He turned back. “What do you mean?”
“I need you to drive me. I don’t think I could stay awake the whole way if I drove myself. I’m totally exhausted. If you drive, I can nap a bit on the way.”
“Drive you? What the hell are you talking about? Are you out of your mind? How is that going to locate the bomb?”
“Don’t you see? If we go on the roads Cassiel took going to Washington from here in that van, and then back the same route from Washington in the car he stole, back here to kill me, I will see things I recognize from his memories.
“I will be able to use those memories I saw from his mind like a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back to the bomb. That’s how we find it.”
Jack was near to sputtering in frustration. “And then what?”
“And then I’m going to kill them.”
Jack gaped at her. “As simple as that. You’re going to kill them.”
“Yes.”
“You held a brain in your hands, and you saw a second atomic bomb that’s now in a building somewhere in Washington, DC.”
“That’s right. Are you going to help me or not?”
The whole thing was so crazy he could hardly keep his composure.
“Better yet, I’ll call in help and have a tactical force go with us. They will be able to handle the situation once we get there and find the place.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“You think I’m going to trust the same kind of people who had me in chains and wanted me to confess to being one of these terrorists? Fuck them. Fuck them all.”
“Angela, for god’s sake, this is different! We’re going to need a tactical team. They’re the only ones who can handle a situation like this.”
“Listen to me, Jack. I saw everything Cassiel saw. The bomb is ready. They have the electrical equipment attached to fire the exploding bridgewire to detonate the bomb. It’s ready now.
“They have observation points from windows. They have lookouts on the street. If they so much as see a SWAT team doing a drug raid down the street, they will blow the bomb. They will not risk failure. They will not delay. If they get so much as a whiff of something wrong, they will detonate the bomb.”
“But if the team—”
“They have a dead man’s switch—a man sitting on a metal chair that’s wired to the electrical supply. If an assault team rushes the place and he moves it will detonate the nuke.
“It’s all wired up and ready to go. They’re only waiting until the scheduled time of four p.m. to set it off because they want darkness settling over the scene in the aftermath to add to the terror, but if they need to, they will go earlier.
“If you call in anyone, they will fuck it up and that bomb will turn Washington, DC, to glass.”
“But the military can strike from a distance. They can send in rockets or if they have to, take down the whole building.”
“Rafael explained to Cassiel how even if the enemy sent in a rocket, the speed of that explosion is not as fast as the detonation of the exploding bridgewire. He said that in a race of microseconds, the nuke will win.”
“But—”
“Look, Jack, this group has been planning for this mission their entire lives. These are the point men. They plan to die in the glorious explosion against the Great Satan. This is the culmination of their life’s work.
“Their commanders have consulted with experts from North Korea to Pakistan on the construction of the bomb to make it as big as possible and they’ve gamed out every conceivable possibility of attack or countermeasure. They have it all thought out and every base covered.
“Those terrorist attacks all across the country were meant to cover what they were doing at the border crossing. They took out that border crossing with ease despite the power of the government arrayed to stop nuclear material coming in over the border. They made it look easy. No one, none of these experts you talk about, even realized that in that attack this group drove two nuclear bombs right across the border, did they?
“The only thing any ‘experts’ or tactical team or whatever you get to go in there are going to accomplish is to detonate that nuke a few hours ahead of schedule. They will get Washington, DC, wiped off the face of the earth.
“You’re thinking exactly like they expect you to think. You’re playing their game, just the way they want you to play it. You can’t win playing by their rules.”
“Jesus Christ, Angela, we have to get experts in there!”
“No, we don’t. I’m telling you that won’t work. I’ll handle the situation myself once we get there.”
Jack took a step back to stare at her. “How the hell do you think you’re going to do that?”
“I’ve already seen everything.” She tapped her temple with a finger. “It’s all in here. I know what the building looks like, inside and out. I know all the people with Rafael. I know Rafael. I will stop them.
“I’m the only contingency they haven’t modeled. I’m the only thing they haven’t planned for. Just like all the killers I find, I’m the wild card they hadn’t expected.”
“Angela, you have to listen to reason—”
“I’m telling you for the last time. I’m not going to cooperate with your fucking experts. They’ll get everyone killed. That’s not speculation, it’s a fact. I’m not going to allow that to happen.
“I’m not offering you a choice, Jack.
“It takes about six hours to drive from here to DC, maybe a little less. That will get us there late morning. We’ll have plenty of time—at least four hours. If something goes wrong, like I get killed, then you can still call in your government people. But I’m telling you, that will be the end of Washington, DC, and a lot of innocent people.”
Jack was shaking his head. “This is nuts.”
But at the same time he could see that what she was saying actually made sense—in a weird, crazy, psycho way. To Angela it made perfect sense. To her way of thinking, Rafael would be expecting the possibility of an attack by a tactical team.
What they would not be expecting, was … Angela.
SIXTY-THREE
“We’re wasting time,” Angela said. “Are you going to drive me, or do I drive myself?”
“No, no,” Jack said, waving off that idea. “With as little sleep as you’ve had since those federal goons picked you up, and then running around in the dark bashing in Cassiel’s skull, you have no business driving right now. We can’t have a nuclear bomb going off because you fell asleep at the wheel. We’ll be better off with me driving. Maybe that way you can get some sleep along the way.”
“That’s my thought,” she said.
Jack ran his fingers back through his hair. “I may be as crazy as you are for going along with this, but since you insist on doing this your way and you don’t have an actual location I could call in, I think it would be better if I was there to help you.”
“That’s why I called you,” she said with a smile.
“We can go in my car. It has a backseat, so you should be able to get some sleep.”
“All right, then, let’s get what we’ll need.” After blowing out the candles, she picked up the plastic casserole bowl with Cassiel’s brain. It was beginning to smell. Red fluid in the bottom sloshed around as she turned toward him. “Do you want this or not?”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I need it.”
She shrugged and took it with her.
Jack didn’t know what she meant about getting what they would need, but he followed her as she carried the brain in the plastic bowl to a door in the hall. She reached up on her tiptoes and retrieved a key from on top of the molding, then unlocked the door. When she flicked on the light, he saw that it was a basement.