Chapter 83: The more things change...

I was waiting for the Ambassador to reply when I got a red message on my goggles. It showed four groups of two people each were moving toward my house from different directions from around twenty miles out. I got pictures of them all. It was the fucking terrorists who had tried to kill Marlene in the mall. Now they were coming toward my house to finish the job.

Too bad they won’t get much chance to shoot me this time. They are on my turf, and I can do so much to them. After having a huge dry spell because of the shit I have had to deal because of Marlene. Steve and Jane are going to have a field day finding out what new shit I am going to teach myself to do to them with the place in my head.

I didn’t say a word as I went upstairs quickly to get my tablet. When I got to my room, I said softly to delay their arrival as much as possible and notify whoever would make them suffer the most on their way here. I was going to play a good game of smoke and mirrors downstairs. I don’t know if anything was even listening. It didn’t matter, but it would go a long way to explaining things later.

Back downstairs I turned on the TV and my tablet “magically” connected to show live video of the male and female terrorists that were on their way here from all 4 directions.

“My tablet has been doing double duty since I haven’t yet gotten a new phone. I got an alert from a friend that these eight people are on their way here right now. Traffic cameras show they are very heavily armed. This one right here,” I said bringing up the image of the man who shot my phone. “He is the one whose bullet would have killed me and Marlene if not for my broken phone’s shiny armored ass.”

Damn I really need to find a way to thank that woman at Treasury for changing the case on my phone. Probably the only reason the FBI even bought the fact that my phone could even have stopped that big of a bullet from that close of a range. More than one of them recognized the case as soon as they saw it, but never said a word.

“I don’t know how many body guards you have protecting you when you came here to be tricked by your daughter, but you probably want to call someone for more. We don’t have any guns in our house that I know of. Even if we did, they are nothing compared to what these people have with them,” I said as I pinched out on the tablet to show the assault rifles, grenade launchers and some stuff I had never seen before.

I pulled up a map of the area with our house in the center and the vehicles coming at us from all four directions. Right now, they seemed to be getting stopped at stop lights or by random emergency vehicles that would pop up as graphics on the map. The ambassador stuck his head outside. Whatever he said got a man in a dark suit running into the house. He was shown the live map and then started talking into his sleeve.

Well, that explains how low on the totem pole the ambassador is in the food chain. Jawbone microphones have been around for a long time and don’t make you look goofy when you talk.

As we watched the cars coming in, one of them expanded to show camera feeds from multiple angles while the other three car videos were shrunk down. When the stoplight for the car turned green, a big armored personnel carrier made a right turn in front of the terrorist. One camera angle caught the passenger doing something with the assault rifle in her lap. She relaxed when the big armored vehicle put on a turn signal to park outside what looked to be some sort of military show. I could see a desert camouflage painted tank from one of the cameras on the roof of the building across from where the personnel carrier had stopped. Just as the terrorists were waiting for an opening to go around, a large SUV stopped beside them. Another SUV with a big metal brush bar came flying up from behind that rammed them hard into the back of the armored vehicle. Almost before the car started to steam, from the antifreeze dumping out, people in all black tactical gear ripped the terrorist’s bloody stunned bodies from the car and removed their weapons. Another video came up from a body cam one of the people in tactical gear was wearing. It showed that the trunk was as loaded with a lot more weapons than what was in the back seat. In less than two minutes, the car was cleaned out and all three of the black vehicles were going off in different directions.

Video came up on for another of the cars which had gotten got caught in what looked like a funeral procession. The car was directed down a side street by a cop sitting in his car. As soon as the terrorists were on the side street the cop blocked that street with his cruiser. When the terrorist’s car got into the open area between the buildings, where the trucks delivered to the businesses, they had to make a sharp stop to avoid some sort of out of control metal rack. The best camera angle we had made it look like it a woman in a restaurant uniform had lost control it of it. From the rear cam in the police car, it looked like the terrorist’s car suddenly exploded. Glass was going everywhere. Someone rushed into the edge of the frame to be beside the car before the car was jerked off toward where the cart had come from.

The two remaining cars each took up half the TV screen now. They were quickly making toward my house.

The car, which didn’t have the guy who pulled the pistol to shoot me, came up on six different cameras mounted on buildings right at the top of one of my town’s steepest hill. As the car started down the hill, something obviously happened to their brakes. They suddenly were speeding down toward the bottom. Their brake lights never came on.

At the bottom of the hill was the propane gas store where dad used to fill the propane tank for our gas grill. I remember hearing some story about it being closed because of something to do with taxes and a lawsuit against the city. Some federal agency installed a big razor wire fence around it to keep people from messing with anything. Dad said nothing could happen with that property until the courts were done doing whatever they did in cases like these. The only people who went inside the fence went were people who checked to be sure that the huge tanks weren’t leaking any propane.

It looks like this place isn’t going to be a problem any longer.

The terrorist’s car had to have been going over sixty now. One passenger managed to get their door open about a foot before the car hit a bump that caused it to slam shut. They never got to try again.

We watched from four security cameras at the propane store as the car seemed to drive right through the first huge tank and partway into the second before there was a huge explosion. Seconds later our windows rattled as we heard the first big explosion followed by the secondary ones we saw on the TV seconds before.

We were now zoomed in on the last car. We had video of it rolling down the last four blocks towards my house. Most of the video came from security cameras outside people’s houses. We clearly saw the passenger lifting their gun up to point out the open car window and getting ready to shoot. As the car started to stop, the passenger jumped out of the car and ran onto my lawn. Their gun was thrown as far away from them as they could get it while trying to spread out flat against the ground.

“That one driving is the asshole that shot my phone,” I said angrily as I pointed at the TV. “I wished I had a gun right now. I would shoot him in the shoulder to show him how it feels. I am even mad enough to let Marlene play with his dick and then kick him in the balls.”

He was already reaching back into the back seat for the RPG before the car completely stopped. As he was turning to shoot it out the passenger window, we saw something block the view of the camera looking in the driver’s side window. The man in the car was still trying to aim when the RPG launcher just dropped down into the car. We saw the security guys outside hadn’t even made it into view when whatever it was moved so we could see into the driver’s side of the car again. There was the rocket launcher and the man’s body, but the man had no head.

We watched the security guard lifting a Taser at someone and firing. The guard went out of the frame for a second before being knocked back into view. He was out cold before he hit the ground.

A knock came at the side door.

“Everyone ok in there,” our neighbor, Al, asked.

Dad opened the door to find Al there with something that looked like a t-shirt launcher with a big metal barrel as big around as my arm.

I didn’t know much about Al other than he was almost never home. He supposedly did a lot of stuff for movies as some sort of special consultant. With me ignoring everyone but my parents, I never met him or talked to him.

He looked at dad and said, “I think I just redefined hand cannon. Eat your heart out Dirty Harry.”

“Man, you guys suck bad,” he said to the other security guard that was now in the house. “If a man wearing body armor blows someone’s head clean off reloads and is heading toward me, I sure as hell aren’t pulling out a wimpy little Taser. Do you think you can take care of the chick spread-eagled on the lawn that crapped her pants? I bet David has a Nerf gun you can use to go threaten her. If your buddy wakes up, he can borrow David’s Nerf Bat.”

After he saw we were good, he called a number on his cell phone, said something cryptic and then hung up.

To the Ambassador, he said, “You best get your ass, your slut wife and snot-nosed brat in the car in five. I will toss that sack of shit guard in the passenger seat so the other pansy doesn’t break a nail. You’ve got fifteen to get to the abandoned fair grounds before the police and media arrive, otherwise you are fucked trying to explain the shit you; your wife and kid just pulled on each other.”

With that, Al went outside again. Everyone but the ambassador’s wife followed. She was still trying to get into the skirt again.

A tow truck was already hooking up to the car and the woman who had been in the yard was gone. The security guard was put into a beige truck with some sort of sign saying props and a warning about explosives. Some other guy got into the Ambassador’s SUV to drive it to the fairgrounds as soon as the wife got inside.

Al came back into our house with us now that everyone was gone now.

“David I am pretty sure I know you won’t say shit about this to anyone. Should someone ask, just tell them that you got to see some special effects for a movie that was being made right in front of your house,” Al told me like I was a little kid.

I looked at him through my goggles and said, “Yeah sure Al, whatever you say. That fucker shot my new phone. If not for that mil-spec Kevlar and chain mail protective case, I would have bought it. I wanted that fucker to suffer for a long, long time as he gave up his seventy-two virgins to be able to vacation at Gitmo. I could care less what happens to the Ambassador’s career or reputation. His wife is a serious nutcase, and his daughter is on the way to be a certified fruitcake. He is just a twit.”

Al laughed long and hard at what I said. He slapped me on the back and then told me it was time to watch the show.

On the local Fox station, a reporter was just getting positioned to start filming a breaking story.

There in the center was the Ambassador’s limo and three of the cars from the terrorists. Police were scrambling trying to get some control of the scene as they had to have only arrived minutes before the reporters.

“Mary Chan reporting for Fox 15,” the female reporter said. “We are live at the scene of yet another attempted assassination of the American Samoa Ambassador to the Cook Islands and his family.”

The talking head at the station broke in with, “While we wait for police to release further details, we are going live to Robert Marks. He is at S&Q Propane where a car slammed into the propane tanks and caused the massive explosion that rocked the town only a short time ago. We have been given an anonymous tip that these were some of the terrorists on their way to assassinate the Ambassador and his family. The absence of skid marks has the police believing the car didn’t or couldn’t stop. As you can see, the fire department is attempting to prevent any additional tanks exploding. Sources from the fire department will be making a statement as soon as the scene is safe. There appears to not be much left of the vehicle. They have confirmed that both passengers are now crispy critters.”

They played that up, made a comment that the terrorists must have bought the car off Craig’s List, showed some commercials, and then cut back with Mary Chan at the fairgrounds.

“A media relations spokesman for the FBI has confirmed they are taking over the investigation from the local police. What we have found out is that Ambassador’s security team were given mere minutes of advance notice to yet another assassination attempt on the family. Their security detachment miraculously managed to shoot both the driver and passenger of one oncoming vehicle, which veered into the path of a second car carrying more assassins, killing them on impact. A lone female terrorist survived and was taken for questioning by the FBI. Preliminary information obtained by police is that this female assassin was preparing to aim a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, at the ambassador’s limo when she tripped. Her rocket instead fired into the car she had just exited, exploding inside the car.” The video cut back to the studio for some canned details on the Ambassador and clips showing from the mall where the first attempt happened.

Dad was going to turn it off when Al told him to wait.

“You probably want to wait there a few more minutes,” Al told us. “Fun’s not over folks. Hollywood couldn’t do anything this good even in their heyday. Just can’t make this shit up.”

They broke back in right in the middle of a set of commercials.

“Mary Chan, Fox-15 here at the fairgrounds. The FBI is starting a press conference,” the reporter as saying live.

“A search of the female terrorist produced an unencrypted USB thumb drive containing photo surveillance, emails, documents, and wire transfer confirmations. All of the data has been authenticated,” a man in a very expensive looking suit said to the cameras. “Millions of taxpayer dollars were illegally used to secure the services of these terrorists by the Ambassador to assassinate his wife and child. US Government secrets were stolen from the Ambassador’s office that were used by the Ambassador’s wife to place an assassination contract on the Ambassador and their daughter.”

“That is the biggest load of pure bullshit that I have ever heard,” dad said as he turned off the TV.

Al laughed as he said, “Well. Sometimes the most outrageous explanations are closest to the truth. By the time the real FBI gets engaged in this mess, no one will be able to account for the whereabouts of the ambassador or his family. There are lines and people in this world that you just do not cross. They crossed both, many times, and it caught up with them. David is fortunate to be alive. I do know for certain that the people they pissed off don’t hire amateurs.”

Of course, he said that we needed to keep our mouths shut about all of this. It could be very dangerous if anyone knew we knew anything about this at all.

“David this is especially true for you after the way you demonstrated you were the alpha male last night when disciplining that little brat daughter of theirs. People present in that restaurant will remember what you did and how you turned down the sexual offer she presented,” Al told me after pulling me off to the side away from my parents. “I am not sure if it was your scary smart lady friend or someone I hope I never meet, but you have a guardian angel or ten watching after you. Absolutely, no video or photographic evidence exists that shows her face, yours, or that of your parents at the restaurant last night. The videos taken as you punished the girl either has your face blurred or the angle is completely wrong. I know of no one that can do live edits on streaming videos without inducing delay. I hope that I never get placed in any of your guardian angel’s sights.”

I tried to look as confused as possible as I said, “Is that part of a movie you are making. It sounds really way out there. Who the heck would do something like that for me? I am just a kid. Sure I have been lucky as hell not to have died from the various accidents over the years, but it isn’t like I did anything that someone would spend whatever it cost to do the stuff you said happened. That would take lots more money than what people spent to fix up my room after my latest accident. I don’t think Paula had anything to do with it either. She is super smart, but if she could do all that stuff, why would she still be going to high school?”