Day 2: May 16, 0810 Hours, Daylight Saving Time
Winchester, Virginia
DESPITE REPEATED OFFERS to help Noor with funeral arrangements, she wouldn’t accept. I was just the estranged brother and uncle. A stranger. Perhaps more to the point, the guy who showed up too late. I had to force my feet to carry me out of the hospital and twice stopped and considered returning. In the end, though, I knew my place wasn’t at their side.
Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
Grow up, Hunter. Life went on without you.
It took me an hour to rent another car. The young rental car manager, a thin, nervous kid barely out of high school, fumbled with his computer for ten minutes. His eyes almost popped out when I told him that my airport rental was at the police impound lot. My explanation had him speechless. Was it that unusual for a rental to be riddled with bullet holes? After all, I’d purchased the extra insurance.
As I sat in my new rental deciding my next move, I thought about the piece of paper Kevin had slipped me before he died. The hand-scribed address had been … 25783 Christ. Using my cell phone, I searched the web and found a short list of possibilities but none close by. The closest was a 25783 Christian Run in Manassas, Virginia, an outlying historic community southwest of DC and about an hour from Winchester.
“Okay, Kev. If it was important enough to waste your last breaths, here I go.”
Before I ran off playing detective, one thing had to change. Last night, I rolled into an ambush empty-handed. I almost got my ass shot off and took far too long to respond to the killer’s assault to make any difference. Perhaps if I’d been prepared, ready for anything at any moment, like I’d lived my life these past years. Perhaps then things would have been different. Kevin was dead. I’d almost been killed. While Kandahar and Baghdad were worlds away, that lifestyle was in Winchester last night. My world—this world—needed to be in balance.
I needed balance.
A few years after leaving home, I’d rented a long-term selfstorage unit in Leesburg. It was a growing community halfway between Winchester and Washington, DC, where I’d stored my few belongings and set up a Post Office box. I never bothered with a permanent residence; there was no point paying for a place I’d never be in. That storage unit contained all that was once Jonathan Hunter Mallory, and a few things that were truly Jonathan Hunter, too.
I drove to Leesburg and made a pit stop at an ATM near the storage place. There, my heart stopped. The receipt groaned that my account balance was zero. Ah, zero? I’d socked away a small fortune in a “retirement account” of sorts. The account should have $879,928.66 round about. My account was a little short. $879,928.66 short.
Obviously, the Agency knew I wasn’t on R & R in Doha.
My troubles just became serious. I was broke except for my credit cards, and they were under aliases, too. How long before the Agency killed them off? Did they know about my storage unit? All my aliases?
From the ATM, it took ten minutes to drive to the storage complex, remember the passcode to get inside the lot, and reach the rear area where my unit was located. Then it took me another five minutes to remember my unit passcode. I was terrible at numbers, so I used something I wouldn’t forget. Except I forgot. It wasn’t my birthday, or any of my phony ones, and it wasn’t any part of my social security number, former addresses, height and weight, or … I got it. It was my zip code in high school. The last time I had a zip code.
Voila, I was in the first roll-up door. I’d installed a second, interior roll-up door made of tougher steel with a high-security lock. This one unlocked using something I couldn’t forget or lose—my thumbprint. Once inside, I closed both doors behind me and wormed my way past filing cabinets, a couple pieces of old furniture, and boxes of memory books. Tucked in the rear corner was a heavy, fireproof safe with another entry code I couldn’t forget. My palm print.
The locker contained what many survivalists, anti-government loons, and spooks like me called a go-bag. Except my go-bag was a go-safe. It had everything I’d need—clothes, knives, guns, and plenty of ammo. Reviewing my stock, I took a pair of compact Colt Defender .45 caliber semiautomatics, a holster, a few magazines, and extra boxes of ammo. I loaded the mags and slipped them into a small shoulder bag atop the safe. Then I opened a drawer in the bottom of the cabinet and took out a stack of cash. Not much, just a grand of the few there. Emergency money. Just in case the stock market crashed or the CIA decided to confiscate my bank account. I’d prepared pretty well, given my current circumstances.
The six Ps—planning prevents piss-poor performance and poverty.
One of the Defenders went into my shoulder bag and the other into a holster in the small of my back. For the first time since arriving in town, I felt at ease. In balance. Grounded.
Back in my rental car, I dug out the address Kevin had given me, plugged it into my cell phone map program, and headed southwest. Forty-five minutes later, I rolled down an older, run-down street. I’m sure the locals would call it a “mature neighborhood.” But this mature neighborhood was littered with run-down town houses, a few small cement block ramblers, and dozens of cars that hadn’t seen wax or new tires in decades.
Three houses before 25783 Christian Run, I pulled to the curb and looked around. I half-expected to see police cruisers outside the battleship-gray cement block rambler. The only vehicle there was a large panel van sitting in the drive with its engine running. As I pulled forward, two men came out of the house. The man in the front was a dark-skinned young man, perhaps early twenties, with tight black hair and a narrow jaw. A Middle Easterner. He was thin and gangly and moved hesitantly, stealing glances over his shoulder as he walked to the van.
Khalifah?
The man behind him was tall and wide, muscular and not fat, and he strode close to the first with one hand touching his arm each time he looked back. He had a heavy, perpetual eyebrow and strong, wide cheekbones on white, pasty, pockmarked skin.
A tingle went up my spine. This only happened when something crappy was about to happen, or on payday. Today wasn’t payday.
Before I could leave the curb, the bigger man opened the van’s side door and prodded the thin Middle Easterner inside. He then jumped in and the van pulled quickly out of the drive. They drove past me without notice, made a right at the end of the street, and were gone.
Instincts took over and I U-turned to fall in behind them a dozen car lengths back. As we hit Route 66 north of Manassas, it struck me that I was doing surveillance for reasons I didn’t know, in a rental car with no chutzpah, against an unknown target. I couldn’t go to the cops, and really had no reason to—yet. Since the Agency was likely pissed at me, I couldn’t call for backup should things get dicey again.
At least I was armed. Overall, this was one of the stupidest things I’d done in a long time.
Thirty minutes later, after a circuitous path around Fair Oaks, Virginia, we entered the parking apron on the west side of a large indoor shopping mall and parked. The van sat four rows closer to the mall entrance than me. The morning traffic was light, but there were a lot of cars in the parking lot. As I parked, two community shuttle buses pulled up and let groups of retirees off near the entrance, and they paraded slowly inside.
The tall, lanky Middle Easterner climbed out of the van and followed the retirees inside. Now, though, he had a bright blue backpack and spoke on a cell phone. He seemed more at ease, too, and moved casually as he disappeared inside.
I checked the .45 holstered behind my back, made sure my leather jacket concealed it well enough, and followed.
Inside was a large atrium near the north end of the food court. The mall was busy with shoppers. A pack of the elderly customers gathered around a coffee shop on the outer rim of the atrium. Everything seemed normal, but the Middle Easterner was nowhere.
Where did he go?
I made my way along one of the grand concourses of shops and stopped halfway. The young man was nowhere in sight. I turned and started back toward the entrance, glancing around trying to catch sight of him.
A lightning bolt sent me diving to the floor. The fireball erupted a millisecond later.
Everyone within fifty feet of the blast was eviscerated. The percussion shattered windows, doors, and display cases the length and width of the ground floor. Damage on the above floors would surely be as bad.
The blast wave struck me even as I dove for cover and sent me backward into a display of children’s clothing. I lay there, letting the shock pass. When the ceiling stopped spinning, I staggered to my feet, looked around, and ran into the maelstrom.
Shrapnel shredded bodies. Shattered displays, tables, chairs, and restaurant counters had been blown out of the atrium and littered the boulevard of stores. Stone planters and metal benches had become missiles that devastated everything in their wake. The fireball had topped three stories into the galleries above and shattered the tinted glass roof above the food court. A couple riding the escalator from the second floor never felt the wave of heat and metal that took their lives. A hundred yards away, a twisted metal spike had passed a woman pushing her baby stroller, missed two lovers at a jewelry store, and struck the jeweler. He was dead before he registered the blast. The woman and her stroller stood frozen looking on.
There were bodies and devastated lives everywhere. Shattered glass. Burning wood. Twisted metal. Blood.
Seconds ticked before the first screams began.
Turning in circles, I saw no one nearby I could aid, so I ran for the entrance and fought my way through dozens crushing outward.
Outside, the panel van was gone.
I ran to my rental, weaving around the injured and frightened. After a complete check of the mall perimeter—slow and deliberate—I knew it was hopeless.
The van had disappeared. Probably before the blast. Damn, I hadn’t even recorded the license plate number.
Kevin’s last breaths had been a warning. He’d strained to give me the address of whoever blew up the mall. No, Kevin, it wasn’t safe. You tried to warn me. Khalifah, G … Maya. I failed him.
What more had Kevin taken into death?
Sirens wailed and traffic gridlocked. I considered returning to the mall to aid those I could or at least give the cops a hand and report what I knew.
I couldn’t. I was in over my head enough.
Last night, I’d witnessed my brother’s murder. I was already on the cops’ radar, not to mention the FBI’s. There was no longer any way to avoid the crotchety old fart sitting at a desk in Langley, probably counting my $879,928.66 and trying to figure out where I’d gone. Now, I’d just stumbled into a major terrorist attack on our homeland the likes of which no one had seen on our shores for more than a decade.
There was no hiding any longer. I was up to my neck in trouble.
There was something more, too. Something more troublesome. More personal. Kevin had the bomber’s address. Although I’d given it to the cops, I had arrived “just in time” to witness a horrific attack—again. Two “just in times” in less than twenty-four hours. Both involving Kevin Mallory.
What had he been into? Khalifah. G. Maya in Baltimore. Now this.
There were two things I was more certain of than anything I’d been in years. First, Kevin Mallory got in over his head and had died for it. Second, I couldn’t stay below the radar any longer.
Anonymity be damned.
Oscar LaRue was about to know exactly where I had landed.