Hidden Threat (54 page)

Her mother stared at her with a palpable hate. Amanda could sense the poison filling the venom sacs.

“
How could you do this to me?” Melanie ran past her and the man holding a pistol to her head. Amanda watched her leap down the steps and race toward the back of the house, only to have the fire, which had already begun licking at the freshly lacquered hardwood floors, push her back toward the front door. “Call the fire department!”

“
How could you do the last seventeen years of my life to me, and to my dad?” she called over the banister. “It’s your turn.”

Then Amanda turned to Dagus, still holding her, but seemingly overwhelmed by the turn of events—perhaps in awe of her manipulation; she didn’t know.

“
Looks like we’re screwed, Lenard. No way out of this now, you know. Don’t worry, there’s a copy of the video at the
The Observer
, too.” His arm was pressed tight against her throat, causing her to thrust her words past her larynx and then gulp in air. “And Mama’s going to lose about a million bucks. What a shame. Fire department comes, the cops come, and so on. They’ll all be here, wild man.”

She was surprised as it happened. So rarely in life does anything play out almost exactly as one envisions it. Blaming Dagus for the article defaming her father, for violating her best friend, and for all of the other horrible things she had seen on his computer, Amanda felt vindicated. Payback’s a bitch.

And as far as her mother was concerned, Amanda felt little satisfaction, yet had accomplished her goal of finding out what she loved more: her or her possessions. Her mother did not love her. It was that simple. Painful, but she had needed to be sure.

“
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come . . .” Dagus began. He gently released her and then swiftly moved the pistol under his chin. The bullet kicked his head back with such force that his tall frame flipped against the railing and slid along the handrail until his momentum carried him over the banister and into the flame.

She stood on the balcony watching the fire lick at the steps. From this point on, everything would be hard, but also easy. Cutting against the grain of her upbringing would be hard, but her motivation would be pure. There would be no conflict. Up until now, she had been unsure, didn’t know whom she could trust.

Amanda fled into the master bedroom and raced down its deck steps into the backyard. The moon had moved overhead and cast enough light to give her some depth perception.

As she rounded the side of the house, she saw her mother running back toward the front door. Flames were now visible through the windows of the rooms adjacent to the entrance. The fire was spreading and would consume the house, she thought.

As she approached her car, she stopped and turned to see her mother reaching for the brass-handled front doorknob.
Not a good idea, Mom
, she wanted to say as she slid into her driver’s seat. She thought she heard the anguished wail of a damned soul above the din of her engine and the crunch of her tires as she rolled away.

Immediately she grabbed the cell phone and saw that it was off, as she had left it. The plan would not allow her to call for about thirty minutes, so she drove in silence, no iPod or radio, until she reached I-85.

She could feel it coming together. She had envisioned the plan and executed it. Worry continued to bite at her, preventing her from becoming too excited about the recent accomplishments. She had to hand it to Dagus, he had remained consistent in his denial.

“
Out of the jaws of death,” she whispered to herself. She looked at her hands upon the steering wheel. They were shaking terribly as she noticed her speed approach ninety miles an hour.
Slow down
, she told herself.

There was still much to do.

Once she was at the predetermined distance away from the mansion, she picked up the cell phone. She played around with it for a moment, learning the buttons, and called the number.

“
It’s done. Go ahead with it.”

CHAPTER 75

Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan

Monday Morning

The Database is Always There
, Matt thought.

Huddled with Hobart and Van Dreeves in the room where Mansur was shackled to the wall, Matt calculated that someone had manned the DSHK machinegun and was pummeling the house in an attempt to ignite the IED. From a certain point of view, he considered this to be good news. It suggested, in simple terms, that the IED most likely had no remote detonation capability, which would buy them some time unless the .50-caliber rounds punched through the right spot and caught the cooking pot full of explosives.

“
Hobart, can you get a shot on this dick?” Matt asked.

“
Not sure what’s on the other side waiting for us to come out, but I can try,” Hobart said.

“
Wait,” Mansur coughed. “Tunnel.”

The three Americans stared at the Pakistani and were immediately suspicious.

“
Tunnel?”

The house suddenly shook from an explosion that rocked the foundation, caving in the southeast portion of the building, which would give the DSHK gunner a semi-clean shot at the IED. He wasted no time in gunning for it, and heavy lead began ricocheting all around the house in the vicinity of the pressure cooker.

“
Where’s the tunnel?” Matt asked Mansur.

“
Unchain me, then I tell you.”

Van Dreeves removed a set of small bolt cutters from his rucksack and snapped the chains around his wrists and ankles.

“
This way,” Mansur said, then stopped, falling backward. His head had exploded from a .50-caliber round that shrieked through the open window.

“
Damnit!”

“
He was going this way,” Matt said. “Let’s see what we can find. Pound on the floor. I give it another minute before this place explodes.”

The cacophony of machinegun fire intensified as if to emphasize his point.

After about two minutes, Hobart called out, “Over here. Trap door beneath the sleep roll.”

He had the sheet of dusty plywood off the spider hole and shone a flashlight into the darkness.

“
Has to be it,” he said.

“
Let’s go,” Matt said, pulling his Glock as he snapped his Sig Sauer onto his outer tactical vest.

He shone the light through into the tunnel and saw darkness start where the light ended. Van Dreeves was in and as Hobart was coming over the edge, the DSHK gunner hit his mark with the entire house exploding into a giant fireball of debris, dust and flames. Hobart fell to the bottom of the six foot drop, immediately covered by falling debris. Matt and Van Dreeves dragged him into the tunnel as the entry hole continued to fill with falling detritus.

Matt surmised that there would be no going back out in that direction.

“
Let’s move. They’ll inspect the house soon and when they just find Mansur they’ll know we got in the tunnel.”

They scampered along the surprisingly well constructed path. Every ten meters or so thick 4 x 4 logs supported the sides and the ceiling. After ten minutes of hunched walking-running in flash lighted darkness, they came to a fork.

“
Go left,” Van Dreeves said.

“
That’s it I think, gotta be to house number three,” Matt said.

Matt continued to lead and found a small ladder another fifty meters in. He turned to Van Dreeves and Hobart and said, “I’ll go up first and go straight. VD you’re second and to my left. Hobart, you’re third and to the right. Both of you need to check the rear also. If this is house number three, we grab the computer hard drive and go.”

“
Uh, Matt,” Van Dreeves said.

“
What?”

“
I’ve got two computers right here. Laptops. Looking good. Maybe a year old, no more.”

“
You’re shitting me.”

“
I shit you not. And a flash drive.”

“
Bull’s-eye. Can you slide them in your ruck?”

“
Wait a minute. These puppies are rigged with explosives. Looks like C4,” Van Dreeves said.

“
Dismantle it. If this is Rahman’s house, the entire database may be in there.”

The three warriors stared at each other, briefly contemplating the significance of finding The Base. Al Qaeda was Arabic for The Base and was simply the name of all Al Qaeda members, meticulously kept first in Jeddah as an anonymous database of Islamic Conference attendees. Over time, bin Laden hijacked the system as a way to keep a list of all supporters and fighters. This was what Matt had come for, the hard drive that kept the database of enemy fighters so they could systemically locate and kill this amorphous enemy.

“
Okay same plan then, but we make a quicker sweep through the house and then move to checkpoint seven on the western ridge to link up with the 101
^st
guys.”

As Van Dreeves knelt to begin dissecting the bomb so he could load the two thin Dell Laptops into his rucksack, they heard a noise directly above them.

And then the trap door opened.

CHAPTER 76

Spartanburg, South Carolina

Late Sunday Evening (Eastern Time)

Amanda pulled to a stop in front of Brianna Simpson’s home in one of the lower-income areas just inside Greenville, near Spartanburg. Low income was relative, with house prices soaring into the upper six figures, yet Brianna’s mother had struggled to keep pace with the costs of raising a child as a single mother without support from Brianna’s father.

The home was a modest brick and siding rambler. Without the address, someone who didn’t know the area would struggle to find the house, because all of the homes were similar in appearance. Red brick and white siding on the frame of the house with moderately sloping roofs appeared on every home on the street in some variety. Some homes had chain-link fences in the backyard. She could still see where some of the fences had only recently been removed from the front yards in accordance with the new community standards.

Amanda pulled into the driveway and nosed the car all the way beneath the carport. Brianna’s mother, Charlotte, had left her VW Bug on the street so that Amanda could quickly park.

The screen door made a metallic rattling sound as she knocked on the side door that led from the carport.

“
Come on in, Amanda,” Charlotte Simpson called from the kitchen. “Hurry.”

Amanda opened the door while Charlotte walked briskly past her, holding her car keys in her hand. She was wearing a worn Adidas light blue workout suit atop a white T-shirt and had yanked her bleached hair back into a ponytail.

“
Better watch the television, hon. Brianna’s in the back. She’s still a little shook up from everything Jake told her. He called as soon as he heard them talking on your computer.”

Amanda walked through a small laundry room and into the kitchen, which was not much larger. On the small television stuffed onto the counter next to the microwave there was an image of a house in flames, with fire trucks spewing streams of water into it. The video was obviously being shot from a helicopter flying over the mansion. There were several cars stacked up along the long driveway, many with flashing blue and red lights. She squinted and could barely make out her mother’s Mercedes, but it was still there.

The crawl at the bottom of the news feed began to spit out small factoids as they were being reported, no doubt by crack journalists on the scene.

. . . historic mansion destroyed by fire . . . flame believed to have been started by burglar . . . weapon and dead body found . . . deceased is male suspect . . . home recently purchased by Melanie Garrett of Spartanburg . . . ex-wife of Colonel Zachary Garrett, recently killed in Afghanistan . . .

The picture cut to a feed from a ground crew who apparently had recently arrived at the scene. On the screen was a plain-looking woman reporter who had obviously gotten the assignment because she lived nearby and could change out of her pajamas quickly. She wore a windbreaker over blue jeans and spoke rapidly as she held the microphone to her mouth. Behind her the flames in one part of the house were still roaring and appeared much larger from this vantage.

Oddly, Amanda was reminded of when her father had taken her to watch the reenactment of the burning of the Heidelberg Castle in Germany. Flames were licking from the windows like tortured demons wishing to escape hell.

“
Bill, what we have here is a huge fire in a house that was sold only a couple of days ago,”
she said against the jet engine roar of the fire behind her.
“Police are on the scene, and firefighters have subdued the flames at the entrance to the home, where they believe the fire began. These are only initial reports, but there is confirmation of one deceased male in the home, and authorities are telling me that they have found a small pistol on the scene. What that means they are unwilling to speculate, but the owner of the house, Mrs. Melanie Garrett of Spartanburg, is hysterical. She has been running up and down the front of the house yelling at the firemen, telling them to pour more water on the flames and to do it faster. From what I can see, Bill, these men are doing a fantastic job of just trying to save some part of this home. Let’s see if we can’t get a shot of the owner.”