Marc Cameron - Act of Terror

The Saudi laughed maniacally. His eyes narrowed to black slits.

“So…” His lip pulled back into a snarl. “You know who sent me? Impressive.”

“Whatever you say. Just put down the girl.”

“I think not, Mr. Jericho Quinn.” The muscles in Jabiri’s face twitched as he spoke. “I am ordered to make you suffer defeat, even as the sheikh has suffered-”

“Okay.” Quinn nodded. “I will suffer. Do to me what you will. Just put the girl down.” He swallowed back the panic rising in his chest. He’d seen too many children die horrible deaths in the mean streets of Iraq. None of them deserved it, but the guiltless often died in far greater numbers than the guilty. Mattie didn’t deserve the violence. Quinn’s life had brought it crashing down around her. Deserving had nothing to do with it.

“Oh, brave Mr. Quinn. You are an intelligent man.” Jabiri’s words dripped like poison from twisted lips. “How do you believe this will end? You want so badly to kill me. I see it in your eyes.” He cocked his head to one side, as if teaching an important point. “The question, Mr. Quinn, is not if I will die, but how you will live after you watch me take a life of one so precious to you…”

Mattie’s eyes suddenly brightened as if jolted with electricity. She began to pedal her legs as fast as she could, her heels slamming into Jabiri’s unprotected groin. That same instant, she turned just enough to sink her teeth into the base of his thumb.

The Saudi threw his head back, screaming at the sudden onslaught of pain. He shoved the girl away as if she was on fire, twisting his hips to protect his groin.

Quinn grabbed Mattie’s hand and pulled, passing her back behind him. In the same fluid movement, he drew Yawaraka-Te from the scabbard along his back. Rushing forward, he drove the length of the Japanese blade into the startled Saudi’s throat, nailing him to the dressing room door.

“You’re right, Jabiri,” Quinn whispered, leaning against the hilt as the Saudi struggled and gasped. “There was never any question that you would die.”

Jabiri’s hands fluttered momentarily at the blade, then fell to his side like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Quinn turned and dropped to his knees beside his daughter. The ruffles on her blue dress fluttered like a frightened bird. Gently, he turned her head away from the dead man.

Bo came sliding up behind them, gun in hand.

Quinn looked up, still holding Mattie. “Kim?”

“She’s okay. Anchorage cops have her.”

A sob caught in Mattie’s throat as she gazed up at Quinn with doe eyes. “They killed Miss Suzette.” She buried her face against his neck. “They didn’t even know her. Who would do that?” She pushed back to look at him again, crying with abandon now. “What about Babette? I dropped her on the ground…”

Quinn patted her head, smoothing her mussed curls. Sirens blared in the background. Hollow shouts echoed beneath the stage. All this had happened because of him. He’d gone away to fight a war-and now he’d brought it home.

CIA Headquarters 1324 hours Eastern Time

Veronica “Ronnie” Garcia stood naked and flushed outside the shower stall, scrunching wet toes on the rubber mat. Dripping tresses of coal-black hair mopped the coffee-and-cream skin of her muscular shoulders. She grabbed her towel from the hook along the wall, enjoying the coarseness of the cloth after the rigors of her workout.

Garcia’s Russian father had blessed her with broad shoulders and a strong jaw, but in a roundabout way, he’d also given her the reason she needed to consistently hit the gym. Peter Dombrovski had been attracted to women he described with the Yiddish word zaftig. While Veronica was by no means fat, her Cuban mother had been a round woman, passing on her own ample hips. They were perfectly suited for birthing babies but gave her a tendency toward what Ronnie’s ex-husband referred to as “ghetto booty.” To spite the jerk, she ran twenty miles a week and did a kick-butt kettle-bell workout on the days she didn’t run.

Garcia blotted at her hair with a second towel and looked down past the hard-earned collection of tomboy scars on bronze knees. She considered her somewhat stubby toes against the puddle of water and shook her head, sighing softly to herself. As a member of the CIA’s uniformed Security Protective Service, she hardly had time for shaving her legs, let alone the niceties of painting her toenails. Her dark complexion made much makeup unnecessary and her busty figure put her at constant risk of not being taken seriously in the law enforcement world.

Jane Clayton, a svelte marathon runner from Human Resources, stood ten feet away at a bank of stainless-steel sinks. She fluffed her mousy pageboy hairdo with a blow dryer, wearing only a sensible gray skirt and white sports bra. The lunchtime workout crowd had all gone and she was the only other person in the locker room. The two women were acquainted, but not well, and in a place where trust was a seldom-traded commodity, not knowing someone well was tantamount to being total strangers.

They’d finished their workouts at roughly the same time, but Clayton didn’t have to bother with all the weapons and gear Ronnie was faced with. She finished dressing and stepped into a pair of shiny black Danskos while Ronnie still wrestled to mash her boobs-which were proportionally in perfect harmony with her hips-into the impossible space provided by her female-cut ballistic vest.

“Time for a coffee?” Ronnie asked, securing the wide straps of her vest under her armpits.

“Gotta have my double almond latte.” Clayton shrugged smallish shoulders. Her eyes darted to the locker room door, as if she’d said too much already. Overly talkative people didn’t do well at the CIA.

“Maybe I’ll see you there then.” Ronnie smiled.

“Maybe.” Clayton picked up her gym bag. She tipped her head toward the pile of gear arranged on the bench next to Ronnie. “My boss needs a staffing report, like, ten minutes ago. You still have a half an hour worth of crap to put on…”

“I suppose so.” Ronnie’s heart sank as she watched Clayton scuttle out the door. She looked down at the bench in front of her. Just putting on her patrol boots would take a couple of minutes. There was a wide gun belt, the heavy leather retention holster for her Glock forty-caliber pistol, two extra magazines of ammunition, handcuffs, a wad of keys, pepper spray, a brick-sized radio, a flashlight, and an X26 Taser. It was no wonder her lower back ached. Even with her tendency toward a ghetto booty, there was hardly enough room around her waist.

Garcia had set a goal to make at least one friend outside her law enforcement circle. She’d have to hurry if she wanted to share a coffee with Jane Clayton.

Eight minutes later Ronnie walked quickly past the Manchu Wok and the Sbarro Pizza, weaving in and out of scattered tables of late-lunch diners. Tables of “heritage speakers”-second-generation citizens, each having passed the stringent background requirements of the CIA-sat in small, ethnocentric groups scattered throughout the food court. Ronnie said hello in Spanish to three dark-skinned girls she knew from the Cuban Desk and smiled at a round table of Sudanese women chattering in Arabic under black hijab headscarves. She kept an eye open for Jane Clayton and thought idly about how young everyone was at the CIA. It reminded her more of a college campus than a hard-nosed intelligence agency.

With no sign of Clayton in the crowd, Ronnie gave up and stopped at the Starbucks to order a tall Americano. When she’d first joined the uniformed ranks of the Agency, it had come as a surprise that Starbucks had found its way into the nation’s clandestine stronghold.