Jack opened his mouth to respond but was halted by Dominic’s raised hand. “Mission first, Jack. I’m just saying, if I get a gomer in my sights, I’m putting him down and notching it up for Bri.”
Aside from odd looks from his fellow travelers who stared at the GA-4 cask as they passed him on the highway, Frank Weaver’s first day on the road passed without incident. As this was a trial run, this particular cask was merely a shell containing none of the neutron and gamma shields the real thing would carry. Nor did the cask bear any decals or stencils. Nothing to give away its purpose. Just a giant brushed stainless-steel dumbbell riding on a flatbed truck. The little kids had been particularly funny, pressing their wide-eyed faces to the windows as they passed.
Four hundred eighteen miles and seven hours from the Calloway plant, Weaver took exit 159 off Highway 70 and turned south onto Vine Street. The Super 8 Motel was a quarter-mile down the road. He followed a sign, TRUCKS ENTER HERE, into the parking lot and braked to a halt between the yellow lines of a truck slot. Three other trucks had taken nearby spots.
Weaver hopped out of the cab and stretched.
Day one down, Weaver thought. Three to go.
He locked the truck, then did a walk-around, checking each of the padlocked ratchets, then testing each chain’s tension. All were solid. He headed across the parking lot toward the lobby.
Fifty yards away, a dark blue Chrysler 300 pulled into its own spot. In the front seat, a man raised a pair of binoculars and watched Weaver step through the lobby doors.
As he had been doing four times a day for the past two weeks, Kersen Kaseke powered up his laptop, opened his Web browser, and went to the online file-storage website. He was surprised to see a file sitting in his inbox. It was a JPEG image of some kind of bird—a blue jay, perhaps. He downloaded the file to his hard drive’s documents folder, then erased the picture from the site and closed his Web browser.
He found the file, right-clicked on it, and selected “Open with ... Image Magnifier.” Five seconds later a window popped up showing the blue-jay image, which flashed from color to black-and-white before going grainy. Slowly at first and then more rapidly, chunks of pixels began fading. After thirty seconds, all that remained were two lines of alphanumeric pairs—168 of them. Finally, Kaseke double-clicked on the day’s onetime pad to open it up. The decoding was tedious, taking almost ten minutes, but when he was done, he had two lines of text:Sunday. 8:50 a.m.
Open Heart Congregational Church
A Christian church, Kaseke thought. Much better than a library or even a school. He knew where the church was located and suspected that like almost every church in Waterloo, this one conducted several services throughout the morning. Eight-fifty would be about the time people were leaving the first service and arriving for the second. Give the members a few minutes to collect their things and head for the door ... In his earlier reconnaissance, he’d studied the comings and goings of the church’s members. They loved to congregate outside between services and shake hands and laugh and talk about whatever they talked about. Such frivolity. What passed for worship here was a disgrace.
8:50. Yes, it was perfect. There would be a hundred or more people standing on the steps and sidewalk. There would likely be children present, though, and Kaseke didn’t especially like the idea of that, but Allah would forgive him. To sacrifice a few for a larger good was acceptable.
It was Friday night. He would use most of Saturday to scout the locations, then Saturday evening to make sure the device was in order. That wouldn’t take long, he knew. His job would be simple: Plant the device, set the timer, walk away, and find a vantage point to watch the results.
76
THE FIRE WAS MAGNIFICENT, Shasif Hadi thought. Even from three miles away, the sky over the treetops was almost as bright as the sun. And then had come the explosions, great mushrooms of flame and roiling black smoke rising silently into the dark sky, followed a few seconds later by a rumble so strong Hadi could feel it rise up through the road, through the tires of his car, and shake his seat. Through the four of us, Hadi thought, the hand of Allah has struck that refinery dead.