Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“These clowns could have turned ugly. If you waited, you might not have gotten a chance. You’re here, you did your duty.”

“I’m so happy to be of use.”

“Here’s what you got us: we confirmed that Juba is in America and that he sheltered at this mosque. That’s the first step of a long process. We didn’t get him, no, but that’s just the way the cards fell. He was out ‘learning’ and was smart enough to get away when he was alerted the imam had busted you. If the cards had been different, he would have been down there in that little basement room and it would have been game over.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Can’t be helped. Tell her, Mr. Gold.”

“Mrs. McDowell, the importunes of providence in these affairs are always puzzling. Enough to suggest that God’s favorite weapon is His sense of randomness, which keeps any of us from getting too smug.”

“But,” said Nick, “we also learned a lot. El-Tariq has connex with a previously unknown terrorist cell, which we’ll track and bring down. We learned that through these guys, el-Tariq had access to Dark Web intelligence penetrations, including the Social Security database and some kind of facial recognition technology. They got your face from your driver’s license, ran it, and came across the photo in The Baltimore Sun of Tommy and you, which ran with his obit. That’s big-time facial ID software, so it proved again there’s a lot of money and ambition behind this. But now we’ve got our computer people working on any leads that dope may run to.”

“And the kid,” said Swagger. “We got the kid.”

“Yes,” said Nick. “Potentially, the game winner. We’ve got a picture and other ID of the boy who’s running with Juba. We’ve got all his credit information, which has been flagged for instant law enforcement notification if accessed. And his picture has been sent to four thousand police agencies, so we think it’s only a matter of time.”

“What do you think, Mr. Swagger?”

“I’m surprised that Juba has hooked up with this kid. It’s not like him. I mean, look at him. He could be any kid at the mall.”

They had the file on Jared before them. He was Grosse Pointe all the way, his father being one of the most successful periodontists in the suburbs of the Motor City. Jared graduated from Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, did two years at Princeton, followed by two years at the University of Cairo in Egypt, the site of his radicalization. Since then, he’d accomplished little of merit, just hanging around the fringes of the rad scene in Dearborn, threatening to go join the ISIS armed fighters in northern Syria, but not wanting to be too far from an ATM that delivers monthly support from his father. He liked being on the edge of the gulf between legal and illegal, as if he had the guts to cross it, but there was no evidence that he had — yet. One could easily see why the imam picked him as Juba’s tutor in the ways of America, for it would enable young Jared to indulge in his fantasy life, but safely. Except now he was on the run, stuck.

“Juba’s normally more self-reliant,” said Nick. “But remember, he’s a stranger in a strange land and probably paranoid and unarmed. He thinks, one mistake and I’m gone. He needs an enabler. Meanwhile, we’ve got legal intercepts on Jared’s parents’ and his friends’ phones, as well as emails. He’ll be the one that cracks. He’ll miss Ma and Pa. He’ll get lonely. He’ll sneak away, put in a phone call, and once we’ve got a heading on that, it’s over.”

“Don’t hurt him,” Janet said. “He’s young, he’s stupid, and people have always lied to him.”

No one had to ask how she knew.

South of Seven Mile Road

That same night

First rule of the raid: recon,” said Juba.

“Do you mind if I wait in the car?” said Jared.

“You follow on me and keep your mouth shut.”

The older man led the younger across the street, well down from the stash house. They waited in the alley, and when they heard nothing, they edged forward, surrounded on either side by the hulks of abandoned houses. The wind rushed, the stars were clearly visible, and their breath turned to vapor. Jared was already huffing.

They reached the property line, noting three gleaming vehicles parked in the alley: another SUV and two slick Mercedes S’s. All looked brand-new, freshly waxed, and preposterous here in the back alley of a rotting city. All three made the point that nobody fucked with these guys.

Juba crept through a fallen fence, edged through overgrown bushes, and shunted low across the yard, coming to rest in the lee of the house. Jared followed, a good deal less adeptly.

It was a prewar bungalow, brick, maybe prefab from Sears, Roebuck. Really, just a single story, with a few windows, probably a couple of small bedrooms off a hall, a living room, a dining room. There was a bit of an upstairs, under the eaves of the mansard roof. It looked like every other house in what had been an autoworkers’ neighborhood in the salad days before the Japanese attack — on Detroit, not Pearl Harbor. The house was old and sad and broken. It wanted to die.

“On your belly,” said Juba.

He crawled to the window, went still under its amber glow, waited for Jared to join him. Then he squirmed out and very slowly stood, surveyed, and ducked down.

“Three men, laughing. Lots of money. Lots of weapons — shotguns, mostly, and pistols. The windows are barred. A TV.”

“Must be the rec room,” said Jared.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“If it’s only three, we’re fine. Come.”

They repeated the drill at the next window, then slid around back. At each window, Juba took his recon, and in none did he find more men. Upstairs might be another matter, but he didn’t think so. He also stopped at the rear door. Leaving Jared behind, he squirmed around to the front, slid under the windows, showing nothing, and examined the door.

When he returned, he drew Jared back to the bushes and into the alley.

“Only the three. Maybe upstairs some women, but they’ll be no problem.”

“Maybe you underestimate women in the drug trade.”

“Okay, we kill them too.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. Let’s not kill any women. Actually, I’d prefer if—”

“We follow Allah, little boy. We do what must be done.”

“I can’t kill a woman,” said Jared.

Juba looked at him squarely. “Are you jihadi?”

“I guess,” said Jared.

“Okay.”

He abandoned the boy and went into the bushes. After some effort, grunting and tugging, he emerged with a straight ten inches of branch, from which he was busily trimming smaller limbs and twigs. He turned to a patch of unruptured asphalt in the alley and set to sharpening one end by aggressively turning and grinding it at an angle and, in a bit of time, had manufactured a pointed tip that looked like the business end of a bayonet.

He turned to the boy.

“We go to front and—”

“Whoa! Wouldn’t it be better to go back? Nobody to see. Suppose a cop happens to drive by?”

“The back door swings outward on hinges. You can’t get through it. The front swings inward. Also, it’s a new hollow-core door and it doesn’t look very strong. Locks come out of the wood easily. Understand?”

“Yeah,” said Jared without enthusiasm.

“Remember, you don’t touch, you don’t spit, you don’t rub. You don’t shed hair. Take off your sweatshirt and wrap your head to prevent hair from shedding. Also, cover your face, since if anybody sees it, they must die. If there are women there and they see your face, they must die. Or, maybe easier, I’ll kill you, let them live.”