Midday, as the Jesus Assassin strikes the 8th Imam
The three investigators opened the doors to their rental SUV and got out in front of the picturesque cabin. Although it was a hot day, most of the area around the quaint home was shaded by trees. Knox approached the front door somewhat carefully as he looked around for any signs that the man or a relative might still be around the home. Seeing nothing to cause alarm, the other two joined Knox as he knocked on the door. When he knocked a second time, the door slightly opened. Someone had forgotten to lock the door the last time they were here; at closer inspection, the deadbolt had been knocked clean through on the other side.
Malik spoke up as he drew his weapon, “So much for needing a warrant; someone’s been here.”
The FBI agents drew their guns simultaneously, and the three agents methodically checked doors, sliced the pie, and gradually cleared the house, room to room.
Once they realized whoever had been in the cabin was long gone, they holstered their weapons, and Beth was the first to speak, “Well I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to take a look around.”
Knox decided he would go explore outside. He went through the house and out the kitchen through the screen porch. He tried to see anything lying around, and he realized one of the screen doors had been forced open on one side of the porch as well. He looked outside in the backyard, and he saw the awesome view of the trees and mountains as a backdrop behind the peaceful pond. Off to one side of the yard, he saw a building that looked like it might be climate controlled, and he decided to go check it out first. As he came up to the door, he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye. When he took a moment to look, whatever it was wasn’t there anymore. He shrugged to himself, opened the black door, and walked inside. As he entered, he noticed the intense humidity at the same time that the motion sensors turned the lights on. Once the lights were on, Agent Knox was able to see a long line of containers; some large, plastic green ones; others made of glass. The glass tanks were obviously more telling of what was kept in these containers – snakes. As Knox walked past the first glass tank, he heard the rattle before he saw it. Obviously the rattlesnake inside was not too fond of his sudden presence in the room. The grumpy little snake got louder as he tapped on the glass. He moved on down the line of shelves, thinking it was probably a bad idea to open any lids on the green containers. He came upon another glass tank, but couldn’t see the resident snake – or any place it could hide in the tank. Although he thought this was odd, he kept going. Finally he came upon some containers at the end that were labeled. One said KING BROWN SNAKE. The other one next to it said INLAND TAIPAN. And finally, the smoking gun, or dripping fang…so-to-speak – which was labeled BLACK MAMBA. Knox wasn’t about to lift the lids on any of these boxes; he would just take the written words for what they said. Satisfied with his discoveries so far, he decided to proceed to the other small building in the back yard. He weaved his way around several roots in the yard, and made his way to the shed. He noticed it was unlocked as well, but when he walked in, he had to flip a switch to turn the lights on. As soon as he did, he saw large compound bows, long guns of various caliber, handguns hanging up on one of the walls, and a machine for loading one’s own ammunition. Over in a corner on a work bench – there was a pile of syringes. They contained some kind of amber fluid inside; he could only guess that it was some kind of snake venom. Agent Knox had enough to suspect whoever was using this cabin was the assassin. He decided he’d go check on the others’ progress; if they weren’t looking for Brady, they were at least looking for someone who’d been using his property.
While Knox had been outside, Malik had been searching for photos of Brady himself. He had been through almost every room, and all he had been able to find were pictures of the photogenic girls in his life…his wife and daughter. Brady had pictures of his little ladies plastered all over the house. Malik still needed to see more pictures of Brady; the one he saw on Knox’s phone struck a chord of familiarity, but he wouldn’t mind seeing the man photographed from a different angle. Finally he came to the study. He saw that there were several pictures in a pile; they looked as if someone had gone through them recently. He picked up several of the pictures, and noticed the man from Knox’s phone in several of the pics, posing with fellow soldiers. He picked up one picture in particular where the sunlight hit his eyes just right; he was standing next to his wife and some other soldier who was obviously a close family friend.
But in the perfect shadow and light, the man’s green eyes jumped off the picture at Malik’s memory, and he yelled out, “Aha!”
He went into the living room to tell Beth what he realized, when Knox came in through the kitchen and almost bumped into Malik.
“Find anything, partner?”
Malik nodded, and said “I realized where I’ve seen Brady before…he’s alive, Knox. And he’s been right under our noses since I visited Langley! We’ve got to go back and nail him.”
Knox was about to tell him what he’d seen in the buildings out back, when Beth yelled to her partners, “Guys…in here!”
When they found her in the living room, she was holding a small leather-bound book open, diving into the handwriting on the pages. Beth was already known to the guys as a speed reader, and she expounded on what she’d already read.
“You guys – this tells us everything. This tells why he’s doing it…it tells us about the twelve imams; it has mock plans that match some of what has already happened to a Tee!”
She closed the journal and laid it down for a minute.
“Now that I have skimmed through some of that, I think I want to take a look at something I thought I saw earlier.”
Beth walked over to the TV, and she turned it on. She turned the DVD player on as she grabbed a small DVD case and showed Knox and Malik the title…‘My Reasons.’ She hit play on the DVD player.
The DVD had started in a place that apparently the Arbiter had either not cared to see or just didn’t know was there. But at the beginning of the video, there were short clips of Brady swinging his daughter up in the air, holding her in his arms, and spinning her in circles. The video montage moved onto times when the beautiful little girl was older, and the redheaded father was seen pushing her down the driveway on her little pink bicycle, letting her go and watching her little redhead coast the rest of the way until she crashed into the bushes…with her mother to the rescue. It continued to a later time when the daughter with the matching green eyes, along with Brady and his wife, were posing out in front of the pond for live video shots of their little family. Brady kept coming and going from the shot, trying to get the video camera to get just the right shot of the three of them. Then there were shots of Brady and his beautiful wife, kissing passionately, not realizing until it was almost too late that their daughter had been capturing the whole thing on camera.
Finally there was a shot of just the women in Brady’s life, sending him a message; probably recorded and sent to him overseas when he was a SEAL. His wife started, and could be seen and heard on the video saying, “Hey Hon…just wanted to send you a message to tell you how much we miss you around here. The bed is awfully empty without you in it…and Jessie misses you something fierce. Speaking of fierce, here she is.” Brady’s daughter entered the scene, holding a black rat snake, speaking in a false Australian accent. “Now you can see as I handle the black rat snake, he sticks his tongue out time and again to taste the air. If this were a black mamba, I would literally be ‘sweating bullets.” The video showed more of the two little ladies laughing and joking, and then yelling to Brady, “Come home soon!”
Then the video went to static for a split second before it cut to a terrorist with his head wrapped in a checkered kafia. The two FBI agents and Malik looked on as the TV screen showed the tragic scene of the terrorist’s rant - and the horrific execution of his little ladies. Before the ultimate gruesome scene hit them in the face, Knox reached out and cut the
TV off. The tension in the room could have been cut with a knife.
Malik finally shook his head and said, “That’s not Islam. That’s just barbaric homicidal maniacs!”
Malik had to walk away from what he had just seen, and wandered outside. Meanwhile, Knox looked at Beth, and her eyes were so full of tears, he thought if she blinked, he could stand under her face and take a shower. She finally stopped holding it in, and she sobbed on Knox’s shoulder for a brief moment. Knox even had a hard time not letting a tear fall himself, but he wanted to be strong for his girl. He ejected the video and picked up the journal and put them in his inner pocket in his sports coat. Then he went back out to the shed and snake house to take pictures of everything. Several minutes later, Knox, Beth, and Malik headed back to the car. Everyone walked away from the house in an awkward silence.
They were all walking to the rental car when a long, slender gray streak of movement lashed up and out from the bushes out in front of the house towards Malik. Knox’s pistol was out in a flash, and bullets riddled the gray serpent until it was a dead mass of scales sizzling on the ground. Agent Knox had almost emptied a whole magazine to make sure that he didn’t miss the black mamba that had reached out for Malik with blinding speed. The sudden break in the somber mood was a welcome change.
Malik spoke up after his heart stopped racing, “Well, I guess I owe you one, Knox.”
Knox laughed, “Well, at least I know why one of the glass tanks in the snake house was empty.”
Malik eventually got to tell them where he had seen Brady before, and that easily made up Knox’s mind.
He put the rental in Drive, and said, “Well gang…next stop – Langley!”
PART THREE
36
Durham, North Carolina
Local University’s Football Stadium
It was a small football stadium for a Division I school, but it didn’t pose any problems for Brady as far as blending into a crowd was concerned. It was around seven thirty in the evening, and the very liberal University had decided to allow a large gathering of The United American Muslims to meet inside their stadium. Brady had donned some loose robes held in place with a large black and white sash tied around his waist. He was strolling around the top perimeter of the upper deck around the stadium. The stadium was set up like a giant bowl, and the top deck was at ground level, where all the vendors and merchants sold refreshments and fan merchandise during football games. Brady considered his presence here a blessing from God; he just happened upon a sign advertising the event as he drove into the North Carolina town of Durham to stop for lunch. He was amazed at the sheer volume of people in attendance – he had no idea that Islam had spread so rampant among Americans; especially in the South! Brady had acquired his current outfit by ‘borrowing’ it from a student outside the gates of the stadium, shouting out blasphemous messages about Allah, and how He will judge the United States soon. It didn’t take the assassin long to take a small, discrete detour with the student behind some trees and shrubbery – where he just happened to beat the student within an inch of his life, stripped him of his robes, and casually broke his neck.
Brady was not sure what his target looked like, but he knew he would have a large audience. The assassin decided he would recon the stadium and its layout, and assassinate the featured American Imam when he had his biggest crowd of spectators. Brady was up for a challenge; he thought he had gotten away from the mosque in Richmond way too easily. He was ready to fight his way out of the stadium if he must. He had no qualms about harming these dysfunctional, brainwashed Americans who had supposedly ‘found Allah’. Brady couldn’t help but laugh to himself as he observed the many students and other American citizens (mostly white Americans) walking around wearing robes and turbans. Brady thought it looked like some kind of bathrobe convention. He could hear whisperings and conversations around him in both English and Arabic. It never ceased to amaze him how people who were born in the USA with certain inalienable rights in a country blessed by God – could turn on that God and worship a false god made up by a false prophet. In Brady’s mind, worshipping Allah was no different than worshipping Satan himself.
Brady turned a corner and started making his way down by rows of spectators. As he began to see more of the football field, he could see the stage about three quarters of the way back from the front entrance to the stadium. The stage was surrounded by large frames to hold up stage lights, and the sides of the stage were divided from the rest of the surrounding stadium seating by a large black curtain to either side. There was a podium in the center of the stage, and several cameras aiming towards the podium from various angles in front of the stage. They had also set up two large TV monitors in front of the black curtains, so crowds sitting farther away could still see the Imam once he took the stage. Brady was fascinated by the spectacle of it all; one could tell these were truly American Muslims because of how Americanized and elaborate the whole show was going to be. True Muslims would not waste such money and energy on the entertainment side of Islam. But then again – it obviously turned out the big crowds. Maybe this was how Islam was going to take the US by storm. Brady made it down to the bottom row of the stadium bowl and made his way out onto the field; security was not very tight at this facility.
That is where Brady saw their weakness…the liberal University would spend an arm and a leg for security during college football season; but when it came to the United American Muslims having to provide their own, it was very limited. Brady doubted very seriously anyone in the place was armed besides him. He did think this group was trying to portray the more pacifist side of Islam. That didn’t matter to Brady, though. Blasphemy was blasphemy.
Brady surveyed the stage more carefully, and realized that the metal framework for the lighting stretched up a good 20 feet above the podium, with metal crossbeams holding lights and speakers in a straight line across the top of the stage. Brady could tell by looking at all the equipment that the framework would easily hold his weight. He could visualize his attack in his mind as he traced over the layout of the metal tubing and crossbars on stage with his eyes.
Brady just had to make it close enough to the stage to get behind the curtain, shed the stupid robe he was wearing now, and climb up the metal frame of stage equipment to wait for the precise moment to strike. He had on his token black outfit underneath the robes; he would need it to blend in with the black curtain as he made his ascent and moved across the bars. He nudged past a few robed figures that acted oblivious to his presence. He knew the type of people he’d be dealing with as he would fight his way out of this place; as long as he didn’t get over-zealous and try to take on too big of a mob, he would leave the stadium with nothing more than hard breathing. He got close to the black curtain and peered around his immediate vicinity to see if anyone was paying him attention. Seeing nobody of interest, he dove in through a gap in the curtain and pulled it over behind him. There were no backstage workers because this wasn’t a rock concert. There would be no groupies trying to get behind the curtain, or any roadies attempting to hang out with the band as they warmed up.
The assassin ducked down into the shadows behind the curtain and removed the hideous bathrobe. He pulled his black hood over his head. He didn’t need his night vision, so he left the night vision glasses in his chest pocket. He peeked around a large post holding up one side of the curtain; there was a tall, lean white man with red hair, similar to the assassin’s own hair. He also had a full beard and a small, dark gray turban. The man was Karim Alah-ah Ahkmed, and he was about to address the whole congregation of Muslims in the stadium. The assassin didn’t know if he was going to simply offer prayer (It was not Friday at Midday) or deliver some kind of speech. He saw a woman who looked like some kind of event manager speaking to him, pointing in different directions, but having a questioning look on her face, like she was asking the Imam permission for something. He didn’t wait around to find out what she was
talking about, and instead found an inconspicuous place to begin his climb. He made sure he was in a dark corner of the curtain as he made his ascent backstage. He was slow and deliberate, making sure his large body didn’t shake the metal tubing and bars in any pronounced fashion. Hand over hand, knees slowly pumping in alternating motion, he carefully moved up the metal frame of the lighting like a spider stalking a fly caught in its web. The structure had only shown signs of shaking once or twice, but he made it all the way to the top with ease. As he came up just past the top of the curtain, he realized that the crowd probably wouldn’t see him if he stayed on top of the structure because the sky was already dark, and all the light in the place pointed at the center of the stage.
There was a loud squeal through the speakers as the imam approached the podium carrying a small, black microphone. He moved it further out and attached it to the mic stand at the front of the podium, and he cleared his throat. It appeared he was not there to offer prayer; he began addressing the entire crowd in English. The assassin listened for a short time, with some interest.
“Ladies and gentlemen – fellow Americans…Thank you for coming tonight. This marks a new era in our nation. This is just the beginning of a movement that I intend to help spread like wildfire throughout this country. Folks, we are here tonight to show the world that America is ready to embrace Islam. There is no will but Allah’s, and Allah has made it possible for us to assemble like this, in the United States…in the South, no less! I am here to tell you all, blessed followers of Allah, that we all must submit to Allah and his will. His will is to spread the news of his almighty power, and share the word that there is no alternative but to submit to Allah.”