John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City
Sherrie kept to the sides, out of the direct flow of the fleeing masses, an eye always on Amira as the woman continued toward wherever it was she was going. An evacuation alarm with calm, prerecorded announcements was now playing and security was efficiently emptying the airport. The update over her comm was that all flights had been diverted and everything else grounded, the authorities not willing to risk there being a second device on one of the planes waiting to take off.
If they blew up an airplane using a Cesium based weapon over the city, it would be catastrophic.
She was having flashbacks of 9/11, too young at the time really to understand what had happened, only knowing that her parents had seemed scared and angry.
But mostly scared.
And a child seeing the ones meant to protect her, scared, was a life altering moment.
They suddenly became human.
They were no longer perfect.
It had changed her.
Then when she had lost them in a car accident, it was one of the most vivid memories that remained when she closed her eyes and thought of them.
Fear.
And it gave her something to insert into the made up memory of the moments before they died, how they must have looked at each other when they knew there was nothing they could do, when they knew it was the end.
Focus!
She shoved the memories aside the moment she felt tears form. She had a mission, and that was less than fifty yards ahead of her. Her primary objective was to save lives, merely delaying things accomplishing this. Her secondary was to try and prevent the explosion and therefore protect the infrastructure.
At the moment, she couldn’t care less about the building she walked through. On 9/11 everyone would have happily sacrificed the buildings if it meant saving the thousands trapped inside, and today was no different.
She had to delay, but there was no point intervening while Amira was still moving. As long as she kept moving, as long as no one interfered, she wouldn’t detonate, and every second that continued gave these people rushing past another second to get to safety.
As she continued forward, keeping her distance, her thoughts turned to her boyfriend, and she wondered how he would cope if she were to die here today. They always knew it was a possibility, her job a dangerous one, and it often troubled her as their relationship progressed and she saw how he continued to fall deeper in love with her every day.
It would destroy him.
If he were to die, it would devastate her, though she was strong enough to eventually move on with her life. Chris wasn’t strong, but he was stronger than he thought he was. She feared he would never be able to move forward, never be able to put his heart out there again to find a new love.
Maybe Sonya Tong will get her chance.
A flash of uncharacteristic jealousy flushed her cheeks.
Focus!
She glared at the woman through her sunglasses, the woman so many had tried to help, to get her and her children to safety, who was now going to repay those acts of kindness by detonating herself and killing possibly thousands.
Who does such a thing?
She had never been able to understand the mindset of the terrorist. She was convinced, as were many at Langley, that most were mentally disturbed. When many estimates put mental illness of some type as high as twenty percent of the population, it was easy to see how there could be a steady supply for the cause.
But she wasn’t willing to so easily accept mental illness as the only reason. If that were the sole reason, then why was it almost exclusively Muslims doing it? Weren’t there just as many Christians and Atheists afflicted with the same mental illnesses? Why weren’t they committing mass murders every day in the name of some cause?
Did she think those who did such things were weak?
Absolutely.
Yet was weakness a mental illness? Not in her mind, that was simply a character flaw that most people shared. It wasn’t that there was something wrong with them, it was simply that their lives hadn’t prepared them for the types of challenges they might one day face.
If someone told her she’d have to detonate a bomb that could kill thousands just to save the ones she loved, she hoped she would have the strength to tell those demanding it to go screw themselves. The ones she loved would never want to survive at the expense of innocent lives, and if they did, then they were people she wouldn’t want anything to do with anyway.
Would she do everything she could to try and save them? Absolutely. Would that involve killing? Again, absolutely. Killing of those responsible. Not an airport or a market or a border crossing filled with innocent people.
Whatever Amira’s excuse was for doing what she was doing, Sherrie didn’t care.
The woman intended mass murder.
And either she dies, or we both die.