Custos: Enemies Domestic Page 7

  The hacky sacking abruptly stopped. The van driver had their attention. He and the four boys talked a few minutes. The boys nodded their heads to what he said. He then handed each a $50 bill and a small tube. “… and that’s what you’ll do. I’ll meet you back here when you complete this good joke on my friends. You must do exactly what I said. I’ll have another $50 for each of you when you pull this off. Can you do it?”

  The van driver fist-bumped each boy as one after another pre-teen answered affirmatively. The man and the four boys looked pleased. Then the man turned and left to get back into his package delivery van. The four pre-teens huddled, planned, and broke like an offensive football team. They quickly revived their kicking game moving down the street. Then they turned the corner heading toward Congresswoman Paige’s home.

  More was afoot than two hacky sacks.

  Chapter 14

  October 6

  Arlington, VA

  Two FBI agents were parked 50 feet down the road from Congresswoman Lynn Paige’s rambler home, in a gray Ford sedan, going through the motions of guarding her. They stretched and fidgeted to stay awake. By now, not even they really took the three-week-old Washington Log threat seriously, but duty was duty.

  As one agent’s yawn became contagious, the driver-seat agent made it official. “This is boring. I left a prestigious law firm to do this… because I was bored,” Aaron Jackson laughed. “Law was long hours of tedium punctuated by boredom. And yet here I sit for hours, bored out of my mind… Why did you become an agent, Greg?”

  “I was a CPA at one of the Big Four,” he chuckled ironically. “I was bored silly.” Shared laughter beat yawning. Just then, Aaron noted movement in the driver’s rearview mirror of the Ford Taurus.

  The group of four boys slowly approached. A pair went to each side of the sedan. Each pair of pre-teens was kicking a hacky sack. The pairs stopped abeam the agents. Both agents simultaneously lowered their windows, allowing informal chats with the boys to deflect from the official semi-covert protection role. Football was always a winning topic with pre-teens, Aaron thought. Each agent kept an occasional eye on the Congresswoman’s house.

  One needed to multitask to be a good operative, Greg consoled himself. No worries for the elite protectors.

  At different times on each side of the car, one of the boys dropped his hacky sack, slowly kneeled, and equally slowly retrieved it. The retrieving pre-teen was free to run a concealed tube along a door seam, then window, as he got back up. The dropping, slow kneeling, and slow rising with unperceived hand swipes, repeated several times on each side of the car — staggered in time. The dropper’s movements on each side of the car went unnoticed by the agents as his standing partner distracted by becoming more animated and measurably louder. All that time, the chatter about football continued. The agents welcomed the break. After a few more minutes, the four boys moved on.

  “Good kids,” Aaron said approvingly.

  “Yeah, the next generation is never as bad as the news would have it,” Greg piled on. “You were pretty cool not revealing what we’re doing.”

  “Right back at you, Greg. Football, good choice of topics. Everyone can relate. We didn’t even have to make something up about what we’re doing.”

  Shortly thereafter, a Navistar package delivery truck approached from the rear of the sedan and abruptly pulled into the Congresswoman’s driveway. The van driver jumped out and jogged to the door with his recording pad in one hand and large envelope in the other. Nothing unusual, but intervention was wise. “Check it out, Greg!” commanded the agent in the left seat. Greg tried to exit the car, but the door would not budge.

  From the driver’s side, Aaron tried his door. It, too, would not open. Then the agents lost time as they bumped shoulders trying to climb to the backseat at the same time to try an alternate exit. “Okay, Greg, you go to the backseat to get out. I’ll follow.” Aaron covered his anger about feeling like a Keystone Cop, one of the fictional incompetent policemen of silent films.

  Greg found the right rear door stuck. Likewise, the left door. Aaron directed Greg, “Try the windows!”

  While the agents scrambled to exit the car, Abdul in his package delivery uniform was at Lynn Paige’s front door. Mental rehearsal did not prevent the surge in his adrenaline level. Abdul’s heart seemed to pound out of his chest. While he rang the door bell, he reviewed his alternate strategy if the housekeeper answered: Plow through her, saying you are sick and must immediately use the toilet. By then, the targeted Congresswoman would have appeared to see what the ruckus was, and he could execute his mission. But, that was not going to be necessary. Lynn told the housekeeper to keep cleaning the master bathroom; she would get the doorbell.

  Lynn opened the door. She instinctively put on her political game face for the delivery man. “Good morning, how is your day going?”

  Abdul responded, “Superb, infidel! Allahu Akbar!” Allah is greater. Abdul punched a key on his recording pad. The explosion was deafening. Neither the agents nor Congresswoman Paige had noticed that the delivery man’s recording pad was larger than normal. In fact, it contained C-4 explosive, a detonator, ball bearings, and jacks. The jacks were the metal kind used in the children’s game. The jihadist planners wanted to experiment with a ratio of 1 jack to 2 ball bearings to increase media hype. The planners had already field tested the effectiveness of the jacks in Somalia.

  The blast ended Lynn Paige’s congressional ambitions, as well as Abdul’s earthly mission. Ball bearings and jacks projected as far as the sedan, where the agents ducked on the floor. The overpressure from the explosion partially imploded the Taurus’s safety glass windshield. Ball bearings took out the light covers on the vehicle and peppered most of the exterior. Jacks impaled the sedan’s front and sides around the numerous ball bearing craters. Fragments of body parts also sporadically dotted the agent’s vehicle — tiny shards of bone, teeth, nails, and soft tissue that had been Lynn and Abdul.

  As the initial shock wore off, the agents in the Taurus began uncurling from the duck-and-cover position they had instinctively assumed. Fortunately, having one agent in the front and one in the back had obviated a repetition of the Keystone Cops’ bumping-bodies routine. Greg could not get the rear windows to lower. He tried again. Semi-shell-shocked, he kept trying without success.

  “Wait, Greg, let me try to open the windows up front. We know the front windows work — or did before the explosion.” Aaron recognized the right front window’s broken glass made it a poor prospect for exit. Aaron lowered the intact left front window and exited the car. He wiggled out head first, turned 180 degrees, put his forearms on the debris-covered roof, and pulled his legs out onto the asphalt. Greg climbed to the front seat and followed suit through the same window.

  While they failed at situational awareness once, it would not happen again. The agents’ training took over. Like clockwork, the agents drew their pistols and divided duties between requesting assistance and securing the perimeter. To view the attack as over was to look for “horses,” but Quantico had taught them to be alert for “zebras” — get ready for another event, unlikely though it seemed. Ears still ringing from the explosion, Aaron was yelling into the cell phone and unable to hear the replies that came.

  Greg tried to help by screaming, “AARON, YOUR PHONE IS PROBABLY WORKING, I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING EITHER. KEEP TALKING TO THE OUTSIDE ANYWAY.”

  Aaron’s brain again saw Greg and himself as the Keystone Cops. He felt ridiculous talking with minuscule feedback. He looked quizzically at Greg’s lip’s moving and hearing no words himself.

  As the smoke from the bomb cleared, Greg found very little left of the Congresswoman and the van driver. Busyness kept him from upchucking at their scattered remains. There was too much to do. He ran into what was left of the house to look for casualties. He found the dazed housekeeper alive but unconscious in the bathtub of the master bathroom. With no fire in proximity, Greg left her in her prone position. Greg was relieved when he impr
obably noticed the dulled doppler shift of converging siren sounds from four points of the compass, marking this location as the epicenter of a nation-shaking disaster.

  Greg ran out to direct EMTs to the master bath area, “TAKE A STRETCHER. I DIDN’T WANT TO MESS UP HER BACK IF IT’S BROKEN.” Aaron had been watching the road and controlling the gathering neighbors. Regrouping moments later, Greg found stripes of hardened superglue running down the seams of the sedan’s doors. Also there were almost invisible beads of the glue at the base corners of the rear windows at the center posts. Greg spoke for both agents, “WE’VE BEEN HAD! BASTARDS!”

  “I THINK I’LL BE GOING BACK TO MY BIG FOUR CPA FIRM,” Greg yelled disparagingly as he pondered his bleak future prospects with the FBI.

  “I THINK I’LL BE ON THE SHORT LIST FOR GLASGOW, MONTANA,” Aaron screamed empathetically.

  Each hoped for more improvement in hearing. The ringing was unbearable. Aaron quipped at triple volume, “I WISH THEY WOULD PUT SILENCERS ON THOSE SUICIDE BOMBS.” They would read later that an Israeli study showed that in two months most victims of explosions would have only about 65% of their hearing back. As a visit to any Veteran’s Administration hospital will show: The human body is not as infinitely pliable as Hollywood would make you think.

  _______________

  The schemer heard the news of the explosion on a local TV channel. He knew FBI protocol well enough not to be seen around the detonation site. He turned up the volume with his remote control and slowly sat to watch his 32-inch flat screen. The anchorwoman had pulled her crew up to the yellow-ribboned police tape on the perimeter of the blast scene. The camera panned the blown-out home structure and debris under the explosion’s dissipating smoke plume. Officials on scene were too busy to talk to the press, so the press winged it. The anchorwoman worked without a script:

  “We’re standing here at the perimeter drawn around Congresswoman Lynn Paige’s Arlington home. It is not known whether the Congresswoman was at home at the time of the incident. Devastation is everywhere. We expect a report any minute from authorities on whether there were any fatalities. We do know from witnesses that one victim was rushed away by ambulance to a local hospital. Firemen and police are on the scene as you can see.

  “At first, it was thought this might have been a gas explosion. We now have a reassessment based on the presence of a number of ball bearings and metal jacks — like kids play with. Here, I’ll have the cameraman zoom in on them in my hand. These missiles, the ball bearings and metal jacks, are virtually all over the place. Besides the damage to the house, a mangled, overturned package delivery truck blocks the middle of the road. There is also a damaged black sedan parked near the house that may or may not have been partially shielded from the direct blast by the truck… Was this another terrorist attack on US soil?… Is any American citizen truly safe after 9/11?

  “Stay with us for ongoing coverage of this savage attack.”

  The schemer did a mental fist pump. His operation was a success. Outward manifestations of emotion were for those whom he protected, not him. Emotional displays belonged to those who had taken a different path in life. He never would have survived this long if he had routinely shown his “cards.” With practice he had learned to suppress natural cultural displays unless his role required it. Practice made habit. Habit became a way of life. In a sense, he had become a constant actor, a consummate chameleon. He only displayed what he wanted seen.

  In spite of his practiced stoicism, the schemer later felt a twinge when he learned it was the maid who was injured. He would not let his mind wander there. He would not consciously allow his emotions to go there. Such guilt feelings were for the weak, the non-professionals, the self-indulgent. His subconscious, however, now could not be suppressed. Perhaps his system had reached critical mass, a tipping point where things that would bother others finally started to emerge in his subconscious life. His dreams would be haunted by the injustice of her pain and suffering until he did something to atone. For the time being, there would be no atonement. He was on a path. For him, there would be results — and recurring nightmares.

  Then the schemer’s mind focused outside himself. Drip, drip, drip — he thought. It was a sad commentary that the peaceful environment of mainstream America he had known as a child had morphed to acceptance of sporadic terrorist attacks. One gets used to anything; hence the wisdom of Mayor Guiliani’s intolerance of even one broken window pane. As a child, he had seen pictures of bombings in Ireland and France. He never dreamed that could happen in his United States, but here it was. His involvement was capitalizing on the pitiful trend. Maybe the United States’ moral fiber had not been tested before. Perhaps American exceptionalism was a myth. Could it be that the United States was sinking to the low standards of the rest of the world?

  Chapter 15

  October 6

  District of Columbia

  After working at the New York Times, Sharon Eielson earned her Master of Arts from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As far back as 1982, 85 percent of students there self-identified as liberal; 11 percent as conservative. Doubtless the conservative number would be even smaller today. Sharon considered herself one of the 4 percent neither liberal nor conservative. She felt self-congratulatory about being open-minded, maybe proud. Sharon did like to go where the action was, so following graduate studies she went to work at the Washington Diogenes.

  In the afternoon a text message arrived on Sharon’s Android at the Diogenes:

  SOTSUC—EGIAP NIOJ LLIW SLLIB DEDNUFNU FO SEILIMAF, SROSNOPS GNIDNEPS GIB EROM ON ETANES,SSERGNOC DNIMER

  Sharon was puzzled by the text. She thought it looked like spam; nevertheless, she kept trying to decipher it. After all, she did work with words all day long. While she considered analyzing nuances one of her strengths, she surrendered to any prospect of beginning to solve a cryptogram… But wait, of course, she saw the answer. It was a backward display of:

  REMIND CONGRESS, SENATE NO MORE BIG SPENDING SPONSORS, FAMILIES OF UNFUNDED BILLS WILL JOIN PAIGE—CUSTOS

  Her editor called his fellow Rotarian and local chief of police, who in turn notified the FBI. Predictably, Sharon withheld the source and her cell phone from officials. This could be a career builder, she thought. Or, it could have been if that dumb bastard Betzold over at the Log had not lucked into the first message. Betzold was from “Hicksville” and didn’t even have a graduate degree. He wasn’t even Ivy League. Anyway, this was still an opportunity. The terrorist angle had enormous possibilities. She couldn’t figure a clever way to compare the source with Betzold without losing her scoop.

  The Diogenes staff scrambled to get more pictures of Congresswoman Paige’s bombed-out home, as well as stories from neighbors. The Diogenes would monopolize the Paige tragedy with their lead headline: “Assassin Kills Again!” The FBI had instructed the paper not to reveal the source to the public under any circumstances. The brutal assassination of a key government official was a real attention-grabber, and the terrorist element made the front page that much more compelling. The old saw, “If it bleeds, it leads,” was as true today as it had been for decades. The op-ed page would be completely filled with fervent views and speculation on what had happened in Arlington. Who knows, maybe people will start reading newspapers again, speculated the Diogenes editor.

  Chapter 16

  October 6

  District of Columbia

  After looking over preliminary reports, Zach and Barb headed to the Diogenes newspaper to question Sharon Eielson. Following introductions, Zach started, “Ms Eielson, you received the message from Sa’d. What did it say?” Zach hoped to get the source from Sharon straightaway, by offering a trial source for her to deny — asserting the real one.

  “Do you mean Sa’d, the commander who conquered Persia in the 7th century AD? Nice try, buddy,” Sharon screeched. “You feds are unbelievable! You aren’t about to get my source. You come marching in here in your jack-booted thug style. America is abou
t “up to here” with your Gestapo tactics,” the spring-loaded anti-authoritarian snarled and gestured with her level hands pushing on her uplifted chin. “If you don’t have a warrant, we’re through here. NOW GET OUT!”

  Zach had trained for such hostility. He calmly answered in an authoritative, but non-aggressiveness tone, “Ma’am, we’re here to investigate a crime, and we’d…”

  Barb cut him off. “Zach, I’ve got this!” Barb took two steps forward, leaned in to whisper into Sharon’s left ear. Zach could hear only the faint hissing of Barb’s voice devoid of intelligible words. Sharon stood speechless. Her face reddened. Barb held her position as Sharon remained motionless. Barb finished her lengthy monologue and stepped back abeam Zach. She finished matter-of-factly, “Are we clear, Sharon?”

  A red-faced Sharon nodded agreement, exhaled, cleared her throat, and lowered her tone, “As you know, I can neither confirm nor deny the source of the threat. The message my editor passed on to law enforcement yesterday came in text on my Android. I’ll write out the words if you didn’t get a copy. I cannot give you my phone — too much on it. I am cooperating. I have no desire to hinder an investigation.” Sharon’s composure returned piecemeal.

  “Sharon, why were you chosen for the message? Any idea?” Barb asked authoritatively. There was no hint that she had just put Sharon in her place. It was clear that Barb could shift her demeanor instantly if necessary.

  “Well, I did a series of articles on powerful women in Congress. Lynn Paige was very accommodating, so I wrote the first piece on her. I got very good access. I spent a whole day with her. Her death is a great loss to women’s progress against the paternalistic power structure…” Zach decided to interrupt the pending rant. He had no time for ideological posturing. He got back in the game, “Sharon, you obviously got to know the Congresswoman well. Did you pick up on anything she was doing that might open her up for such a violent attack? Did she make offensive cultural remarks around you? Any anti-Islam stance?”