Knights and magic volume.., p.22
People of the Book Part Two: Armor of God, page 22
Dropping the pistol back into his pocket, he stepped into the room. “Where’s the guard?” he asked.
“Guard?” Preston said.
“There’s supposed to be a police guard out in the hall. No one’s there.”
“Father Flannery went to the morgue to see Ann’s body, and the guard went with him,” Sarah explained.
“He shouldn’t have done that. He’s not from my precinct, but I can submit a delinquency report.”
“No, please,” Sarah said. “I told him to go.”
“You told him to go?” Santini asked, his voice betraying his irritation. “You’ve no authority to give orders to a New York police officer.”
“Sorry—poor choice of words. What I meant to say was I asked if he’d go with Father Flannery, who’s in as much danger as David. I showed him my Interpol credentials and told him I’d cover while he was gone.”
“You may have been right to ask, but he shouldn’t have agreed. He should’ve stayed here and called for backup to accompany the priest. But don’t worry, I won’t come down on him.” He turned to David. “How bad are you hurt?”
“He’s in a lot of pain,” Preston said, approaching the bed.
“I’m fine,” David insisted. “The doctor says it isn’t serious.” His eyes welled with moisture. “Maybe not for me, but…but for Ann—” He choked back his tears.
“Ann Coopersmith—she was a freelance reporter, right?” Santini asked, and David nodded. “How well did you know her?”
“She was my fr—” The words caught in David’s throat as tears streamed down his face. For a long moment he couldn’t speak, and then at last he managed to say proudly, “She was my girlfriend.” As he wiped away the tears with his good hand, he noticed that Michael Flannery had just returned to the room. “You saw her, Father?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You prayed for her?”
Flannery nodded.
“Good. I’m not Christian, but she was. I know it would’ve meant a lot to her.”
“Mr. Meyers, did you see who shot you and Miss Coopersmith?”
“Not exactly. It was dark, and he was in the cab.”
“A cab?”
David described how the cabbie stopped to offer them a ride, then opened fire when they approached.
“That makes no sense,” Santini said. “Why would a cabbie start shooting? Unless he wasn’t a cabbie.”
“Didn’t you hear?” Sarah asked.
The lieutenant looked at her questioningly.
“He wasn’t a cabbie. A detective came by about a half hour ago and said they found the taxi dumped in Central Park with the real driver in the back seat, shot dead.”
Santini shook his head in frustration. “I was on the phone with Midtown North not ten minutes ago. They should’ve briefed me on that.” He took out his pad and jotted a few notes. “Hopefully the taxi will yield some forensics. All we have to do next is figure out who stole the cab and shot Miss Coopersmith and you.”
“David has a theory,” Preston put in. He gestured to David. “Go on, tell him.”
“Just before it…it happened, we confronted Mehdi Jahmshidi, the head of the Islamist terror group Arkaan.”
“Jahmshidi? Are you certain?” Santini said as he scribbled furiously on his pad. “Where is he?”
“At the Dunn Hotel, though I’ll bet he’s long gone by now. He’s using the name Hassan al-Halid, and he’s the one who reported a bellman had gone missing at the hotel. It was in today’s paper.”
“Yes, I know of that case.” Santini looked up from the notepad. “Are you saying Jahmshidi is the killer?”
“He probably killed the bellman, but he wasn’t driving the cab.”
“It had to be one of his men,” Sarah interjected. “The driver was Middle Eastern; David gave the detective a full description.”
“I’ll bet his friends were also involved,” Preston offered.
“What friends?”
“Benjamin Bishara and Antonio Sangremano.”
“Father Antonio Sangremano of the Vatican?” Santini asked, looking more than a bit surprised.
“Formerly of the Vatican,” Flannery corrected. “I’m impressed. You know your church hierarchy.”
“I’m a good Catholic, Father.”
“Yes, that very Sangremano,” Preston continued. “He’s with a fringe group called Via Dei, and Bishara heads the militant Jewish group Migdal Tzedek.”
“First, I find it hard to believe that a high Vatican official would let himself get caught up in this mess.”
“He’s not with the Vatican any longer,” Flannery reminded the lieutenant. He didn’t want to say more, since Sangremano had gone into hiding following the shooting in the catacombs, and Israeli authorities were keeping the incident under wraps while trying to take him into custody.
“Once in the Vatican, always in the Vatican,” Santini replied. “And what would he have in common with those Muslim and Jewish terrorists?”
“All we know is that there have been communications between the three,” Preston said, “and they share a mutual hatred for everything the People of the Book movement
stands for.”
“And they’re here,” Sarah added. “All three have come to New York during the symposium, which can hardly be a coincidence.”
“I’ll look into all this,” Santini promised, closing the notepad and tucking it back into his jacket pocket. “Really, I will. But they may have their own agendas in coming to New York, and right now I’d say Mehdi Jahmshidi and his lot are the most likely candidates for employing violence.” He turned to David. “Do you know how long they’ll keep you here?”
“The doc thinks I can go home tomorrow, as soon as they’re sure there’s no infection.”
“Good. If I have any more questions, where can I reach you?”
“I’ll be at my apartment until after Ann’s funeral.”
“That’s probably not a good idea.”
“The lieutenant’s right,” Sarah agreed. “If they realize you aren’t dead, they may try again, and your address would be pretty easy to find.”
“He can stay with us,” Flannery offered.
“Perfect.” Santini said. “The safe house is the best place until we track down and arrest this Jahmshidi fellow.” He started toward the door, then looked back at David. “Oh, and one other thing. When they schedule the funeral, let me know and I’ll arrange for a Uni—a uniformed officer—to take you, just to be on the safe side. Maybe I’ll take you myself.”
Santini gave a slight wave and headed down the hall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
New York City
While Ann Coopersmith had many friends and colleagues, that only partly accounted for the large crowd that turned out for her funeral. The suggestion that her murder was somehow connected to the People of the Book symposium brought out hundreds of the curious.
Following a service at the family church in Long Island City, a large contingent traveled to nearby Calvary Cemetery. As the young priest gave something of a New Age homily, Preston Lewkis and Sarah Arad stood nearby with David Meyers and a tall, distinguished-looking man with a trim gray beard, a vested pinstripe suit and blue tie, and the quiet demeanor of a banker.
“Stop touching it,” Sarah whispered to the man.
“I’m sorry,” Fr. Michael Flannery replied, quickly dropping his hand. He moved his mouth awkwardly, as if uncomfortable in his skin.
“Enough. Do you want it to come off?”
“Sorry,” he repeated. “This beard is killing me. I should never have agreed—”
“Better to get killed by a fake beard than a real bullet,” Sarah said bluntly.
“I still don’t see why I had to dress up like this.”
“Because you’re a target. There have already been two attempts on your life; there’s no sense in tempting fate.”
“I know you’re right. But still, I feel…silly.”
The casket bearing Ann’s remains was moved to the catafalque beside the grave. Then the family priest walked up beside the coffin and intoned, “My brothers and sisters, we are gathered here to help deliver the soul of our dearly departed Ann Coopersmith into the company of God. Our sister has made a clean oblation and acceptable sacrifice of love toward God, man, and the universe, and there she shall dwell forever. Amen.”
The assembly responded with their own amen.
The priest stepped away from the coffin to allow Ann’s mother and father to approach. The elderly couple stood by the coffin for a long moment, remembering moments from the past, lamenting her stolen future.
There was a commotion off to the side, and Flannery turned to see a young Middle Eastern-looking man in an oversized coat jostling his way through the edge of the crowd. Someone screamed, and one of the other mourners leaped at the intruder and knocked him to the ground. As the man tried to struggle to his feet, those closest to him began scattering in all directions.
“Down!” Sarah Arad shouted, throwing herself at Flannery and tackling him.
As Flannery went sprawling to the ground, he caught sight of the intruder, who was on his feet again. He was staring directly at Flannery, grinning malevolently, when suddenly he disappeared in a flash of light. The ground shook as the air shattered with an explosive boom, leaving a cloud of smoke and dust. As it slowly dispersed, Flannery uncovered his eyes and saw several bodies lying a few feet from the center of the explosion, with other people down on their knees or staggering away from the carnage, choking and screaming. Many were covered with blood and had severe wounds, but Flannery saw that Ann’s parents and the priest were far enough away to be uninjured.
Sarah was helping Flannery to his feet when David Meyers ran up and pulled at her arm, calling out, “There! Look over there!” He was pointing to a black car parked on the nearest of the small roadways that crisscrossed the cemetery. A man had just run up to the vehicle and was jerking open the door.
“It’s Jahmshidi! I’m sure of it!” David exclaimed.
“I see him,” Sarah said.
Drawing her pistol, she started running toward the car, but Mehdi Jahmshidi was already in the driver’s seat and saw her coming. Throwing the vehicle into gear, he backed onto the road and drove off in reverse, racing the wrong direction down the one-way road.
Gaining the roadway, Sarah halted and raised her Beretta, steadying it in both hands as she fired three rounds. The vehicle swerved, and for a moment she thought she had struck the driver, but he was merely avoiding an oncoming car. She couldn’t risk another shot and watched in frustration as he expertly spun the vehicle around and sped off in forward gear through one of the exit gates. She knew that in a few seconds he would make a clean escape on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
By the time Sarah returned to the others, the sirens of emergency vehicles were blaring. She found Flannery with his disguise removed as he knelt beside one of the bodies and performed Extreme Unction.
When the last rites were administered, Flannery looked up at Sarah, his eyes flooded with tears. “God help us,” he whispered. “We are dealing with madmen.”
The next day, David Meyers was at a desk in the safe house, his calico cat perched in his lap. The New York Times lay on the table, folded to a story bearing the headline: Bomb Blast at Funeral Kills 4, Injures 12.
The story quoted police officials offering several theories as to why a bomb had been set off, but there was no mention a possible link to the People of the Book symposium. Nor did they name Mehdi Jahmshidi or his terror group Arkaan, though Sarah had provided a full report, including her attempt to apprehend a man who looked like Jahmshidi.
The most startling revelation in the story was that the severed forearm of the bomber, its fingers still clutching the detonator, had been found at the bottom of the grave, where it had landed after the blast. It was undergoing forensics analysis in an attempt to determine the identity of the suicide bomber.
David stared morosely at the photo of Ann Coopersmith that accompanied the article and choked back tears as he recalled their budding relationship that now would never be realized.
“I miss her, T,” he whispered as he stroked the cat. T seemed to sense that David needed comforting and leaned into his chest and purred appreciatively.
“Enough,” he declared, not to the cat but to his overwhelming sorrow and self-pity.
Pulling his laptop in front of him, he began tapping on the keyboard. He called up the log file of a code-breaking utility that he had been running for several days to analyze a copy of the code stream he had intercepted on the airliner when it was under attack.
As he scanned the log to see if the utility had highlighted any sections of code, he muttered, “Hello, what’s this?”
A code string several screens long had been highlighted and overlaid with new code. David quickly copied and pasted the new string into one of his hacking programs and ran the code.
“You son of a bitch, I’ve found you!” David shouted at the screen.
The code had connected him to a hacker’s computer in real time, displaying stroke by stroke as the hacker entered new code. The stream suddenly collapsed to a small icon at the bottom of the screen, and David saw an address being typed into a narrow text window above. It was the section of www.nyc.gov for the New York City Department of Transportation. As David watched, the hacker logged into the restricted portion of the site and began examining traffic choke points, computer-controlled traffic lights, and police traffic communications.
“You’re good,” David said to the screen as he realized the hacker was manipulating traffic signals to create a citywide gridlock. “Damn good—but not as good as Mongo.”
David started typing.
Tehran
Taped to Kamal al-Khazar’s computer monitor were small photographs of the two Boeing 767 airplanes he had managed to bring down by hacking into the satellite control system. He joked to his comrades that he needed only three more to become an ace. If he could count trains, he was already an ace, having wrecked four of them by sending incorrect switching signals, causing collisions.
Today he hoped to dramatically increase his count of destroyed vehicles—this time automobiles—by disrupting traffic in New York City.
“What?” he exclaimed in Arabic, his smile vanishing. “What is this? What is going on?”
The code that Kamal had painstakingly typed was flashing on and off, then suddenly disappeared from his screen, leaving behind an animated cartoon of an American cowboy in a ten-gallon hat. The cowboy was holding a lasso, which he flung off screen. The rope became taut, and the cowboy pulled in what he had lassoed: a bearded man in a turban and robe.
Kamal began typing in a desperate attempt to disconnect from the server he had hacked, but he was unable to regain control of his own computer. He was about to reach for the power button, when the cartoon abruptly disappeared and was replaced by a message in English:
YOUR ENTIRE SYSTEM HAS BEEN FRIED. YOUR SLOPPY SECURITY HAS ALSO LET US DESTROY THE SYSTEMS OF EVERYONE ON YOUR DIRECT ACCESS LIST. THIS HAS BEEN A CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE WORST KIND.
HAVE A NICE DAY. ☺ MONGO.
Kamal gasped. His computer could connect remotely to virtually every PC throughout the Arkaan organization. He also had frequent contacts with Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and several other radical organizations. If this hacker Mongo was telling the truth, he had exploited the pathway from Kamal’s PC to severely cripple or even wipe out the wider Islamist network.
Kamal stared in fear at the Blue Screen of Death, the far-from-affectionate nickname for the blank screen of a dead Windows PC. He frantically tried to restart the computer, but it would not boot up.
Grabbing his cell phone, he called an Arkaan associate and discovered that the man’s computer had flashed a message in Arabic from Kamal al-Khazar confessing that he secretly worked for the American CIA and had trashed the PC at their behest. Rebooting resulted in the dreaded blue screen. Phone calls to contacts at Hamas and Hezbollah confirmed that their systems also had been fried, with Kamal purportedly confessing to be the culprit.
Kamal covered his eyes with his hands, trying to erase the flood of images of beheadings of infidels that he had uploaded to the Web. He had taken great pleasure in broadcasting their pain and humiliation, and now, if he didn’t act quickly, he would likely suffer the same fate.
“Allahu Akbar,” he intoned as he removed a revolver from his desk drawer and raised it to his temple. Cocking it, he repeated the phrase “God is great” and pulled the trigger, spraying the Blue Screen of Death with his blood and brain matter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
New York City
David Meyers stood watching the front entrance of the Hotel Musée from across the street. It had taken some effort to track down where Mehdi Jahmshidi had gone after abruptly checking out of the Dunn Hotel in the wake of the disappearance of the bellman. But in a stroke of luck, he had intercepted one of Jahmshidi’s cell phone calls related to the crippling of the Arkaan computer network. He was then able to track the terrorist leader to this small, Upper East Side hotel, several blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
David waited until he saw Jahmshidi depart the hotel and get into a taxi, then he crossed the street and entered the lobby. Shifting his shoulder bag, he gave a nonchalant smile to the woman behind the front desk as he headed to the elevators, looking like any other guest.
Getting out on the sixth floor, he headed down the hall and nodded at an elderly man, who shuffled past and disappeared around the bend to the elevator corridor. David walked slowly, listening as the elevator door opened and closed. When he was satisfied he was alone on the floor, he opened the shoulder bag and removed an electronic device about the size of a cigarette pack. Wired to it was what looked like a credit card, which he inserted into the keycard lock of room 632. He pressed some buttons on the device, and several LED lights began flashing.
