Operation Hell Gate - Marc Cerasini [35]
"A king, huh. Bring it on, 'cause that's what I am tonight."
More than a king, Dante felt downright immortal after surviving the last twenty-four hours. A CTU bust and a plane crash — neither had ended him. Now that it was over, Dante was gonna party till dawn.
"Royalty ain't cheap. These girls, they live on Sutton Place."
"Don't worry about money, cholo. Tonight, you talkin' to the ruler."
Dante reached over the back of his chair, pulled the silver attache case from a bin under the backseat. He laid the case across his lap, patted it.
"In here, I'm tellin' you, I've got me a king's ransom."
The gang-banger nodded and licked his lips as Dante unsnapped the locks. Then he lifted the lid. Beneath the stacks of money that Griff had flashed him in Tatiana's parking lot, the one-pound block of C4 detonated.
There were two triggers on the attache case. In the event one failed, the other would still set off the plastic explosives. Griff had activated both before handing over the closed case. The blast sent the SUV's sunroof upward, to dash itself against the roof overhead. The windows and doors flew off the white SUV, sending debris and glass blowing outward in a wide and deadly arc.
Sitting directly beneath the superheated blast, Dante Arete was instantly vaporized. The twitching body of his bald lieutenant — burned beyond recognition and still ablaze — was tossed out of the van and over the concrete wall that separated the traffic lanes. A truck heading to Queens in the opposite direction pulverized what was left of the burning man.
The SUV, billowing orange fire and black smoke, rolled a few feet forward before it was ripped apart by a secondary explosion that spread wreckage and burning gasoline flowing across two lanes of the enclosed roadway.
6
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 A.M. AND 3 A.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
2:02:03 A.M. EDT
CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jamey Farrell divided her attention between the latest Domestic Security Alert on her main screen — now more than two hours old — and a data window on the upper right-hand side of the HDTV monitor, where Dante Arete's movements on the East Coast were tracked by a GPS program that detected the signal from the microchip embedded under the gang-banger's skin.
Evaluating the daily Security Alert was an important part of Jamey's job. The highly classified watch list was compiled by Richard Walsh's staff in Washington, D.C., and issued electronically every evening at midnight, Eastern Daylight Time. The DSA cited every event occurring inside the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii within the next twenty-four-hour cycle that might pose a security threat, or attract the attention of terrorists. Every division of the CIA — including CTU — and all field agents posted in foreign capitals or the embassies of the world also received the DSA "hot list."
There were numerous events cited in the current Domestic Security Alert. In the next twenty-four hours a United States Navy Carrier Group would be docking in San Diego; the President of the United States would fly Air Force One on a courtesy call to a Colorado Springs congressman's district for a fund-raiser; and the Pennsylvania National Guard would conduct maneuvers in the hills of Central Pennsylvania.
Also listed on the DSA was a scheduled movement of spent nuclear fuel rods from the reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania; a charter flight from the Centers for Disease Control transporting dangerous biological specimens to New York City; and the First Lady's motorcade visit to a kindergarten in Falls Church, Virginia, to push the President's education agenda.
Jamey was about to catalog each item as "requiring no further action/CTULA" when she saw the red warning blip blinking inside the GPS data window. Dante Arete's signal had vanished.
"Oh, damn."
Jamey thought the problem might be a malfunction, or perhaps the battery