John Gilstrap - Threat warning

“Okay, I’m sold,” Boxers said.

“As will all the other talking heads be sold.”

“What’s the other side?” Jonathan asked. “You don’t seem moved by any of that.”

“I won’t say I’m unmoved,” Gail said. When she got thoughtful like this, a thing happened with her eyebrows that turned Jonathan on. A lot about Gail turned Jonathan on. “I mean, you can’t ignore the obvious completely, but it’s all too pat for me.”

“As if Osama Bin Laden was about subtext?” Boxers asked.

“He doesn’t count,” Gail countered. “He’s the one who established the baseline for the other cliches to follow. At face value, Janwari could be our guy. What bothers me, first of all, is that he’s a Sufi, which is one of the truly peace-loving sects of Islam. As far as I know, there’s never been a Sufi terrorist.” She looked at Boxers. “And before you say it, yes, I know there’s a first time for everything, but it would be a really big jump.

“Next, there’s the fact that in all of his known correspondence-even the ones where he was alleging racial discrimination-there’s not a single threat to do harm to anyone or anything. But the single factor above all others that makes me doubt that he did this intentionally is the fact that his daughter was there.”

She paused for effect. “According to early interviews with school officials all the way back to elementary school, Sarfraz Janwari was the picture of the caring father. He was a regular at PTA meetings, he made most of his daughters’ sporting events, and he never missed an orchestra concert when she was playing. In fact, he even chaperoned a couple of the orchestra trips.”

“Did he do any of that in the twenty months since he was laid off?” Jonathan asked. “A lot can change with that kind of financial stress.”

“Not when it comes to loving your kids,” Venice said.

“Couldn’t he have assumed that he was doing a good thing by martyring her for the cause?” Boxers asked. “Though I’m not sure what a middle school girl would do with the forty-two virgins.”

Jonathan burned him with a glare, and Boxers looked at the table.

“The Janwaris were Sufis,” Gail repeated. “They don’t buy into that martyrdom crap. They’re all about loving their children and loving their God.”

“Let’s assume that Janwari is innocent,” Jonathan said. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that somebody planted those explosives in his car, and, I don’t know, detonated them remotely or something. Where does that leave us?”

“Obvious shit is obvious for a reason,” Boxers said. “If it walks and quacks like a duck, I’ll assume it’s not a fox.”

“Roll with me,” Jonathan said. “If some homegrown terror group was trying to frame Islamists for all this killing, what better way is there to seal the deal than having one of them detonate a bomb? At a school, no less.”

Venice held up her hand to command the floor. “There’s more,” she said. “This is just coming in from the wire services. The school where the bomb went off-Gerald Ford Middle School-has the smallest per capita enrollment of Islamic students of any in the area.”

Boxers held out his hands, as if to say, ta-da.

Venice wasn’t finished. “And the four major television networks are reporting that not a single known terrorist organization is stepping forward to claim responsibility for any of the events of the past three days. Not only that, five of the most active groups, including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, have announced that they had nothing to do with them.”

Boxers scoffed, “If al-Qaeda says it, then it must be true.”

“Close,” Jonathan said. “They have a long history of claiming responsibility when they own it, and they rarely lie about it.”

“Honor among murderers?” Venice asked.

“More like good public relations,” Jonathan said. “I guess if you kill and own up to it, people are more afraid of you.”

“Plus, you don’t want to piss off your competition by claiming credit for murders that don’t belong to you,” Gail said.

That this kind of political calculus-all of it built around the murders of innocent people-actually made sense, made Jonathan despair for the future.

“So let’s just make this logical leap,” Jonathan said. “Let’s say that this Army of Allah group is not what it wants us to believe. How does that bring us any closer to finding out where they are?”

Blank faces all around.

“Well, that’s the mission,” Jonathan said.

“No kidding,” Gail replied. “Just how do we do that?” He turned to Venice. “What spigots do we have running for intelligence?”

“We’re monitoring ICIS obsessively,” she replied. “And we’re monitoring all the news services. I’ve designed bots to seek out the key words that might mean something, but there’s not much more I can do. If they broadcast again, we’ll have another shot, but until then, or until we catch a break, we’re dead in the water.”

Jonathan thought about that, and then turned to Boxers, whose shoulders sagged.

“You’re gonna call Roleplay Rollins, aren’t you?” the Big Guy guessed.

With the furnace extinguished, the night brought the return of frigid temperatures. As Christyne wrapped herself in her coat and pulled the blankets over her head, she tried to settle herself by listening to Ryan’s even breaths. At what age, she wondered, did sleep stop coming so easily? As a teenager-as with all teenagers-she’d been able to sleep for fifteen, twenty hours at a time, sometimes sleeping entire weekends away when she was in college. Now, rest felt like a commodity more valuable than gold.

She wished she understood why their captors were being so hard on Ryan. He was only a boy. A frightened, angry boy. Mistreating him would only make him angrier and more frightened. It was the way he was wired. Just like his father.

Christyne told herself that the attitude that made Ryan so difficult as a teenager would also make him a success in life. You never lose if you never give up, right?

These people needed to understand that Ryan was incapable of controlling his smart mouth and his occasionally disrespectful glares. He wasn’t being difficult; he was being… Ryan.

It was so dark in here.

How does one measure darkness? she wondered. There were many words for the varying degrees of brightness, why not for darkness? Because “dark” didn’t touch the lack of light in their tiny room.

A black velvet cave, she thought. The kind of darkness that gave birth to the scariest childhood fairy tales. In this blackness, every terrible thing seemed possible. No one could protect you because no one could see you. You couldn’t even protect yourself.

What was that?

There was a gentle clicking sound, so soft that she never would have heard it if she hadn’t been listening so intently to the night. Ryan’s breathing continued undisturbed.

Could have been a rat, she supposed, which brought precious little comfort.

No, nighttime creatures didn’t stop after a single clicking sound. They’d have made a series of clicking sounds-whatever the clicking sounds might have been.

She sensed movement. This wasn’t a noise so much as a feeling, the kind of near-awareness you feel as an airplane slowly changes altitude. In fact, that was it exactly. She felt a pressure change in the room.

“Ryan, is that you?” she whispered. She knew of course that it couldn’t be. He hadn’t moved.

Another sound. A pop this time, as if wooden furniture were expanding in humidity.

It’s nothing, Christyne told herself. It was just her imagination leveraging the most drama out of the thick darkness.