The Bin Laden Plot

She had no idea how long she lay there as her senses gradually returned. She was lying facedown on the cold dirt. The right side of her head was throbbing, and she felt warm blood running down the side of her face. The pistol was gone, and she had the vague recollection of it tumbling from her hand, lost in the darkness somewhere.

Christine rolled onto her back, spotting Mixell standing above her, holding a shovel. He knelt beside her, pinning her to the ground with a knee.

“You stupid bitch. You thought you could hunt me down?”

Christine offered no response as she assessed her predicament. She now had no weapon, while Mixell had a knife and shovel.

“Hopefully, Jake will live,” Mixell said, his voice tinged with amusement. “At least for a while, tormented by the memory of his wife dying in his arms. Knowing that she’s dead because of him.”

He paused and surveyed Christine. “Now, what to do about you? Killing the director of the CIA is going to bring a lot of heat on me. But no more than I’ve already got, I suspect. That’s bad news for you.”

Mixell placed one foot on Christine’s chest as he stood, then placed his other foot on her right wrist, immobilizing her arm.

“There’s a nursery rhyme about five little piggies,” he said, “about one going to the market and another one staying home. But the reality is, all piggies go to the market.” He examined Christine again. “Let’s see. Two arms, two legs, and one head. That’s five little piggies. I’m going to take them off, one by one.” He grabbed the shovel with both hands, holding the blade directly over Christine’s right arm. The light from the house glistened off the shovel’s sharp blade.

“This little piggy went to the market.”

He raised the shovel, preparing for a vicious thrust downward. When the shovel reached its highest point, Christine pivoted at her waist, raising her hips and legs off the ground in a reverse handstand move. She kept her legs together, slamming both feet into Mixell’s shoulder as he drove the shovel downward.

The impact knocked the shovel off course, and it sank into the dirt a few inches from her arm. Christine’s blow also knocked Mixell forward, and he staggered two steps before regaining his balance. He no longer had a foot on her chest.

She rolled to her feet and faced Mixell. He left the shovel stuck in the ground, pulling his knife out instead. She froze for a second, scanning the ground for the pistol, but it was nowhere to be found. They were a few feet inside the barn, with Mixell between her and the exit. She was trapped.

He moved toward her and Christine bolted toward the back of the barn, searching frantically for a weapon or means of escape. She saw nothing useful along the way, realizing to her dismay that there was no rear exit to the barn.

As Mixell strode confidently toward her, Christine spotted a ladder to the loft and leaped onto the rungs, scrambling upward. Mixell sprinted toward her and grabbed one ankle, pulling her downward as he stabbed the knife into her left calf. She kicked him in the head with her other foot, jamming it down into his face.

Her ankle pulled free and she finished climbing to the loft, but Mixell was close behind. There was a railing on the far side of the loft she could jump over, and perhaps she could land without sustaining any serious injuries. Or perhaps she could go up, climbing onto the beams supporting the roof.

She ran toward the nearest vertical beam, which had several hanging hooks screwed into it. Using the hooks as footholds, she climbed upward, disappearing into the darkness. She froze as Mixell walked below, the knife in his hand.

“Christine, where are you? Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he said in a singsong voice.

Christine was shrouded in darkness atop a center beam that ran the length of the barn. It was an easy jump down onto the loft, but a thirty-foot drop to the main floor on each end of the barn. Blood trickled down her left calf onto the beam, and pain sliced through her leg with each step, but the blood loss didn’t seem severe and the pain was manageable. With Lonnie on the loft below her, the only option for escape was to make the long jump to the main floor.

As she debated the odds of landing without breaking any bones, an idea came to her. Mixell was moving slowly down the loft, scouring the area above him. Christine followed quietly, matching his pace, staying several feet behind him, hoping he’d keep moving down the entire length of the loft. Her hope rose as he approached the railing. He was almost close enough to it, and he just needed to step a few feet to either side of the center beam.

He reached the railing and turned around, moving to one side as she’d hoped. She stepped onto a side beam and leaped toward the next one, grabbing onto it as if it were a gymnastics parallel bar, and her body swung down toward Mixell.