Betrayal (39 page)

Odi nodded as the Senator spoke, reassuring him that his understanding was correct.

“Once the contents of one or more Irish Cream bottles gets ingested, the drinker becomes a very powerful chemical bomb—with a timer of less than thirty minutes. If you can’t land within ten minutes of the first sip passing lips, you’re going to have to throw the imbiber off the plane—mid-flight.”
 

There was a pause while the Homeland Security Director questioned what he had just heard.

The Senator said, “I’ve got the man who built the bombs with me here. He says there’s no other way. I believe him.

“If you don’t find the Baileys bottles right away, or you find any empties in the trash, you need to have everyone look for a passenger developing blue fingertips. That symptom is your warning, but it only appears shortly before detonation, meaning that once you find it you will only have seconds to act. If you see blue you’ve got to get that person off the plane immediately, or everyone is lost. Have the air marshal open the cockpit door, and throw the bastard into Allah’s arms.”

Despite what he and the Senator had watched transpire over the next hour on TV, Marshall had held Odi under arrest. The Director of Homeland Security had informed him of the APB. When neither Ayden nor his Creamer materialized during that time, Odi had insisted on hunting him down.

When he finally stood and moved toward the door, the Senator did not shoot.

Five minutes later, Odi was scanning a dim jungle of churning metal in search of Ayden. Due to the time constraint, he did not have the luxury of sneaking around. He had to walk the aisles, exposing himself to fire. He had no doubt that Ayden would shoot him on sight. He just hoped that his old friend did not have a gun.

The glowing flicker of a flare caught Odi’s attention, coming from a dozen steps ahead and twenty feet to his left. It came from the far side of an iron tank the size of a submarine. As Odi read the label he cursed under his breath. Ayden had targeted the ship’s thermal oil boiler.

Odi knew the mechanics of how ships like this were powered, having studied petroleum chemistry ad infinitum. The heavy oil they used was virtually non-reactive at room temperature. It was the rough equivalent of asphalt. To turn heavy oil into the combustible fuel the ship could use for power, it has to be primed—heated over many hours to liquid form at a temperature of six-hundred degrees. Six-hundred degrees, Odi repeated to himself. This was not going to be pretty.

He peeked around the edge of the thermal oil boiler, and spotted Ayden there. He was sitting in the narrow service passageway between the boiler and the hull. Oddly enough, one of his hands was handcuffed to a feeder pipe. He held a burning flare in the other. Odi saw that he had a dozen more flares gripped between his thighs. He was in the process of lighting them.

Odi stepped halfway out from behind the corner.

“Hello Odi. Did you decide to join me? I’m afraid I drank all the Creamer myself, but if you sit close,” he shrugged, “what’s the difference?”

“I’m not into suicide.”

“This isn’t suicide. It’s a mission of mercy. The thousands who die today will save millions of lives.” He produced the key to the handcuffs as he spoke and then placed it ceremoniously on his tongue as he finished. He swallowed.

Odi could not help but notice the maniacal look in the eyes of his former friend. He did not know what to say.

As it turned out, Ayden was not finished. “In a few minutes the Queen Mary 2 will be rechristened Titanic 2, as she sinks with most of her thirty-nine hundred souls. Oh, some will survive on lifeboats, I’m sure, but given the speed she’ll go under it won’t be a thousand. 10/12 will still eclipse 9/11. As the media sifts through the wreckage, world attention will finally be brought to focus on the issues that matter most. The money will follow.”

“You’re only going to kill yourself, Ayden,” Odi said, shaking his head. “Heavy oil won’t explode.”

Ayden scoffed. “Coming from the man who invented Creamer, your thinking is surprisingly conventional. I’m not counting on blowing a hole in the hull, even though there is that possibility—I did down a whole pint. No, my friend, I’m going to burn one.” Ayden gestured with the flare.

“A whole pint!” Odi sputtered, unable to contain himself. That much actually might blow a hole through the hulls if the boiler banked the energy of the explosion just right. Ayden’s stomach now held the Newtonian equivalent of sixteen hand grenades. Odi dwelled on that image until he remembered the last part of Ayden’s sentence. He was counting on burning a hole through the hull.
 

Odi thought aloud. “When you explode, you’ll rip open the side of the thermal oil boiler. Ten thousand gallons of superheated oil will gush out, hit the flares and ignite. In that quantity, the oil will burn at a temperature of around three thousand degrees. Iron melts at twenty-eight hundred ...”

Ayden looked at him and smiled. Then he held his lit flare to the tip of another and it too burst into flame. The extra light revealed the blue tinge of Ayden’s fingertips.
 

As if reading Odi’s mind, Ayden shook his left arm, rattling the handcuff against the pipe. “Sorry. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m sorry too,” Odi said, bringing his right hand into view. “But I must insist.”

Ayden dropped his jaw as Odi hefted the axe.

Chapter 74

PoliTalk Studio, Washington, D.C.

W
ILEY
WAS
ON
top of the world. Tonight he would solidify his position as America’s go-to man on terrorism at the very moment that terrorism returned to the pinnacle of American attention. His move to the White House was but a hop, skip, and jump away.

Fitzpatrick had invited him to record a profile interview for a special extended episode of
PoliTalk
. Fitzpatrick would use it on Sunday, during his comparative analysis of the leading contenders for the presidential election tickets. He was gunning to become the preferred source for election coverage, and that suited Wiley just fine.

They had just finished twenty minutes of raw video when Fitzpatrick held up one hand indicating that the camera should cut as he placed his other hand over his right ear. As Fitzpatrick listened to the news coming over his earpiece, Wiley’s cell phone began to vibrate—right on cue. Once his expectation was confirmed by the pallid look on Fitzpatrick’s face, Wiley surreptitiously switched off his phone. He did not need to answer it to get the message.

“There’s breaking terrorist news,” Fitzpatrick said, looking up from the notes he had just scribbled. “Are you okay with going live?” His face was rife with excitement.

This was no coincidence, of course. Wiley had timed things to a tee. His speeches were prepared and his messages ready. The Proffitt-for-Vice-President Campaign was about to launch into the stratosphere. The confluence of events was beautiful. He would not even have to feign surprise at the images of exploding planes and flaming corpses. This was the attack The Prophet had been predicting. He gave Fitzpatrick a take-it-or-leave-it answer: “If you’ll cover my back, I’ll cover yours.”

Wiley knew that Fitzpatrick would hate to surrender his boxing license even for an hour, but he had little choice. To have the Director of the FBI live in his studio at a time like this could make him a network news anchor if not a legend. Nonetheless, Wiley thought that Fitzpatrick said “Deal” a little too quickly. Seconds later, he understood why.

The suicide bombers had failed.
 

For an hour, Wiley had to sit there looking perky and satisfied as amateur videos showed air marshal after air marshal apprehending Ayden’s bombers. It was not hard for Wiley to spin this battle in his favor, but behind his flashing teeth and glowing eyes, he knew that this public-relations victory might cost him the war. For terrorism to top the election agenda, the voters had to be scared. These videos not only calmed them, they gave the whole country the cocky jubilation of the winning Super Bowl team.

“Well, your prediction came true, Director. The Prophet epithet holds. And even more impressive and important than your ability to predict this attack was your overwhelming success in defeating it. We calculate that thirty-eight hundred souls were aboard those twenty-four planes. You saved them all—not to mention their families and the casualties spared on the ground. Why, by this time tomorrow, most Americans will have looked up at the sky and understood that without Wiley Proffitt, a plane might well have crashed on them. Please accept my professional congratulations and my personal thanks.”

Wiley was about to comment on the value of a team effort and the dangers of dropping one’s guard when Fitzpatrick held up his finger and pressed his earpiece. “We’ve got more breaking news—also with amateur video.” He pointed to the studio plasma screen. “This video was shot just minutes ago aboard Cunard’s luxury cruise ship the Queen Mary 2 as it sailed a hundred nautical miles from New York. Like the other videos we have shown you this evening, this was streamed to us from a camera-phone. Our apologies for the low resolution and the jerky quality—the photographer was running while shooting. When you see it, you will understand why.”

The monitor cut from Fitzpatrick to the scene of a man running up a set of ornately carpeted stairs. He carried another man over his shoulder, and that man’s wrist was spurting blood. His hand had obviously just been severed at the wrist. The camera angle shifted to center on the victim trying to stem the bleeding from his stump. His efforts were not doing much good, and his moans were becoming feeble. Wiley recognized Ayden.

The running man was shouting “Make way!” and “Move!” while the amateur videographer kept repeating “Oh my God.”

As the crowd of gowns and tuxedos parted, some cursed while others screamed. The bobbing camera kept tight on the running man’s heels as he exited onto the ship’s promenade. Without pausing, the running man dumped his handless hostage over the rail, soliciting a gasp from the audiences in the studio and on the video. Ayden’s screams crescendoed and faded as the camera followed his plummet. Then the audience lost sight of him among the churning waves.

The operator panned the camera back to the perpetrator’s face and everyone went silent. Wiley felt his blood thin as the camera zoomed in. He was looking into a dead man’s eyes.

No sooner had the camera focused on Odi’s panting face than the speakers were filled with a water-muffled boom. The camera whirled about to reveal a geyser of seawater. Ayden had exploded a good hundred yards behind the ship, but the blast was still big enough to be both heard and felt.

The studio monitor cut back to Fitzpatrick who was eagerly waiting. “We have learned that the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Lawrence Marshall, was aboard that ship and is presumed to have been the bomber’s primary target. Would you care to comment, Director Proffitt?”

Wiley’s mind was redlining as it raced toward the distant light he sensed at the end of this tunnel. He sat there motionless for several seconds with the camera on him. Finally he nodded as though making a decision and looked into the lens. “Well, now that the cats are all out of the bag, I may supply additional detail without endangering ongoing operations or innocent lives. Your assumption that Senator Marshall was the target is correct. In fact, the twenty-five members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were the primary targets of all of tonight’s attacks. Al-Qaeda will stop at nothing to murder defenders of freedom.

“The man you saw throwing the bomber over the rail of the Queen Mary 2 was FBI Special Agent Odysseus Carr. Agent Odi Carr and his sister, Agent Cassandra Carr, have been working undercover in a top-secret operation to combat a specific al-Qaeda cell. Due to potential agency infiltration, their mission was so secret that the brother-and-sister team reported exclusively and directly to me.” Wiley paused to let this fact sink in.

“You will recall that three defense corporation CEO’s have been executed during this last month.” Wiley held up three fingers on his right hand. “That was the work of this same terrorist cell. Those operations showed inside knowledge, as did the attack on our envoy to Iran. So in order to avoid the chance of any leaks in this highest-priority mission, I worked exclusively with a couple of expert field operatives whom I knew I could trust.

“While investigating those killings under deep cover, Odi Carr learned that the next 9/11 was pending. Unfortunately, he was not close enough to the terrorist mastermind to learn the details. In an effort to win him the terrorists’ confidence, I added Agent Carr to the FBI’s most wanted list. That ruse succeeded, if only just. Technically this operation was a resounding success, but as you saw we were nearly too late. We need to get even better.”

“Amazing, truly amazing,” Fitzpatrick said. “I certainly thank you for your unprecedented candor, Director. I find it refreshing.”

Wiley nodded and relaxed inside as a warm glow suffused him. He had done it! He had covered his ass with the sweetest perfume, and the scent would never wear off. Nobody picked through glowing successes. The fine-tooth comb was reserved for political failures. Of course there would be those in the Bureau who would suspect foul play, but they would not dare to question him now, much less point a finger. This coup gave Wiley the power to castrate his opponents with a flick of his golden wrist.