Ops Files II--Terror Alert Read Free

to be the best.
    He paused on the far side of the street and took a final long look at the hotel entrance, and then removed a disposable cell phone from the pocket of his leather jacket and placed a call. The voice that answered was gruff. Abreeq’s was surprisingly high in timbre, his words soft, the tone almost feminine.
    “It is in place. Unless you have any final requests, I’ll start the timer,” he said.
    “Make it so, my brother.”
    “It shall be done.”
    Abreeq hung up and dialed a different number – the burner cell phone connected to the timing device and detonator. The call went to voice mail, which was blank, but the ringing was the activation mechanism, and he knew that sixty seconds later the bomb in the delivery box would explode. He wished he’d been able to construct a more deadly device, but the locals had been unable to provide anything save the most primitive of explosives. Still, he’d done his best, and it would kill. The only question was how many.
    He would read all about the results of his efforts later, online. For now, he still had two other bombs to place before he was done for the evening.
    Abreeq was climbing onto the seat of another stolen motorcycle he’d parked in a garage a block away when the muffled boom of the bomb shook the ground and triggered the alarms of nearby vehicles.
    He started the engine and putted down the ramp to where the attendant waited, the man’s attention on the street and the scream of emergency vehicles making their way to the hotel.
    All too late, Abreeq thought as he paid.
    “What was that?” he asked the attendant, the helmet hiding his features.
    “Don’t know.”
    Abreeq pulled into the crush of traffic, leaving the downtown area behind. By the time anyone had the presence of mind to seal off the area, he would be long gone, putting the other bombs into position. He wished he could trust the locals with that low-value part of the operation, but he didn’t dare. The authorities couldn’t stop something about which only he knew the details. In his business, secrecy was essential to survival.
    Abreeq was on every developed country’s list of most wanted men, and the price on his head varied from insultingly trivial to a king’s ransom. One slip on even a small mission like this could cost him his life. In order to assure his safety, he’d worked through cutouts, never meeting his employers, leaving the materials in dead drops, and ensuring the targets were, in the end, of his own choosing.
    In another hour Hat Yai would be shattered from the attacks, and Abreeq would have vanished into the ether, his involvement nothing more than a whispered rumor, on to his next operation, the business of terror never-ending, his services in constant demand.
    He checked the time: ten minutes to the next location.
    Four police motorcycles rolled past a truck blocking the street on the far side, their sirens in full wail and their lights flashing. He watched as they roared away, rushing to the crime scene, presumably to close the barn door after this particular horse was long gone.
    He smiled behind the motorcycle helmet’s tinted visor and imagined the scene at the hotel. The nails and screws he’d affixed to the inside of the delivery box would have sliced a swath of death through the bodies of the bloated tourists, who would never know what had hit them. Like fat, spoiled children, they’d believed themselves safe, insulated from the worldwide struggle of which he was an integral part.
    They couldn’t have been more wrong.
    At the next stoplight, he pushed the visor up and wiped sweat from his face, and then lowered it back into place with a small smile. The few existing photographs of him were all dated, and he’d had surgery on his nose and chin in Lebanon, altering his profile so he looked nothing like the images. Not that it was a concern – he’d taken care to wear his helmet when within range of the surveillance cameras he’d spotted early on, so