Marc Cameron - National Security

Imminent death, he thought, was a liberating thing indeed. The notion of its certainty endowed him with a sort of heady focus he’d never before experienced, even in the heat of deadly conflict. His perspective changed. No longer would it be important to fret over fingerprints he might leave behind. Stains of the American woman’s blood on his clothing would never cause him a problem. The sloppy manner in which she’d died didn’t matter. And the fact that he’d left his DNA on her body was something from which he could walk away and never give another moment’s consideration. The filthy woman had obviously been of loose morals to flaunt her body the way she had-with him, a complete stranger. She was a common whore and deserved what she got. Was he not a man? Did he not have natural tendencies and desires that such a wanton woman would inflame with her behavior?

At the end, when he’d already begun his work with the eagle-head knife, she’d been so pitiful, so utterly without spirit, absent even a hint of the strong will possessed by his old friend Carrie Navarro. Gail had whimpered and begged. Her eyes covered in garish makeup, eyes that had once flirted with him, had snapped wide in abject terror. She had pleaded for mercy as long as her tremulous chest held a breath-when the only merciful thing to do would have been to kill her more quickly. The woman’s weakness made Zafir despise her, but it had made him hate Navarro even more.

He drove on into morning traffic on the littered streets of East Fort Worth near Gail Taylor’s scabby apartment off a frontage road that ran parallel to Loop 820. He passed a western store with a giant red cowboy boot out front and a McDonald’s restaurant with its golden arches rising heavenward like a heathen idol. A line of coffee worshipers queued in the drive-through waiting to show their devotions to their morning fix. Used-car dealerships sprawled along the access road. Stores selling every kind of goods imaginable from mobile homes to baby clothes lined the littered streets. Zafir shook his head at such decadence. America the wealthy, America the fat, America the arrogant. Soon, in a matter of weeks, stores and restaurants as far as the eye could see would stand vacant. Those few infidels who were left alive by the hand of Allah would be too frightened to venture into public places among the rotting corpses of their neighbors.

The heady memories of Gail Taylor ebbed away like a receding tide with each new breath. A single burning desire drew Zafir forward like a flaming string through his heart. Though his death was a certainty, he had to survive the moment. He had to make it to Carrie Navarro’s home, to take care of the unfinished business with her. What happened beyond that was irrelevant. At first he’d thought to try and save his son, send him away somehow, back to the sheikh. But such a thing was impossible. No, he would take the boy from the pitiful shadow of his harlot mother-take him and allow him the great honor of dying as a glorious martyr alongside his father, where he belonged.

Zafir glanced up in the rearview mirror of his rental sedan, scanning as he merged into the heavy traffic of Loop 820. He headed south, toward the highway that would bisect Fort Worth and take him to Carrie Navarro. His instincts told him there was someone behind him, someone who followed him like a jackal follows the lion-plodding just far enough behind to be out of danger. Such instincts had never failed him before. But this time, he had to be mistaken. If the Americans knew where he was, they would surely kill him before he drove another mile. He’d heard the reports. They had shot Kalil in the back of the head without ever trying to arrest him. He had no idea what had happened to Hamid, but assumed he also was out of the game. The Americans could not know everything, but they surely had some idea of the risk these men had posed. They had no reason to follow him and every reason in the world to want him dead.

He moved to the fast lane, and then slowed to fifty miles an hour. Angry drivers honked and shouted obscenities out their windows as traffic stacked up behind him, and then merged into other lanes to pass. If there was anyone following him, he was extremely good at his job.

Zafir shrugged off the feeling and checked the GPS mounted on his windshield. The numbers showed he would arrive at Navarro’s in thirty-one minutes. He smiled, leaning back against the headrest to savor the thought.

What he’d done to Gail Taylor was nothing but an enjoyable diversion. A frolic. He’d been easy on her, made her death come relatively quick. Carrie Navarro had to atone for the things she’d said to him-for the humiliation she’d put him through in the eyes of his subordinates.

And Zafir would make certain that her atonement would be slow and painful.

Mahoney sat on the carpet of the empty house, knees drawn up to her chin, her back against the peeling robin’s-egg blue paint on the living-room wall. The house smelled vaguely of cinnamon, mildew, and motor oil. Four dead roaches and a twitching cricket formed a pile of sweepings on the linoleum floor beneath Quinn’s chair in the vacant dining room fifteen feet away.

Bo Quinn and four other bikers from his “club” had roared up on their Harleys at the TCU helipad and followed the team in the early-morning darkness to Carrie Navarro’s quiet tree-lined street west of Trinity Park. All the men looked like the sort Mahoney’s father had warned her about, the kind you didn’t want to meet in an alley on a dark night. She had smiled inside when Bo had dismounted his bike, and yanked his brother toward him in a back-slapping embrace. Jericho appeared to know the other members of the club as well, shaking their hands and hugging each of them in turn.

Bo’s sandy hair was cut short, though it was still long enough to cover his ears. While his companions all sported full beards or goatees, the younger Quinn had only a healthy growth of stubble, which, if he was anything like his brother, he could have sprouted in less than a day. Like the others, he wore faded jeans and a denim vest over a dark T-shirt. An indigo rocker under the angry-looking black octopus on the back of the vest was emblazoned with the word DENIZENS in embroidered red letters four inches high.

Bo was the only member of his group not completely sleeved in tattoos. While the other men’s muscular arms were covered in multicolored images of big-breasted women, eyeless skulls, and blazing guns, Bo Quinn had only one visible piece of ink. Occupying the entire inside of his veined right forearm was a jet-black octopus, identical to the one on his vest, eight arms trailing around a single angry eye.

Bo’s second in command appeared to be a tall Viking of a man with a scar that ran from his right eyebrow across his nose and to the bottom of his opposite jaw. Called Ugly by the others, he was bald but for the shoulder-length patch of hair on the back of his scalp, which he pulled back into a blond ponytail. A green jailhouse tattoo of a spiderweb covered the left side of his face, drawing attention to the jagged scar. The man had hugged Jericho, grinning as if they were long lost cousins. Caught up in the reunion, he’d embraced Megan as well. She’d been surprised that he’d smelled faintly of cookie dough along with the lingering odor of pipe tobacco. When she closed her eyes, she could picture a kindly old uncle. When she opened them, she saw a bloodthirsty pirate. At first, Megan had found it disconcerting the way the men, who were the type her mother would mention in the same sentence as the phrase “gang rape,” exchanged pleasantries as if meeting at a family reunion over a plate of slaw and barbecued ribs.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Ugly had said, his face a picture of earnestness behind the green web of prison ink. A diamond stud adorned the scarified cauliflower nub of what was once his left ear. “I’ll lead the way,” he’d said, climbing back aboard his bike. “Y’all follow me…”