“So now it won’t be dirty, but it’ll still be a bomb.”
“Yeah, but even if they augment hydrogen peroxide or chemicals from a dry cleaner with gunpowder from bullets, how big could it be?”
“How many deaths add up to ‘big’?”
“We don’t think that’s the point,” said Harry. “We know what Zlatko is building. I posted what we had on A-Space and Intellipedia, the classified sites, set it up like a game. A dozen nerds came up with an Explosive Magnetic Generator of Frequency. The Soviets perfected them. Both Ivan and Zlatko grew up behind the Iron Curtain. A U.S. general challenged some grad students a few years ago, and they designed an EMGF to fit in a pickup truck with a cost of eight hundred dollars-most of it bought from Radio Shack.
“EMGFs are why you turn off your cell phone when you fly. They don’t really ‘explode,’ they beam a sphere of electronic waves that fries unshielded computers, phones, circuit boards for car engines-”
“That’s why I’m supposed to turn off my taxi tomorrow at precisely two p.m.!”
“And why you’re parking where they told you. That pull-off by the Potomac is across the freeways from the Pentagon. EMGFs are designed to slam the enemy’s command and control centers. They’re invisible inside any pickup-sized vehicle…”
“Like the Ameer’s SUV” said Sami.
“Assemble an EMGF with an electric motor into your shielded vehicle, drive it-hell, park it-outside the Pentagon’s secure perimeter, turn it on, fry systems all over a mile-thick spherical zone. We’d be burned all the way to Baghdad and A-stan.”
“What about the bomb they think is dirty?”
Harry said, “We figure it’s a Baghdad doubletap. They park the EMGF vehicle. The longer the EMGF runs, the more it destroys. When SWAT teams figure out what’s going on and blitz the source… boom! Booby-trapped. Radiation is bonus blood.”
“And the cell phones?”
“Maybe one of your crew is gonna be a martyr, stay behind, detonate the booby trap when he sees SWAT closing in. That’d be optimum.”
“Frying the Pentagon meets Zlatko’s conscience. After they ditch the EMGF vehicle, I’ll be the walk-to getaway. If my cab engine gets fried, bikes will still work. Three bikes, four brothers, one stay-behind.
“When do we hit them?” said Sami.
The blue taxi crawled through holiday traffic.
“No!” said Sami.
“After dark, the Pentagon gets ringed by camouflaged snake eaters. Tomorrow when your brothers attack, we got ‘em. Odds are, we get two alive for interrogation.”
“Take them now!”
“Then we get Ivan, but even you don’t know where the other two are. We can’t let them run free. And if we take them too soon, we won’t find out who they report to.”
“They answer to no one but themselves! You said you get that!”
“I do-our bosses don’t.”
“Get the fuck out of my cab.”
On that night before Christmas Eve, Sami assembled three bikes in his apartment. He looked around the mattress-on-the-floor hideaway that his Ameer believed had been made safe from discovery by the vaquera’s tricks, told himself: No more lying rooms.
At 9:30, he broke all the rules, used the breaker box phone outside in the night.
Cold kisses wet his skin. He told Rose, “It’s starting to snow.”
“Too early for holiday clichés. Can’t count on the weather.”
“Tomorrow starts a whole new season.”
“I’m ready,” said Rose.
The city went to sleep.
Cari Jones brushed her streaked blonde hair, saw her black leather coat hung ready to go, decided to try computer dating when she got back.
John Heme packed three different pill bottles for post-traumatic stress syndrome in his soldier’s duffel at Walter Reed Hospital.
Lorna Dumas decided to let her red hair swing free on her blue uniform tomorrow and threw her cigarettes down her building’s trash chute.
Amy Lewis chose her bestest brown teddy bear for Gramma’s.
Morning woke Sami to a snow-dusted town.
At ten a.m., he grabbed the cell phone and Glock. Loaded three bikes into his taxi. They gotta see what they’re expecting. Called Harry, “Launching.” Drove his taxi into Christmas Eve snowstorm traffic.
“It’s a mess out there,” said the man on news/traffic radio. “Washingtonians have never figured out how to drive in the snow, and we weren’t expecting this storm.”
Sami flashed on the Beirut radio announcer who daily reported which commuter streets were ruled by snipers.
He eased the blue taxi over slick streets: Fender benders fuck up ops.
Windshield wipers washed Sami’s view as he drove through a whooshing tunnel, popped up on an interstate threaded along the city. Green metal highway signs arrowed routes for I-395 south to Virginia, for exits to the Jefferson Memorial, federal office complexes, the airport, George Washington Parkway, the Pentagon.
Traffic on the bridge over the Potomac parted for the blue taxi obviously headed to the airport, taking that exit-but then unexpectedly pulling off the main road into a tree-lined turnout where the sign read “Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary”
Bad day to be a bird. Sami parked the taxi away from the only other vehicle in the bird-watcher’s roost, a battered car with bumper stickers reading “One Planet, One People” and “Audubon Society.” A passenger jet roared overhead. Snowflakes died on the warm blue taxi. A husky man wearing a parka stood at tripod-mounted binoculars aimed at the icy gray river, at the highways that blocked a view of the Pentagon.
Parka Man turned to face the taxi and Sami saw he was a bear.
Harry lumbered to the taxi, got in beside the driver. “Anything-anything-from your Ameer, the others?”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nearing noon. Attack time is two p.m. Doc Ivan came to work like always. But his SUV is still in its parking spot. Given the traffic, the weather, the time they’ll need to fit in the EMGF and some electric motor-”
“Hit him! Hit him now!”
Harry started to protest-barked orders up his sleeve: “COOK to all units: HRT Alpha: Take down Target One. I say again: Hit Target One now! Go! Go!”
The idling taxi grew close. Sami shut off the engine. A passenger jet roared overhead. The bear unzipped his parka. The taxi smelled of bike oil and rubber, fading car heater fumes, salty hope.
Harry’s eyes lost focus. He listened to his radio earpiece. Blinked.
“Shit!” Harry radioed, “Core plan! Reset to core plan!”
Told Sami, “All they found in Doc Ivan’s office was a scared old lady in an examination robe. She’s Muslim, did what the doctor ordered. Ivan walked out of the building right under our eyes inside her full burka, rode that charity van to poof.
“S’okay,” Harry said. “He’s just being cagey. Doesn’t know we’re on him. He’ll keep with the plan. We’re set if he comes back for his SUV They’ll attack the Pentagon and we’ll nail them. Everything’s cool, got FBI execs visiting Muslim leaders here to assure them that the busts are legit. It’s okay.”
Sami said, “I don’t know about them having other vehicles!”
“That’s the way a cell works. Nobody knows everything.”
“Except the guy you let slip away.”
“Life is risk. You don’t play it that way, you get played.” Harry shrugged. “You gotta go with what you know. That’s why we have spies.”