The Rig 2: Storm Warning (7 page)

It was a long way to the top of ‘The City’ where the offices were. He stopped a few times to give himself a breather before carrying on. Eventually, the last flight of stairs was a memory and he steadied himself against the wall of the corridor of the office deck. It took him a while to bring his heart rate down again and control his breathing, but he managed it. He walked carefully through the corridor and found the whole deck empty. All except for one office. It was the grandest office of them all, with glass doors and a lavishly furnished interior. It read, ‘Stryker, C.E.O.’, on the door.

In the office was a single man. When Smith pushed through the door the man looked up, “Now who the fuck are you?”

“My name is Smith.”

He pointed the gun at the man.

“And is that your friend, Wesson?” the man from the office sniped. “I’m Reg McCoy, I run this place since Mr. Stryker has fucked off. Now will you please fuck off as well? I have work to do.”

He picked up his phone again and began calling.

Smith raised the weapon and hoped his hands would be steady enough to make this shot. He pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped the phone from Reg’s hand. Reg looked stunned. His eyes were wide open as he stared down the barrel of the gun. Smith stepped closer.

“I want to ask you some questions, Mister McCoy. And I am going to warn you now. Every time you do not answer me or answer incorrectly, I will shoot one of your limbs out. Unfortunately, my aim is not too steady right now.”

He touched his nose and sniffed. Reg looked at him and snorted a giggle. Slowly he raised his hand and used it to open a drawer on Stryker’s desk. His hand rested on the gun there for a moment, but he saw Smith beginning to protest and the gun twitch. He picked up the bag of white powder and slowly raised it above the desk. He threw it at Smith.

“Take as much of Stryker’s as you need. If you’re going to be shooting me, I’d rather you weren’t shaking.”

Smith went closer and drew his handcuffs from the vest he wore. He shackled Reg to the chair. Reg did not resist. There was no point resisting with a gun pointed at him. Reg watched as Smith laid out some lines on the smoothly polished table and snorted them up. He could see how much the man was shaking when he was doing that and how the staggers and jags stopped not long after his nose came away from the coffee table.

“Thank you, Mister McCoy,” Smith smiled at Reg. He brought the gun up and pointed it at Reg’s knee. “Now, can you tell me where Akhmed Hussain Abbasi is?”

“Nope.”

Reg was still smiling when the bullet smashed into his knee.

***

Garcia looked away when he saw what Smith was going to do. He was not soft, but he did not like this. It was wrong. He scrolled through the list of camera feeds and saw the nurse leaving the bar by the Plaza. There must still be people alive in there. Probably hurt, but they would not be a danger to any part of their mission.

He yawned and looked around. He noticed there was a baseball on the desk, he picked it up and found it was signed by one of the greatest baseball players of the Los Angeles Dodgers; his team. He put the ball into his pocket, planning to give it to his son as a gift. Then he looked back at the camera feed of the office. Smith had put the gun to the temple of the mess of a man now. The man did not move, apart from the small heaves of his chest. Garcia shook his head and looked away again as Smith pulled the trigger.

***

Smith wiped his gun on Reg’s clothes. It did not make too much of a difference as Reg was a mess of blood. He opened the drawer Reg had taken the bag of blow from. There was a handkerchief there and another bag of powder. It looked like this Stryker dude was worse than he was, he thought.

He felt better though, and he had no trouble going down the stairs. He knew exactly where his target was now. No point in waiting. Fatima had messed up earlier; his job was to make sure everything was righted and he would do so as soon as he could.

He ran through the Plaza, gun still in hand. He did not notice the eyes that followed him from a broken window above one of the bars.

***

Akhmed pulled out a crate and sat down. He rested his head in his hands for a moment and breathed deeply.

“I heard about it once or twice before this happened. I never believed it. I always thought it was just another conspiracy theory. But after this, I can’t do anything other than believe that it’s true.”

Wes pulled out a few more crates and sat down, urging Sheila to sit down as well.

“So what is it?”

“I never researched it, I only heard people mention it before. Some people on campus listened to some show and once in a while when something happened, they would blame it on the six-week cycle.”

Sheila looked at him suspiciously. Wes had been right. This man did not look like someone who could be a terrorist. He was too nice. He was smart and he did not speak like some radical.

“Before you get onto some conspiracy theory,” she said, “what did happen?”

Akhmed looked at her and she saw how sad he was.

“I’ve been protesting against this place for ages. But my protests were always getting shut down. Eventually, I became desperate and someone proposed joining up with DJ Medina. She wanted to disrupt this place using sound waves. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. But it was a frame up. There was a bomb instead. I was in the bathroom when it went off. Fatima tried to shoot me; she wanted to make it look like I’d committed suicide. But she got knocked down by the blast and failed to kill me, so here I am.”

Wes and Sheila listened quietly as he told that story. It was horrible that something like that could happen.

“But why?” Sheila asked.

“Only thing I can think of is the six-week cycle,” Akhmed answered.

“So, what is it?” Sheila said. “Besides a conspiracy theory?”

“It seems the FBI needs stuff to happen in the USA to keep government’s money flowing to their coffers. The theory goes on to claim that there is research saying the general population remembers to stay scared of terrorists for about six weeks. If the powers that be aren’t confident there is going to be something, it’s said that they’ll then set something up.”

Wes nodded slowly. Actually, the theory made some sense. There were a lot of horrible events in the United States a lot of the time. Almost on a regular basis.

“Why do you think it’s the FBI?”

“Those guys claiming they are FBI in the PA announcement; Smith and Garcia. They are the ones who approached me in the first place.”

Sheila blinked. She did not believe it as much as Wes did.

“Why doesn’t the media report on this, though? Journalists must have picked up on this.”

Akhmed was about to answer her, but Wes provided the answer instead.

“Most media houses are entertainment now. Journalists tend to be more interested in, quite literally, ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ than what anyone important is saying or doing.”

He looked at Akhmed.

“You could be right about it, you know.”

“Of course, he is right,” a voice behind them said.

They all looked up to see a man in a suit standing in the doorway, pointing a gun straight at Akhmed. “He’s right… or I should say, he was right.”

And the man pulled the trigger.

Chapter Seventeen

The nurse had just left. She had said Joy would be fine. She needed to rest, but should not be allowed to sleep for more than an hour. If she drifted into unconsciousness, it could lead to lasting effects. She could give her nothing, but urged Dave to keep cooling her head in hope that the swelling would diminish. Dave dutifully did so, until Joy woke up and scolded him for it. She was cold, she said. There was no need to keep her cold; so Dave allowed her to rest.

He took a seat by the broken window and looked out over the Plaza. He did not even notice the carnage there. Strange, he thought as he opened a beer on the window ledge. The fridge had still been stocked with cold beer. There were no customers now to drink it though, and he doubted anyone would care about him taking one without it going on his tab.

There was a man running through the Plaza. He saw it from the corner of his eye, but it drew his full attention. He sat bolt upright and looked more closely. The man held a gun in his hand. He was edgy, rushed. Why would anyone be running there? Especially a man in a black suit with a gun in hand.

He kept his eyes on the man and watched him disappear into the staircase on the other side of the Plaza. The same one Wes and Sheila had gone down. The stairs that lead to the docks. He had a sudden feeling something was not right. He put the beer down and looked at Joy. She was sleeping again. He felt he could leave her alone for a moment.

Dave ran down the stairs and walked out onto the Plaza. He did not know why he was going after this man, but he felt he had to. He could not explain that feeling. The word would be intuition, he reckoned. Slowly and as quietly as possible he went down the staircase, expecting to see the man with the gun at every twist of the stairs.

***

The shot rang loudly through the docks and the bullet slammed into Akhmed’s chest. Blood sprayed Wes and Sheila. Akhmed fell backwards with a surprised look on his face. He made as though to clutch his chest, but his hands never reached the spot where the bullet struck. Wes looked at the shooter, completely dumbfounded. Sheila looked at him and felt her jaw drop. She wanted to scream, but her voice stopped in her throat.

The man grinned an evil grin at them.

“Well, that’s taken care of then.” He spat on the ground. “That loose end is finally tied up. Now we can get on with our lives again.”

Wes had a question on his lips, but he could not speak. His mouth moved, but no sound came out.

“Smith,” the shooter introduced himself, “from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, San Diego office, Southern California, FEMA region nine, Department of Homeland Security, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...”

He brandished the gun to enforce the last words.

“What...” Sheila asked, rising from her seat on the crate. “What did you just do? Why?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Smith turned his evil grin to her. “I killed him.”

“But why?” There was a tone of hysteria in her voice. “Why did you have to do that? Kill him? Shouldn’t he have faced justice? I don’t care that he was a terrorist; he should have faced justice...”

Smith threw his head back and laughed heartily.

“You stupid woman, didn’t you listen to him?”

“But...” The insecurity in Sheila’s voice was audible. “That was just some stupid conspiracy theory...”

Smith snorted.

“He was right.”

“He was right?” Sheila asked.

“He was right. He didn’t do anything; we did it. And we did exactly what he said we did.”

Wes knew the man was not paying any attention to him. He saw him looking at Sheila’s bare legs and the bits that showed from beneath her thong. He slowly put his hand into his trouser pocket and drew out his phone. He knew he could not call anyone, but he could do something else. Without looking he keyed in the code to unlock the touch screen. He scrolled through the menu and selected the audio recorder. He glanced down and adjusted the volume, then pressed record.

“What did you do?” he asked Smith.

Smith laughed again.

“We set this whole fucking thing up.” He gestured around. “This whole damned rig is a failure, so someone offered it up to us to use as a setting for our six-week cycle event. ‘Cause he was right. We do need people to remain scared. We need people to remain scared so the politicians will keep funding us, instead of sending their money to those idiots at the NSA or the CIA. Or maybe spend it on buying more crap from some manufacturer in Virginia.”

“So you, the FBI, is responsible for all of this?” Wes asked, with his voice calm.

“Yup, not that it’s anything to you. You will be going down with this damned place when it finally goes up in flames.”

Chapter Eighteen

Garcia could not hear what was going on in the docks, but he had a fair idea. He saw the shot and he cursed. He had known this would happen when he saw Smith appear from the office completely revitalized. He knew Smith would become too reckless, but he never expected to see the scene he just watched on the monitor.

He saw Smith pull the trigger and he saw Akhmed fall. The boy must be dead. He regretted it. Akhmed had been a nice guy, but things were what they were. There was nothing to do about it; nothing could have been done about it the moment he allowed Smith to choose Akhmed Hussain Abbasi as a target. As a means to accomplish the ends they had in mind.

It was sad, really. But it had to be done. They needed a patsy and Akhmed had been the best choice Smith was able to come up with. He had not found a better one himself, so the plan was made and executed. It was the way it was; no time for regrets.