Red Cell Seven (9 page)

The van burst through the fireball and continued to slide down the broken white lane markers, finally coming to a halt several hundred feet farther along the highway than the still-burning truck, screeching to a stop amidst a cloud of smoke and sparks.

“Everybody all right?” the leader yelled.

His left wrist was bruised and bloody, but he ignored the pain shooting all the way up into his shoulder.
Capture is not acceptable
, he kept telling himself. They had to do anything to avoid it, because he wasn’t at all confident that one of the men in back—possibly two—would hold up under the scrutiny he knew they would quickly be subjected to. Some people were under the impression that United States agents went the torture route only in rare circumstances. Some people were sorely mistaken.

“Hey! Back there!”

“Saafir is gone,” came the groggy reply. “But Gohar and I are all right.”

“Are you certain he’s gone?” the leader yelled, slamming his shoulder against the jammed door to open it. “Give him a bullet if you aren’t.”

A gun went off immediately.

“Follow me,” he called, gratified that they were still obeying his every order. “Come on.”

As he tumbled to the pavement outside the van, a police car burst through the fireball and skidded to a stop twenty feet away. As the other two followed him out of the van and jumped to the ground, the leader calmly reached inside his jacket, pulled a grenade from one pocket, and tossed it at the police cruiser.

The cruiser exploded instantly, and the cop who’d just climbed out of it was engulfed in flames. The man staggered around for several seconds, arms outstretched in front of him as the blaze torched his body. Finally he dropped to the pavement on his knees, and then fell forward on his chest and face. His flesh began to boil on the asphalt as it peeled away from the bones in smoking chunks.

CHAPTER 9

“O
KAY
,
SO
maybe Shane Maddux is a little crazy.”

Troy was watching the tense standoff outside Minneapolis on the flat-screen. He’d seen a lot of gruesome things during his six-year career as an RCS Falcon, but the image of that cop’s body falling to the pavement, engulfed in flames, would stay with him forever. Just as the image of Karen kissing Jack’s coffin this morning would.

“I’ll give you that, Dad.”

“Oh, thanks,” Bill acknowledged sarcastically. “But I wish we’d found that out a long time ago. At least then we’d have a president who could deal with these lunatics at full strength.”

After killing the cop, the three terrorists had abandoned the van, raced past the still-burning tanker truck, and taken refuge beneath the railroad bridge. They were holed up behind a three-sided concrete barrier that gave them excellent cover, even against the army of law-enforcement authorities who had them surrounded.

“Looks like the cops out there got the word.”

“You mean about taking these guys alive?”

“I’m sure that’s why nothing’s happened yet. They could take out these guys in thirty seconds if they really wanted to, if they didn’t care about interrogating them. And they saw the one guy throw that grenade and kill one of their own. We all did. So everybody knows they’ve committed murder, even if they can’t be absolutely linked to the Mall of America attack yet. The authorities would certainly be justified in moving on them. But they’re waiting. And whatever’s going to happen probably won’t for a while. They’ll probably wait until dark to finish it.” Bill checked his watch. “It’ll be light in the Twin Cities for at least another hour.”

Troy was getting edgy sitting around waiting for President Dorn. With all that had happened and given how exhausted Dorn looked, Troy figured the odds were pretty low that they’d see him again today. At any moment some aide would come in to tell them to go home. Because Dorn had to focus solely on the “Holiday Mall Attacks,” as they’d already been tagged by the media.

He felt like a caged animal in here. He just hoped he never had to take an office job. He’d probably kill himself. Troy hated walls even more than he loved the outdoors, which was saying a lot.

“I
get
Shane,” he said quietly. “I mean, you have to be a little crazy to do what we do, you know, Dad? I think he deserves some understanding from us on that.”

Bill looked over like he figured Troy had suddenly gone off the reservation as well. Not as far as Maddux, but still off. “Have you lost your mind, too?”

“Maybe.”

“Easy there, son. I’ve got enough problems.”

“Maddux loves this country more than most people can possibly understand, Dad. He’s dedicated his entire life to protecting it. That objective drives everything he does.”

“According to you, he shot your brother. Does that deserve our understanding?”

“Well, I—”

“And he probably shot the mother of your child,” Bill added.

It was frustrating to argue with Bill, because he was damn good at making points. People always said his father could have been a top litigator if he hadn’t gone the investment banking route. “Maddux shot Jack because in his mind, Jack weakened the country. Killing Jack was simply getting revenge for America, and more important, making sure Jack never did anything again to weaken the country. If you think about it, it was actually a compliment. Maddux was worried Jack would strike again. It’s the same way Maddux looked at killing President Dorn. For Maddux, Jack and President Dorn were traitors. Neither one of those shootings was personal. It was only about protecting this country.”

“If I find out Shane Maddux really did kill your brother, one way or the other I’ll make him pay. That one’s personal for me. I’ll tell you that right now.”

“Dorn was about to destroy Red Cell Seven. You said it yourself, Dad. If not for Red Cell Seven, this country would have been hit by two major terrorist attacks that would have made 9/11 look small by comparison.” Troy glanced up at the ceiling. “No disrespect to the 9/11 victims.” He looked back at Bill. “Maddux thinks we’ve got to have RCS or we’ll be vulnerable to terrorists. He figures the other U.S. intel arms are so weighed down by bureaucracy, chains of command, and political correctness that they can’t move fast enough to be effective against enemies who can move at lightning speed and do whatever they want with no moral or ethical limitations. And that it’s becoming a bigger problem every day as Congress tries to dig deeper and deeper into what’s going on with us in the shadows. In Maddux’s mind, President Dorn might as well have been destroying our military.” Troy was fascinated to see how his father reacted to this one. “And believe me, I heard all that stuff about Executive Order 1973 One-E signed by Nixon and how we operate outside any laws or constraints. You and I both know that in this society, without that Order, Red Cell Seven would be vulnerable. Maybe even with it. He’s just doing anything he can to keep the cell safe.”

“He brainwashed you.”

“Hey,” Troy shot back resentfully, “that’s not—”

“I know, I know,” Bill said, backpedaling quickly. “Sorry, son, it’s just been a bad day. The older I get, the less I seem able to deal with the stress.”

Or the guilt, Troy figured. If Jack hadn’t wanted to prove he was part of the Jensen family so badly, he probably wouldn’t have gone to Alaska. Then he wouldn’t have gotten involved in a dangerous deal with a dangerous man—who’d ultimately killed him. And the reason Jack felt like he wasn’t part of the family and needed so badly to prove he was? Bill had lied to him all these years about who his mother was—lied to everyone.

“Look,” Bill spoke up, “when Red Cell Seven starts doing the same things terrorists are doing, that’s a problem for me. It’s that simple.”

“Shane has dedicated half his life to RCS,” Troy said again. “He was the leader of the Falcons; he was my leader. He knew Dorn had told Carlson it was over for RCS.”

“You know more than you’ve told me…don’t you, son?”

Troy shrugged.

“Why won’t you tell me everything?”

“Why won’t
you
?”

“Who says I won’t?”

They both knew how absurd the answer to that question was, so Troy didn’t even bother acknowledging the response. Bill couldn’t tell everyone everything—not even his son.

“All I really know, Dad, is that Maddux would do anything to protect this country. And on some basic level, I have to respect that conviction.”

“How can you say that? I mean, what about that LNG tanker?”

“That’s exactly what I mean, Dad. He’d do
anything
to make this country strong.”

“If that ship had made Norfolk, Virgina, half a million people would have died.”

“But Maddux was convinced Capitol Hill had forgotten how bad 9/11 was. He figured they needed a wakeup call. You know as well as I do he didn’t want to kill half a million Americans. He was sacrificing some for the greater good of the whole.” Troy glanced out the window. Night had fallen on Washington. He pointed at the TV screen as his eyes moved away from the window. “Apparently he was right. We were vulnerable. And now we’re paying for it.”

“Killing half a million innocent civilians isn’t the way to send a wakeup call,” Bill shot back. “Even with what happened today at those malls. Jesus, son, you should—”

“I know, Dad,” Troy interrupted angrily. “And I did something about it. That’s how I got myself thrown off the
Arctic Fire
in the middle of the Bering Sea. Remember? I figured out what was going on with Maddux, and I tried to stop him. Just like Charlie Banks did. And I ended up in thirty-seven-degree water who knows how far from land without a life preserver. Just like Charlie did. The only reason I’m here is that one of the crew took pity on me. And Jack came to save me.”

Bill nodded solemnly. “Right.”

“That’s why he’s dead.”

“I know. I’m sorry, son.”

“So maybe I have to share some of the guilt for that, too,” Troy said, sending Bill an accusatory glare.

Bill glanced away after a few moments.

“All I’m saying,” Troy continued, “is that in a very small way, I understand where Shane’s coming from. Especially now that I know how many attacks RCS has stopped over the last decade.”

“We didn’t stop what happened today at the malls,” Bill muttered dejectedly.

“No,” Troy agreed quietly, “we didn’t.”

“And I can’t endorse Maddux’s vigilante brand of justice, either. Roger told me about that little sideshow.”

“He only took out people who deserved it,” Troy argued. “He eliminated the scum who’d worked the system and dodged prison on a technicality. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles—and only ones he was absolutely sure were guilty. I don’t have a problem with that.”

“But how do you know that’s all he did? How do you know he didn’t take out a few people who didn’t deserve it along the way? People he had a personal beef with.”

“I don’t know, Dad, and I don’t care. Look, if you were so hopped up about what Maddux was doing on the side, and Carlson had told you about it, why didn’t you stop it?”

“Who says I didn’t try?”

Troy gazed at his father, wondering—about a lot of things. “I still don’t understand why President Dorn changed his mind about Red Cell Seven. I don’t get why he wanted to destroy it a few weeks ago and now he wants to keep it. Why all of a sudden he wants to make it a cornerstone of the U.S. intelligence program.” Troy hesitated. “And I especially don’t understand the one-eighty when it was one of the senior guys inside RCS who tried to assassinate him.”

“I can think of a couple of reasons.”

“Okay. Spin that out for me.”

“Over the last few weeks, he did find out how valuable the cell has been. He read those files I gave him, and he probably had his people do some more digging.” Bill nodded toward the Oval Office. “He probably knew about at least some of those attacks we stopped before we went in there today. And maybe he figured that if a senior guy inside it is willing to assassinate him to keep it going, maybe it
is
that valuable.”

“Maybe,” Troy said, still unconvinced. “What else?”

“Simple. He doesn’t want to get shot again.”

“So he’s trying to convince a rogue element he’s on their side?”

“Keep your allies close…and your enemies closer.”

“Yeah, yeah, but Shane’s smart enough never to trust Dorn no matter what he said or did.”

“Maybe we should be so smart. Maybe President Dorn is being more careful about getting rid of it this time. Maybe that’s what this is really all about.”

Troy raised an eyebrow and nodded. “See, now you’re on Maddux’s side.”

“I’m on the country’s side, son. That’s all. If that means I have to deal with shades of gray, so be it.”

“Why do you think President Dorn asked you where the two originals of Executive Order One-E were?”

“He was curious.”

“Come on,
Dad
.
”

“It’s like he said. He knows Red Cell Seven is vulnerable without the original documentation President Nixon signed.”

“Or he wants to get his hands on the documents so he can destroy them. That’s why you mentioned impeachment possibilities. You wanted to scare him.”

Bill didn’t respond.

“Do you know where the documents are, Dad?”

Bill shook his head.

“So, how many defections did you hear about?” Troy asked after a few moments. His father would never tell him where the original Orders were, even if he did know.

“How many what?”

“Do I really have to—”

“Five,” Bill cut in. “I heard five RCS agents defected with Maddux.

“There were three from the Falcons, including Ryan O’Hara,” Bill continued, “as well as two from other divisions. You?”

“I heard—” Troy interrupted himself as the news anchor began speaking quickly in an animated tone. “Look at this,” he said, gesturing at the screen on the wall. “The guys under the bridge are shooting at the chopper.”

“Here we go,” Bill mumbled grimly. “This is it. I just hope the cops on the front line are ready for anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“These people are crazy, and they’re well-equipped,” Bill answered. “They aren’t like the normal idiots who shoot up places. Most local law-enforcement units around this country are completely unprepared for this kind of capability…and commitment.”