bird.
“Not a sound,” Gerard threatened as he raised his hand an inch.
“Seth,” she gurgled. “Why-”
Gerard’s hand slammed back down on her face. “I told you to keep quiet.” He pressed the box cutter deeper so it drew a trickle of blood from her neck.
She nodded quickly, eyes round and white with terror.
Timmons spotted a roll of clear packing tape on top of the counter.
“Ginger,” he whispered, in the same voice he’d whispered much more personal things. “You’ve got to stay still so he won’t hurt you. Do you understand me?”
She nodded again, blinking away the tears that pressed from her thick lashes. Mascara ran in black streams down her cheeks.
“Okay… I’m trusting you…” He let her hands go long enough to get the tape. Once her mouth was covered he took several wraps around her ankles and her wrists.
When he was satisfied she was well restrained, he looked up at Gerard. “It’s done.”
“Finally,” Gerard said, shaking his head as if disgusted. He breathed a long sigh of relief. “That was just about the end of us.”
“How are we going to do this?” Timmons looked down at the terrified woman’s face. Ten minutes before, she would have called him her boyfriend. They’d even joked about starting a family together.
“Good question,” Gerard said. “She’ll bleed all over everything if we cut her throat-and I only have this one shirt here at work. It would be pretty hard to break her neck without making too much noise…” His nostrils flared with all the talk of killing. Such things had always excited him.
“Well, we can’t leave her alive,” Timmons said. “Everything won’t be in place until one-thirty… That’s over five hours away.”
Ginger looked back and forth; her chest began to heave uncontrollably. She clenched her eyes as if closing them might drown out their words.
“We can hide her body behind these boxes,” Gerard stared down in thought. “But someone will report her missing if she just disappears.” Ginger’s denim skirt had hiked up during the assault and he seemed transfixed by the dark, chocolate flesh of her thighs and snow-white glimpse of her underwear.
Timmons shrugged. “I’ll tell Selma she got sick and had to run home. She knows we’ve been dating. It’ll seem a plausible story coming from me…”
Ginger’s eyes flicked open. She stared up at Timmons, heartbroken.
Her muffled sobs turned into angry screams beneath the tape. She began to pitch and squirm, pounding her head against the floor and kicking out with her bound feet.
It was too late.
Timmons lay his full weight across her writhing chest. He pressed his palm over her mouth to help dampen the sound as Gerard reached in to slide a plastic garbage bag over her head. Timmons slipped his hand out quickly, then replaced it again while Gerard sealed the bag around her neck.
Her silent screams buzzed against Seth’s palm. Dark lashes, soaked with tears, fluttered against the plastic.
Though he’d seen it done many times, Timmons had never actually killed anyone himself. He was surprised it took Ginger Durham such a very long time to die.
The others would go much more quickly. He would make certain of that.
Situation Room The White House 1315 hours
Secretary of Defense Andrew Filson had the pinched mouth of someone who woke up angry every day. He was a man constantly in motion, and the tail of his starched French-cuffed shirt was generally flapping over his belt ten minutes into any meeting.
He tossed a navy-blue folder onto the long polished oak table surrounded by thirteen fellow members of the National Security Council. Six muted flat-screen televisions flickered along the walls of the cramped, subterranean room. Five were tuned to major media outlets. One glowed in vibrantly blank blue screen, attached to a laptop computer for the very few times a cabinet member was foolish enough to bring in a PowerPoint presentation for the commander in chief.
Winfield “Win” Palmer, the former director of national intelligence, and newly appointed national security advisor, sat to the immediate right of his boss-President Chris Clark. Sometimes brash, often outspoken, and ever devoted, the ruddy, stone-faced Palmer had been Clark’s right-hand man from the time they’d been assigned to the same company in the United States Military Academy at West Point, too many decades before.
Two seats away, SecDef Filson had reached nuclear-option-only mode more quickly than usual. Palmer shot a furtive glance at the commander in chief to see if he wanted the retired three-star reined in a notch or two.
Clark’s gunmetal brow arched almost imperceptibly. Their time together in the military gave Palmer the edge when it came to reading his boss’s unspoken cues. POTUS liked a robust discussion among his cabinet, sometimes allowing things to heat dangerously close to an all-out brawl before offering any sort of mediation. The White House Situation Room was code-named Cement Mixer for good reason.
Filson raged on with all the wind and fury of a true zealot. He waved another navy-blue folder in the air before tossing it on the leather desk blotter in front of him.
“The three yesterday make five,” he said, black reading glasses perched on a bulbous nose as he consulted a hand-scrawled note on his legal pad. “I’m sure you have seen the markets this morning. Dropping like a glass-jawed boxer at our inability to protect our citizens.” He looked at the folder in front of him, shaking his head in disgust. “Look at this. A rogue policeman working off-duty security in Oakland takes his service pistol and guns down fifteen at a Raiders game. Fans tackled the son of a bitch, but he was able to get away and blow the head off a young father in front of his wife and two kids before a sniper from his own department pops him between the running lights….
“And how about this one?” Filson’s eyes flicked up and down the document, pressing on with his grim news. “A TSA screener sneaks a bomb inside the secure area at Miami International, managing to turn the thirteen innocents nearest him into pink mist. Twenty more injured in one way or another.” He scanned the last folder in his pile. “There was one tiny shred of decent news,” he snorted. “A flight attendant out of Detroit tried to strong-arm a Delta pilot into crashing their 767. Luckily for the souls on board, the copilot happens to be a flight deck safety officer. He shoots her in the eye at thirty thousand feet. They had to do an emergency landing in Philly to wipe her brains off the in-strum-”
“All right, Andrew,” the president cut him off. “I know everyone here appreciates your vivid descriptions, but we do have our own copy of the files. The real question before us is the connection. All of these people were under thirty.” He flipped through his executive brief. “What makes Americans with not so much as a parking ticket suddenly go berserk?”
“These people may have looked American.” Filson jammed a thick index finger against the table. “But witnesses at three separate events heard the actors whisper something in another language shortly before each killing. Mark my words Mr. President, an outside group is behind each and every one of these incidents. My money is on al-Qaeda-”
“Someone heard a whisper in something they think was an unknown tongue?” At the far end of the table Jamal Ramidi, the president’s assistant for economic policy, threw up his hands. He was a tall, birdlike academic who looked fragile enough to snap in a strong wind. Doctorates from Stanford in international trade and macroeconomics made him the perfect choice for dispensing executive advice on bean-counting. “For crying out loud, Andrew, just once, might it be possible that our troubles are domestic?”
Filson wagged his head with a curling sneer. “I’m not pulling this out of my ass, Jamal. These are coordinated acts of terrorism with Sandbox fingerprints all over them and you know it.”
“Way to generalize, General.” Ramidi pursed narrow lips. “I suppose you advocate a wholesale roundup of all us towel heads at once-?”
“Believe me.” Filson clenched his teeth, leaning across the table. “I love this country enough that if-”
“Oh,” Ramidi snapped. “And I suddenly hate my country because my grandparents are from Lebanon?” He threw his pen on the table, exasperated. “Mr. Secretary, you do not know Hamas from hummus.”
