Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

“Bastard disarmed city-slickers,” he growled. “Not one of them did anything.”

He cursed them under his breath. In the country, there would be someone with a gun, someone who would offer armed resistance to terrorist attack. But in New York, famed for restrictive gun laws, the entire population had been unmanned. It was unfair — and he knew it was unfair — but he found it hard to care. His partner was missing — and helpless. Her captors could do anything to her… and Steve’s imagination filled in too many possibilities.

“Find her,” he growled. If only she’d agreed to have a tracking implant inserted in her body. But she’d declined. Steve would have declined too, if he’d had the option, but still… he wanted to scream at her for refusing and at himself for not forcing the issue. She could have been found by now if she’d had an implant. “Whatever it takes, find her.”

He wished, desperately, that Mongo had gone to Ying and Kevin had stayed behind. His younger brother might not be a Marine or any other form of infantryman, but he was one of the smartest people Steve had met. Kevin could have deployed all the bugs and drones and taken out all the stops to find Mariko, then acted to recover her while everyone else was still dithering.

“And call on the NYPD,” he added. “Tell them we want them to put every effort into finding her.”

“They can’t,” Mongo said. There was a bitter tone to his voice. “The explosions in New York saw to that, Steve.”

Steve gritted his teeth, feeling another wave of helpless fury. The terrorists had bombed New York, forcing the NYPD to divert resources to deal with the aftermath. Even if the dispatchers realised that the bombings were just diversions, they might still be unable to redirect their people. There were dead and dying on the streets of New York, once again. He wanted to call the Mayor personally and scream at him, but what good would it go? The Mayor could hardly refuse to tend to his own citizens.

“Then we take care of it ourselves,” he said, accessing the interface and staring down at New York from high overhead. The terrorists might have accidentally outsmarted themselves, he realised. Their divisionary bombings would have snarled traffic pretty thoroughly, which meant they would either go to ground somewhere within the city or be delayed as they tried to smuggle Mariko out. “Use everything we have and find her.”

He scowled, remembering kidnapped soldiers and the desperate manhunts American forces had launched when they realised the soldiers were missing. It was a race between terrorist and soldiers, he knew; the terrorists had to get their captives out of the zone before the soldiers had blockades and barriers in place to prevent them from escaping. Holing up somewhere within the zone was risky, even in a shithole like Iraq or Afghanistan. The searchers might not stumble across the hiding place, but the locals might well betray the terrorists, either out of hatred or simple irritation with American troops stamping around and disturbing everyone. New York would be even worse, from their point of view. Someone was bound to see something and call the NYPD.

They’ll want to get her out of the city , he thought, morbidly. But where will they take her ?

Jürgen Affenzeller was no stranger to sudden, intensive demands for action, but this was something else. The nightmare scenario — a terrorist attack on representatives of a foreign power — combined with a sudden awareness that the foreign power might well blame the United States for the lapse in security. It would be unfair, Jürgen knew, but he also knew the world wasn’t particularly fair. By any standards, Steve Stuart’s partner should have been given the same level of protection as the First Lady.

But the First Lady is about as useful as tits on a bull , he thought, as he hastily deployed the covert sensor apparatus to New York. The President had authorised it personally, even though there would probably be lawsuits and threats of impeachment afterwards. Steve Stuart’s partner is a doctor. She couldn’t work with a small army surrounding her .

He brought up the footage from the security sensors and hastily scanned through it. The terrorists had not only hidden their faces, they’d worn dark ill-fitting clothing, just to make it harder for them to be tracked. It hadn’t worked too badly, Jürgen had to admit, but it had its limitations. For one thing, their body language was still readable. And, for another, the van they’d brought could be tracked through the streets.

Few citizens really realised just how formidable a public monitoring system New York had built up in the years since 9/11. It was questionable just how much of it was actually useful for tracking terrorists and it did invade civil privacy to a truly disturbing degree, but when the time came to retrace the terrorist footsteps it allowed their movements to be backtracked across the city. The van itself didn’t seem to have been rented — its plates suggested it was a rental, but a quick check revealed that the plates had been stolen in Washington — which implied that it had actually been brought into the city at one point. Carefully, he started backtracking through the records.

It took nearly twenty minutes for the cross-referencing program to find a match. Three brothers, all from Iran, refuges according to their DHS file. They’d made it over the border into Pakistan, then applied for settlement in the United States. Their relatives in America had vouched for them, so few red flags had been raised beyond their origins in Iran. The DHS had conducted an interview, decided there was nothing to worry about and then just let them vanish into New York. In hindsight, Jürgen suspected, the DHS was going to be blamed for allowing the terrorists to enter the country.

He placed a call to the NYPD’s anti-terrorist division and asked them to check up on the brothers. If he was wrong, he would find out very quickly — and innocent people would not be swept up in a police dragnet. But if he were right, he was confident the brothers would not be at home and, indeed, their wives and children would be wondering what had happened to them. Terrorists these days were advised not to confide in their wives and families, not after quite a few had been betrayed by their relatives, who didn’t see death in the cause of jihad as a worthy aspiration.

While waiting, he uploaded the details of the van into the cameras and scanned through the thousands of eyes watching New York. Hundreds of matches came back at once, most of them wildly out of place; thankfully, the traffic snarl would have made it harder for the terrorists to make their escape. But which one was the terrorist van? Or had the terrorists already abandoned their vehicle? There was no way to know.

Not yet , he told himself.

The phone rang. “Yes?”

“This is Captain Aldridge,” a voice said. He sounded brisk, mercifully professional. “All three of the suspects are missing, sir.”

“I see,” Jürgen said. It wasn’t conclusive proof of anything — the DHS had tracked men it had believed to be terrorists before, only to discover that they’d been having affairs — but it was suspicious. “Take their families into custody, gently . Have them interrogated, then explain to them that their menfolk may be in serious trouble.”

He winced as he put down the phone. Maybe the families did know what was going on, maybe they were guilty as sin — at least of keeping their mouths shut — but it was quite possible that their lives were about to be upended through no fault of their own. They’d be held as suspects, then treated as pariahs, idiots too stupid to realise there was something wrong with their relatives. As always, the terrorists left a trail of broken lives and shattered souls behind them.