The Shadows of Terror Read online

  The Shadows of Terror

  Russell F. Moran

  The Shadows of Terror

  Copyright © 2015 by Russell F. Moran – All Rights Reserved

  Coddington Press.

  ISBN 978-0-9963466-0-3

  ASIN B00UU09ODO

  Kindle Edition.

  Editor – Brenda Judy of Publishersplanet.com

  Cover design – Erin Kelly of Erin Kelly Productions.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, I thank my wife, Lynda Moran, for being my first editor, critic, and contributor of great ideas and suggestions. She makes the art of storytelling fun. After my first draft of any novel, Lynda digs in and helps me bring the story to life. She’s also kind enough to laugh at my jokes.

  I also thank my friend and editor, John White for his eagle-eye reading of the book.

  Brenda Judy, my “editor-in-chief” from Florida, gave me guidance and story insight that only a real pro can provide. You can find Brenda at Publishersplanet.com.

  I also thank my readers, the people who are really what a novel is all about. I write for them.

  The Shadows of Terror is a book for our times and about times. It is a tale about terror, about the new war, a war we never would have dreamed of a few years ago. As the story unfolded before me, I was amazed that my morning newspaper added to the book through every draft. The tale is about two people, and how they cope with the new world around them.

  In the book, World War III has begun, according to the President of the United States.

  It didn’t start with a single event; it didn’t begin with a declaration of war.

  The enemy has targeted the United States with relentless and brutal attacks.

  But nobody knows who the enemy is.

  FBI agent Rick Bellamy, a counter terrorism specialist, is engaged in his own war, a war without end.

  Bellamy’s wife, Ellen, a brilliant architect, finds herself at the center of the greatest terrorist plot to date.

  To defeat the enemy, Bellamy has to connect the dots. He has to find patterns – before it’s too late.

  This book is fiction, and any similarity to actual people is a pure coincidence. But you may find parts of the story in your morning paper, because the book starts with real events, and then let’s those events surround the characters.

  Characters – The Shadows of Terror

  Akhbar, Gamal – see Atkins, Charles

  Aldonzo, Giuseppe - Commercial jet captain

  Aadil Ammar - al Qaeda leader, aka Dennis Borman

  Atkins, Charles – CIA Agent, aka Buster

  Auletta, Barbara – Director of New York City FBI Office

  Beaton, Marilyn and Phil – The Bellamy’s upstairs neighbors

  Bellamy, Ellen – Architect and Matt Bellamy’s wife

  Bellamy, Matt – FBI Agent

  Bukdama, Ali – al Qaeda operative, aka Bob Margano

  Bashara, Ali – Radical leader, aka Phillip Murphy

  Bushariff, Muhammed – Muslim cleric, aka Mike

  Buster – CIA Agent

  Carlini, William – Director, CIA

  Cummings, Randolph – Secretary of Defense

  Drury, Mark – Retired Marine Colonel

  Farooq, Ahmed – Al-Qaeda operative

  Fleming, Nigel – Interpol agent

  Hannon, Nancy – FBI Agent

  Lopez, Phil – FBI Agent

  Magda – Angus MacPherson’s assistant

  MacPherson, Angus – Real Estate Developer

  MacPherson, Jane – Angus MacPherson’s daughter

  MacPherson, Margo – Angus MacPherson’s wife

  Margano, Bob – al-Qaeda operative, aka Ali Bukdama

  Martin, Zeke – FBI Agent and Matt’s partner

  McGrath, Carmella – Mayor of Tucson, Arizona

  McClaren, Denise – Suspected terrorist

  Margano, Bob – Executive at MacPherson Security

  Muktada, Abbas – American jihadi, aka Joseph Portman

  Palmara, Frank – FBI agent

  Portman, Joseph – American Jihadi, aka Abbas Muktada

  Siddiqi, Baqir – aka Smitty, CIA Agent

  Simonetti, Mike – Harbor pilot in training

  Turner, Mike – FBI Agent

  Watson, Sarah – Director, FBI

  Weinberg, Benjamin – Psychiatrist and detective, NYPD

  The Shadows of Terror

  Chapter 1

  We all knew it was coming.

  We’d seen it before, yet we chose to believe it wasn’t happening.

  But now our world has changed.

  A morning habit for most people has become a national custom. You turn on the TV, catch up on the weather, and see the latest news of the day or what happened overnight. Some have a TV in their bedroom so they can catch the news before getting up. It’s the way we start our day. It’s a ritual.

  The ritual has changed. It’s changed from a simple way to feed your curiosity to a ceremony of fear. Some have stopped the morning TV fix altogether, and many avoid the radio as well. Fear has become part of our national consciousness, a shared dread for what’s coming next.

  Anchoring a news program is considered one of the best jobs in journalism. You prepare the broadcast, work with your producers, keep yourself in mental shape, and you’re watched by people across the country. It’s a glamorous job and it pays well. So why are anchor people resigning? According to one famous veteran of network news, “I feel like a cop whose job is to tell people they just lost a loved one in a car accident. I feel like a daily harbinger of death.”

  ***

  I wish I could be more philosophical, but that’s [AB1]not my job. Terror is my job. My name is Rick Bellamy[AB2], and I’m a 42-year-old FBI agent assigned to the Joint Task Force on Terrorism in New York City. I love my work and I’m good at it. But I can’t ignore the morning news. I can’t ignore the radio. I can’t look the other way and hope that somebody else will take care of the shit. I take a lot of Maalox.

  What I do is connect dots. Dots are clues. String enough of them together and you begin to see a pattern.

  I spend every waking hour looking for things that shouldn’t be there and asking why things that should be there, aren’t. Some people look at a bunch of scribbled lines and shrug their shoulders. I look at the same scribbles and see patterns. The first board game I ever played as a kid was Clue, and I always beat my parents. It stuck. I live my life looking for clues.

  Recently I’ve seen more dots, more clues than I can ever remember, and I’m having a hard time connecting them. Maybe they’re not related, maybe they’re not clues, maybe there is no pattern.

  Impossible – there’s always a pattern, always. Just this morning I read about a suicide bombing of yet another bus in Israel. In Yemen, a bomb went off at a wedding. An elementary school in Chechnya blew up, sending 25 children to early graves. This is all familiar stuff, sickening but familiar. The only pattern I see is that none of these events involved the United States.

  That was about to change.

  Chapter 2

  My boss, Special FBI Agent Barbara Auletta, is [AB3]a good cop. Barbara is the director of the FBI New York field office for counterterrorism. She spent her early career as a NYPD homicide detective and then joined the FBI twenty years ago. She’s 55, about six feet, slim, and always well dressed. Yes, she can be tough as leather sometimes, but she’s a serious professional, and treats her colleagues with respect. I’ve always liked her, and for some reason she likes me. Maybe it’s because I pay attention when she talks, something I often forget to do with my wife Ellen.

  “Rick, we’re getting a fire storm of messages from headquarters.”

  “I’ve heard. Is something up?”


  “That’s a good question, but I don’t know. It’s not one thing in particular. At this point, I can’t even call it a case. It’s a lot of little things that we don’t like. It’s a lot of little dots out there that nobody can connect. That’s where you come in, Sherlock. I need somebody to pick the fly shit out of the pepper.”

  “Can you point me in a direction, Barb?”

  “A train bombing here, a gas attack there, yet another bus bombing combined with the usual reports of suicide bombings in crowds. These things are happening all over the world. The only difference is the frequency. The events are happening faster and closer together than we’ve ever seen. The big concern in Washington is the target of targets, Manhattan. We need to find a common element to these events.”

  “You mean besides jihadi scumbags?”

  “Rick, that’s inappropriate.”

  “Yes, mother, it’s inappropriate. What do you call them?”

  “Well, okay. I guess jihadi scumbags provides a starting hypothesis, but Washington is concerned that something big may be on the way. Something really big.”

  “Two questions, Barb. Does this investigation have a name? And will I be alone?”

  “Yes and no. Its name is Powerball and your partner will be Agent [AB4]Ezekiel Martin.”

  I prefer to work alone unless gunplay is involved, which it seldom is. But Zeke, as we all know him, is the perfect partner. Some agents are more concerned with their own careers and how they look in front of other agents and staff. But Zeke is a mission-driven pro. He respects my detective work and thinks of himself as a student, not just an agent. He’s a 6’4” black guy with the physical skills of an athlete, having played wide receiver at the University of Michigan. Zeke is also the best marksman I’ve ever seen – a good guy to have your back.

  “You and Zeke will meet me in my office tomorrow at 9 a.m. And Rick, this operation may be dangerous, extremely dangerous.”

  Chapter 3

  The events of 9/11 had become known as a Terror Spectacular, and no one old enough to remember can forget that morning. Just as people recall what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, everyone remembers what they did when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. From the Twin Towers to the Pentagon to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the images of destruction linger in our minds, as they were intended to.

  Terrorists want [AB5]to inflict fear, and 9/11 did just that. With 3,000 killed on American soil during one bright September morning at the dawn of the new century, 9/11 was the Terror Spectacular.

  At the time the first plane hit, I was at a seminar in Quantico, Virginia, at the FBI training facility. Funny (funny?) how a traumatic event can focus your memory. Our instructor had just uttered the words ‘terrorist attack’ when we heard the announcement over the PA system. If I wasn’t in Quantico, I would have been at my desk on the 105th floor of the North Tower. I would have been dead.

  Terror has taken on a new face, a barbaric face that has every commentator searching for words.

  We’ve started to hear a new word on the political scene, an acronym – ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Even though it was founded in 1999, the term has recently become as familiar as al-Qaeda. It’s also known as ISIL, for the Islamic State in the Levant, the Levant being a region including Iraq, Syria, Eastern Libya, and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. The most important thing about ISIS, or ISIL, are the words, Islamic State, an attempt by terrorist creeps to gain a political identity, not just a bunch of disaffected killers. The goal is a caliphate, a state entity run according to the Sharia Laws of Islam, a state that has no pretense toward any democratic institutions. With the constant beheadings and burning people to death, ISIS has given a new meaning to the word depravity. The subjects of an Islamic State are just that, subjects, not individuals, but human beings whose lives are controlled by a religious/political philosophy that got its start over 700 years ago[AB6].

  ***

  My job is to fight these people. It’s not an easy task, or even one that’s possible to define. Over my career, I’ve grown accustomed to dealing with all sorts of bad guys, good old-fashioned criminals who made profits selling drugs or other illegal contraband. The Mafia, for example, was easy to fight. They were driven by greed and a weird code of omertà , a blood oath of fealty to a strong man. Whether prostitution, drugs, or labor manipulation, the Mafia was obvious in its goals.

  The world of radical Islam, on the other hand, isn’t easy to figure out. Mafia types and Mexican drug lords are guided by a simple goal – to amass lots of money. Greed is an easy vice to deal with because it’s easy to understand, even if you hate their goals and methods.

  You can negotiate with those people, even when that negotiation might be as simple as a pre-trial plea deal. They’re opportunistic and driven by material objectives – money or power or both. And you can expect them to act in predictable ways because they’re self-serving.

  How do [AB7]you negotiate with a terrorist? How do you negotiate with someone who has nothing to negotiate? I remember the scary/funny scene in the movie Independence Day where the President of the United States, played by Bill Pullman, asked one of the alien invaders what they wanted us to do. “Die,” was the alien’s simple response. That scene keeps coming back to me. I think anyone in the military or law enforcement has the same pessimistic outlook as I have. How do you talk to somebody who wants you either dead or subjugated?

  And it’s getting worse, a lot worse. My chosen career is to investigate things, to look for dots and connect them to see if there’s a pattern. I’m beginning to see patterns, and they’re scaring the shit out of me.

  Chapter 4

  Barbara Auletta walked into the room and poured coffee. Barbara’s a good leader, and she decided to address the troops, Zeke and me.

  “Al-Qaeda and ISIS,” she said, “are beginning to look like predictable organizations. Before 9/11, their goals were [AB8]incompatible with civilized societies, but there was at least an undercurrent of rationality that guided them. Terror works. People will eventually either bend to the demands or be killed. 9/11 changed the world. Remember how travel once had a few inconveniences, but the hassles were usually caused by bad weather or occasional bureaucratic screw-ups? Now you have to show up two hours early to catch a flight. Before 9/11, the only time you removed your shoes was if you felt a pebble.”

  “I hear you, Barb,” I said. “It used to be a lot of basic police work, and we at least felt like we knew something was up. Then, all of a sudden, things started to change. People we call lone wolves, sole proprietors of their own terror organizations, started to show up.”

  “You mean like the Boston Marathon bombing?” asked Zeke.

  “Yes, a perfect example,” Barbara said. “a conspiracy of two people, two brothers. They simply planted bombs in satchels among the crowds of spectators. The result? Three killed, two hundred and eighty wounded. There was no organizational infrastructure, no cell phone “chatter” to alert us that something was up. Just plant a bomb and count the bodies. And what about that incident in London in 2013? A man just walked up to a British soldier and knifed him to death. The aftermath was on video for the world to see. The killer, covered in blood, calmly explained to the camera why he murdered in the name of Islam. He was just one man. There was no evidence of activities that could have alerted law enforcement. One knife, one corpse. And last October a man walked up to two cops right here in New York City. He took an ax from under his coat and started swinging, hitting one cop in the back of the head, almost killing the guy[AB9].”

  “Barb,” I said, “how do you connect dots when there are no dots? How do you know when a lone actor bursts forth with his own little jihad? How do you stop a guy who wants to die, even if you know what he’s up to? How do you get between a lone wolf and his prey?”

  Barbara put her face in her hands and shook her head.

  That’s where I come in. One of the reasons I’m a good investigator is that I obsess over solving a
case. But lately I’ve felt like a blind man asked to look at nothing and describe what he saw.

  “And how the hell is a lone wolf even a dot?” asked Zeke. “An investigative dot, by definition, is something you know about. So a guy attacks a cop with a hatchet. Fine, a dot, a hatchet-wielding nut. So now what? Every time we see one of these incidents, we try to find out as much as possible about the assailant. That’s obvious. And the one thing we find all the time is evidence of Islamic radicalism in the guy’s background.”

  “And the guy with the ax even had a Facebook page with radical rants all over it,” I said. “That man was actually on our watch list. So what? Do we round up everybody who has radical

  postings on social media? Of course we don’t. Even if the Constitution allowed us to do such a thing, which it doesn’t, would we really want to live in a country where people could be locked up for their beliefs? So we have a radical who posted his ideas on Facebook for the world to see. It doesn’t take too long for one nut to pick up one ax and start swinging.”

  “Guys,” said Barbara, “Washington thinks that something big is coming. I can’t say why, but I think they’re right.”

  Chapter 5

  Ellen and I were having breakfast at our kitchen table as usual at 6 a.m. We used to go out for breakfast all the time, but we realized we usually weren’t that hungry in the morning and would only wind up eating a lot of fatty foods. I love starting my day talking to Ellen because that’s the time of day I’m able to follow what she’s saying – a time before my brain fills up with a case I’m working on. Our conversation turned to a new big assignment Ellen had just landed. For some crazy reason, Ellen gets horny as hell when she lands a big architectural commission, and she just had. Maybe I should help her do some marketing to land more big jobs.