Vengeance For Gabriel, page 1
Vengeance
For
Gabriel
Robert Borneman
Copyright © November 11, 2023
Robert Borneman
All rights reserved
This Work is Dedicated to My Loving Wife.
My Partner, My One True Joy.
Thanks for a Lifetime of Love and Friendship!
THANKS
Special thanks to my editors and proofreaders:
Joyce Borneman
Louise Neal
Linda Denninger
Joseph Rosario
Noreen Bilsky
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, places, events, references and incidents in this book are not real and have been created from the author's imagination or used only in a fictitious manner.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are entirely coincidental. This book contains references to suicide on pages 224, 292 and 321 in the context of criminal related activity. If you have thoughts about suicide or would like to learn more, contact the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Chapter 1
The Witness
Chapter 2
Heading to Washington
Chapter 3
The Situation Room
Chapter 4
The Deputy Director
Chapter 5
The BrAIn
Chapter 6
Back to New York
Chapter 7
The Sting Rays
Chapter 8
Returning to the Site
Chapter 9
The Apartment
Chapter 10
An Insider?
Chapter 11
Another Clue
Chapter 12
Matthew
Chapter 13
Long Street
Chapter 14
Wheels Up
Chapter 15
Trip to Hayes
Chapter 16
Arnold Archer
Chapter 17
The Ranch
Chapter 18
The Tank
Chapter 19
A Rocky Road
Chapter 20
Kidnapped
Chapter 21
Returning to Washington
Chapter 22
The Unthinkable
Chapter 23
Sacrifice
Chapter 24
Duct Tape
Chapter 25
The Message
Chapter 26
CIRG
Chapter 27
A Win For the “Bad Guys”
Chapter 28
Jacksonville
Chapter 29
Early Morning Call
Chapter 30
The Big Break
Chapter 31
There’s more!
Chapter 32
Sam Taylor
Chapter 33
The Ambassador
Chapter 34
The Proof
Chapter 35
The Philippines
Chapter 36
Carlo Ramos
Chapter 37
The Aftermath
Chapter 38
A Chance
Chapter 39
The Club
Chapter 40
The Informant
Chapter 41
The Plan
Chapter 42
Sunrise
Chapter 43
The Exchange
Chapter 44
Unexpected Company
Chapter 45
The Firefight
Chapter 46
Loose Ends
Chapter 47
Returning to Washington
Chapter 1
The Witness
An unobstructed view of the Statue of Liberty commands one’s attention from the moment the elevator doors open into the grand foyer of Roger Quaid’s spacious penthouse apartment. By design, the view of New York Harbor with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge as a backdrop is spectacular. On most days, you can walk around the veranda of the ninety fifth floor apartment taking in the Atlantic Ocean, all of Northern New Jersey and Southwestern Connecticut while enjoying the noticeably cleaner city air at almost one thousand feet above sea level.
Even on the stormy days, when high winds and lightning bolts deter the boldest of guests from stepping outside the apartment, the light show is still magnificent. On rare days when heavy cloud cover or dense fog obscures the cityscape completely, the view is still interesting. The moisture laden clouds can often be relaxing and mesmerizing, especially when observed with a cocktail in hand.
Roger sat at his desk facing east in the early morning hours of this fifth of May. As he worked, images of building plans and photographs of fires and explosions can be seen on Roger’s computer monitor. He typed away on his keyboard, finishing the last response to the emails that had arrived overnight, which meant in the last three hours while he had slept.
Astronomical twilight had already passed, and the sun had begun to rise on schedule. In a few hours people would slowly begin filling the streets of lower Manhattan in anticipation of a large annual parade celebrating Cinco De Mayo.
The parade is traditionally followed by a celebration that lasts throughout the day and late into the night in the drinking establishments all over town. It is one of the more colorful events the city hosts in terms of costumes and music.
Roger swapped his reading glasses for a pair of progressive lenses in grey frames that were lying on the leather padded desk. These glasses allowed him to take in the distant views more clearly. The grey rims matched his greying hair and his platinum Rolex wristwatch with a Diamond dial, a Diamond bezel, and a custom bracelet. People often complimented him on his stainless-steel watch not understanding it was platinum. He would just smile acknowledging the compliment, never correcting anyone.
Roger Quaid was a tall slender man of one hundred and eighty pounds at six foot and three inches, rapidly approaching fifty. He was all about subtle details, no doubt honed from his keen powers of observation. His instincts dovetailed nicely with his intuitive senses allowing him to avoid many missteps in his time. He glanced at the oversized ship’s clock hanging above the antique mantle of his gas fireplace that did not work. The faux fireplace managed to blend in but served no purpose in his apartment other than to conceal a reasonably large safe.
The time was 5:54 am. Roger walked toward the glass walls of his home office surveying the city awakening to a new day. The sun had now cleared the horizon from his vantage point even though most of the streets below remained dark in the shadows of the towering concrete structures lining them.
Direct sun would not strike the pavement on some of the streets that ran parallel to the suns arc for another four to five hours. Roger took in a final scan of the cityscape from east to west as he did every morning he awoke in the apartment. This morning he would head out to meet his friend who was getting married and assist with some details for the evening’s wedding.
When Roger looked down, he could see a Banco Americana building that had a huge digital clock on its rooftop below him. The clock flashed the time 5:55 and a temperature of fifty-four degrees.
As Roger stood at the window he felt a tremor, then there was a large upward movement and loud sound, like a volcanic eruption of sorts, that caught his eye. The surge was followed by a crescendo of sounds, vibrations, and the sight of a huge expanding orange fireball, overwhelming all his senses at once.
Roger’s body tensed as he recoiled from the window instinctively, but he remained focused on the cataclysmic reaction unfolding below him. His hands had become clenched fists, his breathing deepened, and his blood pressure rose. He stood motionless, unaware of his physical reaction as he absorbed the depth of what was transpiring. His mind recorded indelible images of the dome from one the city’s oldest landmarks splintering into thousands of pieces.
The fragments, some of which were significant in size, were being hurled hundreds of feet into the air. The ascent of the debris terminated well below Roger’s vantage point. The building he knew all too well, Seven Main Street, was less than ten stories tall and it had just disintegrated beneath him. The larger pieces of the building began falling back to earth while dust, smoke and fire were swept higher by the updraft of the explosion below.
Roger’s apartment rattled, antiquities, glassware and anything not affixed to the walls crashed to the floor. Roger barely noticed. The fireball was breathtaking, the proverbial train wreck you cannot turn your eyes away from. Roger stared intently, repulsed, and intrigued at the same time. Waves of black smoke intertwined with the orange flames had a life of their own, unfurling and everchanging, burning brighter than the sun that had just risen.
Silence returned after everything in the apartment stopped shaking and the earthquake like sensation created by the blast subsided. Then a final plate slid from the edge of a shelf and struck the counter, shattering on the floor amongst all the other debris. Ironically this sound startled Roger for a moment until he processed what it was. The lights flickered, battery backups and appliances started beeping, then power failed.
As the smoke continued to rise, it began to billow and flatten, still not having reached the height of Roger’s apartment. The intense heat and height of the fireball rose too, the air above it became more turbulent. The rising temperatures were evidenced by mirage like waves of heat rippling in the cool remnants of t
Roger made note that the glass walls had withstood the blast without any noticeable damage, unlike the lower floors that he knew would not fare as well due to the airborne debris being hurled at a force beyond the hurricane ratings of the glass. The fireball was still expanding. The cloud widened and rose more rapidly, filling the corridors that used to be streets, swallowing the buildings below that were forty or fifty stories high in a storm of ash and flames.
Fine gray ash was beginning to accumulate on the glass. Roger continued to collect mental images he would recall forever. Visibility was decreasing rapidly and within the next few seconds every glimmer of southern light from the glass walls was blacked out. Roger was left in almost total darkness, except for a small amount of ambient light filtering in from the north side of the penthouse.
When the wind shifted, the thick smoke parted, offering an impaired view through the patches of glass that were not completely blackened by the firestorm’s residue. The two neighboring buildings were now becoming part of the blaze spreading from the remnants of the explosions site. It was eerie watching the roaring fire that made no noise.
A survey of the skyline provided no clue of anything else amiss aside from the single rising column of acrid smoke that was undoubtedly toxic. The black smoke expanded even more when it reached at an altitude where the cooler air converted the column of smoke into a mushroom cloud. The top of the cloud was being spread out by the upper atmospheric winds crossing over the city.
The clock on the adjacent building now read 5:56, in less than a mere minute, a sense of dread, terror and fear grew within Roger all at once, as his thoughts gained more clarity. An overwhelming and terrifying realization came to Roger; his son Matthew spent a fair amount of time in that building, recently taking early morning meetings. Would his son have been at work at this hour? Probably not Roger thought, hanging on to the hope that his Matthew would be okay. But he had no way of really knowing, so his thoughts ran to the worst-case scenario.
Surely no one in the building could survive this. Had Matthew just been taken from him? A thousand new thoughts raced through Roger’s mind. He reached for his phone and dialed Matthew’s cell number. The phone rang and rang as Roger placed his hand on the glass wall to brace himself.
“Pick up the phone, pick up the phone!” Roger anxiously repeated aloud as Matthew’s number continued to ring without an answer. Roger redialed. Every ring was another painful second preventing him from hearing his son’s voice. “Pick up, pick up!” Roger repeated.
The time was 5:57, “Come on, come on Matt. Answer the damn phone!” Even though Roger was not a practitioner of any religion, he hoped there was a merciful God that might have intervened and spared his son. Roger tried Matthew’s office number. There was no answer there either.
The sounds of the city streets below were never heard in the penthouse at this height due to the insulated architectural glass. However, nothing less than chaos was spreading below. Roger could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles converging from every direction. The first responders in the neighborhood did not need notification to respond, the enormity of the explosion was enough to mobilize them.
People were entering the streets to grasp what had just taken place. Almost all of the people entering the street from adjacent apartment buildings were running in the opposite direction of the firefighters, police officers, and paramedics now arriving.
The smoke began to clear from Roger’s vantage point as the wind carried more of the ash and smoke to the west towards New Jersey. Roger slid his cell into his back pocket and murmured aloud as he often did under pressure. “Focus! Focus!” Roger’s thoughts started to become more coherent, as he rationalized and tried to hold onto something positive in his mind. As a critical thinker, Roger had developed his own defense mechanisms to quell his inner being when he was under a lot of pressure.
Thank God he thought, it was so early in the morning most of the people who worked in the building probably would not have arrived yet. To Roger this was also a reasonably clear indication that this was not a planned attack or an act of terrorism. Then again, he sensed this was too significant of an explosion to be an accident. Roger redialed Matthew as the horror of the moment gave way to a deep anger that began to well up inside Roger.
What if this was not an accident? The idea that this could be an attack would certainly be unconscionable. For the friends and families of the victims, the suffering would be significantly more difficult to cope with, if that were possible to imagine, and it would also mean someone would have to answer for the murder of innocent souls.
Roger’s heart beat so heavily from his rising blood pressure that his eyes began to twitch. He thought he might be having a heart attack. He started to sweat, and he started to panic, he was alone. His thought process became erratic, his vision blurred slightly, and he started to feel a vertigo type of dizziness. Roger’s breath shortened and taxed his lungs, he remembered the last time this happened to him, and he thought about his wife. He tried to focus and fight the nausea he started experiencing.
Roger leaned against the glass again for stability, thinking he might need to sit down before his knees gave out or worse, he might blackout. He was reeling out of control in a downward spiral when the silence in the penthouse was broken by an incoming call. The ringing jolted his senses and gave him some clarity again.
Roger’s body was still not cooperating, his heart was racing as he retrieved his phone. Then he saw the displayed number was not Matthew returning his call. The screen displayed a number he knew all too well, the time on his cell phone read 5:58. He took a deep breath, pausing for a second, he raised the phone to his ear, and he muttered two words.
“Agent Quaid.”
Chapter 2
Heading to Washington
Nineteen minutes had passed when Roger opened the door to the rooftop of his building. He could hear a helicopter approaching. His phone was now pinging constantly. It was an unwanted concert of musical chimes from incoming texts, tweets, IM’s DM’s, emails, and calls; few of which he was inclined to respond to at this moment. Still no word from Matthew he thought.
The helicopter was coming in fast from the west. As it neared his building, the helo banked steeply like a downhill skier stopping at the end of a run, heading towards Roger sideways, sliding through the air. The craft settled squarely above the hash marks of the landing zone, settling lower. It was an aggressive maneuver performed perfectly by a pilot who had honed his skills flying sorties during three Middle Eastern conflicts.
The sleek, glossy black bird was a modern version of the military’s attack helicopters. It was armed with missiles and guns but was smaller in size, apparently more agile. The bay door slid open, revealing David Jones, Assistant Director of the Critical Incident Response Group for the FBI. He wanted to see the site firsthand and was to return to Washington with Roger in tow.
Roger crossed the rooftop crouching down as he made his way under the spinning blades toward his unmarked ride. He hoisted himself into the cabin just before the skids touched down using a grab bar. He gave the pilot a thumbs up to take off with his free hand as he lifted his second foot from the concrete. Roger buckled himself into a seat and put on a communications headset as the helicopter began to rise, then he greeted David.
Roger and David had a deep and colorful history, having graduated from the same high school and college together. Even though each of them had followed different career paths within the Bureau, their work lives provided enough opportunities for them to stay in touch and reminisce about their youth whenever they had a chance to chat.
David Jones was a highly venerated field operative in his early years, having worked in the most dangerous and unstable places around the globe. The scar that ran from his ear down and along his jaw was a reminder of an encounter gone bad. He never envisioned himself behind a desk, but his wife convinced him to give up the life of a road warrior after their third child was born, almost ten years ago now. When faced with considering retirement or staying in the game, the desk became a viable option for David. It only took six years for him to land the job running the Critical Inc Response Group for the FBI known as CIRG, a testament to his ability to get things done.
