John Thompson - Armageddon Conspiracy

He opened his eyes. His bedroom was dark. From down in the street he heard the noise again, only he recognized it this time—a garbage truck compressing a load of trash. He was alone, as he had been since that last night with Maggie. His heart beat a lonely tattoo against the walls of his chest.

NEW YORK, JUNE 20

EARLY MONDAY, WOFFORD TOOK A cell phone from his pocket and placed it on his desk. He leaned back in his chair and waited. When it rang, he picked it up, pushed the send button, and listened. The voice on the other end whispered that Google’s earnings would be five cents ahead of forecast. “Go with God,” Wofford said, and clicked off.

NEW YORK, JUNE 20

BRENT SLUMPED IN HIS CHAIR and only half-listened to the morning meeting. He was recalling Saturday afternoon when he’d given Simmons the tape of his conversation with Biddle. Simmons had been unimpressed. She’d called it “smoke,” not hard evidence, and said she needed more.

Brent’s other problem was his growing unease about his decision to join Genesis Advisors. In spite of the money, he now realized it had been a mistake. Increasingly he simply wanted to get on with his life, and while much of that stemmed from regrets about Maggie, she wasn’t the whole reason. The idea of being a spy troubled him more each day. He shot a guilty glance at Owen Smythe. It had been one thing to bust a few greedy bastards in Boston. That had been unplanned, an instinctive response to the situation, but this felt very different, coldly planning to take down an entire firm and ruin so many careers.

A sudden silence descended over the room and interrupted his thoughts. At the head of the table, Fred Wofford, once again running the meeting in Biddle’s absence, bowed his head and started to pray. Anticipating what might follow, Brent suppressed a shudder of distaste but pressed the record button.

After his “Amen” Wofford looked at the expectant faces. “The Lord spoke last night,” he began and went on to announce that God had told Biddle about Google’s earnings.

Brent struggled to mask his incredulity—the idea that God would front-run a company’s earnings report! He glanced around the room, angered now by the preposterousness of the lie and the transparent greed of the partners. No longer concerned about being unfair, he felt a thrill at having some concrete proof.

SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE PARIS, FRANCE, JUNE 20

ABU SAYEED HEARD THE STACCATO of a siren and felt the van slow as Naif’s foot came off the gas. He was tucked out of sight, on a folded tarp in the cargo area. It was two a.m., the roads were quiet, and they had not been speeding. “Just one?” he asked, unable to see out the van’s windowless rear doors.

“Yes,” Naif said, his voice calm.

“Pull off here.”

Naif stopped the van on the gravel shoulder, and they waited. A second later, a motorcycle pulled to a stop behind them and then the policeman’s boots crunched over gravel as he walked toward the driver’s door. Abu Sayeed’s pulse pounded behind his eyes as he recognized the snap of a holster flap. The policeman shined a light in Naif’s face and ordered him to keep his hands on the wheel. He sounded young, nervous. Abu Sayeed knew he’d seen what he took to be an Arab face heading north. It had to mean an alarm was out.

The policeman’s light picked its way around the front seats then worked gradually toward the rear of the van, finally picking out Abu Sayeed’s legs and knees and the crate on which he sat. The policeman started to reach for his holster, but Naif’s hand was much quicker. It moved in a blur as he plunged his knife into the policeman’s throat.

Abu Sayeed opened the rear doors and leaped out. He checked for traffic in both directions and thanked Allah for the empty road. He took the dying policeman beneath the arms, dragged him to the back of the van, and threw him inside. Naif took the policeman’s motorcycle and rolled it down the steep embankment into an irrigation ditch. It would be invisible unless someone stood at the edge and looked down.

They drove onward, Abu Sayeed now sitting in the passenger seat. They drove slowly, appeared not to hurry, but both of them knew the policeman had almost certainly called in their vehicle’s license plate. Their eyes scoured homes and businesses, but at this hour almost everything was dark. In the next small town, Abu Sayeed spotted an ambulance, its lights flashing but no siren, waiting to turn onto the main road. Abu Sayeed could see a driver at the wheel and an attendant visible in the back. “There,” he said, and Naif checked the mirror for other cars then pulled across the road to block the ambulance.

Abu Sayeed climbed out of the van and began gesticulating excitedly. When the ambulance driver lowered his window to ask what the problem was, Abu Sayeed shot him through the forehead. He ran around, jerked open the rear doors then shot the nurse and an old woman who lay on the stretcher. He dragged the driver’s body around to the back, turned off the rear inside lights and flashers, and then followed Naif to a pull-off. There, leaving the dead policeman in the van, they loaded their precious cargo into the ambulance, positioning the driver and attendant’s bodies to make it appear that the crates were a second stretcher. They covered the bodies with sheets and resumed their drive toward Le Havre.

Two hours later, on a dead-end road near the port, they pulled up before a crumbling stucco warehouse fronted by a pair of scarred wooden doors. Naif killed the headlights as the warehouse doors swung outward. They drove into the dark interior and heard the squeal of hinges as the doors closed behind them then the heavy thud of a bar being dropped into place. A second later someone flipped on overhead lights to reveal a vast space with a stained concrete floor.

Abu Sayeed shielded his eyes from the glare then climbed out. He came around the ambulance, clasped Naif by the arms, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Well done, my brother,” he said, feeling the reassuring strength in the young man’s biceps.

Naif smiled, his teeth flashing in his dark face. There was youth in his smile but also pain from the recent killing in his eyes, Abu Sayeed thought. Naif was an eager warrior, but his hardness was marred by the poetry in his soul.

“Praise be to Allah that we made it safely,” Naif said, his voice soft with relief. Abu Sayeed nodded, as he too felt an easing of the tension that had eaten his stomach.

Across the empty warehouse floor, the two Americans stood behind their bodyguards. They had trusted the protection of their God enough to risk coming here, and that in turn had triggered Abu Sayeed’s own demonstration of faith: accompanying their lethal cargo for the nearly twelve-hour trip from Marseilles.

The man who had locked the warehouse doors opened the rear doors of the ambulance then dragged the two corpses crudely onto the warehouse floor. When he finished he came over to stand beside Abu Sayeed. Mohammed Al-Wahani, a stocky Egyptian with moody eyes and a bad temper, crossed his thick arms and glared across the room at the Americans and beyond them at the shipping container that waited on its pallet in the far corner.

“Patience and respect,” Abu Sayeed whispered, as he noted the hatred in Mohammed’s eyes. “Today our enemies are our friends.”

Mohammed took a deep breath, but he finally nodded. “If that is your wish,” he muttered.

Abu Sayeed walked toward the Americans. The bodyguards were staring at the corpses, and they edged reluctantly aside as he drew close. “Mr. Biddle,” he said.

“What happened?” Prescott Biddle asked as he eyed the bodies.