Sabotage (26 page)

R
ed promised more money to the cab driver if he could make it to Harrah’s quick. She figured out her play. But first, she needed to help someone important.

Tony was the best lover she had ever had. He wasn’t a great conversationalist, wasn’t really great to even look at, but man he was well-equipped, and he could do what she needed. Red had always been horribly conflicted about sex. She used it as her stock-in-trade, but there were too many weird come-ons by a middle school teacher for her to feel completely comfortable with it. She couldn’t orgasm without deep penetration from behind, and she memorialized her sexual difficulties with a tattoo just above her vulva that read, in a beautiful and enigmatic script,
You Tried
.

If you were able to read her tattoo, you were not in position to take care of her. And, really, only Tony could do this reliably, from behind, with great effort, and intensity. Britt had no business fucking with Tony. That was her job. And by the way, Britt knew what he had in Caitlin: fucking trouble—beautiful, wild, fucking trouble. That was his fault, not Tony’s.

If Tony was trying to get away, she was going to help him. She didn’t care what Britt thought about that. She sent him a quick text:

B KNOWS. I HAVE STRONG LEAD ON C IN LAS VEGAS. AT HARRAH’S. HEADED THERE NOW. TURN AROUND AND JOIN ME.

There, it felt good to send that. Britt had enough control. She wasn’t going to see him hurt the one man who could bring her pleasure.

She grabbed her other phone and called the Harrah’s main number. She needed whoever was the head of the cleaning crew. She believed they had a little mole on their staff, if not an outright terrorist. She was sure they would want to take care of that.

W
as there a moment for sure when you know it’s over? Was that where Britt was? He sure wasn’t going to quit fighting, but he had killed many of his allies and failed to kill those he specifically set out to kill.

He could feel himself losing blood. If he did not turn this around soon, he might have a death as ignominious as Alexander the Great’s: alcohol poisoning.

The work the back-alley doctor did helped but at quite a price. He cried and thrashed as the man cleaned the wounds and then stitched his manhood up. They found a place to park out of sight enough to make it worth their while to go there, and Britt allowed himself an hour’s nap. He awoke feeling a bit better, the pain meds kicking in a little, still painful, but with the edge off.

And then Naseem called; it felt like a call from a ghost. This was another miscalculation along with too many to count. He thought he knew what was in store. He could count on Red. She had her problems under control. He needed to kill Naseem, collect his prize, kill his nemesis, and pay someone who would fly when he said so.

Yes, this could still be salvaged. He dug the phone out and saw enough time had passed since Naseem called. He didn’t want to make him think he was panicking. Even though that was a mild word for the thoughts running through his head.

He dialed the number. Naseem picked up.

“My boy. You decided to stay in the land of the living. How lucky you didn’t follow orders, or you’d be dead. What came over you?” The words were difficult to muster. He felt weaker and weaker.

“I won’t play your games, Britt. I won’t even call you what you like to be called.”

“Oh, I just did that Yankee thing for you. Seemed more properly spy if we were calling each other by stupid names.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Where do we meet?”

“So you can try to kill me? What is this?”

“It’s a challenge, Britt. A taunting. Nothing has gone right for you. Caitlin is alive. Grant Miller is alive. Because of
me
.”

“Grant Miller is alive.” He said this as if he already knew it, although it hit him like a punch in the gut.

“Your plan is an utter disaster,” Naseem said. “A failure. All the people you targeted. They’re alive. A brutal, utter disaster.”

Britt sat unmoving and silent. His ears rang, whether from the truth or the blood, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

He debated whether to speak or not. He could leave the country right now; he was sure of it. But to leave it with his enemies intact? To be half a world away and not be able to solve a single problem? Death was better than that.

Maybe he was now ready for Naseem’s silly games. “I’ll be at the Heritage Air Strip in an hour. You can meet your beloved Allah there.”

He hung up, no longer sure if he was even close to the mark.

T
he deadline hit. It was time. People stayed up just to see what happened. Live feeds showed a building in the middle of the night. Helicopters hovered in the dark, shining lights on the building to see if that was what Sabotage planned.

Britt smiled. This was his preferred outcome and definitely took his mind off all that went wrong. He made bets in every direction, but there had never been any doubt that if he could somehow get the American people to buy his worthless stock he would profit the most.

The trades were so minuscule and in so many names that it would never be possible to corral them all. In addition, much of the activity had already been captured and aggregated prior to actually getting to this moment, so everything else he raked from hard-earned money was truly just a bonus. What happened next was the real fun for him.

The website was off the charts. The hashtag #sabotage was trending number one. He liked this. Britt uploaded the next sequence of code—so simple, so much doom.

Sabotage, the Clown, ambled back to the middle of the screen. He looked up and made a carnival gesture. A YouTube video appeared right above him. Sabotage appeared in the video, too. He looked left and right before unfurling his banner. It read:

HAVEN’T YOU HEARD OF SHORTING A STOCK?????

The video cut away. The Sabotage site stole one of the live feeds from a cable network. It showed the explosions on the roof of the building. Even if they found some of them, he knew there would be no way to find them all. It looked to him like they looked minimally. The explosions danced on the roof. They went off in random order, yet somehow looked choreographed. He loved it.

The anchors for the various networks started their hand-wringing. “Who was behind this?” they asked the audience. “Why would they want to cause such disruption?” They had nothing but questions to fill their broadcasts. Questions and speculations. They filled the airwaves with them.

Britt kept the Las Vegas police scanner on just to monitor the police’s progress. He heard them call in the tip on Trump Towers. They would meet Britt Vasher pretty soon. They would have to work a little bit to get from there to who he really was.

But then he was wide-eyed. Was that what they said? He was sure he had heard it. They called him Britt Vance, not Britt Vasher. It wasn’t rocket science putting these two things together, but it was still much quicker than he expected.

He set up Seth as the decoy to make them believe there was someone above him, and he was dead. It probably wouldn’t last forever, he knew, but it would give him a head start.

How did they know his name?

He was afraid he knew.

P
resident Morgan, with his stellar approval ratings and his eye trained on history, nearly retched after the latest attacks. They were outrageous and wrong, but he realized there weren’t really words strong enough for them.

For the first time in his nearly seven years in office, the president could honestly say he had no idea what to do—that terrified him. He knew he needed to speak to the people. He knew they were waiting on him. And now, when he was needed the most, he had the least to say. He asked Vanessa to set it up and said nothing else to her. He climbed back to the podium, looked into the cameras, and started to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen, citizens in the United States of America, I’m coming to you tonight. It is different from any other moment that I’ve had with you. For a couple of reasons.”

He looked out at the press corps and noticed just how different the mood was. These men and women were normally jaded, bored, barely following along. Now they were riveted.

“As you know, I generally have a large hand in writing my own speeches. That is important to me. But I still get some help, and I still use a teleprompter. I don’t think that’s any surprise, but it’s true.”

Even crusty old Marnie Teeter, always a critic, looked at him like he imagined the press had looked at Kennedy.

“But tonight, I’m not speaking with either a prepared speech or a teleprompter. I did the same thing this morning. Want to know why? Because I have no idea what to say. None.”

He paused for emphasis.

“To anyone affected by today’s attacks, nothing I can say will make it better. I love you, I feel for you, I want to help, but that’s all meaningless to you right now. I know it.”

Gazing straight into the camera, he spoke to the viewers.

“To those of you who sit in your homes now not knowing whether it’s safe to come out, I understand that. And I don’t know what to say to you. But I know this: we have to go on. We will go on. John Wayne said that courage was being scared to death but saddling up anyway. That’s where we are. This is scary. But we ride, because that’s who we are.”

He sensed he was hitting the right notes. So he carried on.

“And for those who are responsible for this, whether it is one or one million, let me tell you: we will come at you with our best people—from Alabama to Boston and South Central, LA. You will see us coming. You will look us in the eye. You will pay for what you have done. We outnumber you. We will outsmart you. We will defeat you.”

He hoped he believed these words. He thought he did. Then he caught himself. He still believed in America. He nodded and finished it up:

“We have grown used to prosperity and peace in this land. For most of our times, we were in a war as often as we were out of one. But now, we have come to expect peace. Expect freedom. This may make for some trying days ahead, but that’s when we’ve always banded together and made our greatest strides. This will not defeat us. That is the one thing I can tell you tonight. This will not defeat us.”

He released the podium and gave a nod. “Thank you.”

The small audience stood and applauded. He did the impossible: after this awful day, he made people believe, which was almost more than he could say about himself.