Blown Coverage by Jason Elam Page A

resulting wet spurt betrayed his anxiety. “Quit being ridiculous. It’s probably just more instructions. Be a man!”
    With the bag in one hand and the lid in the other, Mohsin thrust open the trunk. Inside were three large backpacks laid side
     by side. A dull matte black handgun lay on the middle pack.
    Mohsin’s knees buckled, and his weight drove the lid down, sealing away the trunk’s contents. Spinning himself around, he
     leaned against the back of the car and began again to breathe in the stale smell of breakfast.
    TUESDAY, MAY 12, 7:45 P.M. MDT
LONE TREE, COLORADO
    Abdullah Muhammad’s contact had come earlier in the day via a series of coded text messages. When the first one had beeped
     through and he had seen the gibberish written there, a surge of adrenaline had rushed through his body. After all the waiting,
     waiting, waiting, with a flick of Allah’s hand and a message across his cell phone screen, his time had finally come!
    Abdullah had immediately pulled his patrol car into a Burger King parking lot. After copying the messages down in his notebook,
     he had quickly deleted the texts from his cell phone. The page was then torn out of the notebook and tucked down deep in his
     wallet.
    Finishing out his shift that day had taken what seemed an eternity—making the stops, writing the tickets, taking the reports.
     When he finally walked out of the precinct, he did it knowing that he would never step foot back in.
    At first, rather than just not showing up anymore, Abdullah had thought of quitting the police force or taking a leave of
     absence. However, both of those options would require him to give up his badge, and he really wanted to keep that useful piece
     of hardware for the activities to come. So Abdullah simply became a ghost instead.
    He drove his car from the precinct out to Denver International Airport, where he parked it in a long-term lot. After changing
     clothes in his car and stuffing his old clothes under the seat, he pulled a baseball cap low onto his head and walked to the
     terminal. There he caught a cab. He directed the taxi to drop him off downtown, where he picked up the light rail F line and
     rode it south to its termination in Lone Tree. From there it was a quick walk to an apartment he had kept rented for the past
     two years but had as yet never slept in.
    This trendy singles location served Abdullah’s needs perfectly. The area was filled with high turnover apartments and condos
     that were populated by young professionals who cherished their anonymity. And because of the nearby light rail, Abdullah could
     keep the car he had purchased for this second life parked in the same place for a week at a time without raising any suspicions.
    As the key turned the lock and the latch clicked, Abdullah felt that he was opening the door to a new beginning—his true person.
     Without bothering to lock the door behind him, he strode through the entryway, past the bare living room walls, and right
     to the bookshelf by the sliding glass door. He pulled out his Everyman’s Library edition of Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy and picked up a yellow pad of paper that he kept on the bookshelf. Both items he took to the glass dining table. Abdullah
     then pulled out his wallet and retrieved the coded message. Impulsively, he pressed the piece of paper to his lips. All the years of waiting have finally come to an end.
    The first two numbers told him to open to chapter 57. Then, using the text of the book as his key, he proceeded to decipher
     the code. His heel tapped rapidly in anticipation as he worked. Slow down; slow down, he chastised himself. Now is not the time to be making mistakes.
    With each new phrase his excitement grew as his destiny was revealed to him. It wasn’t until he got to the end of the fifty-plus-word
     message that the full brutal force of what he was being asked to do hit him.
    Abdullah was ashamed to admit it, but he was rocked. He had known he would be asked