Marc Cameron - Act of Terror

Pressing on the accelerator, he looked at his wife again, studying the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck. She didn’t deserve the lot he’d dealt her…

“Hart, why are you driving so fast?” she said, wringing her hands. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “My mind was elsewhere…”

He clutched the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.

“Shit!” he spat, swerving into the right lane to miss a slowing furniture truck.

Kathleen was thrown sideways by the move. “Hart, slow down!”

“I can’t,” he said through clenched teeth. “The brakes are gone.”

Behind them, the dark blue Suburban wove in and out of traffic, struggling to keep up. A line of traffic lay a quarter mile ahead, slowing almost to a standstill. Drake cut the wheel sharply to the right, skidding the BMW sideways. He jumped the curb and careened down the grassy embankment. Drake aimed the long black sedan between the largest trees. Thick brush scraped and clawed at the sides of the car. Saplings the size of Drake’s wrist slammed at the undercarriage, hewn down by the momentum.

They hit a small rise before the water, launching them into the air in a long, agonizing arc. The BMW hit the water in the vehicular version of a belly flop, slamming Drake and his wife hard against leather seats. Air bags deployed from the dash as well as the sides, pinning them backward.

Stunned by the sudden impact of the fall, Drake struggled to make sense of up and down. Frigid green water rushed into the car. The half-deflated air bag confused him and made it difficult to locate his seat belt. Pockets of air hissed and gurgled as the car settled with astonishing speed toward the bottom of the gravel lagoon. He knew he needed to get free, but he couldn’t get the stupid air bag out of his face. He hadn’t counted on the air bag. He had a job to complete…

Water covered his chin and then his mouth. In a moment of panic, he screamed for Kathleen, blowing a volley of bubbles and wasting precious air as the lagoon invaded the last bit of space inside the sedan.

As always, she heard his call and came to him.

Fighting her way past the flaccid air bag, Kathleen Drake reached for her husband’s lap and popped loose his seat belt. The eerie glow of the dash lights played off her auburn hair as it floated around her face. She tugged at his arm, pulling him toward her open door and safety.

On the way out, he spotted the shimmering silver bubble of an air pocket in the corner of the car, near the sun visor. Holding tight to her hand, he pushed upward, gasping for a lungful of air before ducking back down beside her at the door. Her tugging grew more frantic as he braced his feet on the car’s frame, holding her down.

The water wasn’t more than seven or eight feet deep and the surface beckoned.

He drew her close, smiling in the near darkness. She smiled back, trusting him completely. Grabbing a handful of hair, he slammed her forehead over and over against the exposed doorpost, before shoving her back into the passenger seat. A flurry of bubbles erupted from her mouth, forming a silent O of shock and terror.

Lungs on fire, Drake held tight to the frame of the car. Kathleen tried to claw her way past, eyes wide, pleading. He kicked brutally at her face and chest, forcing her to stay inside the car. A thin trickle of bubbles streamed from the corner of her gaping mouth as her struggles ceased. He ducked back inside for one last frantic look. She could not survive now that she knew.

He had nothing to worry about. She floated peacefully, arms outstretched as if to embrace him. A thin trickle of blood trailed from her broken nose in the murky green water. Brown eyes gaped open, staring directly at him as if they’d always known his secrets.

Drake broke the surface gasping and choking. Two members of his protective detail had worked their way down to the water’s edge and stripped off shoes and suit jackets to dive in after him.

“Kathleen!” he sputtered and croaked in what was hardly an act as he tried to catch his breath.

A black agent named Norton pulled him into the shallows and passed him off to a partner before sloshing into deeper water to go after the woman they called “The Missus.”

“We’ll get her out, sir,” he yelled over his shoulder before diving into the blossoming circle of bubbles.

The athletic young officer surfaced a short time later with Kathleen in tow.

Sirens wailed forlornly in the distance as Drake stood on the bank shivering with someone else’s suit coat over his shoulders. The four members of his Secret Service detail worked frantically to revive the sodden lump of flesh that had been his wife of over twenty years.

For one terrifying moment he thought Norton might succeed in bringing her around. In the end, the earnest officer looked up in between rescue breaths and gave a solemn shake of his head. Water dripped from the end of his nose. He kept up his efforts but knew it was over.

Drake fell back against the grassy bank, landing on the seat of his pants. His protection detail would assume he’d collapsed out of grief for his dead wife. Instead, a wave of nauseating relief flooded his shivering body. Events had fallen perfectly into place. Driving off the road had been more exhilarating than he’d imagined. As an added bonus, he’d lost his dear wife. No one would question him too deeply about why he’d lost control of the car.

He would now be seen not only the leader in a crusade against those who would harm the United States, but a widower whose beloved companion had been murdered by those very subversives he had in his sights. The naysayers in the military and elsewhere would be silent now or risk the wrath of public opinion.

Hartman Drake took a deep breath and willed his body to calm. He scanned the trees on the side of the bank, wishing his mentor was there, to see how well he’d done. He thought of his youth and the man who had seen his genius and saved him from a life of starvation-a man who had taught him the one true way and brought him to America for a mission far greater than he’d comprehended at the time. Dr. Nazeer Badeeb, his longtime friend.

Their impossible plan was finally coming to pass. The president and vice president would not survive the evening. As the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, Drake was poised to take the reins.

Laurel, Maryland

Julia Sanborn held her rhinestone-encrusted Coach purse under her arm. She pressed the key fob to unlock her car door with one hand while she talked to her sister on the cell phone with the other. The gray street outside her apartment was deserted. Her heavy heels echoed on the grimy pavement as she sashayed out from her second-story walk-up like she owned the world. Spits of rain clung in tiny droplets to the shimmering black of her pixie-cut hair.

The fob didn’t work, so she unlocked the Mitsubishi sedan with the key.

“I know, I know,” Sanborn yelled into the cell phone as if she was deaf. “I got bills to pay, you know. He’ll just have to, like, get that through his head or else I’ll show him I mean business…”

She tossed the handbag into the passenger seat and hiked up her short skirt to maneuver her legs in behind the wheel. “I know… I know…”

She stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, but nothing happened. She kept talking while she tried again. “Can you believe it? I mean, like, I have the pictures to prove it… No… Of course I’m naked in the pictures… Of course we are. Yeppers… I know, really… I’m tellin’ you, he’s, like, some kind of stud… No, you can’t see the pictures. I told you, I’m naked too…”

She turned the key. Again, nothing happened.