“See that expression?” Mike asked.
“Oh,” Greznya said, biting her lip. In freeze frame it was pretty apparent that what looked like a scream of pain had been anything but.
“She’s having the time of her life,” Mike said, turning back to the door. “Gimme a call if it looks as if they’re gonna kill her. I think Gonzales is having too much fun to do that any time soon. God knows Stasia is.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mike stood in front of the glass doors of his room, sipping a cup of coffee and watching the sun come up. It was going to be another glorious Central Florida winter day: fleecy clouds were spotted hither and yon and the sky was otherwise clear. It was supposed to get to nearly eighty today, which was a bit much even for Orlando in winter.
He didn’t turn as the door opened, just took another sip of coffee.
“You want the update on Anastasia?” Britney asked.
“I hope you weren’t watching any of that,” Mike said seriously.
“A bit,” Britney admitted. “And, yeah, it was hard. You know the question that gets me? How many of the girls in the bunker… ?”
“About twelve at a guess,” Mike said, still not turning around. “Sort of. If they knew it was a game, twelve would enjoy it. And, hell, probably one was ready to hit the table knowing it wasn’t a game; there are some masochists who can’t wait to die under the blade. But Stasia’s not that far gone. On the other hand, she knows that at a certain level it’s a game. She knows there’s a strike team ready to go if it looks as if she’s going to be killed. Intentionally, mind you. You play at that level and it’s not real safe.”
“Do you guys ever…” Britney asked, trailing off.
“Pretty close,” Mike said, taking another sip. “The real bitch about it is that he’s going to scar hell out of her. Bastard. No matter what you do you can’t get rid of them entirely. How’s she doing?”
“Oh, she’s spilling all sorts of stuff,” Britney said. “All total bullshit. He’s a lousy interrogator. She started in on DEA and he started naming names of people he suspected were agents. She ‘burned’ about half of them. I checked the DEA database. None of them are agents and a bunch of them are people close to him. It’s going to nuke his network if he tries to off all of them.”
“She’s very good,” Mike admitted. “But getting her to actually break? That’s tough.”
“Do you…”
“It’s her favorite game,” Mike said. “She has a secret and she won’t share it. I… encourage her to share. The last time it was a cookie recipe. Never did get it out of her.”
“With whips and… ?”
“I told you in the bunker I’m not a nice guy,” Mike said, turning around. “And you didn’t believe me.”
“I kinda figured that out after the freighter crew,” Britney said, frowning. “You know, most of those guys were…”
“Innocent?” Mike asked, taking another sip. “Define innocent. Sure, they were just sailors doing their job. In this case, supporting the mujahideen. You think the crew didn’t dance when the Towers fell? You think they don’t want you wearing a burkha, honey? Maybe there were one or two who weren’t complete jackals. Let God sort them out. I don’t have the time or the interest.”
“You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” Britney asked unhappily.
“Glad you finally got that through your pretty little head,” Mike said. “Ready to go drive around in a hot car with a complete bastard?”
“Any particular reason?” Britney asked.
“It’s today,” Mike replied. “I can feel it in the wind, in the water. I can feel it in the depths of my bastardness. It’s gonna be a hot one.”
“Great security,” Mike said as they cruised past Wet and Wild again. An Orange County deputy’s car was parked on the concrete expanse in front of the attraction. The deputy was chatting with two striking brunettes in bikinis.
As he turned onto Universal Boulevard Mike looked over at the tourists. Despite the increasing temperatures, the water was clearly freezing. But the northerners were playing in it for all they were worth.
“Americanus Arcticus,” Mike muttered.
“Say again?” Britney asked.
“Americanus Arcticus,” Mike said, pointing at one little girl who was climbing out of the pool and shivering nearly to death. “Pseudo-human beings from north of the Mason-Dixon line. They’re evolutionarily adjusted to arctic temperatures. The young are more poorly adjusted but by the time they reach adulthood they are impervious to cold.” He pointed to an immensely hirsute man with a gigantic beer belly and beard wearing only a Speedo. The sasquatchoid was jumping off a diving board in a “cannonball” position and when he hit the water the spray reached nearly as high as the rides. “It’s the layers of subdural adipose tissue. Year by year, layer by layer, they build up their resistance even as the rings of trees. As the walrus developed whiskers to find clams in the Stygian depths, and tusks with which to dig them, even thus doth the Yankee evolve blubber.”
Britney was giggling so hard she nearly didn’t notice her cell phone was going off. She pulled it out of her back pocket and listened for a moment.
“Mike, Orange County Services is missing a spray truck,” she said, sobering instantly.
“It’s going down.”
Gabrel Amani had been an employee of Orange County Services for four years. He had started cutting lawns with Mexicans but had managed, over time, to work his way into the sprayer trucks. The hours were bad but the pay was much better and it was sitting-down work.
Gabrel could not be called a sleeper agent because he had not entered the U.S. with the intent of performing acts of terrorism, sabotage or espionage. On the other hand, he had entered the U.S. as a good Muslim who supported the Great Jihad. It was the will of Allah that all the earth be in submission to Allah and the duty of every Muslim to support that goal. If that meant that infidels must die, then infidels would die. If they would simply realize that it was their destiny to be in submission to Allah, they would not have to die. It was their own fault that they had to be killed. The will of Allah was paramount.
Frankly, though, while he didn’t want to kill infidels per se — some of them were quite nice if misguided people — this mission gave him no qualms. The actions of the people in the area they were going to hit, especially the way that women dressed, were simply sinful. There was no other way to describe it. Wiping these sluts from the face of the earth would be a glorious sacrifice unto God. And if he was lucky, he wouldn’t die himself.
He backed the truck up to the loading dock of the Circuit City on Universal Boulevard and parked it. Two fedayeen were already rolling blue barrels up the slope of the dock. It should take no more than ten minutes to load the truck. And then he could go kill infidels and show them that Allah was too magnificent to be defeated…
“Dunn.”
Bob Dunn was having a bad week. Among a billion other things, convincing the FBI to act like adults, making sure that the Guardsmen didn’t go power-mad and “coordinating transportation” for a group of congressmen, and their families, who had decided that they needed to “check out the nature of the threat” at Disney, he’d had to explain to his bosses that there was a group of heavily armed mercenaries running around Central Florida and that, no, they could not be arrested.