35

The following morning, I’d been awakened by my phone buzzing with an alert, annoying the hell out of me. I looked at my watch, seeing it was only six A.M. I snatched up the phone and saw it was the Taskforce telling me to call in secure, immediately. I did the quick math and realized it was midnight in the United States. Which was foreboding.

Jennifer propped up on an elbow, her hair all over the place like she’d rubbed a balloon to get the static electricity to make it stand on end. She wiped the sleep out of her eyes and said, “What’s going on?”

I said, “I think our trip to Alhambra is going to be put on hold. Kurt wants to talk.”

She perked up at that but couldn’t resist a jab. “But I already paid for the tickets.”

I got on the computer and said, “You did not. You never did anything with the laptop after I turned out the light.”

Behind me she said, “Yes, I did.” And then I got the joke. I dialed up on the VPN, saying, “So it was all work for you, huh?”

She started to reply, and the screen cleared. I held a finger to my lips as Kurt appeared. Without preamble, he said, “You’ve got Omega for your target.”

I glanced at Jennifer and said, “Why? What’s changed?”

Kurt said, “You guys seen the TV news lately?”

We both said, “No. What happened?”

He told us about a strike on a ship in Houston, something that had caused enormous damage tactically, with millions of dollars in destruction and a body count climbing north of 150, but even more strategically. Now one of the largest ports in the United States was shut down. I flicked on the television while he was talking and saw a repeating newsfeed showing a burning lake of fire next to a gigantic tanker ship.

I said, “Okay, got it. What does that have to do with our target?”

“Everything. Right after this happened, but completely unrelated, some uniformed Houston police were looking for a gangbanger and ended up chasing a guy avoiding their checkpoint. He crashed his vehicle but managed to escape. The fingerprints in the vehicle were from the terrorist in Nevada.”

“So . . . you think there’s a connection between the two?”

He gave me a weary smile and said, “Really? A wanted terrorist with a penchant for complex attacks ends up in the city that has a complex attack? Yeah, I do. More importantly, so does the Oversight Council—and you have the only lead in existence, as tenuous as it is. If I’m right, he’s no longer a lone wolf. No way would he have been able to execute this mission by himself, which means there’s a complex plan in play.”

“You don’t think this was a one-off? It’s pretty spectacular. You think more hits are coming?”

“I honestly don’t know, but Tower One was pretty spectacular as well. Before Tower Two and the Pentagon.”

“Who are we looking at? Al Qaida? It can’t be ISIS. Those yokels don’t have the brainpower to manage something like this. All they can do is spray and pray.”

“You have hit the conundrum of the day. We have no idea. It’s not al Qaida—or if it is, they’ve managed to avoid about a thousand different intel feeds, which just isn’t possible given the scope of the attack. It’s not anyone on our radar.”

That was scary. A terrorist group that announced itself with an attack like this was unheard of. Even al Qaida had done multiple lesser attacks before the big one, including the botched World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

Kurt said, “You mentioned earlier you had a plan to roll this guy up. Can you execute?”

I said, “That’ll all depend on Creed.” I told him about Veep’s millennial trap, and that we were still waiting on the code to be built. He said, “I’ll get more manpower on it. If he can get it done, how soon can you execute?”

“We still have to find an ambush location, but that won’t take too long. This evening?”

He said, “Get it done, because I don’t think this asshole is finished yet, and we need whatever is in that drug dealer’s head.”

Twelve hours later, Veep and Jennifer were whispering sweet nothings to each other at an outdoor table, while I was forced to listen to verbal abuse from Knuckles, sitting on a cinder block at a construction site.

We’d been stationary for close to an hour before we got our first nibble, like a fish causing the bobber to bounce. Retro came on, saying, “Dragontooth is in the neighborhood, down on the river, and it’s doing the usual.” Meaning he was playing the game.

Now we only needed to see if we could sink the hook.