David Ellis - The Wrong Man

The Islamic New Year, a different day every year of our American calendar. How did I miss that? I didn’t even know that was celebrated. It was the perfect day for Randall Manning. Two birds-the government and a large gathering of Muslims-in one coordinated attack.

I hit Dayton, which was one-way east-the opposite direction from my route-and came up to an intersection where traffic was idling. A guy on a motorcycle was two cars back from the front of the intersection. I didn’t have the element of surprise, as he saw me approach, so I compensated with aggression. I barreled into him high, up at the head and shoulder area. I’d hoped to keep his bike upright but failed. The guy fell off the bike, but it toppled down on top of him, and me on top of it.

“I have to take this bike,” I said. “I’ll kill you if I have to.”

The guy was stunned a moment, not sure of what he was getting with me.

I righted the bike, hopped on, threw on the spare helmet for passengers, and sped away as he called out in protest. I drove forward and then did a U-turn and went onto the sidewalk and took off westbound.

My watch said it was four minutes to one. Surely they would wait until all of the Muslims had entered the mosque before they’d hit it. Why not maximize casualties?

But maybe my watch was slow, or theirs fast.

It had been a long time-college-since I’d driven a bike, and I surely didn’t know all the ins and outs of this one, but I knew how to go forward, and that was about all I needed to master. I sped through traffic, narrowly missed an oncoming car traveling northbound at an intersection, and silently prayed that I wasn’t too late.

Randall Manning pulled his truck out of the storage unit he’d rented, in cash, over six months ago. The unit was directly north of the target, ten blocks away. He was about two miles directly west of the commercial district.

The first intersection he hit was Rovner Street. It was a red light. Manning stopped the vehicle, saw nothing unusual ahead of him, and reached between his legs, under the driver’s seat, and engaged the first fuse, the five-minute fuse.

He hit the timer on his watch to correspond: 4:59… 4:58… 4:57…

He closed his eyes for just a moment and thought of each of them, one last memory that lingered above all others. His son, Quinn, at a Little League baseball game, crashing into the catcher at home plate and crying when he realized he’d given the catcher a concussion. His wife on their wedding day, so pure and sweet in her white gown, the way her eyes lit up when she squeezed his hand and said, “I absolutely do.”

He remembered Langdon Trotter, back when he’d just been elected governor, and how he shook Manning’s hand and said, “Randy, I couldn’t have made it here without you. If you ever need anything, I’ll be there for you.” That was before he became the big-shit U. S. attorney general, where he breathed the Washington air that polluted a man’s soul, turned him into a coward, allowed him to forget the debt he owed to Manning and led him to decide not to chase a jihadist who had murdered Americans, including Manning’s son.

Payback is a bitch, Lang. Let’s see how you feel after your son is blown to bits today.

The light changed and Manning moved his You-Ride truck forward. Unlike the other trucks, which were canary yellow, Manning had painted this one fire-engine red and put a corporate logo on the side. But he wasn’t delivering flowers today.

If, in fact, the government and that lawyer had gotten far enough to be on the lookout for an assault today, Manning hadn’t given them anything to play with. His vehicle was disguised, and it hadn’t appeared in the open until just now, just five minutes before the truck was going to explode. Even if they were on top of their game, they probably couldn’t stop him.

He did wish he had Cahill and Dwyer, though. The others were three-man teams and he’d wanted one, too. Especially him. Because unlike the other teams, which would try to escape before the bombs detonated, Manning had no intention of leaving. He-and if they hadn’t been arrested, Cahill and Dwyer-planned to pick off anyone who tried to escape, just as the Brotherhood had done to Manning’s family and others at the Adana Hotel.

He’d even brought a machete.

The five-minute fuse having been triggered at Rovner, all that remained was the two-minute at Dodd Street, just a block away from the mosque at Dayton Street.

His heartbeat ratcheted up as the truck passed street after street, catching a couple of lights.

“I understand that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. I understand that revolution is not only a right but an obligation. I understand that bigotry and hate cannot be answered with tolerance, but with intolerance. I understand that those who take up arms against us cannot be answered with peace but with like arms.”

When Manning hit Dodd Street, a red light, he began to lean down to access the two-minute fuse. Up ahead, movement caught his eye. The mosque, a block away.

People were running away, fleeing as if As if someone had called in a bomb threat.

“No!” he cried. He slammed his foot on the accelerator, driving through the red light at Dodd and picking up speed as he headed toward Dayton Street and the Masjid al-Qadir. There was another red light at Dayton. As he got closer, Manning could see more clearly than ever the congregants fleeing from the mosque, running onto the grass and up the sidewalks.

There were still plenty of them to hit. And the blast-well, it wouldn’t kill everyone, but the numbers would be high enough.

Then he made a decision. Forget the fuses. Forget about picking them off as they fled. He was going to crash the You-Ride directly into the building and blow the whole damn thing up in an instant.

He floored the accelerator and held his breath. He steeled himself as the truck ran the red light at Dayton. As he approached he saw a spattering of people pouring out the front door of the mosque, a man carrying an elderly woman in his arms-a white man Kolarich?

Kolarich.

Manning pushed down with all his might on the gas pedal and cried out for his wife, his son, his entire family.

I woke up in the hospital with a start. Two beautiful women stood in my room. And Joel Lightner was no Robert Redford, but it was nice to see him, too.

I tried to take a deep breath but it hurt. Every part of my body hurt. But I still had two arms and two legs, and I could feel all of them, so it could have been worse.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did the… bomb go off?”

They looked at each other. “You don’t remember,” said Shauna.

Tori was hanging back, letting Shauna and Joel hover over me. Actually, it seemed like Shauna had sort of boxed her out.

“The bomb went off,” she said. “The mosque was leveled.”

I took another pained breath. “Casualties?”

Shauna shook her head. “Lots of injuries. A few people in critical condition. So far, no deaths.”

My head fell back on the pillow. I closed my eyes and felt myself spin. “That’s… amazing.”

“They have a theory,” said Joel. “He didn’t use as much firepower in that truck as in the others. He didn’t need to take down some huge government building. Just a one-story mosque. Just a really big house, basically. And they think he didn’t want to blow it to smithereens, anyway.”

“He wanted people… to survive and… try to escape,” I mumbled. “So he could pick them off… as they fled.”

“Just like the hotel in Adana,” Shauna said. “But apparently he changed his plan when he saw everyone evacuating the mosque. So he drove the truck straight into the entrance. The truck was three-quarters inside the foyer of the mosque when it detonated. The blasting radius-that’s what these guys call it-the blasting radius wasn’t particularly wide, especially when the mosque itself absorbed much of the blow.”