Chapter 30

 

Lopez had put the dead terrorist’s smartphone on Speaker mode. He’d just dialed the contact called Jalil and was staring across the Raptor’s cab at Cade. After three rings the call was picked up. A heavily accented male voice said, “Yes, Akim. What is it?”

Whispering in Arabic, Lopez said, “Everything is okay, Jalil … but you must return without me,” then abruptly ended the call. To Cade, he said, “You killed Akim.” He paused to let it sink in. “That means Farhan is the surviving Hendrix Twin. Question is, do you think Jalil bought it?”

“We’ll know soon enough,” replied Cade. A beat later, in his ear, he heard Griff telling him that two men fitting Mohamed and Jalil’s descriptions had just exited the bowling alley through the north-facing doors. “They’re heading your way,” he continued. “And they’re side-eying the club. First responders just arrived and are putting up tape.”

Cade said, “They’re on the move because Lopez called their phone.”

“Whatever he said has those boys spooked,” Griff replied.

Cade repeated verbatim to Griff what Lopez had said. “Start your engine and stand by,” he went on, craning to see the corner of the building where the men were likely to appear. “Once we have a handle on our bowlers’ next move, I’m going to have you two go ahead and stake out the motel.”

Lopez said, “Here they are,” and sunk low in his seat.

“I’ve got eyes on,” Cade said, then continued providing a play-by-play over the comms. “They’re not placing any calls.” He slouched down in his seat and watched as the men paused on the sidewalk. They were rooted in place, their attention focused on the strip club up the street. Cade imagined they were debating what could have warranted the abrupt phone call and drawn the paramedics and half a dozen police cruisers to the club they had to assume Akim had just fled from. Did he murder a stripper? Did the bartender accidentally serve him alcohol and pay for it with his life? Did one of the patrons somehow insult the hot-tempered cell leader and pay for it in blood? From what Cade knew of Akim, he could see any of those scenarios playing out inside of Feisty’s. And there was no reason to believe Mohamed and Jalil should be thinking differently.

The terrorists watched with rapt attention, breaking away only when the bachelor party spilled from the bowling alley and crowded around them on the sidewalk, blatantly passing the dolls around and giving them exaggerated hip thrusts.

Disgusted, Jalil and Mohamed backed away from the throng, then passed directly in front of the Raptor. They were both on the small side, their heads barely breaking the plane of the pickup’s broad hood.

Once the pair was almost to the sidewalk, Lopez fired the Raptor’s engine. Grimacing, he said, “Damn it. They’re going away from the hotel.”

“They’ll double back,” Cade said confidently. “It’s what I’d do. When they commit to one direction, I want you to get us moving. If they decide to go west, since Belmont is one way, Cross will have to pick them up and tail them until you bring the truck around. If they break east, we can set Cross and Griff free to go to the motel.”

Jalil and Mohamed reached the sidewalk, paused there for a beat, then struck off westbound on Belmont. Cade and Lopez remained in the Raptor, its engine thrumming under the hood, until Griff called and said they had the pair under surveillance. During the three minutes Cade and Lopez had been in the dark, the terrorists had walked down Belmont to 7th Avenue, hung a right, and continued northbound.

Moments after Griff reported back to Cade, Cross pulled the Bronco into the gas station on the corner where Lopez had been dropped off, parked out of the way of the pump lanes, and pretended to talk into his phone.

Lopez looked to Cade. “Now?”

“Let’s wait until we know if they’re going to be sticking to 7th Street, which eventually turns into Sandy Boulevard, or if they’re going to swing back east and stick to the side streets all the way to the motel.”

“Is it a motel or hotel?”

“They call it a hotel,” Cade answered. “But it’s really an old motel. It’s got a motor court like the Crossroads. Doors open to covered outdoor walkways. The place is about half the size of the Crossroads.”

“I assume the keycard you took off of Akim did not have a room number on it.”

“Affirmative,” Cade said. “Just the name of the place.”

“How’s Bravo going to know which room Farhan and the gang is staying in?”

“I’m confident they’ll figure it out.”

Griff was back on the comms. The reception was iffy. Which was understandable. The miniature radios were at about the edge of their range. The two- and three-story brick buildings crowding the periphery of the industrial area north of Feisty’s didn’t help matters. He said, “They went one block north, then they turned east on Alder. They’re about a half a block in and acting wary. Heads on a swivel. Stopping now and then to look and listen. No doubt they’re worried about the whereabouts of their boy. So far, their phones haven’t made an appearance.”

Perfect, thought Cade. He said, “Alder will take them by the back side of Feisty’s. They’ll stop and look.” To Lopez, he said, “Take me two blocks north of the club.” He pointed at the navigation pane. “Insert me right here. Corner of 10th and Washington.”

“You going to pick them up and tail them the rest of the way to the Mercury on foot?”

“Depends on what Bravo finds when they get to the motel,” answered Cade. “Let’s move.” He hailed the other team, told them to monitor their phones for incoming messages, then released them to continue to the Mercury. He figured with Jalil and Mohamed moving at a snail’s pace, and that they would likely spend some time watching the action outside of Feisty’s, Cross and Griff would have a fifteen-to-twenty-minute window in which to get to the motel, set up shop, and begin surveilling the place. Whether they would find a spot to park in the motor court, or if they would have to park on the street and go in on foot, didn’t really matter. The main objective was to keep Farhan from getting away if he got spooked and decided to rabbit.

Lopez drove a block south of Grand Central Bowl, then swung back around west and picked them up moving north on 7th Avenue—the street with the gas station on the corner.

When 7th shot off diagonally north by east and became Sandy Boulevard, Lopez slowed the Raptor to a crawl and turned right onto Washington.

For three straight blocks, Sandy Boulevard to 10th Avenue, tents and cardboard domiciles dominated the sidewalk on both sides of the unlined street. The curbs were crowded by cars and SUVs, most of them hemmed in by trash and bicycle parts, some sans their wheels and perched on cement blocks. Working streetlights were few and far between.

“Let me out here,” Cade urged.

“We’re still a block short of 10th.”

“Calling an audible,” said Cade. “I need to see a guy about a change of wardrobe.” He dropped his Blazers cap in the footwell, dug into the center console, and came out with the suppressor for his Glock and the Gerber dagger. Stuffing both items into his jacket pocket, he said, “I may decide to follow them on foot. You push ahead but keep out of sight. And try to stay within comms range.”

Lopez nodded. “Stay frosty, Wyatt. Those hombres can be unpredictable.”

“Copy that,” said Cade, elbowing open his door. He stepped to the street, closed the door at his back, then made a quick visual sweep of his surroundings.

With Lopez cranking a one-eighty in the intersection behind Cade and speeding off toward Sandy, Cade struck off across the street, both hands in the air and trying to get the attention of an African American man kicked back on what looked like bench seats ripped out of a minivan.

“A hundred bucks for the sweater,” Cade offered.

The man perked up. He looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties. On his head was an Operation Desert Storm ball cap, the brim perfectly shaped. Unlike the sweater, it was clean. Probably a prized possession. “Sheeeit,” said the man, displaying a mouth full of perfectly straight teeth. “I’ll give you my pants, too, for that price.”

Keeping his hands in a position of mock surrender, Cade said, “Just need the cardigan. You can have my windbreaker if it suits you.”

“Sho, I’ll take it,” said the man. “Percy never looks a gift horse in the mouth.” He cocked his head. “Running from the law?”

As Cade stripped off the jacket, surreptitiously transferring the suppressor and dagger into his pant pocket, he ignored the man’s question. Instead, he commented on the hat. “Desert Storm, eh? Thanks for your service.”

“I was a tanker … Seventy-Three Easting, my claim to fame. It was all downhill from there. I curse the Bushies every morning upon waking.”

Cade handed over the windbreaker.

Percy took the offering. Studied it for a second, then shrugged. Cocking an eye at Cade, he said, “If you don’t want to answer the obvious question … I’m gonna try another angle of attack.” He slipped an arm in the jacket. Smiled when he found it to be a perfect fit. “What’s a white fella like yourself doing out here on a Friday night? You got clean nails, a fresh shave, and you carry yourself like someone who has been there and done that.”

“Just passing through.” Cade reached in his pant pocket and peeled a single bill from the wad he had relieved Akim of. Handing the hundred over, he took the cardigan. It was pea green and well worn, both sleeves frayed at the ends. When he shrugged it on, something heavy in one pocket banged against his hip.

Sticking a hand in the pocket, he felt something smooth and shaped like a flask. Extracting the item, he saw that it was a half-pint bottle of gin, two fingers of liquor left in the bottom.

“I’ll take that,” Percy said, hand extended, a look of wanting in his eye.

“Sell it to me for another hundred?”

A gleam in his eye, Percy kept his hand extended. “Deal. And I’ll forget I ever saw you.”

Two minutes had slipped into the past between Cade being dropped off and him continuing east on Washington. As he walked, he spun the suppressor onto the Glock and tucked the pistol into his waistband. The dagger he clipped to his hip on the right. It was out of sight if he kept the cardigan buttoned. Stopping at the corner of 10th Avenue, he looked south. The hypnotic strobe emanating from light bars on parked ambulances and patrol cars cast a small group of onlookers in their colorful spill.

Jalil and Mohamed stood at the edge of the crowd, both in the middle of the street, the fluttering crime scene tape the only thing separating them from the gurney being loaded into the rear of the coroner’s van. There was no mistaking the terrorists for anyone else. As they turned around and began stalking north on 10th, the triple lines on their tracksuits glowing white and undulating strangely with each step, one of them pulled a phone from a pocket and started to tap away at its illuminated screen.

Cat’s out of the bag, thought Cade as he grabbed a handful of dirt from the base of a small tree that had seen better days. He dirtied his pants, then ran his palms over his cheeks and forehead. Now the only thing that would set him apart from the people who’d taken over this stretch of inner eastside Portland were his Salomons. As he struck off north, maintaining a two-block lead on the terrorists, he contacted Lopez and requested a SITREP.

Two blocks north and one east of Cade, sitting in the darkened Raptor, its motor silenced, Lopez was just signing off with Bravo Team. There had been no spots in the Mercury’s cramped motor court. They had been forced to park the Bronco on a trash-strewn side street a few blocks north of the Mercury, on the opposite side of Burnside, where Cross insisted the wheels and tires on his ride would be gone before they got across the busy four-lane.

The operators had staked out spots twenty yards apart from each other. Cross was at a bus stop at the curb, where he had a clear view of the Mercury’s lobby and was within arm’s reach of the parking lot entrance. Griff, phone pressed to an ear and pretending to be on a business call, was leaning against a compact EV parked at a charging station at the outside corner of the motor court, where he could see the door to every room, upstairs and down. He had been walking his gaze from door to door, noting how they were all fitted with huge chalkboards, all of them graffiti-covered, save for the one that suddenly hinged open. What he saw next confirmed to him they were in the right spot. Though the man who had just emerged was a bit thicker in the midsection and fuller in the face, Griff was certain he was looking at Farhan Wafi. The terrorist cell leader was speaking into a phone, the guttural, raspy hisses of an Arabic dialect easy to discern, even from Griff’s position in the semi-enclosed motor court.

Lopez put down the smartphone. Then, speaking into the comms, he relayed it all to Cade, stressing that Griff had eyes on Farhan.

“Tell Griff he cannot let Farhan leave,” Cade said, his voice barely over a whisper. Adopting a limp, he slowed his pace and began searching the empty parking lots and shadowy alcoves for a place to wait and watch.

 

Mercury Motel

 

Disgusted, Farhan Wafi ended the call and reentered the Norma Jean suite. Inside, under the disconcerting gaze of an American Hollywood icon known for sleeping with a famous baseball player and, as rumor had it, a sitting U.S. President, Farhan made four additional calls, each one producing the same result as he had encountered five minutes prior. Two entire cells dark. Eight soldiers of Allah. And now, Akim was missing. Jalil had said he felt in his gut the person who had called was pretending to be Akim and that the real Akim was either the shrouded corpse on the gurney or was responsible for the scene at the club and was now incarcerated. Always the loose cannon, Farhan thought. It was only a matter of time. And the timing could not have been worse.

Long dead from an overdose in a Hollywood bungalow, her pouty smile living on forever in the mural adorning the entire wall in the large sitting room, the curvy woman seemed to mock Akim, to ridicule him for relying on practices that had worked in his home country, but, so far, seemed to be unsuccessful in the land of the infidel.

Allah willing, with Jalil and Mohamed at his side, he would make the infidel special operations soldier—the leader of the team responsible for robbing him of years of freedom—watch as his wife’s skin was peeled from her writhing body. The man called Wyatt would be next, only he would be taken apart piece by piece, strands of guitar cord, tightened ever so slowly, taking the place of knife and bone saw.

He knew the infidels were at their home on Boise Street. The drone he’d used to recon the home from hundreds of feet in the air was in its box in the suite’s private bedroom. The little green electric scooter he’d rented to take him to the park he’d launched the drone from was downstairs, in the bushes, with three more just like it. America is a strange place, he thought. So much surveillance, yet very little law enforcement. During the entire round trip he’d embarked upon earlier today, five miles total, he had not seen a single patrol car. Nor had he come upon a police roadblock. Keeping to the many streets on which motor vehicles were forbidden had made the trip a quick one.

Smiling at the prospect of binding the Brooklyn woman in guitar wire, removing her nipples, and feeding them to her husband—the infidel soldier who had killed or captured scores of Al-Simoom’s finest warriors—he went back to sharpening the slightly curved blade of the bone-handled Jambiya that had already skinned alive more sinners than he could count.

 

***

 

Five minutes later, impatience getting the better of Farhan, he texted Mohamed, asking for an update on their progress. When the text went unanswered, he tried Jalil. Nothing. Fearing the worst, that the remainder of his cell was compromised, he strapped the knife to his belt, tucked a Beretta pistol into his waistband, and then strode purposefully for the door.

 

Cade had chosen a deep alcove that funneled to the doorway of an auto parts distributor. He was sitting with his back to the steel door and breathing air sullied with the stench of urine when he heard the scuffing of rubber on cement. He pulled the half-pint bottle from the cardigan pocket, unscrewed the cap, then took a swig of the medicinal-tasting liquor. The remainder he poured out over his chest. Finally, he wiped his prints off the bottle and dropped it back into the pocket.

Leaning forward, cardigan wet and stinking of booze, he used the glass face of his phone as a mirror. Angling it just so, he detected movement on his side of 10th Avenue. It was the terrorist duo, walking shoulder to shoulder, keeping a steady pace, seemingly lost in their thoughts.

The men were still a dozen yards from Cade’s position when one of them said in Arabic, “Why is Farhan not worried about Akim’s disappearance?”

“Because his brother has always been trouble,” replied the other man. “If it didn’t find him, he sought it out.”

“What do you think of the other cells not responding?”

The man stopped walking and turned to face the other. “I don’t like it. God willing, the phones the colonel provided were found to be missing and were bricked.”

“Bricked?”

“Rendered inoperable with a signal from space.”

The man shook his head doubtfully, then fell back into the same steady pace, arms swinging, head on a swivel.

The pair were ten feet from the doorway when Cade rose on wobbly legs. One hand on the wall, ostensibly to steady himself, the other gripping the silenced pistol pressed hard to his right leg, he groaned and exhaled sharply in the terrorists’ direction.

Stopping in front of the doorway, lip curling into a sneer, the man who’d been skeptical of the bricked phone explanation said, “Americans are all drunkards and druggies.” He drew a black pistol from his waist.

Intercepting the pistol mid-swing, the other man said, “It will draw attention. Use a knife.”

Shrugging, the man returned the pistol to where he’d gotten it and drew a K-Bar fighting knife from somewhere out of sight. Squaring up to Cade, the sneer widening, the man raised the knife over his head.

In Arabic, Cade said, “What, no suicide vest?” and shot the man in the face.

Overcome with rage, the unarmed man wrapped an arm around his face-shot comrade, snatched the K-Bar mid-fall, and took a clumsy backhanded swipe at Cade’s neck.

Though Cade was already stepping back when he saw light glint off the blade and realized it was coming up and around, with the two bodies crowding in on him in the enclosed space there was little room left over for him to bring the pistol to bear on J or M, whichever one of them now had possession of the knife.

Jerking his head back quickly, Cade felt a sharp sting as the K-Bar’s blade swept across his Adam’s apple. As the momentum from the wild swipe left the terrorist off balance, Cade yanked the Gerber from its sheath, parried the terrorist’s feeble follow-on knife strike with the Glock’s suppressor, then, looking the terrorist squarely in the eyes, drove six and a half inches of tempered American steel into the man’s stomach. With all his might, even going so far as to bend his knees and get up on the balls of his feet for added leverage, Cade firmed his grip on the Gerber, locked his wrist, and rose from the crouch. Abdominal muscle was no match for the razor-sharp blade as it opened the terrorist from navel to breastbone.

The face-shot man was just settling on the ground, dead at Cade’s feet, when the second man, wearing a surprised look, dropped the K-Bar and lowered his gaze. Mouth frozen into a silent O, he watched in amazement as his entrails slithered from the bloody, foot-long gash, only to coil snake-like on his fellow jihadi’s upturned face.

Cade dumped the disemboweled man at his feet and watched him die. Ninety long seconds during which the terrorist’s blood-slicked hands clenched and unclenched and his tennis-shoe-clad feet scissored back and forth, spreading the contents of his own ruptured lower intestine in a stinking greasy arc at the mouth of the alcove. All of it was accompanied by animalistic grunts and groans the likes of which Cade imagined the terrorist had elicited from his many helpless victims.

Checking both men for a pulse, and finding not so much as a faint flutter, he policed up their weapons, cash, and smartphones. As he poked his head from the alcove to make certain he was still all alone, he reveled in the fact that his face was the last thing the terrorists saw when they each received their well-deserved comeuppance.