Ted bellowed above the chaos, “FBI! Everyone freeze!”
“No one’s in the van!” Sami glared at the traffic cop who’d helped the medical crew park the brown van at the curb. “Was there another guy?”
“They had a patient pickup! With a wheelchair.” The cop pointed to the terminal.
“What did he look like?”
“Like a guy! White guy. Blond hair. White uniform. EMT vest.”
Ghosts whispered to Sami, “Diverting the enemy… let us attack. Timing.”
“Harry!” Sami yelled to the man cuffing the unconscious Ameer. “It’s Maher!”
“Go!” Harry guarded a brown van with a neutralized EMGF near an airport control tower and people-packed jetliners flying through a snowstorm.
“Ted-you know Maher’s face-work down from the other end!”
The FBI agent leaped into the tan sedan. Siren wailing, red light spinning, Ted raced back the way they’d come-straight into oncoming one-way traffic.
Sami ran toward the terminal, told the uniformed cop, “Stay away from me!”
Don’t blow my cover. I’m a spy. I’m a spy.
Plunging into a sea of shuffling humanity. Shoulder to shoulder. Move! Suitcases rolled like roadblocks. Crowd hubbub. Scents of Christmas pine, lemony floor cleaner, sweat, petroleum luggage fabric. Through the bedlam cut ringing phones.
Sami shoved his way toward the other end of the terminal.
Where is he? White uniform. Blond guy. Vest. Pushing an empty wheelchair.
Sami didn’t exactly know how his brothers packed the wheelchair’s tubular frame with gunpowder and particles they thought were radioactive. Wired an IV bag of liquid to the same detonation device Zlatko engineered for the gunpowder. But Sami knew.
A digital clock on the wall told him T minus 1.
The diversion bomb timed to cover the EMGF transmission. First responders might mistake the brown medical van for one of their own. Let it run as jetliners tumbled through the snowflakes.
Where are you? Move, out of my way! Sami jumped for a glimpse over the teeming crowd. “Watch it!” Somebody bumped him. There’s the terminal wall, the end, the last/first street exit, there’s-
An IV-bagged wheelchair sat by the wall of windows.
Sami leaped onto a planter-There! Fifty feet from the wheelchair. Nearing the exit: blond, EMT vest over a stolen white uniform. Get to him! Con him! Neutralize!
“Maher!” bellowed Sami.
Quiet filled the moment as if in slow-motion. Maher turned. Saw his brother waving at him above the airport crowd. A quizzical look filled the California blond’s face. He reached his right hand inside the vest.
Forty-four feet away, known murderer and terrorist Maher’s textbook gesture equaled gun! FBI Special Agent Ted Harris drew his service weapon, pushed an old man out of the way, acquired his target-fired three booming shots.
Panic exploded. Screaming. People tried to run. Dive. Hide.
“FBI!” yelled Ted. “FBI!”
Shots one and two blasted Maher off his feet.
His third bullet crashed into a metal heating grate above an exit.
Sami fought through the scared, silent mob toward where Maher sprawled on his back as combat-shuffling toward him came Ted, his eyes on what the suspect had pulled from his vest, still held in his right hand: only a cell phone.
Maher rose on his elbows, vaguely heard “Don’t move!” Saw his white shirt reddening. Felt phone in his right hand. Saw brother Sami scrambling through the huddled crowd to save him. Maher smiled blood. Saw Sami stumble, crawl closer. Maher’s right thumb hit speed dial as he raised a weakening left thumbs-up.
Sami screamed, “No!”
In the city, Zlatko stood outside a green door, left hand pushing a buzzer while his right hand held a pistol tied to four other murders as he terminated a loose end who ran downstairs to the peephole he’d blurred with street slush.
In Ronald Reagan National Airport, soldier John Heme huddled with blondish, black leather-coated Cari Jones. Beside them was redheaded, blue-uniformed, airline service rep Lorna Dumas pulling Amy Lewis and teddy bear closer to the shelter of an empty wheelchair rigged with a cell phone programmed to block every call. Except one.
They all heard ring!
NEIGHBORS by Joseph Finder
“I can’t shake the feeling that they’re up to something,” Matt Parker said. He didn’t need to say: the new neighbors. He was peering out their bedroom window through a gap between the slats of the Venetian blinds.
Kate Parker looked up from her book, groaned. “Not this again. Come to bed. It’s after eleven.”
“I’m serious,” Matt said.
“So am I. Plus, they can probably see you staring at them.”
“Not from this angle.” But just to be safe he dropped the slat. He turned around, arms folded. “I don’t like them,” he said.
“You haven’t even met them.”
“I saw you talking to them yesterday. I don’t think they’re a real couple. She’s, like, twenty years younger than him.”
“Laura’s eight years younger than Jimmy.”
“He’s got to be an Arab.”
“I think Laura said his parents are Persian.”
“Persian,” Matt scoffed. “That’s just a fancy word for Iranian. Like an Iraqi saying he’s Mesopotamian or something.”
Kate shook her head and went back to her book. Some girl noveclass="underline" an Oprah Book Club selection with a cover that looked like an Amish quilt. At the foot of their bed, the big flat-screen TV flickered a blue light across her delicate features. She had the sound muted: Matt didn’t get how she could concentrate on a book with the TV on.
“Also, does he look like a Norwood to you?” Matt said when he came back from brushing his teeth, a few stray white flecks of Colgate on his chin. “Jimmy Norwood? What kind of name is Norwood for an Arab guy? That can t be his real name.”
Kate gave a small, tight sigh, folded down the corner of a page and closed her book. “It’s Nourwood, actually.” She spelled it.
“That’s not a real name.” He climbed into bed. “And where’s their furniture? They didn’t even have a moving van. They just showed up one day with all their stuff in that stupid little Toyota hybrid sardine can.”
“Boy, you really have been stalking them.”
Matt jutted his jaw. “I notice stuff. Like foreign-made cars.”
“Yeah, well, I hate to burst your bubble, but they’re renting the house furnished from the Gormans. Ruth and Chuck didn’t want to sell their house, given the market these days, and there’s no room in their condo in Boca for-”
“What kind of people would rent a furnished house?”
“Look at us,” Kate pointed out. “We move, like, every two years.”
“You knew when you married me that was how it would be. That’s just part of the life. I’m telling you, there’s something not quite right about them. Remember the Olsens in Pittsburgh?”
“Don’t start.”
“Did I or did I not tell you their marriage was in trouble? You insisted Daphne had postpartum depression. Then they got divorced.”
“Yeah, like five years after we moved,” Kate said. “Half of all marriages end in divorce. Anyway, the Nourwoods are a perfectly nice couple.”
Something on TV caught Matt’s eye. He fumbled for the remote, found it under the down comforter next to Kate’s pillow, touched a button to bring up the sound.
“-officials tell WXBS NightCast that FBI intelligence reports indicate an increased level of terrorist chatter-”