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  “What the fuck?” a large, bearded cook shouted out, clutching a butcher knife.

  He made a quick run toward Darion and was shot three times in the chest. More screams followed as the cook’s body slumped to the ground and the knife skidded across the tile floor. Two other cooks tried to run back to the kitchen but were shot in the back, moments from reaching the door. Cries and screams erupted through the room. No one knew what to do. A shaking, sweaty manager stood up from behind the counter with his arms up.

  “What do you want?” he cried out, emptying the cash register. “Please. Take it all. Just don’t harm us.”

  Darion looked at the crumpled bills clutched in the manager’s pale, shaky hands.

  “I have come to deliver a message from the Islamic State. Because of your country’s continued aggression against my people, you are no longer safe to eat in your restaurants, to go to your movies, and shop at your malls. The day of reckoning for your crimes begins now.”

  With the GoPro capturing every moment, Darion fired two shots into the manager, sending him spiraling into the stack of dishes behind him. A tower of clean plates fell over, crashing onto the floor. Darion pointed his pistols at the crowd as their screams intensified. Several people jumped out of the way, hid behind chairs, and some under tables. Their behavior and reactions fascinated Darion.

  “Remember, please, that this is nothing personal. But it is necessary.”

  ***

  Craig continued his chase down the alley, closing in on Rasheed just as his green hat flew off. Craig drew his gun and shouted at him to stop. Rasheed instead turned left at the end of the alley and ran to the next block in open view. He then bulldozed between a couple and pushed them out of the way as they tumbled onto the sidewalk, shaken and confused.

  “Stop! FBI!” Craig shouted.

  He pointed his pistol up into the air and fired. Rasheed ran across the two-lane street and jumped over some bushes into the yard of a nearby house. Exhausted, Craig pushed on. Rasheed climbed over a wooden fence into the backyard and ran on. Craig clenched his aching sides and then pulled himself over the same fence, only to see Rasheed rushing through the backyard and hurdling a divider.

  Craig fell into the backyard and maintained his pursuit. Once he made it over the same divider, he watched Rasheed run out into a residential street with such frenzy that one of his shoes flew off. He lost his balance and suddenly rolled onto the pavement. His backpack flew off his shoulders, bursting open onto the street and revealing several pipe bombs.

  Craig closed in with his gun drawn. “Put your hands above your head! Do it now!” he shouted.

  Rasheed seemed undeterred. He recovered, jumped up with one shoe on his foot, and sprinted off twice as fast as before. Craig heard little faint pops from a distance and stopped. He turned again and yelled for Rasheed to stop, just as the man darted out in front of a large red pickup truck.

  The truck's tires screeched across the pavement about ten seconds too late. Its front end struck Rasheed, tossing him into the air. The truck skidded to the side of the road and rammed into a phone pole. After a blaring crash, glass, metal, and plastic erupted on the scene flying across the road. The phone pole tilted to the side with heavy cables dangling in midair.

  Craig ran to the scene, slowing traffic as he held his pistol and badge in the air. Cars abruptly halted in the middle of the road, giving Craig the chance he needed to get to the other side. Responder vehicles’ sirens wailed in the distance. Smoke billowed from the front of the smashed truck. Blood covered the cracked windshield. Rasheed’s body lay in the street, unconscious. The driver sat slumped over the wheel knocked out. As he heard the police sirens getting louder, Craig knew something had gone terribly wrong with the entire mission, and that it had all happened very fast.

  ***

  Darion continued his siege of the diner, terrifying the men and women backed up against the wall, holding each other. Some had their eyes closed and were praying. Others pleaded with the shooter to let them go. Darion heard sirens and realized that he was running out of time.

  He swung around his backpack, pulled out his MacBook, and placed it on a nearby table next to a plate of half-eaten eggs and spots of blood. A USB cord dangled from the MacBook’s side input. Darion was about to plug it into his camera and make the upload, when he realized that he wasn’t quite finished with the carnage. One of his pistols was empty. The other still held rounds. He dropped his empty pistol to the ground and scanned the faces of the people along the wall as their screams rose.

  “You have meddled in the affairs of the Islamic State far too long. And we condemn you to death!”

  ***

  From outside, Patterson suddenly came to. He could hear the wailing of terrified patrons from inside the diner as he struggled to get up. The pain in his stomach was almost too much to bear. A puddle of thick, sticky blood had formed around him on the dry, hot pavement. Most people had fled the area, not sure who Patterson was or why he had been shot.

  He struggled to stand. His legs felt as frail as toothpicks and unable to support his weight. He vomited on the ground and gasped for breath, dizzy and quickly losing consciousness. Despite his injuries, he pushed himself to move. The screams from within the diner intensified, and even with the emergency sirens getting louder, he knew he had to do something before it was too late.

  With one hand against the side of the building, he moved to the entrance, wobbling ahead, one foot in front of the other. He hunched over as blood dripped from his wounds, leaving a trail along the sidewalk.

  He pushed his way inside through the swinging door just as Darion was delivering his final messaged to the terrified patrons.

  “Allahu Akbar!” Darion shouted, pistol aimed and ready.

  Patterson raised his pistol in the air with all the strength he could muster and fired. More screams pierced the air. Then silence. He watched as the blurry figure in front of him collapsed. Darion had taken a shot to the head and joined his victims who lay dead and dying on the bloody tile floor. The boy never knew what hit him.

  After some confused commotion and tears the room went silent, as people clung to one another sobbing softly. Patterson stumbled forward and fell face-first to the ground right at the feet of the shooter. The emergency responder sirens outside grew deafening. Police surrounded the building. Patrons remained low to the ground, aghast in their hiding spots. Patterson felt himself drifting. The pain became less intense, and soon everything went black.

  Fallout

  When Detective Harper entered the scene, he hadn’t ever seen anything quite like it in his thirty years with the Richmond PD. Eight people lay dead in the diner. Three cooks. One manager. And four patrons. The police quickly herded everyone out of the diner and to safety. Paramedics were quickly on the scene and overwhelmed by the carnage. Richmond hadn’t experienced a mass shooting of such size in recent memory, or probably ever.

  Every casualty was pronounced dead on site except for one man with shaggy gray hair and an FBI badge affixed to his belt. He had a steady pulse and was breathing slowly, but had lost a lot of blood. Identified as Agent Josh Patterson, he was promptly taken to an ambulance and rushed to the emergency room. The perpetrator was a young man wearing a camouflaged bulletproof vest.

  “He should have been wearing a helmet too. Eh, Detective?” one of the officers said to Harper.

  Harper scratched his scruffy face and knelt down to recover a small GoPro camera amidst a bag of hundreds of rounds of ammo. He was astonished that the boy had killed only eight. The presence of a lone FBI agent only complicated the situation more. What had he been doing there? Eyewitness reports of a brief firefight outside before the massacre only piqued his curiosity. A frenzy of reporters and news cameras had flooded the scene outside, held at bay by tight-lipped crowd control officers.

  Detective Harper noticed that Darion had failed to upload his video in time. After recovering the busted-up GoPro, he viewed the recording and was met with gruesome sce
nes of the carnage—death captured in real time.

  Harper placed it in a sealed evidence bag to be transported to the evidence room with everything else. The detective did a Hail Mary and then tried to get some ID on the shooter. Nothing on the scene directly linked him to a terrorist network. He had no identification on him. Suddenly, Harper heard on his radio that another man, who resembled the diner gunman, had been hit by a truck, not far from the diner.

  ***

  Craig tried his best to maintain control of the crash site. He called Patterson repeatedly but only got voicemail instead. A sick feeling brewed in his stomach as he heard sirens blare from a few blocks over.

  Police were everywhere on the street around him. Paramedics had the driver of the truck—an unconscious white-haired man—on a wheeled stretcher and fitted into a neck-and-shoulder brace. As they pushed him to the ambulance, one EMT held an oxygen pump over the man’s face and pumped intermittently.

  Rasheed lay in the road unconscious among broken pieces of the truck’s front end and a backpack full of pipe bombs. It was a surreal scene, the second time Craig found himself in the middle of the street amid destruction and chaos in a matter of days. The tide seemed to be turning against him.

  He forbade investigators to touch the pipe bombs and demanded that the paramedics handle Rasheed with the utmost care. If he died, Craig didn’t know where he would start.

  “That man is under the custody of the FBI.” He looked to some nearby police. “I want you to escort the ambulance to the hospital and keep guards posted around his room.”

  He tried Patterson’s cell phone again and again and then pulled his two-way radio from a clip on his belt. Patterson didn’t answer.

  The police were still blocking off traffic as a tow truck pulled up to haul away the pickup truck that had been destroyed against the light post. Craig took pictures of the pipe bombs—five in all—on the pavement. He didn’t know where Rasheed had been headed with the bombs and why, but he was relieved to find a brown leather wallet in Rasheed’s backpack. Inside were Rasheed’s Virginia driver’s license and some credit cards. Nothing more.

  Two police officers had just approached Craig for further instruction when his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Craig pulled his phone out expecting to see Patterson’s number, but instead he saw that it was Assistant Deputy Director Calderon. Everything began to hit him at once: the surveillance, the chase, the diner shooting, the police, the ambulances, and the news media. It had no end. Craig hesitated but then answered.

  “Agent Davis.”

  There was silence on the other end before Calderon’s noticeably restrained voice began. “Your name came on my radar a minute ago, and I don’t know why. But it seems you have a little situation out there in Richmond.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “I’m seeing it on the news now. A total bloodbath. Is this you?”

  “Bloodbath, sir? I don’t think so.”

  “I just received word that we have an agent in the hospital. Your partner.”

  Craig was speechless. “I-I don’t know. We were apprehending two suspects on foot and got split up.”

  “What the hell are you doing out there, Craig?”

  “Rasheed Surkov. He’s connected with the sleeper cell in Minneapolis.”

  “And?”

  “And we have reason to believe that he was planning an attack here in Richmond.”

  Calderon sighed. “We’re sending a field agent team out there. Counterterrorism. We have no choice now but to show a presence.”

  “What happened at the diner? Where’s my partner?” Craig said, dreading the answer.

  “I was hoping you could tell me that,” Calderon said.

  Craig began to move quickly away from the scene. He ducked under the yellow tape and ran back toward the diner.

  “You’re to come to D.C., Agent Davis,” Calderon said. “Immediately.”

  Craig hung up the phone without responding and ran to the diner. Surkov, the pipe bombs, and Calderon were no longer on his mind. All he could think about was Patterson.

  “Please let him be okay,” he repeated to himself.

  When he arrived on the scene, he was unsettled to see so many people gathered around the perimeter of the building. There were more news trucks than he could count and what looked like the entire Richmond police department out in full force. Bodies were being wheeled out of the diner on gurneys with white sheets covering them, stained with blood.

  Craig held up his badge and pushed his way through, trying to get a better look at the diner.

  “Officer!” he shouted to a detective standing amid the chaos.

  “Yes?” His name tag identified him as Detective Harper.

  “Special Agent Davis, FBI. I’m looking for my partner, Agent Patterson. We were in the middle of tracking two suspects. Mine ran away on foot. The other one was here. What happened?”

  Harper looked pale and queasy as if he was suffering from food poisoning, no doubt related to the crime scene directly behind them. The glass had been shot out. The air reeked of gunpowder. Pools of dark red blood were everywhere on the floor of the diner.

  “There was a shooting here, and yes, an FBI agent was involved.”

  Craig’s heart sank.

  “But he’s still alive,” Harper said. “They took him to the emergency room a few minutes ago. Had him listed in stable condition last time I checked. Many others weren’t so lucky.”

  Craig felt relief for his partner but distraught to hear that so many had died. There wasn’t much more to say.

  Surkov’s young counterpart had been sent into the diner to spray the place with bullets. Surkov himself had probably been on his way to a larger target. But where?

  Just as he was about to ask Detective Harper about what hospital Patterson had been taken to, Craig noticed several black SUVs pull up near the building, tires screeching. Several men in suits jumped out of the vehicles and quickly moved in.

  Unbelievable, Craig thought.

  Deputy Jenkins led the pack, wearing dark shades and his typical three-piece suit. He approached Craig and addressed him with a serious tone. “You’re wanted back at FBI headquarters, Special Agent Davis.”

  “You guys move fast,” Craig said. “And what division of Homeland am I answering to now? Secret Service? Coast Guard? Immigration and Customs?”

  “Counterterrorism,” Jenkins responded. “I’m glad to see that you find this massacre amusing.”

  Craig stared into Jenkins’s dark sunglasses, enraged, and raised a finger in his face. “You’re out of line, Deputy Jenkins. And I don’t answer to Homeland any more than I would the Peace Corps.”

  Jenkins seemed amused. “Well, since we’re out here cleaning up your mess again, I say that makes us the authority in the matter.”

  “Get out of my way,” Craig said, pushing past him.

  Jenkins turned around. “You look a little angry, Agent Davis. Need a ride back to headquarters?”

  Ignoring him, Craig found Detective Harper and asked him where he could find Patterson.

  “Richmond Medical Center. ‘Bout ten miles from here.”

  “Thank you, Detective.”

  Without saying another word, he left as the Homeland agents took immediate control of the scene. Even with all his work slowly crumbling in front of him, Craig could think only of Patterson. Still light on the details, he ran to his car and drove off, leaving the madness behind.

  ***

  Washington, D.C., Tuesday

  Craig sat in the small downstairs meeting room with only his Supervisory Special Agent Vince Walker and Assistant Deputy Director Calderon sitting across from him. All blinds in the room had been drawn shut over the glass window looking out into the halls.

  It was a tense two-on-one—the first grilling from his superiors since his return from Richmond. He had little idea what to expect. Calderon had been vague on the phone, but Craig was prepared for disciplinary action.

  Calde
ron sat at one end of the rectangular table with a file in hand while Walker sat in the middle, examining a copy of the same file. Seated at the other end, Craig patiently waited for their verdict.

  He had written a report detailing every aspect of the Richmond investigation. In it, he took responsibility for the outcome, while claiming that their presence had prevented the Surkov brothers from fully carrying out their plans.

  Calderon came across Craig’s conclusion in the report. He shook his head, looked up, and folded his hands together.

  “You make a compelling case, Agent Davis. And your report clearly tries to justify your actions.” He raised one hand and pointed out the window, beyond the blinds. “I was wondering if you happened to catch Mrs. Patterson out there.”

  Craig looked over.

  Calderon continued, “She’s patiently waiting in the lobby for some answers on how her husband took two hollow-point shells to the gut. She wants the bureau to be held responsible.”

  “Kathleen,” Craig said under his breath. In all the commotion, he had yet to talk with her face to face, although she was one of the first people he had called after arriving at the hospital.

  “The doctors tell us that Agent Patterson will be eating from a tube for some time now,” Calderon continued. “But I guess we can thank God that he’s alive.”

  Craig thought back to his brief hospital visit, before leaving Richmond. Patterson had still been in surgery. Craig waited for hours, making calls back home and to Patterson’s wife, apologizing for everything.

  Post-surgery, Patterson was unconscious, on a million drugs, and being closely monitored. Their main concerns were infection and internal bleeding. Now back in D.C., Craig was ready to answer for everything.

  His supervisor, Agent Walker, spoke up. “Your intended target was Rasheed Surkov, but you seem to have completely disregarded his younger brother, Darion. Why was that?”