The tears were now streaming down Donny’s cheeks and he was staring at her in disbelief. ‘How did you…?’
‘We know lots, Donny. What we don’t know is what the sting of death refers to. Perhaps you can tell me.’
‘No. I promise you, I can’t, even if I wanted to – I don’t know!’ He clutched his face in his hands and bent his head to touch the table. ‘This is all crazy!’
‘But you’re a chemist, aren’t you? Wasn’t that part of your training at NYU, among other things?’ She leaned forward and got him to lift his head, staring him in the face, deliberately piling on the pressure. She had no reason to believe Donny was anything other than a techie originally brought in by Malak to fly the drones. But squeezing him on the question of the weapon involved might be enough to make him crack. ‘Isn’t that one of the reasons you were recruited at the mosque in Queens – to produce a chemical agent?’
He stared at her in confusion. ‘What? Me? How can you think that? I did some chemistry at NYU, sure – that was part of the course. But I’m not a chemist! I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff!’
Ruth sat back, giving him the time and space to calm down. His voice carried a worrying ring of truth, and she decided that if Donny was playing them as Wright had claimed, he was a world-class actor.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Freedom. What does that refer to?’ She deliberately didn’t tell him where she’d seen the word; she was hoping that if he knew it he’d work it out for himself.
He frowned and scrubbed at his cheeks. ‘Freedom? I don’t know. Malak never said exactly. He used the word all the time but in different ways, like it was some kind of mantra. But he said lots of things without going into detail… as if was talking to himself. I think there were times when… it was like he wasn’t even aware of me.’
‘Because he didn’t think you were important enough?’
‘I guess. I never thought about it before.’ He looked miserable and refused to meet her eye, and Ruth figured Donny was trying to come to grips with the knowledge that he’d only ever been a small cog in the machine, unimportant and no doubt easily expendable.
‘OK. Let’s assume he wasn’t talking about freedom as a concept, like freedom from repression, freedom of speech or stuff like that. Did he use the word like… I don’t know – a place or a code, for example?’
‘Field. Freedom Field.’ He looked up and blinked, like a small light had gone on. ‘He said that the day before I… left. I asked him where we were going and he said Freedom Field. It’s the only thing I can think of.’
‘So it’s a place. Where?’
‘I don’t know. He said the name… only not to me or Bilal; it was just something he mentioned sometimes.’
‘What was the context?’
‘Huh?’
‘What else was he saying at the time? Did he say, ‘We must go to Freedom Field’, or ‘How do we get to Freedom Field’? Words like that. The context.’
‘Oh, right.’ He bit his lip and said, ‘I recall at the time he was like angry, but it wasn’t at me any more for crashing the drones.’
‘Like angry?’
‘Intense. He did that occasionally, going into some other place as if he was reminding himself about what he had to do.’ Donny snapped his fingers a couple of times, then said, ‘I’ve got it: he said Freedom Field, then something I can’t remember and “…the fools would regret honouring the fallen because it was going to come back and bite them.” That was it – I don’t remember the rest.’
Ruth thought it over. Honouring the fallen? That sounded like a garden of remembrance. But there were hundreds, thousands of those scattered across the country, with one in most towns and cities. ‘Fine. One last point, Donny, then you can get something to eat. Would you like that?’
‘Yes, please. I think I’ve told you everything I know.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. My point is, this entire plan is bigger than it seems. Bigger than one man’s idea for inflicting a blow on the United States; bigger than merely leaving a car bomb in a crowded place timed to explode, which is much easier. This is about chemicals – a dirty bomb. And a unique form of delivery. You don’t exactly pick up dangerous chemicals or drones at B&Q, do you?’
‘Huh?’ He looked puzzled and Ruth realised he’d never heard of the British DIY chain.
‘Like Home Depot.’
‘Oh.’
‘Instead, Malak would have needed finance and resources and manpower to get it going. And that’s a lot more than a single man could do. You agree?’
‘Yes. I guess. But I never saw anybody else except for him and Bilal.’
‘Ah, yes. Bilal Ammar. We know he’s no organiser. He’s a lump of muscle.’
Donny scowled. ‘He’s a pig. I hate him!’
‘I’m not surprised. He’s hardly in the same league as you, is he?’ She decided to throw in a change of direction. ‘Was it Bilal who killed the construction crew?’
His mouth dropped open again and he went pale. ‘I had nothing to do with that… it was all them, I promise you.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘It was before Chadwick arrived. I was sent out to the far end of the runway because Malak wanted me to test one of the drones, to see that it worked and to try out a few simple manoeuvres. I did as he ordered and made sure it was assembled and functioning properly, then made some very simple manoeuvres.’ He hesitated and looked away. ‘I went even further than he told me because I didn’t want him to see me if I made a mistake. While I was running the motors I thought I heard some noises, but I was concentrating on not crashing the drone, so I never gave it a thought.’
‘What sort of noises?’
‘Popping noises… very fast, but not loud.’
‘You mean gunshots.’
‘Yes – but I didn’t know that at the time, I swear!’
‘Go on.’
‘When I got back Bilal was walking around outside the hangar waving an assault rifle. He was grinning like he always did and I could see and smell the gun-smoke in the air. He was also excited, which made me feel sick.’ When Ruth looked blank he explained, ‘He was clutching his groin and showing off his arousal to me as if I’d be impressed!’
‘What had he done?’
‘He showed me the hole in the floor… where the dead men were lying. I couldn’t believe it. He said Malak had ordered him to kill them all because they had demanded more money for finishing early. Malak had refused and one of the men had threatened to tell the police. Malak ordered them into the pit and… Bilal shot them.’ He shook his head. ‘You have to believe me – I had nothing to do with it.’
Ruth breathed out slowly. It was most likely that Malak had never intended letting the men go in the first place. Once paid off, all it would have taken was for one of them to talk about what they’d been told to do, and his whole plan would have been thrown into disarray. ‘Very well. Let’s get back to Malak. Where does he get his money? How does he have a call on the men he needed to watch Chadwick and his family in England and here in the States; to watch me… even to follow me halfway across America?’
There was a long pause while Donny digested and processed the question. Then he said, ‘He talks to people all the time – pretty much every day.’
‘By phone?’
‘Yes. He has many. He keeps them in a box. He uses them once and throws them away.’
‘So how do these people contact him in return?’
‘They don’t. He calls them – although sometimes he allows them to text him, but only once. Then he disposes of the cell. He says it’s a fool-proof system so the CIA and NSA can’t find him.’
‘Do you know who these people are?’
He lifted his shoulders. ‘No idea. And I never heard what he said to them. I’ve never seen him with anybody, but he kept disappearing during the day while Bilal and I slept, and never seemed to stay in the same motel as us. I assumed he was meeting up with people to discuss his plan. But about a week ago I saw him checking his laptop and he was furious about the lack of a signal because he couldn’t contact anybody. He said a meeting would have to be postponed and the bid would fail.’
‘A bid for what?’
‘I don’t know. A bid – that’s all I heard.’
Ruth’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen. It was Brasher. She was tempted to ignore it, but figured it must be important. She excused herself and said, ‘Yes?’
‘I think I know what he means by that,’ Brasher murmured softly. ‘Get out here. We need to talk.’
‘I have one more question,’ she insisted. ‘The main one. It’s critical.’
Brasher didn’t reply immediately, but she heard Special Agent Wright talking angrily in the background. Eventually Brasher said, ‘Go ahead but make it quick.’
Ruth disconnected and turned back to Donny. ‘Let’s go back to the plan. Malak’s going to use the drone to spray a chemical agent over the target, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t know what that is. Presumably it will be a toxic substance.’
‘Yes. He says he had another chemist put it together. But I don’t know what it is.’
‘How does he plan to do that – to release it, I mean?’
‘There are set coordinates fed into the flight controls. Once there, a signal will activate the trigger and… and the spray begins to operate.’
‘Tell me about the delivery system. How will the drone get to the target? Is that what Chadwick is there for, now you’re no longer around?’
‘I suppose. I think he decided to use Chadwick in the end anyway, because of the complexity of flying the drones. I wasn’t able to keep even one in the air, let alone four.’
Ruth felt a chill down her back. After knowing what had happened to the construction crew it was easy to guess what Chadwick’s fate would be once the deed was done. Then something else hit her. ‘Four? What do you mean?’
Donny shrugged. ‘Malak had me show him how to feed the numbers into the controller for all four drones. Thirty-four degrees seventy north,’ he recited automatically, ‘ninety-nine-twenty-five west.’
She didn’t need to ask what the numbers referred to; instinct told her they were the map coordinates for the Altus Air Force base.
‘Four drones.’
‘Yes. It should have been six but I crashed two and that really made him pissed.’ He flushed. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘They start off in different places but they’ll converge as they get closer to the target area. That way Malak said there will be a chance of at least one of them getting through. He said it was for a military target, not civilian.’
‘And you believed him?’
He shrugged. ‘That’s all I know.’
Ruth didn’t want to ask, but had to. She knew from what Vaslik had said earlier when looking at the possible target bases that Altus had anything from upwards of four thousand personnel there at any one time. And that wasn’t counting families, visitors and the surrounding population. Her lips were dry, but she didn’t dare lick them. ‘And then what?’
‘Death. He said many people would die. Hundreds, possibly more.’