American Terrorist (The Rayna Tan Action Thrillers Book 1) (5 page)

“I am big problem.”

“No, Sabiya. You’re not. I thought that it would be good for you to spend a month or two with me so I can tutor you in English. If we do this one on one, you’ll be way ahead of the game when you return to Toronto.”

“You so smart. So nice.”

“No, just another sinner.”

“Um, how long before get place? I need umm... potty again.”

“It’s another half hour to my place but there’s almost no one that lives from here to there.” Geraldine turned to Fatima and winked. “You can use the trees like the boys do.”

She slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. Fatima discreetly took the fishing line out of her pocket and folded it in half, doubling the tensile strength. With a sudden motion, she whipped the ligature around Geraldine’s neck and began to pull.

Geraldine gagged, trying to free herself, but she was no match in muscular power for a woman less than half her age. The nylon thread cut a thin crimson line across the retired minister’s neck. Geraldine struggled but, as the blood flow increased, her flailing weakened. Finally, her body went limp.

Before the blood could seep down onto Geraldine’s clothes, Fatima whipped the minister’s top off, then removed the rest of her attire. She took her own clothes off and placed them beside the woman. Rifling through Geraldine’s purse, she took all the identification, cell phone and credit cards. She then dressed herself in Geraldine’s clothes. Not a perfect fit and rather dowdy for a thirty-year-old, but acceptable.
 

She turned on the car and put it into neutral. Then she took her own shoes, placing them on the accelerator, until it revved as high as she could make it go. She found two cantaloupe-sized rocks to anchor the accelerator. She positioned the steering wheel and, with the car still revving high, she got out and pulled the gearshift into forward. The car took off and accelerated to more than sixty miles per hour before it smashed into a tree. It burst like an incendiary bomb, shooting flames thirty feet into the air.
 

There was no chance there would be any identifiable remains. The liquid explosive from Fatima’s own clothes was developed by Al-Qaeda. It was fast-acting, non-toxic, and easy to detonate. The thousand dollars paid to the supposed protester at the airport was worth the price. On this remote road, it was impossible to know whether someone would discover the charred hulk in three minutes, three hours or three days.

Fatima took no chances. She walked back to the town they passed an hour earlier, expecting to arrive there early the next day. It could be faster but she was not going to travel on the paved road, but in the forest beside it. She definitely didn’t want anybody to see her.

After a couple of hours, assured that she was alone, Fatima sent a text using Geraldine’s phone. “Praise the Lord. After working for thirty years, I have retired and can now do all the things I want to do that I couldn’t do when I was working full time. It is wonderful.”

Moments later, she received a coded reply from her brother. “Glad to hear that. You’re going to love retirement.”

In other words, things were going to kick into high gear.

SYRIA

Half an hour later, there was a small gathering of young men in the desert. All the acolytes looked at their bearded leader, wondering what he would say. Some had followed Ahmed for two years, some not as long.
 

All had committed themselves to training in the desert. They had hardened their bodies, not only with tens of thousands of push-ups, sit-ups and chin-ups, but by taking turns at pummeling each other so they could withstand beatings, even torture.
 

Phenomenal physical specimens, they learned techniques to kill and defend—martial arts, strangling, bladework, boxing, garroting, and firearms. They practiced with Russian, American and Chinese rifles. Each of them had fired over ten thousand rounds of ammunition, turning themselves into worthy marksmen.
 

In addition to training, they learned the fundamentals of making explosives and had created a vast stockpile of cheap IEDs with flashlight batteries, cell phones and detonators. They even raided traditional landmines for explosives and put them in everything from soda cans to gas cans. Some of the souped-up mines had nails, ball bearings or fire-starting chemicals to make them even more dangerous.

At least once a month, they wreaked havoc on some small remote village. Each time, they grew more vicious, more skilled, more committed to the cause of Ahmed’s bloodthirsty vision of a caliphate. Every one of them was willing to martyr himself for the cause by driving a booby-trapped vehicle into a crowd or detonating himself with a suicide vest.

Ahmed raised balled fists into the air and shouted, “Soldiers of Tiger Claw, it is time. You have proved yourselves worthy warriors. More than that, you have proved your undying allegiance to a new world order. Someday history will point to you and say, ‘a small band of true believers, against all odds, changed the world.’ Are you ready to accept the challenge?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” chanted the men.

“Then today is the beginning. We are no longer Tiger Claw but the American Muslim Militia. Allahu Akbar!”

“Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

Chapter 5
 

Rayna strode confidently down San Francisco’s lofty business area to her destination—the pyramid-topped monument to glass at 777 Harbord Street. With its seventy-seven floors, it was a perfect San Francisco address for its elite clientele. While many poo-pooed the concept of lucky numbers, Fidelitas discovered that this was not so with their clients, especially those not from North America. Many of them consulted fortune tellers, astrologers or numerologists before making any important decision.

When Paulina suggested to Arthur that Barry be brought onboard, Arthur thought him to be an almost ideal candidate. Not only because of his work in Delta Force, but because Barry’s family fortune was built up partly by capitalizing on a burgeoning Hispanic population. The experience of working with minorities, while not exactly transferrable, gave Barry the insight to work with under-represented groups.
 

Using the motto of legendary baseball hitter, “Wee Willie Keeler” of achieving his elevated batting average, Barry “hit where they ain’t.” There was no way Fidelitas could ever have competed with the JP Morgans, Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynchs of the world. However, Fidelitas hit where the big boys weren’t—the Asians, the middle-class Jews and the increasingly important Hispanic American population. Barry recognized that by focusing his attention on these minorities—and making them money—that would give him credibility to play in bigger sandboxes. As the years progressed, their clients grew with them and, as they did, they attracted bigger and wealthier clients.

Over the years, Barry took on another three advisors besides himself. The requirements for getting a job as an investment advisor at Fidelitas were pretty much the same as at other investment firms: you had to have an athletic background and talk intelligently about sports; you had to have a sparkling personality that drew people to you; you had to be willing to work eighteen hours a day, and only slightly less than that on weekends; you had to be able to talk intelligently about whatever deal or investment you were pitching (but you didn’t need to crunch the numbers—that’s what the minions at the office were for); you had to be impeccably honest; you had to have an ethics and honesty record that was only slightly less than that of the Pope; and, at least twice a week, you had to be able to drink like a college freshman on his first visit to Panama City Beach with daddy’s credit card. Advisors had an entertainment allowance of twenty-five thousand dollars a month that, if they didn’t spend it, meant they were not doing their job. Client relations was the number two priority. (Number one was convincing the client to give Fidelitas his money.)

These were all fantastic assets for one to be an investment banker. Numbers guys, analysts, who cared? You could always hire bean counters. What was most important was who could bring in the business and keep clients happy. Clients loved to hang with athletes, they loved to hang with good-looking people, and they most definitely wanted someone who could speak their language.
 

What would make a fresh young Ivy League MBA decide to join Fidelitas as opposed to any of a dozen New York investment banks that offered a starting salary twice what Barry offered?

One word: Potential.

Barry never had more than three other investment associates working at Fidelitas at any given time. Before he brought someone in for an interview, the candidate was already thoroughly vetted. In addition to all the factors the big boys on Wall Street wanted, Barry looked hard at a candidate’s morals—or more specifically, lack of them. In the interview, Barry let it be known that the main thing he was interested in was the size of the “book,” or amount of money that a client could potentially bring to the firm. Barry would gladly ignore the source of the funds. That made the jobs of the greedy bastards Barry hired a lot easier. If ethics was not an issue, bringing in business would be even easier than shooting ducks in a barrel. And there would always be the run-of-the-mill doctors, lawyers, and company presidents—but that wasn’t where the big money was. It would be what the legit firms might consider undesirable or untouchable.

And that was where Fidelitas thrived. There were at least a dozen clients whose net worth was as great as the GDP of small countries. If it were known how these clients obtained their funds, they would be up for several hundred lifetimes of jail sentences or execution, either from some government or, more likely, one of the victims they fleeced.
 

To ensure their own safety, Fidelitas had one cardinal rule. Never ask clients the source of their funds. If they started to tell you, cut them off. That way, Fidelitas could legitimately claim ignorance if they were ever investigated.

Which would be a huge lie. Through their own research, Fidelitas knew the financial details of each of their clients intimately. It was a “win, win, win” situation: a win for the client—Fidelitas never had a year where the return was less than twelve percent; a win for the investment advisor—as compensation was based on the value of a client’s book, all of Fidelitas’ investment advisors had annual compensation over three million dollars a year; and a win for the “real” Fidelitas—Barry, Paulina and Arthur had research and access to some of the worst scum on earth. Every year, at least two of their clients were killed outright or met an unlikely accident. No one ever suspected involvement from Fidelitas. These guys were so bad it was generally accepted that it was only a matter of time before someone took them out. This was the world Rayna had become part of.

***

At 9 a.m., there was a meeting of the banker advisors in the conference room. Rayna scanned the room. There were six men, all at least fifteen years older than Rayna, all dressed in tailored, conservative dark suits. A quick glance down showed shoes so polished Rayna was sure she could see her reflection. All were WASP. This was due to an odd quirk about many clients of diversity. Although they themselves might be of non-Caucasian heritage, they would rather have a white representative when it came to dealing with Fidelitas.
 

They all sat around the one-piece mahogany conference table in two-thousand dollar Scandinavian custom-made ergonomic chairs as Barry addressed the group. Ignoring Rayna, he dove directly into the discussion he knew his sharks were ready to feast on—what opportunities there were for making their clients and, by consequence, themselves money. As Barry described the latest opportunity in the biomedical field, she saw the eyes of the predators gleam; this could make them a killing.

“Okay, guys. I have to stress this investment is different from most shit we see around here. It’s either going to be a ten-bagger in two years or it’s going to go bust. Naturally, I’m working on a way to mitigate the downside. Any questions?”

“What’s the FDA preliminaries?”

“I’m working on it.”

The men smiled. In Barry-speak, that meant he was “investing” in the retirement funds of key bureaucrats at that agency. As to “mitigating the downside,” that was Barry-speak for “we’ll write it off against another investment if this one goes tits up.”

“How much do you want and when do you need it?”

“Five hundred million and six months. I’m capping each contribution at a hundred.”

Rayna couldn’t believe her eyes—whoops and high-fives around the table. They all got up to go hit the phones, but Barry said, “Wait.”

The men paused, looking anxious. There was money to be made and every second counted.

“This is Rayna Tan,” Barry announced. “I thought we needed to get a little more diversity and Rayna fits the bill. She’s a woman and she’s Chinese. She’s our newest advisor.”

There were just a few lukewarm greetings as the guys exited the room.

Barry smiled at a dumfounded Rayna. “Welcome to my world and your new one, Rayna.”

“They didn’t even say ‘hello.’”

“They’re focused on one thing only—putting money in their own pockets. I just fed raw cow to sharks. A ten-bagger means that not only do they make their initial fees but, without lifting a finger, they’ll take the ride up with their clients. As for not greeting you, don’t feel sorry for yourself that they didn’t drool over you and ask you to lunch.”

“I wasn’t upset,” said Rayna defensively.

“Bullshit. You are so used to being the hot babe that guys will do anything for. Doesn’t mean anything to them. One of them was married to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, another to a Playboy bunny, porn star, Miss America... Besides, they probably all think you’re having an affair with me. That’s the only way a non-Ivy Leaguer would get hired. But don’t worry about me. I am very happily married.” Barry smiled. “Besides, Diana would cut off my balls if I so much as looked at another woman.”

The thought of matronly but exceptionally well-preserved Diana wielding an ax at Barry’s private parts was the only thing that had made Rayna smile that morning.