and the textures of real life.
However, that fantasy most definitely hadn’t involved a prison meat wagon backed up to the morgue where they’d been stood up by Rickey Charles, the contact who was the key to the next stage in their getaway. And it definitely hadn’t starred a pistol-whipped woman hanging limply in his arms…and three seriously nasty terrorists glaring at him like they already regretted involving him in their jailbreak.
Not that they’d had a choice. He’d made damn sure of that, with help from Jane and some of the other agents working underneath her. She headed up a national security agency so secret it didn’t even have a name, one that was organized along the lines of the very terror networks it hunted, with each agent functioning as a separate cell, not knowing who else might be involved, or how.
For this particular op, Jane had gotten Fax arrested for murder, constructing such a deep, seamless cover that even his mother and brothers had written him off. That had been the only way to make him useful to al-Jihad, just as orchestrating an escape had been the only way they could come up with to flush out the high-level terrorist’s suspected contacts within Homeland Security itself.
The deaths of the prison guards and the morgue attendant were regrettable, but Jane had chosen Fax for the op because she knew he could function in the bloodiest situations and deal with an acceptable level of collateral damage—and innocent lives lost—if it meant getting the job done. It was cold, yes, but necessary.
Jane had honed that level of detachment, perhaps, but he could thank his wife, Abby, for setting him on the path. She’d been dead five years now, and he thought she would’ve hated what he’d become. No way she would’ve accepted the part her betrayal had played—she’d never been big on personal accountability. But even as he thought that, Fax was mildly surprised to realize it’d been some time since he’d last thought of the woman who’d been his high-school sweetheart, and later his wife. In the past, her memory had driven him, haunted him, made him into the bloodless man he’d become, the one Jane had needed and wanted.
Now, it seemed, even the warmth of anger was fading, leaving him colder still.
“You gonna kill the bitch or dance with her first?” Lee Mawadi asked, nodding to the woman in Fax’s arms with a sneer.
Then again, Lee seemed to do pretty much everything with a sneer. Fax was pretty sure it covered some major insecurities.
Fax didn’t know any of his fellow escapees well, because the 24/7 solitary confinement at the ARX Supermax tended to cut down on social discourse. He’d met the three terrorists in person for the first time just an hour earlier, when they’d awoken from the drugs Jane had smuggled to him, which had mimicked death close enough to pass inspection for twelve hours.
Almost immediately upon awakening, Fax had pegged the thirtysomething, blond Lee Mawadi as a wannabe, a follower. Lee had grown up a rich, pampered American, but had developed a love of violence along the way, a desire to kill, and be part of a killing squad. He’d hooked up with al-Jihad and had found the leader he’d been seeking. He’d played the part of a businessman, married a photographer and lived the American dream, all while working as a member of al-Jihad’s crew, following orders without question.
Lee was a lemming, but Fax suspected he was a nasty critter, the sort that would bite you before it ran off the cliff in pursuit of its leader.
“No need to kill her,” Fax said in answer to Lee’s question. “She’s out cold.” He shifted the woman’s deadweight, figuring on dumping her off to the side, out of harm’s way. The younger, male morgue attendant was beyond help, but if Fax played it right, he could probably leave the woman alive without attracting too much suspicion. Motioning to the van with his chin, he raised his voice and called to the other members of the small group, “Let’s get out of here. Our cover’s blown to hell thanks to Lee’s itchy trigger finger.”
As planned, they’d come out of the coma-inducing meds mid-transpo. Fax had suffered a moment of atavistic terror at finding himself zipped inside a body bag, but al-Jihad had come through as promised. The bag was taped shut rather than zippered, and one of the four guards had distracted the others long enough for the prisoners to emerge from their bags and get into position. Then they’d killed all four guards—including their accomplice, whom al-Jihad didn’t trust to stay bought—by breaking their necks, so as to keep their uniforms unbloodied. Then they’d switched places, four for four. Fax didn’t know what the death-mimicking meds had contained, but they’d left him with a nasty hangover and occasional double vision. That didn’t matter, though. He was still alive, his cover intact. His job was to keep it that way until he figured out who al-Jihad was working with, and what they planned to do next.
With fanatical monsters like him it wasn’t a case of if; it was a case of when and where.
“Hey!” Slow to catch the insult, Lee spun in the midst of dragging the younger man’s body into the van. “The guy recognized me. I had no choice!”
“Maybe,” Fax retorted, propping the woman up against the cold cement wall, partially hidden behind a Dumpster. “Maybe not.”
Knowing he was pushing it, he slid a look at the other two men, who as far as he was concerned were far more dangerous than Lee Mawadi.
Muhammad Feyd’s dossier pegged the dark-eyed, dark-haired man at thirty-eight, a fanatic among fanatics who’d left al Qaeda in search of a more proactive group of anti-Western terrorists. He’d found exactly that in the man seated in the passenger’s seat of the prison transpo van…a man known simply as al-Jihad.
The terrorist leader’s dossier was thin, devoid of any information predating the new millennium. He’d appeared on the world stage just before the September 11th terror attacks, had slipped out of the country immediately thereafter, and had played tag with Homeland Security for the next several years. Federal law enforcement suspected that he’d been the mastermind behind numerous bombings and other atrocities, but had never managed to concretely tie him to any of the attacks until he’d finally been tried and convicted for the Santa Bombings that had occurred in several major Colorado cities a few years earlier.
Targeting six shopping malls all owned by the American Mall group, the bombings had been planned to coincide with the ceremonial arrival of the mall Santas to their decorated thrones. All six of the Santas had died…along with the parents and children who’d been lined up, eagerly awaiting the kickoff to the holiday season.
It had been terrorism at its most horrible, and local and federal law enforcement had worked around the clock to indict and convict al-Jihad and his henchmen. They had succeeded, but the evidence had been more circumstantial than proof-positive. The terrorists’ high-powered defense attorney had lodged appeal after appeal, but the filings had wound up logjammed in the legal system, which Fax figured was no accident. The courts had no love of terrorists.
The delay had given Jane time to formulate Fax’s cover and arrange to have him locked up in the same prison as the terrorist leader and his two lieutenants. She’d turned Fax’s honorable military discharge into a dishonorable ousting, cast him in the role of anarchist, invoked the USA PATRIOT Act and held him without trial, making him that much more attractive to an anti-American bastard like al-Jihad.
And thus, an unholy alliance had been born, right on schedule.
In person, the terrorist leader was tall, thin and angular, and graceful enough in his movements that he almost appeared effete…except for his eyes, which were those of a killer.
From reading the available reports, Fax had known that al-Jihad would be a smart, driven, dangerous man. Meeting him in
