No, Crenshaw thought as he mixed the last of the explosive powder, that figure just wouldn’t do. Not for the cleverness of his designs. Not for what his efforts were going to do to make the gold quadruple in value overnight.
He looked over at the truck now labeled WILBIX CONSTRUCTION and smiled. His greatest achievement. That truck would make him go down in history as the person who obliterated America’s superpower status once and for all. A pity no one would ever know it was him. But after the truck blew up, the FBI wouldn’t bother looking for suspects because they would think the perpetrators were already dead.
Snatching the Muslims had been Orr’s idea from the start. He picked two who had questionable ties to radical Islam. Or so it would seem, once they were blamed for carrying out an attack masterminded by Al Qaeda. All signs would point to them. Their sudden disappearance. The trucker who had been allowed to live so that he could report that he was hijacked by two Arabs, played perfectly by Orr and Gaul. The Muslims’ identification found seared but recognizable in the warehouse ruins. Their bodies torn to pieces by the truck blast.
No one would suspect that it was anything other than another bold terrorist attack by America’s sworn enemy.
And that would let Crenshaw and the others retire to the island country of their choice to enjoy the spoils of the operation, with no fear of retribution from the CIA, the FBI, or any other three-letter agency sifting through the wreckage.
Of course, Sherman Locke and Carol Benedict would have to be dealt with, but that was fairly simple. Once they were done with them, Phillips would put a couple of bullets in their heads and dump the bodies in the Potomac so they wouldn’t be linked to the dirty bomb.
Now that Crenshaw thought about it, maybe he would let the world know somehow that it was he who had been responsible. Just not until after he was dead. He could leave some kind of testament describing exactly how he outwitted the brightest investigative minds the US had to offer. Even though he wouldn’t be around to savor the embarrassment and disgust aimed at the people who let him slip through their grasp, he would guarantee that his name would be immortalized in history.
The truck-bomb design was his favorite part, and he would revel in divulging the details. Five hundred pounds of binary explosive packed underneath three hundred gallons of gas, buried in sixty thousand pounds of highly flammable sawdust. The strontium shielded in a special lead case of his design that would blow up and aerosolize the nuclear material just before the larger bomb detonated. The explosion would transform the sawdust into highly radioactive ash, which would coat everything downwind for miles.
Air-handling systems would exacerbate the effect, sucking in the microscopic particles and making them an integral part of every building in the vicinity. The buildings would never be cleaned of the radiation. They would all have to be destroyed to make sure the radioactivity was gone. Even if the authorities claimed that a building was below the level of harmful radiation, who in their right mind would ever want to occupy it again?
After the warehouse was nothing but wreckage, the plan was for Crenshaw and Phillips to drive the truck and the van to their destination, and when Orr wired the payments to their accounts, they would park the semi in the pre-designated location, drive away in the van, and detonate the bomb.
By Monday evening the United States would be changed forever. The stock market would be in ruins, the economy would take a nosedive when the world’s financial hub was no longer inhabitable, and trillions of dollars would vanish overnight.
Amid a crisis the likes of which the world had never before seen, only one certainty among the chaos would remain: tangible goods. Commodities. And the most important commodity in the world was gold.
When the stock and bond markets crashed, investors would flee to gold, causing its value to skyrocket. James Bond’s nemesis Goldfinger had the right plan-nuke the gold reserve to make his own gold more valuable-but by targeting Fort Knox he’d chosen the wrong location.
Yes, the US had a huge stockpile of gold at its disposal at Fort Knox in Kentucky, but it wasn’t the largest depository of gold in the country. That claim to fame belonged to the Federal Reserve Bank, which held more than ten percent of the world’s gold reserves. Depending on the daily close, its value was around $300 billion.
After tomorrow, those reserves would be worthless.
Although the bank’s vault was eighty feet below street level, the building’s air-handling system wouldn’t be able to scrub the radiation from the dust motes circulating through the structure. Five thousand tons of gold would become radioactive.
And what amplified the impact was the fact that the Federal Reserve Bank was located in the same square mile as the New York Stock Exchange, along with all the other investment firms and brokerages that made downtown New York the single greatest concentration of wealth on earth.
At least, it would be for one more day. Then everything would change. And, merely by blowing up a single semi trailer full of sawdust, Crenshaw would eventually be remembered as the man who transformed lower Manhattan from a shining beacon of unholy greed into a desolate wasteland.
FORTY-SEVEN
T hirty thousand feet above the Mediterranean, Tyler, Grant, and Stacy were huddled around the laptop so they could see Miles Benson and Aiden MacKenna on the video chat via satellite. Their Gulfstream jet would arrive in Rome in an hour. Miles and Aiden were on their own plane, heading to Washington to confirm Sherman’s and Carol’s release.
Tyler had expected to have a hard time persuading his boss to go this alone without intervention by the authorities, and he was right.
“I don’t like this plan,” Miles said. “We should have the Feds ready to nab whoever drops off your father.”
“If we do that,” Tyler said, “we’ll have to tip them off to everything, and I’m not ready to take that chance. If I thought there was any danger for you, I wouldn’t go this route.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. I want to keep you three safe. What about the Italian national police?”
“We can’t call in the Carabinieri. As far as they know, Orr hasn’t done anything wrong in Italy.”
“Yet.”
“Four specialists from Neutralizer Security should be able to handle taking down Orr on our end,” Grant said, referring to the private security contractor Tyler had hired for the job. “I’ve worked with them before. They’re pros.”
“Then why didn’t you hire them in Greece?” Miles said.
“My fault,” Tyler said. “I didn’t expect Cavano’s men to show up at the Parthenon.”
“None of us did,” Stacy said.
“Cavano’s persistent, I’ll give her that,” Grant said.
Aiden pushed his way in for a closer look. “For four billion dollars’ worth of gold, she’d probably take on the entire Carabinieri herself.” Aiden was talking about the cube of gold that supposedly sat in the middle of the chamber.
Miles shook his head. “You see what you’re up against, Tyler? They’ll kill all of you without hesitation to get that money.”
“The strontium adds a new variable to all this,” Tyler said. “If Orr really has a dirty bomb, he’s going to use it. We have to stop him.”
“Are you sure he has it?”
“No, which is another reason we’re not going to the authorities just yet. Once we have Orr, we’ll make him tell us everything.”
“How?”
“We’ll have plenty of bargaining chips, but they’ll be useless until he’s in our hands.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“We’re going to follow his directions to meet him at the outdoor concert. Piazza del Plebiscito is a huge plaza near the Naples waterfront. It’ll be packed with partyers. Orr told us to be there at nine and wait for his call.
