False Signs (John Taylor Book 2) Page 3

  “We have as yet been unable to identify the remains of any of the soldiers stationed and signed into the armory at the time of the explosion, including Corporal Abbas. Until such time as we can confirm his status, we are operating under the assumption that he is alive and possibly planning additional attacks.”

  Taylor was a little amazed at the way some of this was framed. Robles was correct when he said they had already made their determination, and the number of assumptions the FBI seemed to be making was startling. He raised his hand to make just that point, when a vice like grip pulled his arm down.

  Looking over, Taylor saw the hand belonged to Agent Whitaker, who shook her head at him, making it clear there would be no questions.

  “You each have your assignments. We need to tear apart this kid’s life, both in the military and out of it, and find him and anyone in his cell. Details of the case have been emailed to each of you. Please come see me if you have any questions. Let’s go find this kid.”

  And like that, the briefing was over. Taylor started to make his way to Dorset, but once again Whitaker reached out to him, this time gripping onto his upper arm and directing him out the conference room door.

  “I’m supposed to take you to see the scene,” she said once the door shut behind him.

  “I wanted to speak to Agent Dorset about his briefing real quick,” Taylor said, pulling to a halt.

  “Agent Dorset has a lot going on right now, dealing with real investigators. He doesn’t need to be dealing with tourists.”

  “I seem to remember something Ruiz said about complete cooperation.”

  “I’m taking you to the crime scene, that seems pretty cooperative.”

  Taylor didn’t have any specifics to bring to Dorset’s attention yet, just his concerns that the FBI seemed incredibly sure of themselves that Samar was guilty, without much in the way of evidence. Thinking about Dorset’s attitude in their ten seconds of interaction, Taylor figured Dorset wouldn’t hear him out even if he did get Agent Whitaker to relent.

  “Fine,” Taylor said, letting the matter drop. “Before we head out, he also mentioned you guys would be able to set me up with a sidearm and some kind of temporary carry license.”

  Ruiz hadn’t actually said this, but it seemed close enough to Taylor. The FBI appeared to be all for making rash assumptions, after all.

  “That's a bad idea. The last thing we need you to do is get in a gunfight in the middle of downtown.”

  While that example was specific enough to tell Taylor she had read his file, it didn’t deter him from getting armed. “Be that as it may, your boss's boss seemed to think it’d be ok.”

  “Fine,” she said, sounding annoyed. “Follow me.”

  Taylor followed Whitaker down the hall and into an elevator, where she hit the button for the basement. Muzak played in the background as they avoided conversation and eye contact. Usually the silence wouldn’t have bothered him, since that’s how he liked it anyway. It was hard to miss the hostility coming from the woman, which did bug Taylor a bit. He understood it was probably because he was an outsider and every organization is wary of interlopers, but it was hard not to take it personally.

  The elevator door opened and they exited, headed into a warren of turns. The light tan walls and pictures of various FBI muckety-mucks were replaced by concrete walls and pipes on the ceiling. After several turns, they ended at a solid metal door with a keypad next to it. Whitaker keyed in a series of numbers and an audible click could be heard. Pushing the door open she gestured Taylor through the door.

  Inside was a room with a small waiting room-like window, with a man sitting behind it, typing away at a computer. The only difference between this and something you would see at a typical doctor’s waiting room was instead of file drawers behind the person manning the front desk, Taylor could see multiple rows of small arms.

  “There should be an authorization from upstairs for a John Taylor,” Whitaker told the man.

  He didn’t respond directly, just punched what seemed like an endless string of data into his computer. After a minute he got up and went into the cages. Scanning down the sides of the boxes, he found the one that matched what he was looking for and pulled it off the shelf.

  He returned to his computer, pulled a handgun out of the box, and compared the serial numbers on the side of the weapon to something on his computer. Apparently, it matched since he set the weapon back in the box, which he slid towards Whitaker.

  “Sign here,” he said, handing a clipboard to Taylor.

  Mostly due to what happened with the Marshals in Miami, he didn’t want to take these people's word on it, and pulled the weapon towards him, comparing the serial number to the one on the paper. Once he was satisfied, Taylor signed the log and handed it back to the man in the window.

  There was a belt holster in the box with the weapon and Taylor removed both, along with the two loaded magazines. The weapon was a Glock 23, .40 caliber pistol. Taylor was impressed. The army had gone 9mm years back, something that had bothered Taylor. The 9mm didn’t have the stopping power needed in some circumstances, although Taylor could recognize it had advantages over heavier caliber weapons. Thankfully, Special Forces had allowed their soldiers to be more choosy and he’d been able to carry a .45 for most of his career. That experience in the army made Taylor appreciate the Bureau's choice of the .40 caliber.

  Both the .40 and .45 were comparable in power, the only real difference between the two was the .40 was faster and the .45 had a wider impact radius. Although they were close enough either would work.

  Taylor checked the breech to make sure it was unloaded and worked the action to check that it was well maintained. He wasn’t surprised to find that it was. Guys who worked the armory tended to be an obsessive lot who took pride in the weapons under their care.

  He slid a magazine into the weapon and made sure the weapon was on safe before sliding it in the holster, which he clipped to his belt. The other magazine he slid into his pocket.

  “Happy?” Whitaker asked with impatience.

  “Very. Shall we?”

  “See ya Tom,” she said to the guy in the cage and headed for the door.

  “See ya Lola.”

  As the door shut behind them, Taylor asked “Lola?”

  “Agent Whitaker to you.”

  “Fine. What’s next?”

  “We take a plane over to Lubbock and you get to see the crime scene.”

  “Will the weapon be a problem?”

  “No, Ruiz approved our use of one of the Bureau's planes. I’m not sure how you got access, but whatever you did, it really loosened up the pocket book. We almost always have to fly commercial.”

  “Happy to help.”

  She rolled her eyes and picked up the pace to put some room between the two of them. Taylor didn’t mind particularly, since it offered him a pleasant view. Her suit wasn’t tight, but it was well tailored enough that there was enough to appreciate. She had the rolling gait of an athlete, and Taylor was confident she wasn’t a desk jockey. If he had to guess, she probably had done some sort of competitive athletics when she was in college, and clearly kept herself in shape.

  She moved with the easy confidence of an operator, and he’d seen it hundreds of times in the experienced men he'd served with. Taylor had no doubt Agent Whitaker could handle herself.

  They left the FBI offices and she drove them in yet another ubiquitous black SUV the government seemed to love to a small airfield on the outskirts of town. There a small prop plane waited for them. It wasn’t one of the fancy private jets you see in movies, but it was comfortable inside, with large, comfortable chairs that faced each other instead of the cockpit.

  Taylor was still hauling around his duffel bag, having picked it up from security at the FBI building on the way out. He tossed it into one chair and sat in the one next to it. Leaning back, he closed his eyes and started to let his mind center.

  “Don’t you want to go over the file we have on Samar an
d the events at the armory?”

  “Later”

  “Whatever,” he heard her mumble, but didn’t reply.

  Taylor spent the flight with his eyes closed, listening to Whitaker move around the cabin, make phone calls to arrange for things like a car at the airport, a hotel outside Lubbock and to notify local LEOs of whatever the Feds notified people of. A lot of the conversation was in jargon that Taylor didn’t know. It didn’t seem there was anything particularly critical that had to be done on the plane, and Taylor just assumed she was keeping herself busy.

  The flight was short, and it seemed like they were descending to land nearly as soon as they took off. Opening his eyes, Taylor looked at his watch as they landed and saw it had taken just under an hour and a half.

  Taylor revised his consideration of Whitaker just doing busy work when he saw a SUV sitting on the tarmac just by where the plane taxied. He had to hand it to her, she was efficient and this was better than standing in line at a rental place.

  Minutes later they were driving away from the small private airstrip and headed down roads which seemed to stretch on into the horizon.

  “Do you want to go over what we have now? It’s about a thirty-minute drive to the crime scene.”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Seriously? What are you waiting for?”

  “I want to see the scene, first.”

  “The file will have background information in it that you might find useful at the scene.”

  “Probably does, but if it’s anything like that briefing, it also contains a whole lot of assumptions. I’d prefer to see the scene before I wade through that.”

  “You think we are making mistakes?” Whitaker asked angrily.

  “Didn’t say that. I won’t know 'till I look at the scene and the files. I just know the briefing I heard had a lot of conclusions and was kind of light on anything to back them up.”

  “So you think we’re screwing this up?”

  “Didn’t say that. Like I said, I need to see the scene first.”

  “You’re impossible”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Whatever ... asshole,” she mumbled again, and lapsed into silence.

  Taylor let the conversation lapse; although, if he was honest with himself, he knew he had done that on purpose. He’d found that sometimes it was helpful to poke the bear a bit, to see what kind of reaction you got. Plus, it was pretty fun. Of course, that probably meant she was right, he was an asshole. Which was ok with him.

  They didn’t head directly to the site. Whitaker must have looked at a map on the plane, because she drove straight to a middle of nowhere roadside motel not far out of Lubbock that, until they were practically on top of it, Taylor hadn’t seen.

  She went in and checked them in, throwing Taylor’s key at him and silently heading to her room. Taylor hauled his bag to his room and was happy to see that, for as out of the way as this place was, the room was a step up from the place Robles had dropped him at. It wasn’t fancy, but Taylor thought the odds of catching a disease off the furniture were significantly lower.

  Taylor wasn’t as lucky this night as he was during the evening before, and just before daybreak he was jerked away by yet another of his dreams. This time it was a dream about his escape, except he didn’t get away. His dream was filled with torture and pain, until he woke up with a scream.

  By the time eight AM rolled around, he had shaken off the dream and gotten his feelings locked down and was ready to face the day. He knew that probably wasn’t healthy. Several head shrinks had seen him at Walter Reed while he was still recuperating, and to a man they all said he needed to talk about his experience and come to terms with them before he could really move on.

  Taylor had chosen to go in the other direction.

  He was already outside by the car, waiting, when Whitaker came out of her room. She seemed briefly surprised to see him, but didn’t say anything. The mutual silence continued on their short drive from the motel to the crime scene.

  Even before they pulled up onto the small driveway heading off the country road, it was clear something bad had happened. There was a giant hole in the hillside, and the landscape for hundreds of feet in any direction was black and charred, where the grass had burned away following the explosion.

  This contrasted strongly with the other side of the country road, where the asphalt had acted as a fire break. There, the grass was a light green color that stretched back into the horizon.

  The driveway ended in front much shorter than it had when the building was still standing, as brick, charred wood and glass that had once been a guard booth lay strewn across much of the road leading up to the site.

  Whitaker pulled up next to a Sheriff’s department car, with a bored looking deputy pulling himself out of the car to greet them. The rest of the area was silent. It had been almost a week since the incident, so all of the forensic guys and crime scene guys and lookie-loos had come and gone by this point. Yellow tape still stretched around the circumference of what used to be the installation, tied to twisted pieces of chain link fence that somehow managed to survive or stakes where the blast radius had extended past the fences’ confines.

  Near the road, off to one side and down a little way, sat a handful of bulldozers and heavy machinery that would clean up everything. It seemed pretty clear the only thing they were waiting on was the green light from the FBI.

  “You Agent Whitaker?” the deputy said, thumbs hooked in his belt as he walked up to the car.

  “Yes. We just need to go over the site and then we’ll be out of your way.”

  “Ah’d be here, anyways. They’re keepin' one of us on site round the clock until the Army cleans up the mess. There’s some scattered munitions lyin' about, and the first few days we had problems with local kids comin' by and messin' around the crater.”

  “Ok. Well, we'll be in and out quickly.”

  “Sure thing,” he said heading back to his car.

  The way the seat was leaned back in the squad car, it seemed pretty clear he’d been doing more napping than guarding.

  Taylor heard all this peripherally as he got out and made his way onto the site.

  The guardhouse wasn’t much more than a foundation, with chalk circles in various sizes, although none particularly big, drawn on the asphalt in the direction of the road. If Taylor had to guess, those were the various places they found what was left of the person manning the guard post.

  He would be shocked if they found anything at all of the people who had been in the building. Taylor thought back to an episode in the sandbox. His team had been headed to see a local village leader, to find out where the fighters in the area were based, when they took fire from a hill across a small ravine.

  In the Humvee in front of Taylor, the other Bravo in his ODA was in the turret manning the 40mm. As Chambers rotated the weapon and prepared to walk a string of grenades up the hillside where the fire was coming from, Taylor had raised his scope and caught sight of a spider-hole with a Haji climbing out of it. The guy had just stood up and lifted his AK when Taylor saw a grenade hit him dead center mass. When the smoke cleared there was only part of a sandal left behind, everything else was evaporated or turned into such small fragments it’d be hard to distinguish it from the pebbles that littered the hill.

  From the look of the giant hole in the ground, the combined explosion here was a hell of a lot bigger than a single 40mm grenade.

  Whitaker stayed at her car, not wanting to spend more time with Taylor than she had to, leaning against the hood of her vehicle. She lifted her hand above her eyes to shield it from the sun and watched as the annoying man she’d been saddled with walked a slow, steady pace around the crater.

  Strangely, as she watched, he spent more time looking out away from the hole than he did looking in at the destruction. He would stop from time to time and look in all directions and then continue his path. Eventually, he made his way back down to the driveway and walked up to her.r />
  “Ok, I’m ready to see your file,” He said.

  She didn’t say anything, just went to the driver's side rear door and reached in to pull out a soft-sided briefcase. From inside, she pulled out a dark tan folder wrapped closed with a rubber band and small brad holders in the back. She dropped it on the hood of the car and stood back, giving him an annoyed look.

  Taylor pulled off the rubber-band and opened it up. Inside were a series of memos and reports, including a transcript of some of the 911 calls and interview notes with someone from DOD describing the alarm being disengaged.

  On the top of the opposite side was a picture of Samar in his dress greens standing in front of an American flag. A typical shot of a soldier that is usually only seen in family photo albums or on an easel at their funeral.

  They had biographical data on him, most of which Taylor had already heard from Colonel Keene and Samar’s mother.

  The notes themselves were heavy on supposition and very light on details. But it was evident they were certain this was terrorist related, that Samar was tied into ISIS, and he had somehow put together this plan to blow up the armory. There were dueling theories that he was either a long term, Al-Qaeda plant or a self-radicalized extremist.

  The why’s were a lot thinner and the memo somehow made the conclusion that he was both a suicide bomber and still out in the wild, ready to blow something up.

  After twenty minutes, Taylor closed the folder and handed it back to Whitaker.

  “Ok, I’ve seen enough.”

  Chapter 3

  Whitaker looked at the file Taylor handed back, and waited.