Moonlight Warriors: A Tale of Two Hit Men (11 page)

“You’ll get your money, but I need some additional information.  I need you to find out where Fatima and Dennis
Sandhaven are staying.”

“It might be possible for me to obtain that information for you.  Unfortunately, due to your present situation, I must insist on immediate payment.  I want an additional one hundred thousand dollars.  And you still owe me a hundred thousand dollars for the information that I sent you earlier this evening.”

Damn this miserable little toad, Saud thought silently. I wish that I could kill him myself, but I need to get out of America tomorrow, so one of my brothers will have the pleasure of squashing this toad.

“Agent Troutman?
  Are you still there?”

“Yes, Franklin.
  The money will not be a problem.  I will have the money electronically transferred into your bank account right now.  I’ll call you in a few minutes after I complete the transaction.”

“Good.  And, while you are doing that, I will begin searching for the information that you need.”

“All right.  I’ll speak with you shortly.”

Using his cell phone, it took Saud about ten minutes to transfer two hundred thousand dollars into Franklin’s bank account.  He wondered whether there would be some way to retrieve the money after Franklin’s death later this week.

After completing the transfer, he called Franklin, who then requested some additional time in order to verify that the money transfer had been successful and to complete his research.

While Saud waited an additional fifteen minutes, he became impatient and was about to call Franklin again when his cell phone rang.

“Agent Troutman, I’ve verified that the money has been transferred into my account.  And you will be glad to hear that I found out where they are staying.  I intercepted a text message that Agent David Hummel sent to your FBI superiors and to several computer experts with the NSA, the National Security Agency.”

“Thank you,” he said sarcastically.  “I was aware what the NSA acronym stood for.  Where are they staying?”

“At a Holiday Inn on Hampton Ave at Wilson Street.  It is near Highway 44.”

Saud smiled.  This little toad named Franklin is good at what he does.  I hope that his honor was worth the money that I sent him.

“Do you have a room number at the hotel?”

“No.”

“The room number does not matter.  The information that you gave me will be sufficient.  You have done well.”  Saud surprised himself by adding that compliment at the end.

“Thanks.  Well, I guess that you will be leaving the FBI, but you know how to reach me. 
It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Agent Troutman.”

“Thank you, good night.”

After completing his call with Franklin, Saud called Maulana Hafsa, Shaukat Khan, and Sharif Saffa.  To each of these three persons, he gave the same message: meet me in the parking lot of the Shrewsbury Metrolink Station as soon as possible.  Bring all of your weapons.  It is a night for jihad.

Chapter 16

Double Jeopardy

Jenny and Charlie parked on the lot of the Holiday Inn on the east side of Hampton Avenue.  There was a Drury Inn on the west side of the street and a Red Roof Inn on Wilson Avenue next to the Holiday Inn.  All three hotels did a good business; the proximity of the interstate highway as well as Forest Park and its many attractions helped fill the hotel rooms.

They walked through the lobby and took the elevator up to the third floor.  Charlie and Jenny brought the police officers on plainclothes duty up-to-date on the events of that evening.

“I’m glad that you are okay, Charlie,” Sergeant Mitch Cooper told him.  Mitch had just arrived a few minutes earlier and was going to share the overnight guard duty with Jenny and Charlie.

“Thanks, Mitch.  It was a close call.”

“Hopefully the remainder of the night will be quiet.”

“Let’s hope so,” Charlie agreed.  “We only need to get to morning.  The cavalry is on the way and will be here in the morning.”

The three police officers who had been on duty for the past eight hours departed.  Charlie and Mitch settled into the room with Dennis Sandhaven, while Jenny went into Fatima Cedar’s room.

Fatima looked up from her laptop computer upon which she was intently working. 
“Hi, Jenny.”

“Hi, Fatima.
  I’m glad to see that you are hard at work on that Intelligent Agency program.  Some top computer experts from the federal government are on their way to St. Louis at this very moment.  In the morning, they want to meet with you and Dennis in this hotel’s conference room.  The government wants to bring Intelligent Agency online tomorrow.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, really.  The program is ready, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but everything is happening so swiftly!”

“More has happened than you know about.”  Jenny proceeded to give Fatima a detailed description of everything that had happened that evening.

Fatima listened with rapt attention.  She was shocked to hear about the murder of the FBI official and about Charlie’s rooftop battle with Sam Troutman.

“Charlie is a hero!” Fatima declared.

“Yes, he is,” Jenny agreed.

“Jenny, you must marry this man.  I will allow no dissent.”

“Well, then I guess that settles it,” Jenny laughed.  “In the morning, I will inform Charlie of your proclamation about us.”

“Good.”

“You’ll be pleased to know that a number of other persons share your opinion about Charlie and me.”

“It is not just an opinion.  It is the way things must be.”

“I don’t disagree,” Jenny said.  “He is my partner, m
y best friend, and my hero. I guess that I might as well make him my husband also.”

Fatima smiled and nodded sagely.

In the adjacent room, Charlie recounted the same tale for Dennis Sandhaven and Mitch.  Charlie, though, humbly downplayed his own role in the evening’s events.  Just as Charlie completed his narrative, his cell phone rang.

“Hi, Charlie,” David said.  “I’m coming up in the elevator now.  I’ll be at the door in less
than a minute.  I didn’t want to startle you by just knocking on the door.”

“Good idea.”  Charlie walked over, unlatched the door, and waited for David’s arrival.

After admitting David to the room, he locked the door and latched it again.  Charlie introduced David to Mitch, and the two men shook hands.

“Charlie has been telling us about his gun battle with your former partner,” Mitch told David.  “I can tell that Charlie is being too modest.”

“Charlie is a modest man,” David said.  “He probably saved us all.”

The men conversed for several more minutes.  Then Dennis set up his laptop computer on the desk and logged onto the Intelligent Agency program.  He wanted to make some last-minute preparations for the early morning arrival of the computer experts.

David stood up.  “I’m going to go buy us some sodas and snacks.  I’ll buy some for Jenny and Fatima, too.  Do you want me to stay on guard over there?”

“That will be fine,” Charlie said.  “Mitch and I will hold down the fort in here. I’m going to stay up all night.  I might come over there in a couple of hours and trade rooms with you.”

David grinned.  “I’ll bet that you will.  You don’t want to be away from Jenny very long.”

Charlie laughed and rolled his eyes.

David went out of the room and walked about twenty feet down the hallway toward the alcove containing vending machines.  A woman was standing in the alcove, scanning the various types of candy available in the snack machine.  David assumed that she was a hotel guest staying in one of the other rooms on that floor.

“There are too many good choices,” David said as he approached her.  “I always have a hard time deciding what to buy.”

“You won’t need to make any decisions tonight,” the woman said as she turned to face him.

To David’s horror, she was holding a pistol equipped with a silencer.  She fired three
times.  The first shot hit him in the chest, the second in the stomach, and the third bullet missed and hit the wall.

As he collapsed onto the hallway carpet,
Maulana Hafsa hurried forward, hoping that the door to David’s room was still open.  Seeing that the door had closed, Maulana cursed quietly.  Then she remembered that David probably had a key card in his pocket.

She turned and walked back toward his body.  If he does not have a key, he must have been planning to knock on the door so that the cop could let him back into the room.

Maulana had surprised David, and now she was herself in for a surprise.  In spite of being wounded, he managed to draw his gun from his shoulder holster while Maulana was looking toward the room door.  Now, after she took two steps back toward him, he fired one shot that pierced her thigh.

His gun was not silenced, so the sound of the gunshot reverberated through much of the hotel. 
Maulana collapsed in pain on the floor just a few feet from where David lay.

Charlie came bolting out of the room, his gun drawn as he looked wildly in both directions for other attackers.  He rushed forward, picked up the gun that
Maulana had dropped, and bent down to examine David.

Two seconds later, Jenny came rushing out of her room.  She held her pistol in one hand and her cell phone in the other hand.

“What happened?” she asked excitedly.

David groaned.  “She ambushed me.  She was pretending to buy candy.”

“I don’t see any blood on you,” Charlie said.  “Where are you hit?”

“Thank God for body armor,” David said, placing his hands gingerly on his shirt beneath which was the bulletproof vest.   “I think that I have some broken ribs, but the vest stopped the bullets.”

Jenny went over to Maulana, who was holding her wounded leg and moaning.  “You’ll be all right,” Jenny told the woman.  “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

Jenny dialed 911 on her cell phone, waited for a few seconds, looked at the screen,
then dialed again.   “Charlie, I can’t get a signal.”

“Perhaps your phone’s battery needs recharging,” Charlie suggested as he pulled out his own phone.

“No, it should be fine.  I charged the battery this afternoon.”

Charlie tried calling 911 from his own phone.  “I can’t get a signal either.  This is weird.  We are in the middle of the city.”

“Perhaps the hotel’s walls are interfering with the signal,” Jenny suggested. 

Mitch was watching the doorway of Charlie’s room.  “I will try calling from the room phone.” 

Several hotel guests down the hallway were looking out the doors of their rooms.  One man stepped into the hallway.

“Was that a gunshot?” the man called to them. “What’s happening?”

“There has been a shooting,” Charlie said.  “We are the police.  Go back into your rooms and stay there until we tell you that it is safe to come out.”

“Oh!”  The man went back inside, and the other room doors closed.

“I doubt that this woman is here by herself,” Jenny said.  “There could be a hit team coming in behind her.”

“Who is with you?” Charlie asked.

In spite of her pain, Maulana managed a cackling laugh.  “I am the anvil upon which the hammer is descending.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll know the hammer when you see it,” she continued to rave. “Actually, you probably won’t see it.  You will just die.  You have already seen it, but you don’t know that you have.”

“She is delirious,” Jenny suggested.

“I don’t think so, but I know that we don’t have time for riddles.  I think that a hit team is coming in.”

“I agree.”  Jenny’s eyes continually probed up and down the hallway.

David rose up to one knee, grimacing with pain from the broken ribs.  “I can help.”  He checked his gun.

Mitch reappeared in the doorway.  “The hotel phone is not working either.  I can’t even get a dial tone. ”

Fatima stood in the doorway of the room.  “That woman is Maulana Hafsa.  She is one of the radicals who works at Sandhaven Software.  Every day Maulana had something negative to say about me.  Every day she would sit at the lunch table spouting jihadist propaganda to the other radicals.  She is their little lion.”

Maulana
snarled contemptuously.  “Our little traitor appears.  The hammer is also descending on you tonight, Fatima.”

“How are they jamming both the cell phones and the land lines?” Charlie asked
Maulana.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Primarily because you are likely to bleed to death unless we can call an ambulance to take you to a hospital.”

“Drive me there yourself if you are so worried about me.”

“I’m fairly certain that there is an ambush awaiting us on the parking lot,” Charlie said.  “If we step out of this hotel, we will be shot.”

“Stay or leave, it does not matter,”
Maulana told him.  “You will die either way.”

“Charlie, we are too vulnerable in this hallway,” Jenny said.  “Let’s get back into the rooms until we figure out what to do.”

“Okay.  First, though I want to check the elevators.”  With his gun held ready to fire, Charlie move cautiously down the hallway and approached the elevators.

Then, suddenly, all the lights went off and the hallway was engulfed in almost complete darkness.

“They might be coming now!” Charlie exclaimed.  He half-expected armed figures equipped with night-vision goggles to appear at any moment.

“We’d better get back into the rooms,” David said.

“What are we going to do about her?” Charlie asked.

“In spite of what she has done, I don’t feel right about leaving her in the hallway,” Jenny said. 

“I have some medical training,” Fatima volunteered.  “We can bind her wound with a bed sheet to help stop the bleeding.”

“Good,” Jenny said.  “Help me to get her into the room, Fatima.”

“The hammer has begun its descent,” Maulana snarled.

“It’s good to see that you are not ungrateful,” Jenny said sarcastically.

The bright screens of their cell phones provided a small amount of illumination as Jenny and Fatima supported Maulana as she hopped into the room on her good leg.

Charlie helped David back into their room.  While Charlie locked and bolted the door, Mitch pulled open the drapes and the room was partially illuminated by the street lights as well as the lights from nearby businesses.

“This should help a little,” Mitch said.

“Close those drapes, Mitch!” Charlie declared, realizing the danger.

At that moment, there was a pinging sound as the bullet punctured the glass balcony door.  Mitch lurched backward and then collapsed dead onto the carpet.  The bullet had penetrated his forehead.

“Get down!” Charlie commanded Dennis, who promptly complied.

The two men crouched behind a bed, startled by what had just happened.

“Jenny!” Charlie shouted.  “Mitch was just killed by a sniper!  Stay away from the windows!  Take cover!”

“Okay!”  Jenny called back.  “We’re down behind the beds!  We are all right.”

Two more shots smashed into the wall of Charlie’s room, but neither shot came close to either man.  Based upon the angle of the shots, Charlie tried to determine from where the sniper was shooting.

“I think that he might be firing from the parking lot,” Charlie said in a very loud voice so that Jenny and Fatima could hear in the other room.

“He does not seem to have a good angle on this room,” Dennis observed.  “As long as we stay in this half of the room, I doubt that he can hit us.”

“I agree,” Charlie said.  “However, he might be able to move somewhere that will give him a better angle, so we’d better stay down.”

At that moment, someone in the hallway fired a torrent of bullets into the door of Charlie’s room.  Startled, Charlie drew his gun and fired back, uncertain whether the bullets would penetrate the fairly-heavy hotel room door.