SIXTY-EIGHT

Two Weeks Later

Agent John Gallagher sat on the edge of a fake leather chair in Joshua Jordan’s hospital room. He was feeling slightly out of place, although Abigail was there, and she was trying her best to make him feel like part of the family.

Debbie had been pumping Gallagher for information about his life as an FBI agent. He patiently shared a few interesting incidents, though he was not a guy to share war stories. So after awhile, Abigail told her daughter to give him a rest. So Cal and Debbie leaned back to watch the TV hanging by brackets from the ceiling. Cal was used to the cast on his broken finger by now. They were laughing at a silly TV commercial. Life was getting back to normal.

“So, you get out tomorrow?” Gallagher asked.

“Maybe,” Joshua replied. He was in multiple casts. As he spoke, he tried to shift his position in the bed without tangling up the IVs. “You know how they play the medical game with you. Waiting until the last moment before you find out if you’re going home.”

“He’s rushing his recovery, of course,” Abigail said with a smile. Then the smile disappeared. “Josh had a hairline fracture of the pelvis. Broken collar bone. Fractured wrist. Multiple lacerations from the shrapnel. One of them punctured his back about one inch from his spinal column. Any closer and he’d be paralyzed.”

“All things considered,” Gallagher said, “you oughta be dead. You’re a lucky guy.”

“No, not luck,” Abigail said with a tender kind of ferocity. “This was a miracle. This was God. The Lord wanted Josh alive.”

Gallagher looked over at Joshua who was thinking it over.

“How can I argue with that?” he finally said. “I’m here, right?”

“Well,” Gallagher said at last. “I’d better move along. There’s a chili dog out there somewhere with my name on it.” Then he got up slowly and stiffly.

“Agent Gallagher,” Abigail said, reaching out and taking his hand. “Thank you. Thank you for being there for my husband. And helping to save our son.”

John Gallagher didn’t like the whole emotional scene, so he nodded quickly and turned to leave.

But Joshua had a question for him. “This Atta Zimler guy. What happened to him? I read in the news that he just disappeared. Vanished. It’s troubling to know he might be out there somewhere.”

When he said that, Cal stopped looking at the TV and looked over at his dad.

“I wouldn’t worry about Zimler,” Gallagher said.

“Oh?”

“No. We have some pretty good intel that the guy may have been killed overseas. Here’s hoping…”

“Anything you can talk about?”

“Not really. I’m in enough trouble.”

“Hey, are you kidding? You’re a hero,” Cal interjected. “I saw them give you that commendation on TV.”

Gallagher smiled. Sure, he got a Bureau commendation. But the next day, in the office, Miles Zadernack dropped a written reprimand on his desk. It read: “…failure to notify supervisor of a request to consult with local police regarding a terrorism incident.” Still, Gallagher didn’t care. He looked at a live Joshua Jordan and his son, who was now laughing at a stupid TV show rather than lying in a million pieces. So he knew it was all worth it.

As he stood in the hospital doorway, Gallagher turned to say one last thing. It could have sounded perfunctory. It was probably said by all the agents to all the other families who had ever been traumatized. But this time, Gallagher meant it in a way he’d never meant it before.

“You know,” he started to say. But right then he was surprised at how he had to fight a little to keep it together and not get choked up. “You people…you’re the real heroes here. Just wanted you to know that.”

Then he gave a clumsy wave and left the room.

On the way down to his car, he was thinking about what he couldn’t share with Joshua Jordan and his family. Classified information about Atta Zimler.

Of course, it was disturbing at first. The thought that Zimler had killed and tortured his way to the Jordan family, and then he terrorized them, yet had slipped right through the fingers of the large nest of NYPD officers at the scene. A clean escape. As if by some magic act.

Zimler knew that the airports and the roads would be watched. Getting out of New York City would be daunting. Which is why he’d planned all along, whether he was able to get the RTS documents or not, on the escape route he would use.

He’d spent an enormous amount of money in advance rigging his exit strategy from the United States. Zimler had prepared a large ocean-going container in the New York harbor and fitted it for human habitation during the Atlantic crossing. It had a chemical toilet, an air circulation system, a small solar-run generator, a satellite phone, and computer and plenty of freeze-dried food and water for the trip. From the outside, it looked like just another corrugated metal shipping container that would be loaded on a cargo ship bound for Rotterdam.

Once he landed in the Netherlands, he would connect with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood that he knew. He would go underground for a few months. Then he would start making his way to Cyprus where the initial fee that Caesar Demas had paid him was still waiting for him in an account.

And it was a smart plan.

Except that Petri Feditzch, in his shipping office in the Rotterdam port, got wind of it. He knew that Zimler had failed in his mission and that Caesar Demas had no more use for the assassin. So Feditzch made a call to some old friends in Moscow. Then, when the ship pulled into the harbor, and Atta Zimler’s big metal container got unloaded, he had a greeting party waiting for him.

It was Vlad Levko and two other Russian FSB agents. They had two reasons to be there. First, they wanted to verify that Zimler hadn’t confiscated the RTS documents himself, while pretending that his mission had failed. But they had a pretty good idea that, in fact, Zimler had returned empty-handed. The only exception to that was the fact that Joshua Jordan had been forced to email an executive summary of the RTS protocols. But it was questionable how useful that limited data might be.

But there was also another matter too. The business about Zimler assassinating several friends of Levko’s in the FSB. That made it personal.

After the shipping container was lowered down on the dock, the Russians got ready.

Levko gave the signal to his two agents. They donned toxin masks, and one of them pulled out a radioactive aerosol. They would swing open the metal doors, and they would spray Zimler in the face. Then the Russians would lock him into the metal container from the outside. It would take Zimler about three hours of horrifying agony before he finally would lose consciousness. Two hours after that, covered with hideous radiation burns, he would be dead.

Laying his hand on the locking handle of the metal door, Levko lifted the handle and swung the door open. He shined a big flashlight into the container.

Levko took a step in. He was almost too wide for the narrow doorway. He stopped inside the big metal container, with his back to the agents. Then he turned, emotionless, and stepped back out into the sunlight.

After looking at each of the agents, Levko’s face erupted into a purple rage. He made a fist and screamed several Russian profanities. One agent grabbed the flashlight and ran into the container, followed by the other agent.

The beam lit up the inside of the container nicely. They could see the chemical toilet. The generator. Some scattered bits of unfinished food rations. A few magazines.

But Atta Zimler had vanished.