population would at last get their own prophet. There was a pool of more than 330 million people with Spanish as their native language.
More than enough to catapult Codyism into a mainstream religion.
20
Agent Fowler studied the body of the dead farmer on the floor of the barn. It was a shame that it had come to this. The farmer had been a patriot. He had paid his taxes and even served his country in the Korean War. Agent Fowler had done his research. There was no way around it though. No war was won without collateral damage. And that was what the farmer had been; collateral damage.
The Director had been crystal clear. Agent Fowler couldn’t use C4 or any other high-tech explosives. The attacks had to appear as if they had been executed by amateurs. If it had been up to Agent Fowler he would have used a drone as the delivery mechanism and chemicals as the weapon. Nothing scared people more than chemical bombs. He understood the Director though, and it also provided him with an opportunity. He had always wondered why terrorists were so ineffective. Despite there being thousands of willing martyrs around the world, most of them never got off the ground. And the few who did launched amateurish attacks that could have been better planned by three-year-olds. The vast majority of wannabe-terrorists got caught planning their silly and naïve operations a long time before they were ready to execute them. The truth was that most terrorists were the losers of society. Stupid morons who could hardly hold down a job at the supermarket. And then the even more stupid media elevated them into rock stars by labelling them terrorist masterminds. Agent Fowler shook his head. Masterminds . If buying a gun and walking into a coffee shop spraying bullets into innocent bystanders warranted the label of a terrorist mastermind, then the media had truly set the bar low. Talk about enabling idiots. If there had been a terrorist with even half a brain then Agent Fowler would have been worried. Luckily they were all morons, petty criminals who, encouraged by social media and left-wing newspapers, saw blowing themselves up as a way to get their fifteen minutes of fame. They were probably too stupid to even blog about their opinions. It was easier to blow themselves up and let the media do the job for them. Because none of the moron-martyrs whom Agent Fowler had read about seemed to be true believers. If they had truly believed in their God, Allah or whatever other gods there were, they would have spent every waking second of their life living exactly as their God wanted. And they wouldn’t have feared anything, because God would of course protect them until it was their time to die anyway. They could have walked out in front of a bus, and nothing would have happened unless their God wanted it to. Agent Fowler couldn’t exactly remember having read that any of the reported martyrs had lived their life like that. They just seemed to have blown themselves up in the hope that such an action would let them into paradise early, let them have their fun with their seventy-two virgins.
Damn losers.
And poor virgins.
Well, today Agent Fowler would be able to test out how much damage an intelligent terrorist could cause; a terrorist who wouldn’t blow his cover by chatting in confidence with friends and family, or revealing his frustration with society on the net before he got ready to execute his plan. He would simply get the job done.
No fuss.
Just blow up the building and get on with it.
His first target was the Washington Memorial Hospital. A lot of the politicians in Washington had relatives and old colleagues there, and it always hurt more when you could relate to the damage. The Director hadn’t expressed it in clear words, he had offered Agent Fowler a way out, told him he could call in a bomb threat if he felt the loss of civilian lives would weigh too hard on him. But Agent Fowler had seen it in the Director’s eyes - he would