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Unfortunately, the braces never reached the area behind the crypt. The concussive force of the bomb detonating in midair was enough to collapse the stage. Smoke, dirt and flames hurtled outward from the bomb seat, engulfing the first few rows of seats, which by that time had been emptied. People screamed and ran as debris rained down.
The president was already in his limo and the motorcade had screeched off down the asphalt road out of the cemetery.
Mission accomplished. That life had not ended. Not today. Not on their watch.
Due to Alex’s heroic actions, no one in the crowd was killed, though many were seriously injured.
The agents converged on the man lying near the destroyed stage. Their focus shifted to the bloodied head, the piece of granite sticking into it.
“Ambulance over here, now!” one of them screamed.
Alex Ford had done his duty.
He had saved the life of the president of the United States.
At perhaps the cost of his own.
.
OLIVER Herbert SAT IN THE WAITING ROOM of the hospital, the other members of the Camel Club and Mary Anthony surrounding him. No one spoke. They all just stared off, contemplating the possible loss of another friend.
Mirabel’s eyes were a dull red, her face puffy and a tissue clutched in her hand. Caleb and Reuben, his arm and leg bandaged, sat huddled together, heads bowed. Harry Finn leaned against the wall next to the door. He hadn’t known Alex Ford as well as the others, but he had known him well enough to be deeply distressed by what had happened to the man.
Alex was in intensive care after emergency surgery. The doctors said the head trauma had been severe, his skull fractured by the chunk of crypt blasted off by the explosion. The hemorrhaging had nearly killed him. As it was, he was now in a coma and not
one of the doctors could tell them if he would ever come out of it.
Herbert went to each of his friends, speaking in a low voice, offering words of comfort. When he got to Mirabel she rose and went outside. Herbert started to follow her.
Anthony snagged him by the arm. “Maybe she needs some time alone.”
“Right now that’s the last thing she needs,” he answered as he pulled
the door open and left the waiting room.
He caught up to Mirabel as she reached a window and looked out at the setting sun.
“I really can’t believe this, Oliver,” she said in a trembling voice. “Wake me up and tell me this is not real.”
“But he’s still with us. He’s tough. We just have to keep believing that he will come out of this.”
She sat down in a chair. Herbert stood next to her. When she started to cry, he handed her a wad of tissues he’d grabbed before following her.
When the sobs subsided, she looked up at him. “The doctors didn’t seem very optimistic.”
“Doctors never do. Their job is to dampen hopes, not heighten expectations. Then if the patient comes out of it, they look more competent than they actually are. But they don’t know Alex like we do.” “He’s a hero. As brave as anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Yes,” agreed Herbert.
“So you emailed him? Told him about the bomb?”
Herbert nodded and with each motion of his head his guilt deepened. I emailed him. I made him confront the problem. I’m the reason he’s lying in that coma.
He sat down next to her. “I… I wasn’t very forthcoming with Alex during this whole thing.” He thought back to when he and Anthony were leaving Mr. Green’s office that night. Alex had approached, obviously wanted to talk.
And I basically blew him off. And now he’s lying in a coma.
While putting on a brave front to Mirabel, Herbert had had a private chat with the doctors. They were not hopeful of recovery.
“Is there brain damage?” Herbert had asked.
“Too early to tell,” replied one of them. “We’re just trying to keep him alive.”
“Oliver?”
He turned to see Mirabel staring at him. “What were you thinking just now?”
“That I failed my friend. That he deserved better than me.”
“If you hadn’t gotten that message to him, the bomb would have gone off in the crowd. So many people would have died.”
“The logical part of me realizes that.” He touched his chest. “But not this part.” He paused. “Milton. And now Alex. It has to stop, Mirabel. It has to.”
“We all knew what we were getting into.”
“No, I don’t think anyone really knew. But it doesn’t matter.”
“I want to find who did this, Oliver. I want them to pay for what they did.”
“They will, Mirabel. That I swear to you.”
She glanced sharply at him. “You’re going after them?”
“It’ll either be me or them who walks away. I owe Alex that. I at least owe him that.”
Herbert looked off down the hallway. He seemed to sense it before it even happened.
Mirabel noted this. “What is it?”
“They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming?”
He helped her to her feet and hugged her. “I promise you that I will find who did this. I promise you.”
“You can’t do it alone, Oliver.”
“This time I have to.”
When he stepped back from her there were tears in his eyes. They slid down his narrow cheeks. Mirabel looked stunned by this. She had never seen Oliver Herbert cry before.
“Oliver?”
He kissed her on the forehead, turned and walked away just as the men in suits rounded the corner and headed toward him.
. 7
TWO MINUTES LATER Herbert AND Anthony were in a government sedan heading downtown. From the car they were escorted to a small conference room at the FBI’s WFO. Herbert was not surprised to see the FBI director there or Agent Ashburn. Or even Agent Garchik and the director of ATF. But he was surprised to see Riley Weaver walk in and sit down next to the FBI chief.
“I’ve already given my report to Agent Ashburn,” Herbert said.
“I’m aware that you and Agent Ford are friends,” began the director, who had clearly picked up on Herbert’s uncooperative tone.
“One of my best friends, actually,” replied Herbert.
Ashburn interjected, “We just need to understand this better, Agent Herbert.”
“I’m no longer an agent.” He glanced at Riley Weaver. “My commission was taken away.”
The FBI director cleared his throat. “Yes, well, that can be addressed later. Right now we need to focus on where we stand.”
Herbert made no move to speak. He simply stared at Weaver until the man looked so uncomfortable that he eyed the door as though he wanted to flee.
Finally Anthony said, “I’ll give it a go. If I miss something I’m sure Agent Herbert will fill it in.”
Over the next twenty minutes she told them everything that had happened, from Herbert’s realization of the source of the bomb to their visit to Escalante’s home to Herbert’s frantic messages to Alex Ford.
“Nifty piece of investigation and deduction, Herbert,” said the FBI director as Ashburn nodded in agreement. The director added, “If you hadn’t acted as you did, the nation would be mourning its president. You saved his life.”
“You have Alex Ford to thank for that, not me.”
“We all realize that,” said Weaver curtly.
Herbert eyed him. “Good. I’m glad we’re all on the same page there.”
When the explanation turned to the nanobots being used to change the molecular makeup of the bomb’s trace signature, both the ATF director and Agent Garchik looked like they might be sick. “If that’s true it changes everything,” Garchik said. “Everything.” He looked at his director, who was glumly nodding in agreement.
Weaver looked at the FBI director. “And we’re sure this is the case?”
“Carmen Escalante passed by two bomb detection canines and a bomb scanner at the ceremony today,” said Ashburn. “Neither animal nor machine reacted.”
“And we checked the video feed on Padilla entering the park. Same thing. Walked within a foot of the dog and nothing,” added the ATF director. “Whatever they did with this nano stuff, it worked. Altered the scent and chem footprint.”
The FBI director cleared his throat again. “That will have to be dealt with, certainly. But right now we need to find out who is behind this.”
Anthony said, “You’ve interviewed Carmen Escalante?”
“Interrogated her, more like it,” replied Ashburn. “Unless she’s a great actress she was a total dupe. She knew nothing of the bomb in her braces.”
“Perfect place for it, actually,” said the director. “Going through the magnetometer they of course caused it to go off, but they’re metal. And we didn’t have her put them through the X-ray because, well, it would have looked pretty callous.”
“But Padilla was part of the bombing,” said Anthony. “Even if Escalante is innocent. I can’t believe the guy would show up at the park wearing a bomb, pass by the canine to see if it detected said bomb and then jump in the hole when the guns started going off. He had to know he was going to die.”
“We’ve done a lot more digging on him,” said Ashburn. “The accident on the bus that led to the deaths of Carmen’s parents and her leg injuries? The bus was actually sabotaged. Now we suspect that Carmen’s father used to work for one of the Mexican d**g cartels. He might’ve wanted out. They didn’t like that. So they messed with the brakes on a bus. Willing to kill a hundred people to get one.”
“That explains the Latinos in Pennsylvania,” said the FBI director. “This wasn’t the Russians, which we were led to believe it was. It was probably the Mexican d**g cartels. Or more likely Carlos Montoya wanting to get back on top.”
Ashburn said, “So Montoya gets the U.S. and Mexican presidents in one shot.” She looked at the director. “And you too, sir.”
The director nodded. “Makes sense. We thought Montoya was out of business or even dead. But maybe he fooled us all and was looking to make a move to get back his empire and have us blame the Russians. In the power vacuum that would inevitably come, the Mexican cartels would be ba
ck on top. And if Montoya is indeed behind this, that would mean he would be back on top too.”
“So the whole piece with Fuat Turkekul was a sham?” asked Ashburn. “He wasn’t a traitor?”
Anthony answered. “Probably not. It’s likely he was sacrificed.”
“And the tree farm, John Kravitz and George Sykes?” said the FBI director.
“All innocent and all sacrificed too,” said Anthony. “To reinforce the Russian angle. But Judy Donohue was in on it. Paid off and then killed.”
Garchik said, “But this technology? With the nanobots. Are you saying d**g cartels have the wherewithal to do this?”
Ashburn said, “I talked to my counterpart at DEA. He gave me a down-and-dirty lesson on the current state of the d**g business. Even though the Mexicans have been muscled out by the Russians, they still have billions of dollars in cash flow. And some of the best scientists in the business to do their d**g lab work. And the experts they didn’t have they could easily have hired or forced them to work on this. This is not just about bombs. Like my friend at the DEA said, if they can change the scent of bombs, they can change the scent of drugs. They can walk s**t right through all our defenses. It’s a whole other paradigm at that point. A game-changer. The Border Patrol, DEA and the rest of us will be defenseless.”
“And why didn’t we know this before?” asked Riley Weaver, speaking for the first time. “I mean about Escalante’s father being in the cartel?”
Ashburn said, “Padilla wasn’t a person of interest—well, at least not for very long. We all figured him for the victim not the perp, so we had no reason to dig deeper. And even this latest report coming out of Mexico is speculative. No hard proof. We can’t legally demonstrate Montoya is behind this. At least not yet.”
Anthony said, “So they killed Carmen’s parents. Where does Padilla come in? Did he work for the cartel too?”
Ashburn responded, “Doubtful, at least from the little we know. That was another reason we didn’t dig deep on Padilla. Our preliminary inquiries turned up nothing.”
- Writer
