“I’m ready.”
Leon shifted his foot from the brake to the accelerator and eased after the Land Rover.
They followed the Rover straight to the Loin-the part of the city that had long ago given itself over to liquor stores and strip clubs, where anything and everything was bought and sold, twenty-four/seven.
Jamal wondered what a well-off Arab was doing down here. If he was looking for action, all he had to do was pick up the phone. He didn’t have to cruise through wine country. Maybe he had holdings here, invested some of that oil money in hookers and crack dealers.
An’ the government tells us businessmen are responsible for everything that’s wrong, he thought.
“Next red light,” Leon said.
Leon’s voice was soft, steady. It pumped Jamal up, like the gun. He wanted to impress his brother, win his respect.
A few seconds later the car came to a stop at Eddy and Larkin. The red light burned like the devil’s own eye, fueling Jamal’s own sudden, intense focus on the moment, the gun, the target “Go!”
Leon’s voice broke through the near-hypnotic state. Jamal didn’t think. He pushed open the door and jumped out, ripping the Glock from his waistband as he went, holding it against the driver’s window, shouting, “Out of the car!”
The light turned and Leon roared past them, the Camry’s tires shedding rubber. The Arab looked at the gun in horrified disbelief. Jamal slammed the window with the heel of his other hand, angled the gun menacingly.
“I said out! Do it now or you’re a dead man!”
The Arab popped the lock and opened the door. He seemed resigned to losing his car. Jamal stepped back to let him out. Cars were beginning to pile up behind them. Jamal turned slightly so they wouldn’t have a good look at his face.
“Don’t shoot!” the Arab pleaded. “Take the car but don’t kill me!”
“Shut up!” Jamal snarled as he drew back his arm and pistol-whipped the Arab.
The man fell to the asphalt, his arms fluttering like bird wings, his white button-down shirt a coat of feathers. The Arab wasn’t so tough now, Jamal thought, however much money he might have. The young man sighted the gun on the man’s forehead, above his big, frightened eyes.
Jamal heard more horns as well as people shouting. He should have just shot him-no talk, no knock-down, no thinking. Now, too many people were watching. He heard a siren in the distance. Maybe it wasn’t for him, or maybe someone had already called the cops Jamal looked up the road, saw the Camry had pulled into an empty space curbside. It was too far to run. And he didn’t want to leave empty-handed.
Okay, you didn’t kill the guy but you can bounce with the car. He could still score points by leading the cops to the Embarcadero and putting the Rover in the bay, or maybe driving it into the hot new lounge of the Phoenix Hotel Shoving the gun back in his waistband, Jamal jumped into the Rover, slammed the door, and stomped on the gas. He shot through the intersection, unaware that the light had changed back, clipping a Prius and spinning it ninety degrees. Jamal caromed off into a double-parked yellow panel job with the words WONDER BREAD painted across the side. He saw the R and the B grow large and then the world got very loud as the sound of the impact, the screech of twisting metal, and Jamal’s own scream blended into a single roar. He felt himself flying against the windshield as the rear end of the Rover went airborne and the thing flipped.
Jamal threw his hands out, felt his arms go through the suddenly liquid glass, felt countless pinpricks as the shards raked his hands and face and scalp. It seemed to take forever for the Rover to crash to the ground and everything to go still. In the cottony quiet that followed, all Jamal could hear was his own strained, wheezing breath and the throbbing blood in his ears. He was lying on his back, half out of the Rover, his head resting on the blacktop. He was looking back toward the front seat, which was upside down. Peripherally, he could see people ducking, shifting, reaching into the tangled metal that shielded him from the outside world. He couldn’t move his head, couldn’t feel his body, so he continued to stare ahead.
There was blood in his right eye. It swirled the driver’s side in a ruddy haze, but his left eye was clear. That was how he saw the strange object that had been upended and was resting on the roof. It consisted of four… five… six two-liter bottles full of liquid and tied to one another with duct tape. They were anchored to a pair of propane tanks with more tape. Wires were strung from one of the tanks to a cell phone taped to its side.
A bomb. It was a bomb.
2
“You feel it?” Drabinsky asked. “The rush?”
Freelance TV producer Jack Hatfield barely heard the man. As they blasted toward the crime scene, the former firebrand talk show host-defrocked by a fearful, powerful few-found himself thinking about those long-ago days in Baghdad, days that were little more than a distant wash of sounds and images. All he really had left of the place was the shrapnel in his right thigh and an instinctive reaction, a gut-tensing alertness, to any sign or image that had Arabic or Kurdish writing.
“I feel it,” Jack said in a dry monotone. It reeked of insincerity but Drabinsky didn’t seem to notice. He was in the moment, psyched and impatient. Jack understood; these were the times they’d trained for. For Drabinsky, it was a chance to test himself. For Jack it was part of a larger, frustrating picture of bailing water instead of being able to get to the source and stop the damn flood.
They were barreling along Mission Street in a white Chevy Tahoe, the siren blaring, Officer Tom Drabinsky at the wheel-a lean cowboy with a leathery, sunbaked face.
Drabinsky was commander of the SFPD bomb squad, part of the city’s Homeland Security Tactical Company, and Jack had been profiling the squad for nearly a week now. His time with them had been pretty uneventful so far-mostly interviews, each member of the team recounting past glories and talking him through the “what-if…” white papers they had studied.
“They’re kind of like role-playing games, y’know?” one man had told him about those scenarios. “They let you think about problems you might encounter and solve them before you have to.”
Sure, Jack thought. As long as you don’t factor in the stuff that hits you square in the face when you’re in the field: fear, pressure, the media watching you, and the fact that at the very least your job is on the line, at the most your life…
Then just before dinner, Jack was putting together footage for the local CBS affiliate, something to help make the public aware of its role in watching and informing, when he got the call telling him it was time to saddle up.
“We’re on,” Drabinsky had said. “Where are you?”
Jack’s heart had kicked up a notch. “At the marina, editing footage.”
“A little out of my way but I don’t want you to miss this. Be at the lot in twenty.”
After he hung up, Jack immediately contacted his photographer Maxine and told her to meet them at the accident scene.
As Drabinsky maneuvered impatiently through traffic, Jack’s mind went back to the first time he had been rushing somewhere, that morning in Baghdad when everything went wrong.
He was remembering Riley’s face.
He saw that face in his sleep sometimes. The slack jaw, the glazed eyes, the dust-caked laugh lines around them. A dust that could neither be tamed nor conquered and had permeated every facet of their lives back then-two hotshot network news monkeys riding shotgun with the Second Marine Division, Riley always complaining that the desert was wreaking havoc on his video equipment.
Not that it mattered much.
Richard Edward Riley had the tragic distinction of being the second journalist killed during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Jack had been right there when it happened. He could just as easily have been the third. One minute they were bumping along a deserted road and the next they were on the ground bleeding, their Humvee in pieces around them, Jack staring into the open, lifeless eyes of his best friend.
