Joshua`s Hammer by David Hagberg Read Free Book Online Page A

nothing on the others yet. Same with hair samples. We're running DNA identification tests now, but they won't do us any good unless we can get an arrest out of this." Rudolph did not sound optimistic. "What about your shop? Can you tell me what Trumble was up to that made him and his family a target?"
    "I can't give you the details, but it involved bin Laden. What can you tell me about Jersey City Trucking?"
    "We thought there was a connection, but we ran that operation through a ringer and came up clean last week. There's just nothing there tying it to any of bin Laden's other suspected business interests. Not even remotely." "I thought they had some kind of a financial arrangement with one of bin Laden's banks."
    "For about two months, and that was over five years ago. It's another dead end. Everything about the place stinks, we'll probably close them down under the RICO Act eventually, but there are no terrorists there."
    "Except for Bari Yousef."
    "We're going to toss the business again, but unless we find something tying Yousef directly to bin Laden through the company, it'll be another dead end. We have to play by the rules even if they don't," he said angrily. "This guy could have been working on his own for some reason, or for somebody else close to bin Laden. It's happened before." Rudolph was silent for a moment. "You would know more about that than me."
    "Anything new from INS?" McGarvey asked, sidestep ping the comment. It was hard to focus while blaming himself.
    "Nothing other than what I've already sent you. Yousef got by them, and so did the other three. It's another angle we're working on. We'll try to find out if anyone else beside him is missing from the business." Again Rudolph hesitated for a moment. "It would be helpful if we could come up with a motive. I mean, are you laying this on bin Laden's doorstep?"
    McGarvey looked up as Otto walked in. He waved his special operations officer to a chair. "I just don't know, Fred. On the surface it looks like it, but there's no reason for him to have ordered the hit. If anything it's counterproductive for him. Crazy."
    "Yeah," Rudolph agreed. "There's a lot of that going around these days."
    "Keep me up to date' McGarvey said.
    "It's a two-way street, Mac. Sorry you had to lose one of your people that way. Especially his family."
    "There will be a payback," McGarvey said, and he broke the connection. He looked at Otto who was sitting cross legged on the chair. "You said lavender."
    "Hardly any impurities," Rencke replied, almost dreamily. A number of years ago when he was trying to work out the mathematics and physics of a very complicated link between advanced bubble memory systems, he'd struck on what for him was a very simple, but sophisticated notion: how to explain color to a blind person. Using tensor calculus, the same mathematics that Einstein had used for his general theory of relativity, Rencke had come up with a set of equations that he'd tried out on a blind Indian mathematician, who'd made the observation afterward: "Oh, I see," Reversing the process, Rencke developed a method by which he thought of colors to represent mathematical equations that described highly complex real world variables. Lavender was for very bad.
    "Are you talking about the man that Trumble was worried about at his meeting with bin Laden?"
    "I came up with a dozen candidates I was going to show him when he came back." Otto shook his head in sadness. "But that's not it, Mac. It's the other thing. The bad, bad thing. Bin Laden didn't have Alien killed. At least I don't think so. But one of his lieutenants might have ordered it because bin Laden is probably crazy, and his people want to save their own gnarly hides, ya know."
    "Does he want to negotiate, or what?"
    "Oh, he wants to talk to somebody, all right. But his troops, are passing purple peach pits 'cause they don't know what he wants to do. They're playing with serious fire and they're all wondering if they're going to get