Quick Read (Badger Thompson Book 3), page 15
A trio of semi drunk guys in suits stumbled out of the front door, cursing and singing at the same time. Thumping music followed them echoing out of the blue and red tinted showroom bar, then as the door closed it was quiet on the street again. One of the trio stopped to light a cigarette, standing there wobbling on his legs as the puff of smoke wafted around his head, circling up into the black night sky, back lit by street lamps. He inhaled the poison as though it was an elixir.
An oriental woman leaned against the lamp-post, pulling her skirt to the side, showing me her leg up to her hip. She looked experienced. She knew I wasn’t a cop, and the drunk guys would just waste her time. She’d soon find out she was wasting her time with me also.
She was an American, but tried to act like she was straight from the Saigon Delta with a fake accent.
“Hey baby? I love you long time. You like?”
I walked across the street without looking her in the eyes.
The Hillcrest Apartments. Two miles from the Lincoln Memorial. You had high end housing mixed right in with the dregs of the world. There was a secure front door and you needed an electronic code to get in. No problem. There were three hundred units at the Hillcrest.
All I needed to do was wait till someone exited, and be there at the exact same time as though I belonged.
I stood by the side of the road, near the curb. The oriental woman on the other side of the road studied me, wondering if she should give it another try. Then a long car came along, pulling alongside her. She leaned through the open window at the back seat, then climbed in, and the car continued down the road.
Twenty long minutes later I saw the elevator open, out walked a light grey suit, this guy was in better shape than the suits exiting the Cha-Cha Club, he looked stone sober, hair neatly combed, eyes bright, carrying a thin black briefcase, walking crisply for the front door. He was in a hurry. Trying to get a jump on the other suits in the city.
I made as though I was walking for the front door also, timed it so I’d get there at the same exact moment. The door would have to swing outward and I was blocking his exit. I’d have to punch in the code while he waited.
I saw too late that it was Dmitri.
It was also too late to turn away from the door as if I never intended to enter the building. That would be a dead giveaway.
I’d made a mistake. It was late, I was fatigued from not sleeping. I forced my outer demeanor into non-aggressive passive, semi bumbling, eyelids drooping, not really aware of my surroundings, possibly drunk. Completely non-threatening. A poor slob out late just trying to get home.
Maybe he’d recognize me as the guy sitting outside the Coding Dojo and try to take me out like he did to the guy back at the college, with a silencer on the front end of a pistol.
His eyes however told the story, he was agitated. Unnecessarily so. I was in his way, and that’s all that mattered to him at that particular moment in time.
I noticed he was holding the briefcase in his left hand, that meant he was right handed, which would come into play within the next few seconds. When carrying an object and walking it was a normal tendency to carry it in your free hand while keeping the dominant hand ready for action. If he was carrying a gun it would be in his right pocket.
I pretended to just then notice my bad timing, as though I’d just woken out of a walking slumber, holding up my hands in the universal sign of ‘I’m so sorry’, and backed away from the door. I put my open left palm forward in the other universal sign of ‘after you’.
“You go first!” I said loud enough so he could hear through the double paned glass.
He smiled tightly, pushed against the crossbar, unlocking the door and tried to walk right by me without a word.
Too late his eyes widened as he realized that he’d seen me before, twice actually in the past few hours, sudden adrenalin, his entire body exhibiting a frantic movement as he tried to back away from the door and reach into his pocket.
I stepped in front of him, grabbed his Adams apple in a pincer between my thumb and forefinger of my left hand, and waltzed him back through the doorway. He grabbed the pincer with his right hand, his dominant hand, a normal reaction in a fight to the death as the wind was abruptly cut off from his pipe.
He dropped the briefcase, as he stumbled backwards losing balance, reaching for the pistol which unfortunately was in his right pocket. He tried to switch hands on the pincer but it was too late. I danced him straight back into the stairwell next to the elevator, and threw him into the first set of stairs like a sack of potatoes. Cracking his head on the metal stairwell.
He blinked hard, jackknifed off the stairs, not trying to grab for the gun, just trying to create some space so he could reach for it again, kicking and clawing, one kick caught me on the shin, the left one that was nearly broken. Stifling a shudder of pain I backed up an inch to give myself room to attack, he lunged forward, caught me under my cracked ribs with a left handed undercut. His chin exposed, left hand extended, I caught him with a straight right cross to the side of his jaw. I could feel it dislocate out of the socket. He went down on his side, legs splayed in odd angles, out cold. Or so I thought.
The gun with the silencer was halfway out of his pocket, I kicked it all the way out with my foot, sliding it well behind me, then reached down, grabbed him by the ears, shaking his head, slapping his face to wake him up.
“Where’s the device?” I whispered. His eyes fluttered, but did not open. “Palo Alto. Where’s the device? Is it in the briefcase?”
I didn’t want to take my hands off him just yet to retrieve and search the briefcase.
“Where is it?” I repeated.
He was playing possum. With his eyes still closed he reached his left hand up towards my face as though it was a natural reaction of his unconscious synapses. I pushed the hand back.
He reached up again, I pushed it back again, his eyes still lightly shut.
It was a slow motion feint. Slowly moving his right hand along his side towards his ankle. I didn’t see it coming, he gave a quick twist of his torso, bringing his ankle up into contact with his fingers. Too late to prevent it, the tiny gun from the ankle holster was in his grip. Small caliber, smaller than the palm of his hand, a one shot derringer, perfect for a fight like this, fitting in so tight that there was no way to dislodge it, I could only try to make sure that the barrel didn’t point at me. One shot and it would be over.
Now both of my hands clamping down, circling his right wrist struggling to maintain control. Both of us gasping for air. His legs like serpents leveraging around my thighs, twisting me off, and I with no leverage, taken by surprise.
I fell on my left side, the point of my hip grinding on the concrete. The hand with the gun pushing against my grip with all his might, getting close to having a shot at my mid-section.
No way around it, reversed leverage from pushing against the gun hand to pulling straight up in the air then down into his side. The sound of a muffled pop and he went limp, this time for good I imagined. The bullet must have pierced his heart, or a good enough portion of it to stop it. He shuddered once more and was still. Eyes half open, pupils dilating as they rolled back into his skull.
There was no mistaking the body language. There’s knocked out cold, and then there’s dead. He was the later of the two.
I searched his pockets. All he had was a thin wallet, a cell phone, and a set of three keys on a small simple ring. I put the wallet in my front pocket and left the phone and keys where they were.
I stood up and left the pistol in his hand, thought about picking up the larger one with the silencer attached and tossing it a storm drain but realized that I hadn’t touched it. No prints.
Not that it would matter.
They had motion detecting sensors and cameras all over this building, inside and outside the front door, where most of the action normally took place. Top of the line motion detecting, passive infrared radiation sensors, high definition wide angle lenses.
I was on another camera with a dead guy nearby. They were starting to pile up in my wake.
Walking towards the exit, picking up the briefcase, I almost felt like waving to the camera, but that would be immoral. I didn’t choose this fight. It came at me. Now I was reacting to it.
The Cha-Cha club was still going strong when I crossed the street for a second time heading for my car. The lovelorn oriental woman with the long skirt was long gone and there was no one to take her place.
I settled into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine and did a U-turn down the street two blocks then took a left turn. The nearest lamp post was twenty feet away so I was in a bit of shadow. The briefcase was locked.
This is one of those instances where maybe you shouldn’t go poking your nose into places they didn’t belong. For all I knew it could be booby trapped. It was unlikely, who in their right mind would walk around with an explosive armed briefcase. It could accidently just open up on you and then, kablam.
If it did have a trigger, it would be on the front. Wrong guy opens it up without putting in the correct code, kablam.
The funny thing about locking briefcases is the fact that they don’t think anyone will see the flaw in the design. Grabbed my boot knife, popped off the rear hinges and carefully pried the top off a quarter inch. Just enough to poke my little pen light into the crack and look at the front. No wires, no bulges, just the normal smooth inside faux black leather interior, with brown stitching along the top edges. Opened it up a bit further and pulled out the contents laying them on the passenger seat.
The usual; pens, notepads, calculator, handgun with a silencer. This made three guns the professor was carrying. One in his pocket, one on his ankle, and one in his briefcase.
The paper on top had a mathematical equation: X=201-030400+5060-00330.
Maybe this was the equation that was on the chalk board. There was a stack of more papers dealing with psychology, human anatomy. More papers on hypnosis, case studies of human behavior while in a hypnotic trance.
Then a schematic of a military base, buildings, roads, live fire ranges, check points, a train station, barracks, even a little golf course, all bordering the Potomac river to the east and curving away down and to the right. In tiny letters at the top of the page: Marine Base Quantico.
Training ground for the Marines, FBI, Secret Service. I always wanted to go there, but never had the chance. You could fire any weapon in the world on the ranges they had scattered throughout the creek filled Virginia countryside.
I kept flipping through the papers.
Towards the bottom of the pile of papers, wedged in between two pages of mathematical calculations, a single ruffled page torn from a yellow legal pad. In the middle in big bold black letters:
NUKE TEHRAN
I looked closer at the two papers that bookended the yellow paper.
Mathematical equations dealing with the weight and price of gold, lift capabilities of helicopters. The physical structure of a steel plated bank vault door and the explosive force per square inch needed to breach it.
Looked like someone was planning a heist.
24.
Yuri sat in the hard backed chair at his desk on the top floor of Black Op Security. The one way silver tinted windows looked out onto a small city park to the east. There was a basketball court, swings, benches. A grass area to walk a dog or throw a baseball. The black of the night sky was beginning to lighten on the edges of the horizon, heralding the impending dawn less than an hour away.
Dmitri needed to ditch his clothes, so he texted a few hours ago with the code. Walter was inserting the language into the software in his office downstairs, and soon they’d be ready to go to war.
Yuri’s office was bare bones, solid tile floor, light stained redwood walls, tongue and groove ceiling. One chair, one desk, one computer screen, one keyboard, one phone, one yellow legal pad, one pen, one pencil. No trophies, no pictures on the walls, no vases with flowers. If someone came to visit or debrief, they stood at the front of the desk.
He looked down at the phone, checking the time print on the face. Four twenty five AM. Five minutes from now he’d receive a call on the satellite line. Untraceable.
In Iran, at the edge of the desert, one hundred miles from Tehran sat two sleek attack helicopters, and one giant heavy lift helicopter in an old crater the size of a warehouse.
Camouflage netting that resembled the sand and rocks surrounding them covered the crater, propped up by telescoping poles, giving them invisibility and air flow to survive the torrid desert heat for the three days they’d been in hiding.
Two forklifts were strapped into the belly of the heavy lift copter. The two attack choppers, armed with Gatling guns on either side of the nose, also had two AGM-114 hellfire missiles mounted under the small wings that jutted out from the fuselage. Five feet long, one hundred eight pounds in weight, cobalt black with three bright yellow bands around the seven inch diameter.
It was a precision missile designed for soft targets such as buildings, tanks, bunkers. This particular design was modified for a tight blast window and minimal collateral damage. They needed to blow through a ten inch thick steel plated door, and not bring down the entire building around it.
Not included in the official descriptive uses for the precision missile, but one that they felt confident would work was against a bank vault.
One that held half a billion dollars in gold bullion. Each missile cost seventy thousand dollars to procure and even if they needed all four to complete the job, it would be money well spent.
Yagiz Kaplan, Turkish Air Force retired patted the rounded nose of one of the missiles.
All system checks were completed, with just one more right before they lifted off.
The time on his watch read one o’clock. It was afternoon in the desert, the sun still directly overhead and hot in the crater even though shaded by the netting.
He pulled out the satellite phone and dialed the ten digit telephone number. It rang once.
“Conduit,” said Yuri.
“Copper,” replied Yagiz completing the code.
“You are ready?”
“All systems go,” said Yagiz.
“Remember our procedure.”
“Yes,” said Yagiz. “Any changes?”
“None yet. We have the device prepared. Our meeting is in ten hours.”
Yuri hung up the phone.
Nothing else needed to be said. With the helicopters airspeed at three hundred miles per hour, they were twenty minutes from Tehran.
If all went well the nuke would explode at eleven o’clock at night, two hundred feet above the center of the city, while nearly everyone was either asleep, or headed there.
They needed to stay hidden deep in the crater until a few moments after the nuclear blast to protect the sensitive electronics on board the aircraft from the resulting EMP, the electromagnetic pulse that would fry any gear that was turned on with a voltage surge.
Five minutes after the blast, while the mushroom cloud was still rising into the atmosphere, in the frantic minutes after the shock wave had passed by, they would fly in low to the bank vault, blast the door off the hinges with the Hellfire missiles, then with the forklifts load up twenty pallets of gold into the heavy lift helicopter, and five pallets each into the attack helicopters.
They wouldn’t have to worry about any survivors getting in their way. With their protective radiation suits, and air tanks, they’d be able to move at will throughout the compound, clearing a road if needed for the forklifts through the rubble from the mother lode to the choppers.
Twenty five minutes after the blast to the bank vault, half hour at the most to load the freight. One hour after the disaster, five minutes before midnight, they’d be flying straight south to the rendezvous site on the coast.
Now where was Dmitri?
He should have been here fifteen minutes ago. He looked at the security cameras outside the office. No movement had been recorded in the past half hour. He called down to Walter.
“Any word from Dmitri?”
“None.”
“Are you finished with the software coding?”
“Yes, it fits seamlessly.”
“Be ready to leave in one hour,” said Yuri and hung up the phone. He picked it back up and dialed Dmitri’s cell phone. It rang five times then went to a robot voice asking the caller to leave a message.
Hair raising on the back of Yuri’s neck, he turned to his computer, logged into the camera system and pulled up the security camera link to Dmitri’s apartment complex. The screen was empty. He looked back at his phone, scrolling through his messages, the one from Dmitri said he was leaving his apartment in five minutes. That was at three ten AM.
Over half an hour ago.
Three camera angles edge to edge on the screen. One camera on the outside of the building with a super wide lens showing the street running from end to end. One on the wall by the elevator looking directly at the front entrance. The best angle is the camera with a wide lens that points towards the elevator and the front entrance from inside the lobby. A few people coming and going through the front door. Then at three fifteen AM, Dmitri walking swiftly from the elevator to the entrance, trying to get by a seemingly drunk, wavering man on the outside who is blocking his way. The door opens. They tangle, Dmitri drops the briefcase and is pushed backwards into the stairwell next to the elevator.
Two minutes later, the other man leaves the stairwell, picks up the briefcase and exits the building.
All three of the cameras are mounted high on walls looking down. It’s a flaw. You have to install them that way to make it harder for punks, hooligans and drunks to rip them off their base. The man on the screen who ambushed Dmitri must know this and keeps his head pointed down the entire time. There is no clear shot of his face.
Yuri’s forehead turns red as the fury builds inside, but he quickly calms his emotions. Takes a long deep breath, slowly releasing it. Rage solves nothing. Pure calculated thought takes over. There are other security cameras that he can access. They take more time to locate, but nothing is impossible. He has access to a wide array of government cameras. It took a few quick clicks till he found the right set.
