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The time for action was pending and Kara was getting more anxious. Even though she had planned everything down to the minute, including the items she would carry, which vehicle she would drive, not to mention the routes she would take, the clothes she would wear, and the weapons cache that could save her life—there was still the very real possibility she would die tomorrow. Remarkably, she could accept that. Ever since her parents had been killed, she had opted to travel down the road of life with the big signpost up ahead that read DANGER! Joining the CIA and going on covert missions, she was well aware the territory was littered with the carcasses of dedicated CIA agents who hadn’t fared too well.
Contrary to anyone who would argue the fact, there was no pleasant way to die. This mission of Kara’s own design was no different. If she happened to make it out alive that was a plus, but every living thing on the planet had a countdown clock going tick-tock. Whether it be a blade of grass or a CIA agent in Pakistan, death would arrive when it was time, but she accepted that her clock was simply running a little faster than most.
Within the tunnel, she had collected and hauled up a massive cache of weapons and materials she would need if she were cornered in Safe House One, but the tunnel was her first line of defense.
If she found herself under attack from below, the tunnel would offer a very nice tactical advantage. There was no way for an enemy to flank her. They would have to walk through the pipe and her machine gun on full auto would make short work of anyone unfortunate enough to be in that kill zone.
If the tunnel turned into a jailbreak, her initial fallback would be Kornev’s first safe house. If that was compromised, she would escape to Safe House Two, but she hadn’t moved any weapons over to that home.
Kara turned her attention to several closed crates of guns lining the tunnel floor and decided to have a peek. The very first box held a welcome find.
“Nice,” Kara said, plucking a well-oiled Russian-made AK-74M out of the crate. A dozen of the newer 5.45 x 39mm weapons seemed to have been waiting for some CIA agent in need of high-powered weaponry. The select fire AK-47s were OK, but the new AK-74Ms were da’ bomb.
Kara couldn’t read the smudged letters on the top of the crate next to the AK-74s. She used her hammer’s claw to pry off the top. Inside it held twelve of Russia’s newest creations by Kalashnikov, better known as AK-12 assault rifles.
“This will do nicely,” Kara said. But there was still one more box with goodies inside.
Unlike the other two wooden crates, the last crate had no markings at all. Kara used the claw again to pop open the top.
“What do we have here?” she asked, smiling down at more guns. “Come to momma,” Kara cooed, pulling out an AA-12 fully automatic shotgun. Inside were six of the weapons along with their ammunition drums. Kara had seen some clips on YouTube showing this gun fully immersed in water, pulled out, and immediately fired. In terms of a close quarters weapon, it might be one of the best she’d seen. If someone thought a single bullet coming at them in full auto was bad, try having a shotgun cascading pellets in a broad pattern at the same frequency. It was simply a beautiful weapon, and Kara knew just where she would be able to use one.
She did her best to catalog the items she wanted to take to Safe House Two. She pulled an RF handheld scanner off the shelf and started making a to-go pile. The scanner could be helpful in locating tracking devices either planted on items or embedded within people. She raided Kornev’s supply of Pakistani money, filling a paper bag with what she estimated was about two million rupees or roughly $20,000. Carefully, she loaded her pack, making a mental note of where she placed everything so she could quickly and easily retrieve them. Her life might depend on it.
Over the next two hours, Kara lugged guns, ammo, and Kevlar vests up and into Safe House Two. Kara found ten Kevlar shields (the types riot police use) and brought them to the second safe house as well. She didn’t stop until she had all her stashes in place.
She mentally reviewed her plan and walked out to the barn with her backpack. She placed it in the front passenger seat of the car and closed the door. Somewhere inside the barn, she remembered having seen a garden hose, or was it in the potting shed? She was pleased to find two garden hoses. She took one to each safe house and returned to the barn to find some tools. Pushed against one wall was an ancient workbench complete with many useful looking drawers. In one she found an old-fashioned manual drill. Although she’d never used one, how it worked was simple. Put a wood bit in it and crank the handle around in circles until a hole is made. She found a supply of rusty wood bits in the drawer as well. Kara selected one with a head the size of a poker chip and took it into Safe House One. Back in the closet, where the trapdoor emerged, she drilled a hole in the corner just to the side of the trapdoor. The drill bit was rusty, but once it bit into the wood it only took a minute to drill the hole. Kara was surprised how well it worked. The old guys who had invented this drill knew what they were doing. She went into the tunnel and surfaced in the other home’s closet. She repeated the process using the same hole size in the same location within the closet. Once completed, Kara sat back against the bedroom wall to catch her breath.
It was time for her to leave, but she felt very safe in her new surroundings. Out there, she was just a woman with a gun. There was no backup and no partner to help if she found herself in trouble. Almost reluctantly, she got to her feet, went over to the refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of water. She drank it standing, thinking if she sat back down, she might lose her nerve and call the whole thing off. After all, it wasn’t too late. She could drive Kornev’s crappy little car to the airport and by tomorrow she would be gone.
She drained the bottle and threw the empty into the sink. Marshall Hail was now on her mind, and that couldn’t be a good thing. Thoughts that distracted her from the mission at hand served only one purpose—to provide a distraction. In the back of her mind, however, she wondered if Hail would approve of her plan. After all, it was unconventional. Some might even say it was brutal, while others might claim it was immoral; but where were they when her parents had been killed? Extremists had suppressed in their followers all sense of morality, that which made men better than the animals around them. The men now unquestioningly fought a Holy War. To those brutal jihadists, there was no right and wrong except that dictated by their extremist doctrine, no good and bad. No remorse and no ramifications other than choosing to die as a martyr. How does a civilization even begin to reason with people like that? In every sense of the word, the jihadists were insane. They fought for an elusive belief, no different from any psycho who killed because a voice had ordered him to kill. If the word terrorist hadn’t been invented for them to hide behind, the terms used in a court of law would be mass murderer or génocidaire.
Kara walked into one of the bedrooms and removed the blanket from the bed. As she folded the wool bed covering she wondered, yet again, what Hail would think of her plan. Three folds later, she was irritated at herself for even considering such a senseless question. It wasn’t as if Hail’s head was screwed on straight. Since the loss of his family, a lot of threads had been stripped away before his noggin had rediscovered his shoulders. That was for sure. However, there were children involved with her plan, and Hail had loved his own kids, as he did the kids on his ship. She hoped the children wouldn’t get hurt in the crossfire, but then again, hardening her heart, all the rules went out the window when going up against those whose principals were skewed beyond recognition.
It was time to get started. Kara tucked the blanket under her arm and walked to the kitchen. She took another bottle of water out of the fridge and left Safe House Two via the back door. She walked to the barn, fired up the little car and drove into the silent Pakistani night, purposely not closing the barn door behind her.
It was early morning and still dark outside when she arrived at the housekeeper’s home. She parked her car three houses down the street, retrieved her pack, a blanket, and in addition, a tool law enforcement referred to as a slim jim. Watching for nosy neighbors, Kara stealthily made her way down the street to the housecleaner’s quiet home. Kara scanned the street and homes for any activity prior to sluffing off her pack and leaning it on the side of the car. Using the slim jim, she slid the flat metal stick between car window and jam. Moving it from the right to the left, Kara felt the stick catch the locking mechanism in its slot. With one solid upward pull, Kara unlocked the car door.
“Bingo,” she whispered.
From the passenger front door, she snaked her hand around to unlock the back door. Behind the front bench seat on the passenger side she set her backpack sideways on the floor. She put the blanket on top of the pack. She rolled down the passenger side window. Kara closed and locked the doors. There was nothing left to do but wait. Kara sank down and sat cross-legged on the ground with her back pressed against the passenger side of the car. She rested her pistol in her lap.
While she sat there in the dark, unsure how this would turn out, she began to think, “What’s next?” If her plan played out perfectly and she was able to put a bullet into the man who killed her parents, what was next? She thought about the sprawling mansion she had abandoned in Virginia—her family home. After her parents had been killed, all the day-to-day and utilitarian things became unimportant. The upkeep of cars, homes, and pets had seemed a foolish waste of time. All those things suddenly felt so temporary. Her parents, on the other hand, felt to Kara as if they belonged on this earth. If her parents’ lives could be erased so easily, what did that say about the things they owned? If everything played out perfectly today, did she want to stay in the CIA? Was there a reason for her to stay? Would they even take her back?
Up until recently, she hadn’t known who had killed her parents. She hadn’t even known what group was responsible for the attack. Compound that with the fact that the wheels of justice moved agonizingly slow, the idea of taking the matter into her own hands had seemed like a logical move. There were so many toes to step on when one country pursued crazy people who lived in a war-torn third world country. Those who oversaw such campaigns appeared happy to kick the can down the road instead of getting some skin in the game. It was easier to send a missile into a building and wait to see what cockroaches scrambled out prior to sending in troops. The only problem with that strategy was you never knew which cockroaches had been killed and which ones escaped—again. The attack and aftermath only served a purpose if there existed excellent advanced intelligence. Increasingly, guided weaponry responses were more palatable to the American people than putting boots on the ground, and Kara couldn’t fault that logic. If she had children, she wouldn’t want them bum-rushing into buildings that could be wired with explosives.
So, after this... after this...
Kara let the words marinate in her head, hoping some elusive words would pop into her mind so she could finish the sentence.
After this—maybe she had already found a place on Marshall Hail’s ship. She questioned if Hail would have any use for her if she left the CIA. She was Hail’s conduit of sensitive information from the agency, and Hail had one of those minds that placed every person he met into a container of some type. For example, Nolan was a jet pilot, and Hail needed experienced pilots. Nolan had been placed in the pilot container. Her being a CIA agent was useful to Hail. Kara felt that Marshall had placed her in a CIA container, a person who could obtain confidential information. She knew she couldn’t fly a plane, determine the balancing point of a prototype drone, synthesize powerful explosives, fix a ship, or even cook—all skillsets Marshall could use. If she left the CIA then what would she be to Marshall Hail? A girlfriend? Possibly, but that wasn’t enough. She needed more. It could be her rigid sense of self-worth, but she needed to be significant in Marshall’s eyes, and not just for the way she looked. The container labeled “girlfriend” might be enough for some women, but she had more to offer than just companionship. More to Hail. More to the world in general.
The sky was brightening, and Kara hoped the housekeeper was an early riser. In a perfect world, Kara would have liked to spend an additional day surveilling the housecleaner’s home, but if the woman hadn’t come out to her car by the time the sun had fully risen, Kara had to come up with an alternative. Next to the car was a thicket of bushes in which she could hide. A short wall separated one property from the other, and Kara had noticed a space wide enough for a thin CIA agent to hide.
Just as she was preparing to relocate, she heard the front door of the housekeeper’s home open and close. She heard soft-soled shoes walking on a gravel path and felt a vibration on her back when the key was placed into the car’s door. Kara held her handgun in front of her chest and waited for the woman to sit in the driver’s seat.
Stay cool, Kara told herself.
The car door slammed shut. Kara used this as her cue to stand, turn, and face the open window of the passenger door. She leaned in so her upper torso and head were inside the vehicle, and she pointed the gun in the housecleaner’s face. The Pakistani woman did a double take, saw movement from the corner of her eye, gave a quick look, and discarded the sight of a woman with a gun hovering inside her car. Her brain hadn’t had time to take it in, but she looked again for confirmation, and was stunned into silence. This time the big black gun with a long silencer was the only thing she saw. The woman behind it was a dark, blurry smudge. The naked light bulb burning on her front porch cast just enough light to focus on the muzzle of the gun.
In Punjabi Kara spoke, “I won’t hurt you if you follow my instructions to the letter.”
The housekeeper said nothing. She did nothing. Kara thought she still appeared to be in shock, like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. Kara withdrew her body from the window, quickly opened the passenger door, and sat next to the woman.
The housekeeper noticed that her robber had something in her other hand. Looking closer, hoping it wasn’t a knife, the woman saw she held both a paper bag and a tiny flashlight. Kara handed the bag to the woman.
“Open it,” Kara said.
The woman cautiously accepted the bag, but she didn’t open it.
Kara repeated the order, “Open it.” She kept her voice quiet yet authoritative.
Emerging from her trance, the Pakistani woman unrolled the top of the paper bag and looked inside. Kara snapped on her flashlight to reveal the bag’s contents.
The woman took in the sight and looked back at Kara who withdrew the flashlight and told the woman, “I need to borrow your car today. If you want that money, I need you to go back inside your house and don’t go to work today. That’s all. I don’t know if you will get your car back, but that’s enough money to buy fifty cars like this. That is a lot of money. More than you will make in ten years.”
The woman was held by Kara’s green eyes, the only thing she could see. Kara had her black scarf wrapped around her head and face. She appeared as a set of eyes holding a gun and a big bag of money.
The woman still said nothing. Maybe she was contemplating the deal, but there was no deal to be made. If the woman said no, Kara would either kill her or take her somewhere and tie her up.
“What’s it going to be?” Kara asked in her best Punjabi.
“I will take the money,” agreed the woman finally.
“And what will you do today?” Kara coaxed.
“I will go back inside and not go to work today.”
“Correct,” Kara said. “And you will also not call anyone today. If you contact anyone or leave your home today, I will return for my money, and I will kill you and your family. Is that understood?”
Now terror overtook the woman.
Kara didn’t know if she had needed to go quite that far, but she had needed to put the fear of Allah into the woman. This was the most precarious part of the plan. Kara had gone over it in her mind repeatedly. All it would take was a single phone call of warning from this woman, and it would all be over, but killing the woman was something that might haunt Kara the rest of her life. After all, Kara Ramey was supposed to be one of the good people, and good people didn’t kill innocent people, no matter the consequence. Maybe that was the only distinction between a terrorist and those who hunted them. In the end, it came down to two options. Option 1: Kara could give the woman a bunch of money and a terrifying warning. Option 2: Kara provided the housecleaner no money and tied her up somewhere. The second option came with unknowns. Where would she tie her up? It would have to be somewhere remote, but Kara might not have time to come back to untie her, and maybe nobody else would come to her rescue, which would equate to killing her. In the end, Kara had decided that money and a warning would be the best option.
“What’s your name?” Kara asked.
“Uzma,” the woman said softly.
“What is your cleaning schedule at the mansion?”
At first, the woman looked as though she didn’t fully comprehend the question. Then it finally struck her that Kara was going to work at the mansion today in her place.
Kara watched the woman’s face for some type of a tell. The woman looked a little shaken, but then inadvertently looked back down at the bag of money.
“You are not going to hurt the children, are you?” inquired the housecleaner.
Kara smiled under her scarf before she realized the woman couldn’t see her smile. Instead, Kara softened her voice as if she were talking to a young child and said, “No, of course not. I love the little ones.”
Kara didn’t know if the woman bought it, but it really didn’t matter.
Kara asked again, “What is your schedule at the mansion?”
Uzma answered, “I normally clean up the toy room and den and then dust until the children are ready for lunch. I make their lunches, and they return to their tutor for three more hours of school.”
“What time does their teacher leave?” Kara asked.
“The teacher leaves around 3:00 p.m. I clean the outside windows for a few hours while the children play outside.”
Kara knew that the woman was being honest with her because she had observed her schedule with her binoculars.
“Is there normally anyone in the home other than you and the teacher?”
“No,” the woman said. “Not until their father gets home at 5:30. The guards patrol the property but they don’t come inside.”
Again, the housecleaner truthfully confirmed information Kara already knew to be true.
Kara asked, “How do you get into the mansion?”
“A key,” the woman said, pointing at her bag sitting between the women.
“Is there an alarm? Do I need a code?”
“There is an alarm, but it is shut off before I arrive at work. Mr. Shallah turns it off before he leaves for work. He really doesn’t need an alarm. He has guards. But there is an electronic lock on the front door. The code is 4477.”
Kara thought the woman might require a little more intimidation, so she asked her, “Who lives at the house you went to Sunday night?”
The woman looked fearful and said, “That was my sister’s house. She wasn’t feeling well and needed help with her children.”
Kara flashed the gun again and said, “Just a quick recap — make sure you don’t call the banker to warn him I’m coming. You don’t want anything to happen to you, your sister, or her kids, right?”
“Right,” the woman acquiesced, a little tremor evident in her voice.
Kara pointed at the keys in the ignition with the tip of the gun. “Is your house key on there?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Then take it off, get out, and go back inside. Don’t come out until tomorrow. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” confirmed the woman, fumbling to get her house key off the keyring.
A moment later, she handed the key to the mansion to Kara and left the car. As Kara scooted over in front of the steering wheel, she watched the woman let herself back into her home and close the door.
The car started on the first try, and Kara backed out slowly and headed off in the direction of the mansion.