THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (2 page)

The front seats of the Moke, a kind of open-air mini jeep, were baking hot. He started her up without a fuss and made his way along the white, shell-covered driveway of the hotel, out the main gate and into the palmary. He was glad now that he’d left Doris behind. Despite himself, her very presence made him depressed these days, and he felt guilty for a moment as he followed the twisting narrow road between the palm trees. It wasn’t her fault she was sick, he told himself. Of course, the cigarettes hadn’t helped; she’d been smoking since she was fifteen.

As he turned a bend and quit the palmary, the sun blasted down onto his neck and the entire east coast of the island opened up before him. It was an amazing view. The ocean glimmered to his right, gleamed and glistened, with a pale moon high in the turquoise sky. He pulled the Moke over onto the side of the road and got out.

Down the coast, he saw a chevron jutting from the water, like the naked backbone of some beached leviathan. The landscape was littered with boulders, bloated and huge, some over a thousand tons, ripped from the ocean floor and dumped unceremoniously onto the ground a hundred meters from the sea. One hundred and twenty thousand years ago, he thought. It must have been a frightful storm. Terrible in its ferocity. Relentless. As violent as the one that raged inside his heart.

He turned and stared across the shimmering Atlantic, far, far away, at the waves that crawled inexorably to shore, at the pale toenail of the crescent moon which dangled in the sky above him, the slightest paring, almost diaphanous. He knew what had launched the monumental forces that had carved these islands in the stream. It was the subject of his latest book. But despite his understanding, the sight of those great boulders and that distant chevron charged him with a sense of awe. And suddenly, from nowhere, he recalled the ending of a poem he had learned in college, years before –
Dover Beach
, by Mathew Arnold:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dr. White stared across the glittering sea. Then he looked up at the sky, at the pitiless blueness of the firmament. “Dear God,” he said. “What have I done?”

SECTION I

Masjid

Chapter 1

Thursday, January 6 – 4:38 PM

The Quad Cities, Iowa

John Decker, Jr., drove along I-74 in a non-descript tan van packed full of electronic equipment, across the bridge that spanned the Mississippi, from Illinois toward Bettendorf in the Quad Cities, Iowa. A Cryptanalyst Forensic Examiner with the FBI, Decker had been contacted two hours earlier and told to drive out – on the double – to a farm in the little town of New Liberty, Iowa, in order to intercept and decipher some communications. As he drove across the bridge, he stared down at the glassy Mississippi. The river moved lethargically below, wide-bellied and recalcitrant, studded with chunks of ice. It was a cold, gray day. The highway was still covered with smatterings of snow. He passed another semi carrying feed and realized that he hadn’t been back to Iowa for almost fourteen months. A long time. Yet nothing had changed. Rock Island looked the same, despite the thinning of the military base. The bridge still needed painting. The river still rolled inexorably toward New Orleans. He pulled into the right lane, a dozen yards or so in front of the truck, and tried to tear his mind away. He should be happy, he told himself. It was rare he was called into the field; normally he was lashed to his desk. But he felt as though the frigid waters of the river were pulsing through his veins. Decker was going home.

As he drove along the highway, Decker tried to recall the details of the briefing he’d been given in Chicago two hours earlier. Ed McNally, leader of the local chapter of the White Apocalypse, his wife Mary, and his brother-in-law Peter Sampson were all holed up inside their ramshackle white clapboard farmhouse in New Liberty. So were the McNally’s three children: Sarah, Rachael and Rebecca. Ed McNally had a long rap sheet, including arson, armed robbery and tax evasion. He and Peter Sampson had been stockpiling weapons at the McNally farm west of the Quad Cities for months. This, plus recent purchases of various chemical fertilizers that could be leveraged for bomb making, had brought the extended family to the attention of the FBI. But since both acts were legal, there was little the authorities could do.

Then, following a recent high school basketball game, Sarah McNally’s boyfriend, Malcolm Burns, had gotten into a fight with the center from the predominantly African-American rival high school from Rock Island, Illinois – a kid named Evan Hudson. The facts were somewhat sketchy but witnesses later claimed that Burns had called Hudson a “nigger” in the parking lot outside the school after the game.

At first, Hudson had just ignored him. His parents were both Evangelical Christians and, summoning up a reservoir of self-restraint, he had tried to walk away. But Burns hadn’t let it go. He had followed Hudson toward the bus the rival team was boarding and before the boy could get inside, had pushed him from behind, called him a “mud pussy,” and kicked him when he slipped on the icy pavement to the ground. A fight ensued. Ironically, it wasn’t even Hudson who responded to the assault. It was his fellow teammates. They streamed out of the bus and tore into Burns and his friends. The mêlée was brief but brutal. Several of the youths were badly injured, on both sides of the altercation. Then, just as it seemed to be winding down, Ed McNally pulled up outside the schoolyard in his battered gold Ford pickup.

McNally had come to pick up his daughter from the game. When he saw what was happening in the parking lot, saw his daughter Sarah in the midst of the thrashing arms and kicks and punches being thrown around her, he jumped out of his truck with a tire iron he kept under the front seat, and weighed into the crowd of teenagers.

It was just bad luck the coach from the rival team, a tall ex-Marine named Aaron Turner, happened to be black. He was in the midst of trying to pull the fighting boys apart when McNally struck him from behind. Turner went down, rolled, and then sprang back to his feet. He tried to reason with McNally but the man seemed absolutely deaf to his entreaties. So he had struck the farmer with a right cross that shook McNally to the core. If Turner had followed up right then, if he had taken the advantage, perhaps it would have ended at that moment. But the coach had simply raised his hands and said, “I don’t want to hurt you, mister. Just take it easy.”

The words only seemed to make McNally angrier. He side-stepped to the right, threw a jab and swung the tire iron at Coach Turner’s head. Turner stepped back but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The end of the tire iron caught him on the mouth and drove his head back with a loud
thwack
. Blood spurted from his face. Two teeth went flying. He raised his hands in self-defense but McNally swung the tire iron once again and brought it down on Turner’s collarbone. It snapped like a Popsicle stick. Turner screamed as he collapsed. McNally kicked him in the face, and kept on kicking him until the combined weight of the boys from the rival high school finally managed to drag him from the bleeding man. McNally backed away. He shouted at his daughter Sarah to get back into the truck. Then he swung the tire iron threateningly at the crowd and laughed. “Fucking coons,” he said. “You ain’t worth my sweat.” With that he turned and walked away. Everyone was in a state of shock. A few of the boys knelt down to help Coach Turner. The rest simply stared dumbfounded as McNally started up his pickup truck and drove nonchalantly out of the parking lot. He never even turned around.

The following day, at approximately 8:30 AM, two local New Liberty policemen – Sergeant Jim Crowley and Officer Alvin Cox – drove out to the McNally farm. They were there to serve McNally a warrant for assault but Mary McNally refused to let them in the farmhouse. Her husband and brother were not in, she claimed. They were in Moline, at a meeting. They wouldn’t be home until late. Rather than force the issue, the local policemen decided to wait.

Eventually, about forty minutes later, McNally and Sampson were spotted driving along the country road back toward the farmhouse in McNally’s battered gold Ford pickup. They slowed down when they saw the police cruiser outside the farm’s main gate. But instead of pulling over when Sergeant Crowley tried to flag them down, they picked up speed and swung around a tractor lane, entering the property from the side. Then they jumped out and ran into the farmhouse, carrying what were later described as “suspicious-looking objects under their arms, possibly automatic weapons, wrapped loosely in plaid blankets.”

Once again, the police approached the house, this time with their guns drawn. When they had come to within a hundred feet of the front porch, McNally appeared at the door with a shotgun in his arms. He asked them what they wanted, and they told him they were there to serve him with a warrant for his assault on Aaron Turner. McNally laughed. The police told him to put the shotgun down and, without a fuss, McNally complied. Then, as they drew closer to the house, a shot rang out from the window of the bedroom on the second floor. Sergeant Crowley went down, a bullet through his forehead. He was dead before he even hit the ground.

The second policeman, Officer Alvin Cox, retreated in a shower of bullets and barely made it back behind his car. He immediately put in a call for reinforcements. Within twenty minutes, another New Liberty police car, two state police cruisers, three local Eldridge and four Bettendorf police cars – including the Bettendorf Chief of Police, Paul “Popeye” Landry, and Sergeant Pat Higgins – had converged onto the scene. Two hours later, an FBI SWAT team had completely surrounded the farmhouse.

After three hours of fruitless negotiations, during which the police had begged McNally to send his children out from the farmhouse, they intercepted a call from McNally to a man named Jordan Fletcher, the Grand Master of the White Apocalypse, based in a small town twenty miles southwest of Sioux City. Fletcher had immediately reprimanded McNally for calling him, especially on a landline. He told him to call back on his cell phone and to use “the book.” Then he hung up. The head of the FBI SWAT team, Don Morgan, had immediately called his office in Chicago and requested a device to pick up cell phone transmissions and a cryptanalyst. Within two hours, at approximately 4:20 PM, as the sun was beginning to set, John Decker Jr. left I-80 and drove up Rural Route 30 toward the McNally farm in New Liberty.

It was a strange kind of homecoming for Decker. The son of a local policeman, Decker had joined the Bettendorf Police Force himself soon after college in Chicago. But after only two years on the force, he applied to join the FBI and was accepted by the Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Following sixteen weeks of intensive training, and a stint with the Racketeering Records Analysis Unit in Washington, D.C., he had been transferred to the Bureau’s office in Chicago where he worked within the Cryptanalysis Subunit, mostly on white collar crimes involving credit card fraud, money laundering, illegal gambling and a few drug cases. His superiors felt he didn’t have the qualities required for a Special Agent. And besides, his abilities seemed better suited to a desk job.

As Decker approached the farmhouse, driving past the TV crews and news reporters crowded around the outer gate, Chief Landry ambled slowly down the muddy, snow-flecked road to greet him. Decker got out and they shook hands.

Just shy of six feet tall, a trifle thin but wiry, Decker had thick coal black hair, pale gray eyes dotted with blue and green specks, and the gentle features of a poet. Only a long white scar, barely visible below the hairline and sweeping along one eye, and a slight lopsidedness to his face, marred his demeanor. He had just turned thirty last December.

“It’s good to see you again, John Junior,” Landry said. “Happy new year.”

“Happy new year, Popeye,” he responded. “Sorry to hear about Crowley. He was a good cop.” Popeye simply nodded. A minute later, Decker was surrounded by Alvin Cox, a dozen local New Liberty, Bettendorf, Davenport and Eldridge policemen, plus a handful of troopers from the Iowa State Patrol. Despite the somber mood, they joked with him about returning to the Quad Cities. “Look what the cat dragged in,” said Sgt. Higgins. “Is this all the Bureau could spare?” Even two local state troopers, Dick and Harry Sloane – identical twins, like mirror images in their brown and light tan uniforms – swung by to say hello. It was clear they remembered Decker with fondness. Higgins handed him a steaming cup of coffee. Then Special Agent Don Morgan of the SWAT team briefed him on the situation. Within minutes, Decker was back in the surveillance van, listening to the conversation between McNally and Jordan Fletcher.

He fell into the cipher. It was always the same process, like one of those 3-D puzzles that looked like some kind of Impressionistic painting until you relaxed your eyes, stared beyond the image, and it suddenly shifted into place. His old sensei, Master Yamaguchi, had called it “Reclining in Chaos.” There was no other way to describe it. Decker had possessed this skill for as long as he could remember. It was like a good ear for music, or the ability to run fast. He simply had a way with numbers and symbols, a gift for finding patterns in seemingly random data.

He took a deep breath and began, as always, with a substitution cipher, replacing true letters or numbers – plain text – with alternate characters – cipher text. He looked for patterns, series and common combinations. Nothing. Since the cipher McNally used was numeric, Decker dismissed traditional Caesar and keyword number ciphers off the bat. On the other hand, he thought, it might have been a telephone keypad cipher. But since McNally was using two-digit numbers – some of which were greater than twenty-six – he set aside this protocol as well.