Sabotage (2 page)

Seth wondered if you could see his thoughts on the surveillance screen. He didn’t want to give anything away. He didn’t want to risk Yankee pulling back. He went back to thinking like a mule. That was what this job required. If he got paid this well, he would think like a mule, act like a mule, be a mule.

Finally, some fifteen minutes later, in came Yankee. He kissed Seth gently on the cheek as he always did. This was their only physical contact.

“Big day!” said Yankee in an overly fey manner. Seth knew he wasn’t gay. “Are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” said Seth, who had been anticipating this for weeks.

“Well, they’re in the fridge.” Yankee went and opened the refrigerator and took out a plate with three pink condoms on it. “I put some strawberry jam on them,” Yankee said. “I know that’s your fave.”

The condoms were filled with a gelatinous substance. They were the size of small bananas, but not difficult to get down. At the last visit, they practiced swallowing some condoms close to this size with a similar liquid. They timed how long it took them to come out: two and a half hours. Yankee paid him double for that session.

Yankee assured him that these were double-bagged. Seth smiled and said, “Down the hatch.” He opened up the back of his throat and swallowed the three packages easily, followed by lots of water.

“Lie down. Like last time,” Yankee said, a little hurried. “Then I’ll take you to the airport.”

Seth did. This place made him sleepy anyway. He moved to the couch, took off his shoes, and laid down. He closed his eyes and relaxed.

Yankee went to the kitchen. He opened the knife drawer and took out the H&K pistol that was hidden in the back. The silencer was already on.

Seth started to drift. Then it hit him. Why would Yankee want someone who looked like him to make this run? Why wouldn’t he want someone completely different? Why would he want connections?

Checking one more time to make sure Seth’s eyes were closed, Yankee emerged from the kitchen. He strode stiffly across the room. Yankee bent over Seth and held his breath.

Seth felt the weight on top of his chest and opened his eyes in terror. He realized what was happening. He tried to push Yankee away but couldn’t. There was no leverage. He started to yell “No,” but it was too late. Yankee put the gun up to Seth’s left eye and pulled the trigger. All that was heard was a sound no louder than a handclap. Seth slumped. Yankee started to shoot again but saw it was unnecessary. Seth, the greedy escort, was no more.

Yankee flipped his body off the couch and onto the floor, where he landed face-down, exactly as planned. Blood rolled down the leather couch where Seth’s head lay. He took the coffee table and flipped it on top of the body, enough movement to cause papers to scatter but not enough to make much of a sound. He eased it on top of the remote-operated bomb that was now Seth the Escort. Yankee looked down and saw he managed to get some blood on himself, which was not surprising. The room, normally so neat, was now oh, such a mess. Yankee laughed. He was still playing the fake fairy.

It didn’t matter. Yankee was never coming back. He took off his clothes and placed them in a black garbage bag. Just like the condoms filled with plastic explosives that now rested in Seth’s belly, he double-bagged them. He turned the thermostat all the way down; he wanted it to feel like a meat locker in the apartment. Then he went into the heat and steam of the shower and took his time. Lather, rinse, repeat. Stay calm and think. He breathed deeply and fully, slowing his heart rate as best as he could, and made sure his plan was ready. He came out of the shower, put on his delivery man getup, replete with white coveralls and a red cap, put the trash bag in one hand and a clipboard in the other, and found the service elevator. He keyed in the code and rode down, happy that no one shared the ride. He made it to the ground floor and tossed the trash bag into the back of the trash truck, which backed into the bay, nodding at a couple of workers as he headed for the parking lot. He walked to the other side, got in his ride, and was on his way.

Yankee enjoyed his last minutes of anonymity, driving a red Ford pickup into history. Soon, he was going to be the most hated man in America or, at least, the devilish new character he created would be.

N
aseem Amin knew all there was to know about Lake of the Ozarks. It was originally Lake Benton, which was about 130 feet deep. It had the most crowded docks, the most forgiving entries, and a few spots that were rather difficult to navigate. He spent the past month understanding his place in American history, just as he ran off to do whatever else his leader told him to. The lake became an obsession, and he became an expert. He didn’t need to know all this detail, but it seemed important to know about where you’re going to die. Unless he changed his mind rather quickly, Naseem Amin was there to die.

The phone vibrated and Naseem saw the message.

702-555-2312: IN PLACE?

He captained the big boat, but it seemed the boat had control of him. All of his certainty, all of the things he promised himself, all of them had become muddier than the Lake of the Ozarks water beneath him.

Naseem: IN PLACE. TEN MINUTES TOPS.

702-555-2312: PICTURES?

Naseem rolled his eyes and slowed the boat. He kept it steady with his left hand, gripped his iPhone with the other, and snapped a couple of shots of the boats in the distance. He took one of Ashlee and other lovelies on the boat, knowing that it would either offend this high man of Allah or turn him on. He was no longer sure. At this point, he barely even cared. He attached them to a new message and hit send. Was this some new form of terror porn?

Ashlee came up and put her hand on his arm. Naseem turned and looked at her and still didn’t know what to think. Here was this beauty, with sun-streaked, sandy hair, high cheekbones, and piercing gray eyes, wearing a bikini that showed off her surgical enhancements, and she had unknowingly trusted Naseem with her life. She was dumb as a telephone pole, but, despite the mounting years and miles, there was a sweetness that completely caught Naseem off-guard.

“You good, baby? We doin’ okay for you?” She kissed him sweetly on the neck, showing him a vulnerable side he had all but forgotten about in a woman.

She was wearing a red bikini with a scarf covering her shoulders. He lived eighteen years ogling this kind of titillating display and followed that with eleven years of loathing it. Now, after he thought he was totally protected from the West and its many mistresses, these past weeks had shown him he knew very little; all that was sure now seemed jumbled. Was this what God really wanted from him—to destroy people who did nothing but trust him?

“You’re great,” he said, and meant it. She tiptoed up and kissed him again, this time on the cheek, marking her territory. “Yay! I’m gonna go check on the others.”

He reminded himself that these people flaunted everything he held dear. They raped the planet and made mockeries of their bodies and their lives. They were vermin and vermin needed to be exterminated. Where had that state of mind gone? Why could he not summon it?

“Okay. We’re about ten minutes out. Get them up here.”

She turned and mock-saluted him, winked, and headed in the other direction. He was eighteen again. For a moment, he almost felt giddy, a word he hadn’t used to describe himself in years.
What an ass she had
, he thought as he watched her go. Where did all those years of training go? Was he really so weak that this girl could so easily turn his head? If one woman could so quickly undo him, what had he devoted his life to?

Naseem lived in America, just east of Hollywood in L.A., during his first eighteen years. His parents were devout Muslims but were as American as Ronald Reagan. They talked as much about the opportunities in America as they did of the Quran, and Naseem had really never considered any other life. He was an Americanized Muslim. He played video games, chased girls, and did not keep Halal. When he spoke about his experiences later, in London and other places, he knew what happened: he became one of
them
. He spat the last word like the vilest curse.

Then came 9/11, and everything crumbled. He felt the hatred and mistrust, not from his friends but from nameless people who did not know him and had no understanding of his family’s commitment to this country.

One day, two ignorant, no-necked lowlifes harassed his mother just because of her skin color and the prayers she said. They were about to defile her, in a way that Naseem’s father never could have understood, in her own home, no less, in some sort of drunken, hate-filled joke. Naseem had left for the store but turned around, praise Allah. He came back to retrieve his wallet and saw these men. He charged them with a strength he did not know he possessed, plowed straight into the one who was unzipping his pants and did so with such fury he sent the other man scrambling for the door. If they had stayed a minute longer, he surely would have killed them. He saved his mother that day, but, now looking back on it, he wasn’t so sure he hadn’t lost himself.

He felt shame, guilt, and anger—anger like no man should feel—and lost any sense of his place in this new world. He needed rules and guidance. He felt betrayed. His parents healed, dealt with “the situation,” as they called it, and, most disappointing to him, adapted. This made it worse. He helped them move to a better neighborhood. Sad and bitter, they still bought this lie. They still were a part of America. He was now its enemy.

He moved to London, the home of the most radical of radicals. It took a while to completely transform from the American way of life, even when seen through the eyes of an increasingly radicalized Muslim, to the hard and rigid existence of his new world. But he hid his transition from these men who never knew the duality as it existed in America. He forced it down. He detached. He did not return or regret. He wrote his parents benign things so they wouldn’t worry, but he was sure they knew what was happening. They wrote him of Muhammad’s promises in the Quran. He read that book so differently than they did. His instructors programmed him with hate, stripped him of the individuality that America encouraged, and sent him further east, where he learned hand weapons in Afghanistan and bombs in Iraq.

He was given no fancy nickname. He was not broadcast across TV or canonized. But he was known and admired by the right people. The network used him in a series of four increasingly difficult kidnappings of minor Israeli dignitaries in the West Bank, and each job was done with precision and without emotion or error. He obliterated his old identity so completely that when American intelligence finally started picking up on him, they believed he was a British citizen named James Malhi. Unfortunately for the original James Malhi, a studious British nurse, that was exactly what Naseem wanted when he strangled him to death in his own London flat.

Now, a decade later, Naseem came back to the States to finish what Mohammed Atta and his other heroes began on 9/11.

Problem was he hadn’t anticipated what the reintroduction into American life would be like. From the moment he landed, after more than a decade away, he noticed it all coming back. The smell of cotton candy, reminiscent of his high-fructose childhood. The sound of a video arcade. The flirtatious look of a young, pretty woman, whose face was uncovered, uplifted, and shown promise and verve. Little things he didn’t hate. Things he hated to admit he liked.

And then there were the people. In the time since he came back, he sensed things had changed. Everyone was angry, but it was not just at him. It was at their government, at the banks, at everyone and everything. He was treated differently—better, like before.

He saw his parents, who were now old. His mother doted on him and shared her experiences with her American friends, who now looked like a rainbow of different colors and backgrounds. His father, in his absence, learned to watch baseball and halfway understood the rules, something Naseem never thought he would see. He sat down with him and filled in the details of suicide squeezes and hitting and running. A suicide bomber explaining suicide squeezes—the irony was not lost on him.

He knew he shouldn’t have come. It introduced conflict. It brought nuance. And nuance is the great enemy of the ideologue.

At first, it was merely a niggling thought in the back of his head. But America was intoxicating. He took each job he was given and completed it, did it correctly and with painstaking detail. Now, it didn’t feel the same. He was stalling. He was
thinking
. And now, on the day he had based his whole existence since his teenage years, his fleeting thoughts turned into full blown doubt. He asked himself repeatedly if this was how he was to spend the final moments of his life.

He still had two hours to decide before the explosion was scheduled. If he didn’t take radical action, the beautiful Four Winds boat filled with beautiful women, on this beautiful day would be blown to the top of the sky. He moved the craft into place in Party Cove, one of the most notorious, debaucherous spots in the Midwest, one that stood for everything he hated in his previous life. All around him, under a brilliant sky, in a picture-perfect setting, he saw boats with half-naked and fully-naked women screaming, wooing, and taking shots at the behest of all the shirtless males around them. For a week now, he had brought in explosives that looked like rock concert speakers and dummy boats filled stem to stern with TNT. Once he started this, no one would be able to stop it.