“She’s going to take an invisible pill, right?” Brian asked.
“That’s her mission,” Alexander elucidated.
“You going to issue us magic glasses to see through the makeup?”
“Not even if we had any—which we don’t”
“Some pal you are,” Dominic observed coldly.
BY ELEVEN that morning, it was time to scout the objective. Conveniently located just a quarter mile north on U.S. Route 29, the Charlottesville Fashion Square Mall was a medium-sized shopping mall that catered to a largely upscale clientele of local gentry and students at the nearby University of Virginia. It was anchored by a JCPenney at one end and a Sears at the other, with Belk’s men’s and women’s stores in the middle. Unexpectedly, there was no food court per se—whoever had done the reconnaissance had been sloppy. A disappointment, but not all that uncommon. The advance teams the organization employed were often mere stringers, for whom missions of this sort were something of a lark. But, Mustafa saw on going in, it would do little harm.
A central courtyard opened into all four of the mall’s main corridors. An information stand even supplied diagrams of the mall, showing store locations. Mustafa looked one over. A six-pointed Star of David leaped off the page at his eyes. A synagogue, here? Was that possible? He walked down to see, halfway hoping that it was indeed possible.
But it wasn’t. It was, rather, the mall’s security office, where sat a male employee in a uniform of light blue shirt and dark blue pants. On inspection, the man did not have a gun belt. And that was good. He did have a phone, which would undoubtedly call the local police. So, this black man would have to be the first. With that decided, Mustafa reversed directions, walked past the restrooms and the Coke machine, and turned right, away from the men’s store.
This was a fine target place, he saw. Only three main entrances; and a clear field of fire from the Central Court. The individual stores were mainly rectangular, with open access from the corridors. On the following day, at about this time, it would be even more crowded. He estimated two hundred people in his immediate sight, and though he’d hoped all the way into this city that they’d have the chance to kill perhaps a thousand, anything over two hundred would be a victory of no small dimension. There were all manner of stores here, and unlike Saudi malls, men and women shopped on the same floor. Many children, too. There were four stores listed as specialty children’s goods—and even a Disney Store! That he had not expected, and to attack one of America’s most treasured icons would be sweet indeed.
Rafi appeared at his side. “Well?”
“It could be a larger target, but the arrangement is nearly perfect for us. All on one level,” Mustafa replied quietly.
“Allah is beneficent as always, my friend,” Rafi said, unable to conceal his enthusiasm.
People circulated about. Many young women were pushing their little ones about in strollers—he saw that you could rent them from a stand just by the hair salon.
There was one purchase he had to make. He accomplished it in the Radio Shack next to a Zales Jewelers. Four portable radios and batteries, for which he paid in cash, and for which he got a brief lecture on how the radios worked.
All in all, it could have been better, in a theoretical sense, but it wasn’t supposed to be a busy city street. Besides, there would be policemen on the street with guns who would interfere with their mission. So, as always in life, you measured the bitter against the sweet, and here there was much of the sweet for all of them to taste. The four of them all got pretzels from Auntie Anne’s and headed out past the JCPenney back to their car. Formal planning would take place at their motel rooms, with more doughnuts and coffee.
JERRY ROUNDS’S official job was as head of strategic planning for The Campus’s white side. This job he performed fairly well—he might have been the very Wolf of Wall Street had he not chosen to become an Air Force intelligence officer on leaving the University of Pennsylvania. The service had even paid for his master’s degree from the Wharton School of Business before he’d made full-bull colonel. This had given him an unexpected master’s degree to hang on the wall, which also gave him a superb excuse to be in the trading business. It was even a fun diversion for the former chief USAF analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s headquarters building at Bolling AFB in Washington. But along the way he’d found that being an “unrated weenie”—he’d never worn the silver wings of a USAF aviator—didn’t compensate for being a second-class citizen in a service completely run by those who did poke holes in the sky, even if he were smarter than twenty of them in the same room. Coming to The Campus had seriously broadened his horizons in a lot of ways.
“What is it, Jerry?” Hendley asked.
“The folks at Meade and over across the river just got excited about something,” Rounds replied, handing some papers across.
The former senator read the traffic for a minute or so and handed it all back. In a moment, he knew he’d seen most of it before. “So?”
“So, this time they may be right, boss. I’ve been keeping an eye on the background stuff. The thing is, we have a combination of reduced message traffic from known players, and then this flies over the transom. I spent my life in DIA looking at coincidences. This here’s one of them.”
“Okay, what are they doing about it?”
“Airport security is going to be a little tighter starting today. The FBI is going to set people at some departure gates.”
“Nothing on TV about it?”
“Well, the boys and girls at Homeland Security may have gotten a little smarter about advertising. It’s counterproductive. You don’t catch a rat by shouting at him. You do it by showing him what he wants to see, and then breaking his goddamned neck.”
Or maybe by having a cat spring on him unexpectedly, Hendley didn’t say. But that was a harder mission.
“Any ideas for us?” he asked instead.
“Not at the moment. It’s like seeing a front move in. There may be heavy rain and hail in it, but there’s no convenient way to stop it”
“Jerry, how good is our data on the planning guys, the ones who give the orders?”
“Some of it’s pretty good. But it’s the people who convey the orders, not the ones who originate them.”
“And if they drop off the table?”
Rounds nodded immediate agreement. “Now you’re talking, boss. Then the real big shots might poke their heads up out of their holes. Especially if they don’t know that storm’s coming in.”
“For now, what’s the biggest threat?”
“The FBI is thinking car bombs, or maybe somebody with a C-4 overcoat, like in Israel. It’s possible, but from an operational point of view, I’m not so sure.” Round sat down in the offered chair. “It’s one thing to give the guy his explosives package and put him on a city bus for the ride to his objective, but, as applied to us, it’s more complicated. Bring the bomber here, get him outfitted—which means having the explosives in place, which is a further complication—then getting him familiar with the objective, then getting him there. The bomber is then expected to maintain his motivation a long way from his support network. A lot of things can go wrong, and that’s why black operations are kept as simple as possible. Why go out of your way to purchase trouble?”
“Jerry, how many hard targets do we have?” Hendley asked.
“Total? Six or so. Of those, four are real, no-shit targets.”
“Can you get me locations and profiles?”
“Any time you say.”
“Monday.” No sense thinking about it over the weekend. He had two days of riding all planned out. He was entitled to a couple of days off once in a while.
“Roger that, boss.” Rounds stood and headed out. Then he stopped at the door. “Oh, there’s a guy at Morgan and Steel, bond department. He’s a crook. He’s playing fast and very loose with some client money, about one-fifty worth.” By which he meant a hundred and fifty million dollars of other people’s money.
“Anybody on to him?”
“Nope, I ID’d this guy on my own. Met him two months ago up in New York, and he didn’t sound quite right, and so I put a watch on his personal computer. Want to see his notes?”
“Not our job, Jerry.”
“I know, I shorted our business with him to make sure he didn’t dick with our funds, but I think he knows it’s time to leave town, like maybe a trip overseas, one-way ticket. Somebody ought to have a look. Maybe Gus Werner?”