General Middleton shook his head. “Play nice, Gunny. What are you thinking?”
Swanson walked around the table and looked out of the only window to the street, where civilians were going about their daily routines in the heart of Washington. Behind him, the image of Juba was still on the three television screens. “This is all out of some James Bond movie. Those people out there have all the toys, but they still don’t know who they are really dealing with. Juba is a damned good sniper. He is not running away to avoid prosecution, he is moving with great speed and deliberation toward a specific objective.”
“He’s stalking a target,” Sybelle added.
“And he knows I am coming after him, which is why he had that investigator in Connecticut checking me out.” Kyle picked up the transcript of the exhaustive FBI interview with private detective Chris Lowry, who had been totally cooperative. Discretion was one thing in keeping a client’s confidentiality, but a federal subpoena was much different. He gave them everything he had.
“Look down where Lowry reported back to his ‘client,’ who has to be Juba using another false front. He listed everyone he spoke with during the day and a brief outline of the conversations. When he was talking with my old high school buddy Mikey McLaughlin, the detective also mentioned that I was godfather to his nine-year-old daughter, Mary Elizabeth. Juba sent an e-mail right back to thank him and added that he would talk with Michael and the girl, Mary Elizabeth, personally.” Kyle dropped the transcript. “Now why would he do that?”
Carolyn Walker from the DHS had been following the conversation without adding anything, but now she spoke up. “He did not have to respond at all, and in fact, he did terminate that entire e-mail link after sending that message. The conclusion is that he intends to attack that little girl in order to draw you into the open.”
“And how have you responded to that threat?” Swanson asked.
“Boston is being flooded with extra agents to help secure the area, and some HRT countersniper teams are standing by. He won’t get near her.” Walker looked steadily across the table. The routine was in place, concentrating overwhelming manpower on a trouble spot, building a protective web around the target.
“It is a waste of time, money, and resources, Agent Walker,” said Kyle. “Juba has no plans to go after my goddaughter and couldn’t reach her even if he did. What you people aren’t mentioning is that you have a file a foot thick on Mikey. His uncle Tim runs some of the healthier criminal enterprises in Boston, everything from gambling and girls to dope and supplying money for what’s left of the Irish Republican Army. Mikey is Tim’s chief enforcer. No, Mary Elizabeth is quite safe.”
“So why did he send the message, if that is indeed what happened?”
“A diversion. It is a sniper’s habit to make pursuers chase their tails instead of him. He took an action with minor risk that caused you people to have a major reaction.”
Dave Hunt came back into the room. “We now have him in the domestic air system, flying from Washington to Tampa.”
SAN FRANCISCO
Juba’s warning antenna was quivering. He had rented a spacious, fully equipped automotive garage in a small industrial park on the outskirts of San Francisco, and while he was working, he kept an eye on a small black-and- white television set perched on a workbench. His picture was on part of the screen, and he walked over, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, to turn up the volume. A colorful SPECIAL ALERT logo was imprinted below the woman news reader giving the report. National security authorities had issued a request for all citizens to watch for this man, Jeremy Osmand, a known terrorist believed to be somewhere in the United States at the moment. Do not approach him by yourself, she said. Call the police.
Juba had purchased a 2004 Ford Excursion, the biggest sport utility vehicle ever produced in the United States, for a 20 percent cash down payment and his signature on a lot of legal papers. It shone dull silver beneath the overhead lights of the garage, where he had been clearing out everything behind the front seats to create a long, flat deck. Now he got in, rolled up the big front door, and drove to his motel, a nice mid-priced facility. He parked two blocks away and walked down a narrow alley, with a dirty 49ers cap tilted low on his face. At the corner, he went into a health food store, bought a cup of vanilla chai, and sipped it as he scanned the area.
He had been there for two nights but had only been seen by the night clerk. Had the young man already recognized the picture on the screen and called the authorities? It did not seem that way, because there were no unmarked police cars in the neighborhood, no vans with tinted windows, and no strong young men pretending to do work. No cops, but they would find this place sooner or later. He had to take the chance.
The pistol was snug in the waistband of his jeans, beneath the floppy T-shirt, but he needed the contents of a plastic bag that he had left in the bathroom and the big gun that was hidden in the air-conditioning vent of his room.
It was difficult to buy a good weapon in the People’s Republic of San Francisco, but back in the late 1980s, American law enforcement had turned a blind eye toward al Qaeda representatives who had made many open purchases at gun shows around the country. Those guns were believed to be for export to Afghanistan and the war against the Soviets, but a number of them went into secret caches such as the one that had been stored in northern California. He had picked up an Armalite civilian knockoff of the famous.50 caliber Barrett, which had been purchased from a gun show in Sacramento. There was a little.22 Bushmaster, too, but Juba wanted the big kick.
He dumped his drink and circled the block to approach the motel from a direction that could not be seen by the front desk, sauntered up the single flight of stairs, and was quickly into the corner room. The maid had already been by to clean up and prepare the bed, and the room had fresh towels and the smell of pine aerosol. He stole the towels and pushed them into the plastic bag with the box of Clairol Nice’n Easy hair coloring, then unscrewed the wall vent with a tiny screwdriver on his army knife and pulled out the Armalite in its carrying case. Four minutes after entering the room, he was out. Time mattered now, and he still had chores to do.
A hospital located twenty miles from the baseball stadium was commonly known as “the Saints.” It had been founded by Mormons as a business and charitable venture; the Latter-day Saints sold it to the Catholic Church in 1993, and it was renamed St. Mary’s Hospital. Sick people did not care which saints were in charge as long as the doctors and nurses took care of them. The Saints encompassed four floors of a modern building and had earned a reputation as a top-rated trauma center.
The previous day, Juba had picked out an apartment about two hundred yards away from the Saints, and now he drove there and parked in an empty space behind the low building. He went up the inside stairwell and needed only thirty seconds to pick the lock. It was the middle of a sunny afternoon, and the dead bolt had not been engaged by the young mother watching television. She only had time to turn in surprise when she heard the door open; Juba shot her before she could scream. He carefully went through the apartment and found a little boy playing in a bedroom. The kid looked up just before the trigger was pulled. Juba pulled the dead woman into the light blue bathroom that smelled like daisies and dumped her in the white bathtub. Her four-year-old son was placed atop her body. The gunman dipped a washcloth in the boy’s blood and wrote his name on the tile:
In the refrigerator, there was some leftover chicken in a covered bowl, which he heated in the microwave and brought into the living room with a dish of cold potato salad. As he ate lunch, he studied the unobstructed view from the window: a large white sign with EMERGENCY ROOM printed in large blue letters and a concrete ramp that jutted into the driveway to allow ambulance drivers to back right up to it and wheel their gurneys smoothly from the vehicle and straight into the trauma unit.
Then it was back to the garage.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“About seven hundred and fifty million passengers flew on some eleven million flights from U.S. airports last year,” said Lieutenant Commander Freedman, surging around the Internet. “That’s a lot of faces for the computer to look at, and they won’t find anything if he rented a car and drove somewhere.”
“Damn, Liz. Don’t even think like that,” said Sybelle Summers. The Trident group was bored. They liked answers crisp and quick. The coffee was stale and so was the air.
“We have people on it down in Florida,” said Carolyn Walker. “If he’s there, we’ll find him.”
