“Looks like the prince isn’t the only one who got face time with Allah,” I said.
“Whole family,” Church confirmed. “Two wives and four or five kids. Detonated in downtown Riyadh.”
The Kingdom Centre loomed in the background, a distinctive tower with a top like a strange crown. I’d had lunch there once. I could never see that crown without thinking that the eye of Sauron should have been gleaming from its center.
“In the heart of the city? Holy shit!”
Now, one fewer rich Saudi oil-monger in the world is no skin off my ass, but when you drag women, children, and innocent bystanders into it, that’s a different story. “Sounds like somebody was being made an example of,” I said. “What’d he do to torque off the local Wahhabis, give financial backing to some American porn producer?”
Church shrugged. “Here’s the kicker, Captain. It was a self-driven car, no chauffeur.”
He gave me a second to let it click. We hadn’t seen that one before — a new death delivery system. There’s an arms race that has been going on for thousands of years, from the time that man invented the first club, to spear-throwers, to… well, this. A new death delivery system. The thing is, I saw the potential instantly. Back in the Middle East, suicide bombs are popular. It makes a statement: I hate you so much, I’m willing to kill myself to be rid of you. You’ve got to be a true believer to be a suicide bomber — and an asshole. But for the past few years, a lot of these suicides have been committed by kids — twelve or thirteen. The jihadists fill the young boys with bloodlust, maybe inject them with a bit of heroin, and then aim them at an embassy or military compound. Half the kids don’t even know how to drive, so the jihadists tape their foot to the gas.
But the kids get scared, and sometimes they try to drive the wrong way, or they get shot while trying to break through a checkpoint.
Self-driven cars would allay that problem, take out the human dynamic. And a big truck could carry massive payloads.
Church said dryly, “Looks like we’ve got a terrorist who’s taken his childhood fascination with remote-controlled cars to a whole new level. I need you to shut him down.”
Now, I don’t like terrorists, but I admire them sometimes, the way you can admire a jaguar in the jungle, all full of deadly grace. I imagined my target that way.
“I’m guessing you want it done now?”
“With this kind of terrorist,” Church said, “there’s always a ticking bomb waiting to go off. We don’t know what targets might be lined up, but I want the killing spree stopped. Now would be good.” Church smiled, and I smiled in return.
This was already feeling up close and personal.
Ashley slipped me one of her come-on glances as she placed a folder, stamped with TOP SECRET and a couple of compartmented code words, on my desk. “Here’s the latest from the CIA, Joe. I included links to a handful of videos.”
Somehow, knowing that Ashley wasn’t getting her Sunday off, either, made me feel better. She didn’t appear sleep-deprived. A lot of top researchers are like that — half machine — but she was special.
She had platinum-blond hair that drifted like sunlit fog to her nicely rounded butt and swayed enticingly as she walked; sapphire eyes as deep as cenotes in the Yucatán, so wide they gave her a perpetual expression of mild surprise; and a wardrobe of blouses that fit like second skins, hugging in exactly the right places. Never mistake her for the stereotype blonde, however. Ashley is the Baltimore Field Office’s top analytical researcher, and a deadeye with any firearm you hand her. She’s outshot me on the range a couple of times, and not because I let her.
She also has a low purr of a voice that always sounds like a come-on. Something in my vitals stirred.
“Thanks, Ash.” I returned the best smile I could muster under the circumstances. Maybe when I wrap this up we can do something video-worthy ourselves, I thought.
Her pursed lips and the glance over her shoulder as she sashayed away weren’t exactly a turndown.
As usual, Ashley had been thorough. The fat folder she’d brought me contained maps; geo-coords; a page of photos with names, personal data, and high-value target ID numbers; and half a dozen black-and-white stills of a rambling, single-story building taken by Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel. Developed by LM’s Skunk Works specifically for the CIA and operated by the U.S. Air Force, the Sentinel collected much of the intel that had resulted in Osama bin Laden meeting his seventy-two virgins in May 2011.
Except this facility wasn’t in Abbottabad, Pakistan, or Kandahar, Afghanistan. This building was identified as a technological research facility on the outskirts of the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah, capital of the northern Syrian governate, or province, of the same name. The CIA had confirmed that ISIS was using the place to create car bombs.
Conclusive proof of that came with the videos Ashley had provided. Though annoyingly jerky, they followed a trio of Middle Eastern men, middle-aged by their salt-and-pepper beards, as they sauntered along the kind of assembly line one would see in a DOD explosive ordnance plant. A great deal of gesticulating punctuated their muffled discussion.
The last video included white arrow markers and a voice-over by some spook linguist who called himself Mack. Yeah, I know, really imaginative. I kept thinking Dweeb and picturing the Napoleon character from that odd little movie made in Idaho a few years back. Nothing dynamite about this guy, however.
When the flighty camera managed to zoom in on each of the terrorists’ faces for a couple seconds, Dweeb identified each man by name. None of the hot ISIS leaders one occasionally hears about in the news — when the news services actually admit that Islamist terrorism exists — but I knew who they were. I tried to adjust my monitor’s focus. Or maybe my bleary eyes just needed adjusting.
Dweeb went on to explain, in a monotone as dry as a stale biscuit, that even with these state-of-the-art upgrades to their factory, the three scientists doubted they could produce sufficient car bombs in time.
In time for what?
That made my short hairs stand at attention and not just the ones on the back of my neck.
I watched eagerly as they went into a room where they had taken a mannequin and had fitted its head and arms with various gears so that it could move in a semi-realistic way. A red butch wig completed the description.
Shit, I thought. These guys weren’t just rigging up cars to drive themselves, they were creating robot drivers so that they could fool any bystanders. All the better to get close to military checkposts.
The kicker was, the mannequin was wearing a uniform: Royal Mail. I saw the joke immediately: I’ve got a message for England.
“Pay dirt,” I told Church. “But these guys aren’t settling for one lousy prince. Sounds like they’re planning something big. Watch this.” I showed him the video.
Church arched an eyebrow. “Time to deploy the fleet.” Before I could ask what he meant by “the fleet,” he ordered, “Contact Bug.”
Jerome Taylor, known as Bug to everybody including his mother, is DMS’s resident computer supergeek. He’s also the undisputed nerd master of pop culture. That’s actually proven useful on a few occasions.
“What did he mean by ‘the fleet’?” I asked Bug via telecom a few minutes later. He’s located at our headquarters based at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
Bug grinned like a prankster about to pull off a practical joke. Obviously, he hadn’t been out partying a few hours earlier. “Fly cams,” he said.
I flashed a quizzical smile.