American Terrorist Trilogy Read online

  He remembered the man that looked like a cop who had been eyeballing him from the lobby doorway of the coffee shop. He slowly pivoted his upper body to the left and spied the man in the beige pants and black windbreaker ushering the last of the coffee shop employees and customers into the lobby, out of harm’s way.

  He faced back forward again. The first time you get jacked up, you’re paralyzed with fear. The cops know this. They approach you and start shouting at you, trying to overwhelm you with sheer volume and surprise, and it works.

  Shock and awe.

  It’s human nature to retreat from shouting and loud violent words. When those violent words are focused at you—especially by men in uniform, especially with guns pointed at you—human nature automatically forces you to assume a posture of submission. You wonder what the hell is going on or what you’ve done. You’re scared shitless. You answer all their questions.

  Yes, sir. No, sir. I don’t know, sir.

  Only later after they release you and the fear fades do you experience the emotional aftermath of humiliation, shame, and helplessness. Then you start to feel the anger. After that, you feel the frustration because you have no target for the anger.

  The second time it happens, however, you jump back in time and pick up emotionally right where you left off the first time, even if it happened years ago. You skip the fear. You just go straight to the anger, contempt, and frustration you tried unsuccessfully to get over from the last time. But those emotions have simmered over the months or the years, residing just beneath your consciousness, an echo of a memory that never quite faded.

  That’s what Carl felt as the initial shock of his new encounter faded. He figured a psychiatrist would say he was still suffering from post-traumatic stress, but he didn’t care. He knew these cops were going to take him down hard. Cops didn’t bring SWAT and the FBI tactical guys to a party with this many guns if they were going to let you go. Like, “Oh, sorry, Mr. Johnson, we thought you were robbing a coffee shop this time. Our mistake. You’re free to go now.”

  These cops were going to bust his ass hard, and he knew it. The reason didn’t matter. No amount of cooperation was going to change that.

  So, after the initial two seconds of shock, his wildly thumping heart calmed, and he dredged up all those raw emotions that had been simmering inside him for four years.

  “Fuck you,” he said to the nearest cop. He waved his coffee cup at the crowd with his index finger pointing at them. “Fuck all of you.”

  Then he took a long slurping sip of coffee.

  Carl watched the woman cop follow the FBI assault troops from the SUVs. She side-stepped her way through the crowd of weapons.

  “Make a hole,” she commanded.

  Then she stopped five feet from Carl. She had tied-back blonde hair, brown eyes, and a serious look on her face that suggested she could kick his ass with her pinkie finger if she wanted to. She wore denim pants, white and blue running shoes, and a gray pullover sweater under an open, dark blue windbreaker with FBI in yellow letters over the left breast. She wore a badge clipped to her belt and an empty holster on her right hip. She gripped her service weapon in both hands, its barrel pointed roughly at Carl’s feet.

  She was the boss of all this mess, Carl figured, because she wore no Kevlar vest or other combat gear, and she had brought only a handgun to the party.

  “I want you to slowly pull your left hand out of your pocket,” she said.

  He locked gazes with the woman cop and decided not to comply immediately. He gave her a derisive, cocky smile.

  “Fuck you,” Carl said. Then he took a long sip of coffee. “Just don’t shoot me.” He slowly pulled his hand out of his pocket.

  They shot him.

  Chapter 5

  1122 MST Friday

  Albuquerque, NM

  Fire ripped through his body as four SWAT cops zapped him with stun guns from eight feet away. The world tilted to the right, and a portion of the sidewalk rotated up and slammed against the left side of his body. He lay there sizzling and could actually see his arms and legs twitching and flailing as the four cops continued to juice him for a few more seconds.

  When they finally stopped, a detached part of his brain registered men moving near the edge of the roof of the Convention Center diagonally across the street. Two of the men held long rifles, and their partners held high-powered binoculars.

  He had a couple of unpaid parking tickets, but...snipers?

  What the fuck?

  The female cop squatted in front of him and said, “Not so cocky now, are you?” Then she said, “Hit him again.”

  In his peripheral view he saw three of the cops reach to their belts and start replacing cartridges in their black stun guns. One of the cops had a yellow and black gun that didn’t need recharging. Carl recognized it as one of the new multi-shot Taser guns that could hit three separate targets in rapid succession.

  Or one target more than once.

  Electrical fire ripped through his body again, and he screamed in pain. When that cop was done with him, Carl saw the woman pull a syringe from her blazer pocket and felt a prick as she plunged the needle into the right side of his neck. An unpleasant sensation of heat spread into his neck and chest.

  His eyes focused on the lid of the coffee cup that lay on its side near his face. The lid hadn’t popped off when he dropped the cup, and a trickle of brown liquid gurgled slowly out of the sipping hole. He saw the engraved words on the lid: Caution Contents Hot. A huge boot nudged the cup aside. Another boot stepped on the cup, and coffee splashed all over the concrete.

  The cops near him began to disburse, but the woman cop kept her position squatting near his head. She was obviously watching and waiting for the drug to take effect, and Carl felt it taking over his body gradually, but quickly. The woman’s left hand fiddled with the expended syringe. The sleeve of her right arm had hitched up a bit, exposing a simple digital wrist watch. The face of her watch was pointed downward, right at Carl’s eyes. He noticed it was twenty-two minutes after eleven. He was going to miss his noon appointment.

  He felt himself fading into blackness. A cop rolled him onto his belly and roughly restrained his wrists with plastic zip cuffs. Then two cops grabbed him under his armpits and dragged him across the sidewalk toward a black box van. He tried to regain his feet and at least walk with some tiny bit of dignity, but his body wouldn’t respond.

  Should have kept my hand in my pocket a while longer. Could have at least finished my coffee.

  He passed out halfway to the van.

  Chapter 6

  1530 EST Friday

  Arlington Heights, VA

  On the center monitor, Aaron McGrath watched the video conference feed that originated in the conference room of Guillermo Figueroa, the SAC, or Special Agent in Charge, of the Albuquerque FBI field office. The high-definition camera was aimed from the middle of the top edge of the wall monitor at the end of the conference table, and the FBI agents that sat with Figueroa looked like they were gazing at something just below the bottom of McGrath’s monitor. He knew he appeared the same to the FBI people.

  At McGrath’s instructions, Special Agent Cummings was one of only three individuals in the room. While the two male officers were dressed in typical dark suits, Cummings was dressed in jeans and a pullover gray sweater. She’d been pulled in on her day off. Her FBI windbreaker was draped over the back of her chair. Her blonde hair was tied back but wasn’t braided. Intense brown eyes gave her narrow face a serious look.

  Cummings was an elite federal agent, and that was why he’d considered recruiting her into the Terror Event Response agency. She displayed extremely high competency in the physical police skills—marksmanship, fitness, and special weapons and tactics—but she also brought a measured and deliberate approach to her investigative research. While big-city agents often competed to be the first to solve a crime or catch the unsub, or unknown subject, Cummings took a more Zen-like approach to her cases. As a result, Cummings
had amassed an impressive list of successful case results and commendations.

  Figueroa sat at the head of the conference table, and his tactical commander, Special Agent Ed Murphy, sat to his right. Special Agent Lenore Cummings sat to the left of the SAC. Murphy and Cummings had their chairs swiveled so they could look at the wall monitor.

  “Agent Figueroa,” McGrath said, not using the man’s full, formal title. “The information has been relayed to you that the suspect you have in custody is a Tier-Three terror suspect of interest to the Department of Homeland Security, correct?”

  Figueroa nodded.

  “His associates have the resources to mount a rescue, should his location be disclosed, so you should consider your building a target of imminent assault. Implement immediate protective measures to defend the building.”

  Figueroa narrowed his eyes, then glanced at his tactical commander. He gave him a brief nod and the man left the room. McGrath knew the building would be emptied of all but essential personnel and then sealed, with heavily armed, combat-trained security personnel stationed at every entrance at street level and on the roof. They’d call in local law enforcement to establish a defensive perimeter around the building, along with sniper support. Nearby buildings and industrial complexes would be evacuated to minimize collateral damage should a firefight take place.

  Figueroa said, “May I know the nature of the terror event?”

  “A high-profile child has been taken. The man you have in custody is our only information source regarding her whereabouts at the moment.” McGrath nodded and shifted his attention to the only other occupant in the room. “Special Agent Cummings, you have responsibility for the suspect until my people arrive. You answer only to me and to my retrieval team when they arrive. Is that clear?”

  Cummings nodded.

  “The suspect is in isolation?”

  “Yes, Mr. Director, and he is sedated. He’ll be out for no less than three more hours.”

  “Keep heavily armed security officers outside his cell, with orders to answer only to you. You will personally see to it that absolutely no one is allowed inside his cell until my team arrives.”

  Figueroa sat forward and balanced both his elbows on the conference table. He was short and compact, his upper body thick and muscular. His hairline had receded so far he was nearly bald. His round face featured heavily lidded eyes, a broad nose and full lips, and his skin held a deep brown hue. The man held his fingertips in a steeple formation, and McGrath sensed his curiosity.

  “Agent Figueroa, this is as much as I can tell you at the moment.”

  The man nodded. “You’ll have our full cooperation.”

  “Agent Cummings, you have an encrypted cell phone?”

  She nodded.

  “You have a SCIF in the building?” He pronounced it skiff.

  Again, she nodded.

  A SCIF was a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a specially shielded communication room used to discuss classified information. Typically, it was a room within a room, wrapped in copper mesh to prevent any signals from being intercepted from the outside. The double walls were filled with vibration-absorbing foam to prevent the transmission of voices. White-noise generators added another layer of protection, and the SCIF had no windows that could be interrogated by lasers to sense vibrations from voices or transmissions like electrical signals from computer keystrokes. Even the electrical conduit pipes had high-tech isolation filters to prevent interception by any laser-based or mechanical eavesdropping devices.

  “See to the prisoner, then call me from the SCIF to receive an additional briefing and further instructions.”

  McGrath terminated the conference call and turned his attention to Nancy Palmer. During the video call, she had stepped outside the field of view of the camera. Some of the time she’d been giving instructions and queries to the analysts. Now, she was doing that athlete thing, rolling her neck from side to side and stretching muscles like she was getting ready for a workout. She noticed him watching her and stepped close to him. He pointed at the monitor showing all the heavily armed men that captured the terrorist.

  “Christ, Nancy, we instructed them to use nonlethal force only.” He shook his head as he watched the replay of the takedown. “One mistake and our only lead would be dead.”

  “This can’t be our guy, Aaron. There’s no way that takedown should have been that easy.”

  The point of view of the video feed was one of the sniper units on the Convention Center roof diagonally across the intersection.

  “He’s our guy. I’ll bet my salary on that. He’s the exact same height, weight, eye color, skin color, and age.”

  Palmer shook her head, and a short flock of her blonde, close-cut hair dropped over her right eye. She stood nearly as tall as he, and she wore a perfectly tailored, two-piece black suit over a black turtleneck.

  “He’s such a minor player on the world stage we don’t have recent intel on the guy yet, outside of his website, but in all of the photographs, he is wearing glasses. The man we have in custody is not, and he’s not wearing contacts either.”

  McGrath raised an eyebrow, and Palmer preempted the question forming in his mind.

  “I asked Cummings to check him.” Palmer shrugged. “That detail bothered me.” She head-nodded toward the wall monitors.

  The photo collage of Alfonso Reyes, along with the image from the Albuquerque traffic camera, had been moved to the left monitor. The frames Reyes wore at the kidnap site were dark and square. As Palmer pointed out, in all the images except for the traffic camera, Reyes was wearing stylish frames of various shapes and colors.

  “Except for that detail,” he said. “This guy is an exact match from everything we know about him. Not a close resemblance, but an exact match. And he’s been under our noses the whole time.”

  “Agreed,” Palmer said. “Maybe he had Lasik surgery, and just wears stylish, non-prescription frames to confuse people. But this guy saw our off-duty FBI agent and didn’t react. Hell, anybody with half a brain would have made that guy, yet Reyes took no action.”

  “Yeah.” McGrath slid his hands into his pockets and looked at the images again. “That FBI agent should be dead, either by Reyes or by his body guards, which we have yet to find. In fact, Reyes should have fled the scene immediately.”

  Palmer nodded. “He never would have allowed himself to be seen in public in the first place, not after snatching Melissa.” She paused a moment. “They’ve searched the Hyatt towers completely, top to bottom, floor by floor, room by room. There’s no evidence of anyone meeting with him, and there’s no sign of any of his body guards.”

  “Well, we have him now,” McGrath said. “So we’ll proceed under the assumption that he’s our guy unless we find out otherwise.”

  Palmer said, “I’m only suggesting that we keep an open mind until we’re certain.”

  “I’m certain.” He gestured with his shoulder toward the analysts seated in front of them. “How is the search going?”

  She deliberately showed a hint of frustration with a forced exhale and a subtle shake of her head, then used her right index finger to push the lock of hair away from her eye.

  She said, “Jimmy, anything on the plane?”

  The big Afro wobbled as the analyst shook his head. “I’ve got nothing here in Virginia yet.”

  Next to him, the bald kid said, “And I can’t find any plane that made an unscheduled flight into any airport, in or near Albuquerque.”

  McGrath said, “Then check scheduled flights. This kidnapping was well planned and well organized. Maybe they sedated her and stuck her in a box or a coffin. Hell, maybe he flew to Albuquerque and let himself get caught as a distraction, while the girl was taken out of the country by some other means.”

  Palmer nodded. “We assumed they moved Melissa from the scene in the SUV, but they could have used a helicopter to get her outside our lockdown. Check all buildings, parks, and parking lots near the kidnap site that are large
enough to land a helicopter.”

  “And check legitimate limousine carriers for missing or overdue limos,” McGrath added. “Also check cargo trucks, mail trucks, and moving companies to see if any have reported any missing vehicles. Double your radius of search, and double-check everything.”

  The icy fingers of panic were starting to twist his gut. They were six hours into the search for the girl, and the only hope they had of finding her was forcing a terror suspect nearly two thousand miles away to tell the truth.

  Chapter 7

  1745 MST Friday

  Albuquerque, NM

  Slowly, Carl felt himself rising from the drug-induced slumber into consciousness. As the fog in his brain cleared, his face and head felt itchy, like spider webs were stuck to his skin. He tried to bring his hands up to rub away the cobwebs. That’s when he discovered his hands were shackled behind his back. The chains rattled when he moved his arms. He wiggled his feet and found they were similarly shackled to the chair.

  The hell?

  He took a deep breath and raised his head from the table with great difficulty. He regretted the move immediately, for a wave of nausea made his stomach contract in dry heaves. A hot sweat broke out on his face and torso, and his mouth felt dry like cotton. His breath tasted like stale coffee, and he was suddenly so hungry his stomach started growling.

  Carl laid his forehead back on the table. Then he remembered the female cop had injected him with something. He was feeling the after-effects of her drug.

  He sat still and calmed his breathing even as an electronic buzz accompanied the door opening to his left. He lifted his head off the table. It was the female boss cop, except now she was dressed in a dark two-piece pant suit over a light blue blouse. Her dark blonde hair was still tied back. He could tell she wasn’t a regular street cop. Maybe she was a detective or a lieutenant or something.