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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Cornucopia Press
ISBN-10: 1452839239
Type: Fiction
Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9781452839233
Kirkus said, "Sandom's strength lies in the verve of his story, with writing that has both muscle . . . (and) brains . . . (THE WAVE) races from improbable to crazywild, all in good fun, with Sandom always one step ahead . . . A story with enough manic energy to be worthy of a nuclear explosion."
When Cryptanalyst John Decker of the FBI is assigned to the Joint Terrorist Task Force in New York, he has no idea he is about to be thrust into a deadly plot of eco-terrorism masterminded by El Aqrab, a diabolical killer recently arrested in Tel Aviv whose calling card is to wrap his victims up with incendiary devices designed to produce flames in the shape of Koranic verses. Some call it aesthetic destruction
Following the theft of eight kilos of Highly Enriched Uranium, an ultimatum is issued to the West: Release El Aqrab or a nuclear bomb will be detonated. But, at the last moment, El Aqrab escapes . . . and the authorities never get the bomb
While Homeland Security is convinced it's headed for New York, only Agent Decker - assisted by brilliant and beautiful oceanographer Emily Swenson - believes the bomb's true destination is La Palma, in the Canary Island chain.
Now, Decker and Swenson only have six hours to prove their theory, defuse the bomb, and prevent a mega-tsunami from annihilating the Eastern Seaboard
Kirkus said, "Sandom's strength lies in the verve of his story, with writing that has both muscle . . . (and) brains . . . (THE WAVE) races from improbable to crazywild, all in good fun, with Sandom always one step ahead . . . A story with enough manic energy to be worthy of a nuclear explosion."
Excerpt
Chapter 2 of THE WAVE - A John Decker Thriller by J.G. Sandom
Friday, January 28 – 2:33 AM
Tel Aviv, Israel
The man stood on the balcony overlooking the tranquil sea. He held something in his arms, wrapped loosely in a carpet. Then, with a quick twist, he dropped the object from the balcony. The carpet unrolled and a woman’s naked body unfurled and tumbled downward. The body landed on top of a parked car, a light blue Fiat, crushing the roof with a mighty crash, exploding the windshield. The car alarm began to wail.
Only a few feet distant, an old man walking his dog jumped back, looked up and spotted the figure on the balcony above. He immediately reached into his coat pocket, whipped out his cell phone, and punched 100 for the police.
* * *
Benjamin Seiden slept like a child. Even in repose, it was obvious he was incredibly fit, a testament to his daily workouts and ascetic diet. A handsome man, just turned forty-four, he had a wide uncompromising chin, full lips, a regal if unbalanced nose, and hair of the deepest chocolate, only recently beginning to gray along the temples.
The alarm clock rang and Seiden found himself sitting up in bed. It was 5:30 AM. Beside him, his wife Dara stirred and, with a sigh, rolled over.
Seiden slipped from the bed and padded like a cat into the bathroom. He took a cold shower, as he did each morning, letting the frigid pinpricks rinse the slumber from his skin. Within twenty minutes, he was fully dressed, wearing a pair of cotton khakis, hand-ironed the night before; a pressed white shirt; a tan Egyptian cotton tie; a pair of sturdy English walking shoes, light brown; and a brushed suede cinnamon-colored yarmulke.
Seiden made his way along the hallway. As he passed the first door on his left, he paused and poked his head in, and stared at his two daughters, Rachael and Ruth, in their beds. Ruth, the eldest at six, lay lengthways across the width of the mattress, one hand dangling down, pointing at the floor. And Rachael, his four-year-old, slept in her standard kneeling position, bottom in the air, and her little arms curled underneath her chest. Seiden wondered how she could possible find the position comfortable. She looked like a contortionist.
He stepped into the room and shook his children gently. “Time to get up, sleepyheads,” he said. They moaned and came to life. “And I want you dressed and ready in ten minutes. No dilly-dallying in the bathroom.” He looked pointedly at Rachael.
Seiden marched them both into the bathroom, grumbling and dragging stuffed animals. “Ten minutes,” he repeated. “Ruth, help your sister with her pajamas.” He hesitated for a moment longer, and then made his way back through the hallway to the kitchen.
It looked like it was going to be another beautiful day. From the kitchen, across the breakfast bar and tidy living room, he could see the open, turquoise waters of the Mediterranean shimmering beyond the sea walls. Seiden slipped an apron on and started making breakfast. The girls liked their scrambled eggs made with real milk, slightly overdone. Seiden favored yogurt and fresh honey. And Dara – she couldn’t move without her Turkish coffee. A family of individualists. The New Israel. He fussed about the tiny kitchen, working efficiently, when his wife appeared at the head of the hallway wearing a light pink cotton T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. “Good morning,” he said. “How’d you sleep?”
Dara didn’t actually respond. She uttered a kind of anthropoid grunt, scratched her head, and shuffled slowly into the room. Then she yawned, and he could see her teeth flash for a moment before her thick hair fell about her face, dark as a widow’s veil. “M’n’in’,” she finally ushered up, squeezing a yawn.
Just then the phone rang. Dara straightened reflexively and looked up at her husband. “Don’t forget you’re taking the girls to school today,” she said. “I have a conference at the Women’s Center. You promised.”
Seiden didn’t respond. He simply stared at the bright red wall phone as it continued to ring, again and again.
“Aren’t you going to get it?” Dara asked.
A phone call at this hour was never pleasant news. With a sigh, he picked up the receiver. “Seiden,” he said.
It was Captain Hymie Rubenstein of the Tel Aviv Police. “Sorry to disturb you at this hour,” he said. “Sir, I’ve tripped a flare.”
Seiden scratched at his chin. Hymie was seldom nervous. “It’s alright, Captain. Where are you?”
Captain Rubenstein gave him the address. Seiden wrote it down on a pad of paper on the kitchen counter. Dara continued to stare at him. She stood with her hip out, arms akimbo, frowning. She waited. “I’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up the receiver. Then he took the apron off. He walked back toward his study past his wife, unlocked his desk with the little key he kept in his pocket at all times, and pulled out his Jericho 941PS and holster. The handgun smelled of oil and polished leather. He slung it casually across his back and shoulder. He slipped on the light brown jacket which hung from his chair, and made his way back out into the hall.
Dara was standing in the kitchen. She held a cup of coffee in her hand. As he entered the living room, he turned and looked at her and shrugged a little shrug and said, “I’m sorry, Dara.”
“Is it bad?” she asked, looking down at something on the floor. It was a piece of plastic, a tiny bright red Lego block. She bent down and picked it up.
“Don’t know yet,” he replied. Then he kissed her gently on the forehead. At six feet two inches, Seiden towered over his wife. He pressed her sleepy face between his hands. “But it’s never good, is it?”
It took Seiden only thirty-five minutes to make his way to the little row of apartment buildings on the north side of Tel Aviv. At this hour, the traffic that normally snarled the seaside city streets during the day was blissfully absent. Seiden pulled up beside the building. It was a six-story white affair, typical of the apartment blocks erected north of the city over the last ten years. Anonymous and neuter. A soulless structure. The architect had designed the building so that white blocks of fossil-encrusted sandstone poked out at intermittent levels from the façade beside the balconies. While the design did something to break up the otherwise bland surface, it also afforded anyone the opportunity to scale the building quickly and efficiently. He noticed bars on many of the sliding doors leading out onto the balconies. Some enterprising tenants had even mounted razor wire on their railings, fencing off the stone protrusions.
Three policemen stood at the foot of the front steps, smoking cigarettes. They talked and laughed, ignoring the naked woman splayed out across the roof of the crumpled light blue Fiat only a meter or two away. Despite the fall, Seiden noticed, the body looked strangely intact. Her arms hung over the windshield and he could clearly see that both of her wrists were slashed. Like a suicide.
The three policemen spotted Seiden and stepped up to block his path. He flashed his identity card. The policeman closest to him gave it a cursory glance, then suddenly stepped back, dropped his cigarette to the ground, and issued a sharp salute.
Seiden saluted back. “Is Captain Rubenstein inside?”
“Apartment 2 B. Yes, sir.”
Seiden stared at the policeman with a level gaze. Then he glanced down at the cigarette still burning at his feet. “As you were.”
Seiden mounted the steps. As soon as he had disappeared into the lobby, the young lieutenant turned to his fellow cops and mouthed the word, “Mossad.”
Seiden took the stairs instead of the elevator. He didn’t like elevators. He’d always considered them a waste of electricity. Seiden couldn’t understand why people invariably took the elevator even when they were only going up one flight or two. And then they paid outrageous sums to join a health club or a gym. It made no sense. He was a man who disliked tall buildings, not from vertigo or fear of fire. He simply preferred things in human dimensions.
Captain Rubenstein was waiting outside apartment 2 B. The lieutenant downstairs must have alerted him to his arrival, Seiden thought, because he stood there poised and ready. Seiden shook the Captain’s hand. Rubenstein looked pale and ill at ease. His fingers were moist. Seiden had never seen him so distraught.
“Acting Chief Seiden,” the Captain said, and Seiden noticed how Rubenstein found solace in the salutation. Titles were settling things. They showed you where you stood. They rooted you.
“I’m sorry I had to bother you at this hour . . . ”
Seiden waved a hand and the Captain opened the door to the apartment. They were immediately assaulted by the acrid smell of smoke. Rubenstein moved ahead of him to lead the way.
Policemen and members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) crowded the living room. Near the sliding glass door that opened onto the balcony, Seiden spotted a dead, middle-aged bald man tied to a chair with his back to him. Beside him, kneeling on the floor, his hands handcuffed behind him, was a skinny Arab. He was dressed in traditional Arab garb, with a grey aba, and the red and white keffiyeh headdress of the Palestinian. Two soldiers stood above the suspect, their automatic weapons trained on the back of his head.
Two young boys, no more than ten or eleven, were lashed to another pair of chairs, perpendicular to the dead man by the windows. Seiden could see strange cuts, in the shape of Arabic script, slashed into their skin. They both appeared to be naked. It was difficult to tell. Their bodies were ribbed with glassy burn marks, gunpowder black.
Seiden turned toward Rubenstein and said, “Please have the room cleared, Captain.” Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of off-white latex gloves.
Rubenstein issued the order, and the soldiers and policemen filed out one by one without a word. Seiden walked over to where the Arab was kneeling on the floor. The suspect didn’t look at him. He didn’t even look up. He simply knelt there, facing the floor, as if in prayer. Seiden slipped on the latex gloves.
All of the victims were lined up in a row, with the middle-aged man facing the sea, and the children at right angles to him. A bloody carpet lay on the floor by the glass door leading to the balcony. Seiden approached the bodies of the boys. He touched the forehead of the nearest victim, tilting the head back. It lolled over to the side. No rigor mortis, he thought. He peered into the open mouth. The face was practically warm. He leaned over, taking a closer look at the wounds on the boy’s chest and stomach: carved Arabic script; and some kind of foliation, burned into the flesh. It appeared as if each of the victims had been tortured and then set ablaze with some kind of combustible material. Probably magnesium ribbon, Seiden thought, remembering a high school science class from years before, when he had set a magnesium strip on fire, acetylene bright, spitting and smoking like a sparkler. Around their arms. Around their necks and thighs.
Captain Rubenstein was calling him. “I think you’d better take a look at this.” He pointed toward a video camera set up on a tripod in a corner of the room. “He taped the entire . . . thing,” he added, faltering. “Shall I play it for you?” Rubenstein rewound the tape. It was one of those Japanese models with a mini-screen that popped out to the side. It whirred like a toy.
“Not now,” said Seiden. “Later. I think I can see what happened.” He turned toward the sliding door. “The suspect scaled the façade of the apartment building and climbed up over the balcony. The curtains were probably drawn at the time and they didn’t see him until he was in the room. By then, of course, it was too late.”
Seiden walked over toward the balcony and gazed down through the sliding door at the street below, the stores and small apartment buildings just across the way, the tranquil sea . . . the naked woman lying on the broken light blue Fiat. Without turning, he added, “He probably threatened to kill the children, the two boys, unless she killed herself, sacrificed her own life for theirs.” His voice was slow and steady, emotionless. “Eventually she agreed, and slit her own wrists.” He turned and looked at the immolated figures in the chairs. “Then he stripped the children of their clothes and lashed them to the chairs. Once their ankles and wrists were secured, he used what appears to have been a long, sharp knife or razor blade, flaying the skin on their backs into those tiny curved strips.” He shook his head. “Although he was faced the other way, I’m sure the father knew exactly what was happening to his children. Then the suspect pulled out a roll of metal ribbon and trussed the bodies up in silver coi
ls – first the boys, and then the man – wrapping them up like . . . like presents at Hanukkah. He set them on fire, while they were still alive. You can see that from the soot in their throats. They were still breathing when their skin began to burn.”
Seiden paused for a moment. “Then he took the body of the woman – wrapped in that carpet over there – and tossed her from the balcony onto the car below.” He looked over at Rubenstein. He smiled a flat thin smile. “Well,” he added, “am I right?”
Rubenstein nodded. He closed the side of the video camera, removed it from its tripod, and dropped it into a large clear plastic bag. “I’m sure you know what this means,” he said.
Seiden walked over to the man lashed to the chair by the sliding door. Sheer white cotton curtains wafted around his body like the wings of an angel, a shroud newly thrown. They shivered on the breeze. The dead man’s face looked tattooed, a mask of petrified terror. His brown eyes bulged as if the magnesium ribbon – which had been wrapped, again and again, around his neck – had constricted slowly as it burned, strangling him with fire. He had bitten his tongue off at the tip. It hung like some organic growth from his lower lip. His entire body was covered with burns, bright black, like the carapace of some gigantic beetle.
“Call in the forensics team,” said Seiden. “And have the IDF take the suspect to police headquarters. I’ll have a car pick him up from there.”
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Rubenstein continued. “Isn’t it, sir?” His voice was filled with awe. “Who else would . . . ” He could not finish. He pointed at the boys. “This is his trademark, isn’t it? This kind of writing with fire. I thought he was dead. That’s what I heard. Killed by a rocket strike in Lebanon three years ago.”
“Call your men please, Captain.”
Rubenstein stepped forward and yanked the Arab to his feet. He was still praying. He was still mumbling underneath his breath as the soldiers returned and ushered him away.
Seiden pulled off his latex gloves, wiped his hands across his trouser legs, and glanced down at his watch. His daughters were probably on their way to school by now. Dara would be driving them, along the open and defenseless roadways of the city. And, at home, the blankets and sheets would still be warm from their small bodies, would still retain the memory of dreams.
Seiden looked over at Captain Rubenstein who hovered expectantly by the hallway. Seiden knew only too well what this trademark torture meant. The thin, rather nondescript Arab in custody was the infamous El Aqrab, one of Israel’s most wanted terrorists, responsible for dozens of bombings, thousands of innocent deaths, affiliated with both Hamas and Hezbollah, leader of the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar, with shadowy ties all across the Middle East and Europe, and beyond.
“He didn’t even try to run,” said Captain Rubenstein. “He was waiting when my men arrived, in the center of the room, just waiting like that, on his knees. It doesn’t make sense, sir. Why throw her body from the balcony, alert the world? It’s like he wanted to be caught. As if he’s given up.”
Seiden glanced once more at the two boys in the chairs, their anguished immolated faces, the script tattooed across their flesh. “No, Captain. I’m afraid he’s only just begun.”
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