is now taking orders from you both.”
Stark exchanged a brief glance with Monica before facing the Homeland man again, who added, “I don’t know what that means, but I’m not about to try and figure it out right now … so, what do you want me to do?”
“Perhaps we can just all do our jobs and find the damn bomb,” Monica said quietly, before turning to face the group again and adding, “but my money is that Austin, just like this one, is another diversion. Otherwise it should have also already gone off.”
A moment later the bomb squad chief approached them, holding an electronic gadget in one hand and something resembling a ball of plastic explosives in the other.
“Dummy trigger … just a remote control … for a toy car,” he said. “And … well … twenty pounds of Play-Doh.”
“Toys,” Monica hissed. “That’s all this is. Toys R fucking Us.”
* * *
Flanked by his team while Monica, Stark, and the Homeland agent discussed whatever it was he needed to discuss in private, Ryan did everything in his power to control his temper while whispering to Larson, “It takes real talent to put up with this bullshit. The world is literally falling apart around us and this dickhead wants to argue about whose agency swings the biggest stick?”
The large chief, arms crossed while watching the show, nodded and replied in his tenor voice, “I’m amazed she has survived in this shithole this long. I need to recommend to Stark that he hires her.”
“Yep,” added Danny. “She’s always been a fighter, and in the last hours more than proved her value. Isn’t that right, Mickey?”
Hagen stood to the side smoking a cigarette. He exhaled through his nostrils while nodding once.
“Plus it’s great to see her again,” added Ryan, grinning.