Peter was the expert and his theory sounded and looked right based on the images on screen.
Only he wasn't.
"Any security footage from these buildings? The convenience store, here?"
Peter turned to her and smiled. Even though he had a good ten years on Floyd, their boyish mannerisms were very similar.
"I've already got some ATF foot soldiers on their way over. They’re going to grab any footage they can and head up to the roof of all three of the high-rises. I mean, I severely doubt that the shooter is still up there, but you never know. They’re also going to ask around. If the shots came from here, somebody had to hear or see something."
I beg to differ, Chase thought absently. A hand on a bottle, a hand on a Styrofoam cup with TIPS written on the side. How close was I to being that man?
"You have any friendly judge’s you can reach out to if the building super doesn’t want to give out the footage?" Chase asked.
Peter chuckled.
"This is Washington, Agent Adams and we have a murdered senator on our hands—an act of terror. DoJ and Homeland have pretty much given us carte blanche. Well, technically, they’ve given the Secret Service free reign, but by extension…"
Chase nodded. That would make things easier… and it would also speed up eliminating the buildings that Peter had just identified as the location that the shots were fired.
"Great; So why DeBrusk? Why was he targeted?"
"Not a real popular guy around here. Was heading up a bill to restrict lobbyist power. You know, Bill S-89?"
Chase shrugged.
"No… no idea. I’ve been on, ah, sabbatical for the last little while. Forgot to keep up on my politics.”
"What, you don't get William Woodley in… Quantico, or wherever you're from?" As he spoke, Peter raised a finger to the large monitors on the wall. On it, she saw the same talking head, the bald man with the tan, who’d been on earlier.
“Nope.”
But Chase did think she saw something on the way to the command center, a billboard with his face on it and some text about how in debt the government was.
“Well, he’s our uber-libertarian, quasi-republican, fully hypocritical talking head.”
Chase blinked.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Yeah, neither do I,” Peter said. “Anyways, he seems to get his information about an hour before everyone else. Not sure how. But if you’re looking for a motive, it’s gotta be Bill S-89. I haven’t seen this much—”
The talking head suddenly nodded, and the camera zoomed to a podium with the United States seal on it.
“Hey, can you turn this up? I think the President is about to speak.”
Peter grabbed the remote and increased the volume.
“We are still gathering intel about Senator DeBrusk,” William Woodley’s voice came through the speakers loud and clear. “But at this point, it is not clear if this was an act of terror or just some—we’ll discuss that shortly. But right now, the President is about to take to the podium.”
Chapter 29
Special Officer Pratt was right of course; it was preposterous that the President of the United States of America would be giving a press conference in such close geographical and temporal proximity to an assassinated Senator.
Why the man wouldn’t do it inside the Oval Office, was something of a mind melt for Stitts. Yeah, understood all that show them who's boss rhetoric, the alpha male mentality of the current regime, the never negotiate with terrorists dogma, but this was just throwing yourself in front of a moving car.
Pratt had taken a position at the President’s flank, just out of view of the media, while he had been relegated to crowd control with a much more junior Secret Service Agent.
The crowd itself, which consisted of roughly twenty members of the media and twenty random people that Stitts didn’t recognize, had been funneled into neat, five by eight rows. Whether or not they been vetted before they'd entered, or even searched and patted down, was a mystery.
“This is nuts,” Stitts muttered under his breath.
A collective hush fell over the crowd as the President emerged from the White House and made his way toward the podium. His head bowed, he grabbed the sides of the podium and remained in this pose for a good twenty seconds before speaking.
Anything for a photo-op…
"It is with a heavy heart that I stand here before you today and confirm that not a member of parliament, a good friend of mine, and an excellent father, was taken from us. Earlier this morning, Senator Tom DeBrusk was assassinated…"
Stitts zoned out the President’s words. It was, unfortunately, a speech that he'd heard dozens of times before. It was almost as if the official speechwriter had gotten lazy and had just reused an old speech, simply swapping out the victim’s name.
But he wasn't here to pass judgment on the President's speech or even his policies; Stitts was here to make sure that the man didn’t get his ass shot. So, instead of paying attention to the President, Stitts surveyed the crowd.
Pratt had made it clear that he thought that the president was a target, which suggested that taking out the Senator could have been a ploy just to get the man out into the open.
The President had happily obliged.
If that were the case, it was Stitts’s job as the Bureau’s premier profiler to identify the shooter.
Pratt had called the shooting an act of terror, and while he wasn’t wrong, it didn’t fall into the normal Jihadi suicide mission. Jihadis blew up malls filled with innocent people, or the cowards drove a minivan through crowded streets. They didn’t typically use a sniper to take someone out from a mile away. So, while others might be looking for a middle-eastern male between the ages of twenty and thirty, Stitts was looking for someone different.
He’d already put together a profile in his mind without even thinking about it; the person they were looking for was a young man between the ages of 35 to 45, Caucasian, likely of medium or slight build. He likely had a military background of some sort, which might be evident in what he was wearing or how he was carrying himself.
Stitts scanned the audience for someone who fits this description, his eyes jumping from one camera man to the next.
"We will not, and have never, negotiated with terrorists. This cowardly act of violence will be met with the just and swift justice. We will…"
A flicker of movement on the stage caught Stitts's attention.
It was SO Pratt and the man seemed agitated. Two fingers were pressed against his ear, and he was speaking rapidly.
Stitts cursed himself for not asking for an earpiece from Pratt earlier. He leaned over and gently nudged the junior agent at his right.
"What's going on?" he asked quietly.
The man, clearly trying to listen to whatever message was being shared over the radio, shook his head. Frustrated, Stitts resigned himself to searching the crowd again for any potential threat.
Everything seemed as it was before, which suggested that the threat might be coming from elsewhere. Long range, perhaps, like—
No, he thought suddenly his eyes fixating on one man in the crowd. Something has changed.
One of the camera men had lower his camera—a bulky, archaic thing—from his shoulder and was fiddling with it on one knee. A man fixing his camera, trying to ensure he got the best shot, might not have been strange under normal settings, except this man didn’t look like he had any idea what he was doing. Cameramen usually knew everything about their cameras, every trick to get another minute of battery power, every setting to get the lighting just right; after all, their jobs depended on it.
To top it off, this man didn’t look fit the mold of a cameraman: he was young, late teens to early twenties, maybe, and had dark brown skin and wiry black beard that fell to the hollow of his throat.
The Secret Service Agent at his side suddenly leaned over and whispered in his ear.
"Go—we’re a go! Go, go, go!"
&nb
sp; Stitts looked at the man for a moment, his eyes wide. Then he heard the same instruction repeated through the man’s earpiece, even though it was more than three feet away.
"Go! Go get him! Take him out!"
And then all hell broke loose.
Chapter 30
"This can't be a good idea," Chase mumbled under her breath, shaking her head. The president was speaking about the recent assassination of Senator Tom DeBrusk to a crowd of maybe forty or fifty people. Outside, no less.
"Since when was having good ideas a prerequisite for becoming president?" Peter Horrowitz shot back.
Chase pressed her lips together.
Good point.
With the president’s speech going on in the background, Chase returned her attention to the software on Peter’s computer.
"What if the shooter was farther away," she asked. “Like, further than those three buildings.”
Peter zoomed out of the satellite image that his program had constructed.
"It's possible, but not very likely. Once you get outside of about a half-mile, hitting a moving target without a spotter, or maybe even several spotters, becomes very, very difficult. Especially considering the surrounding buildings, cars, people walking, etc. Even the slightest fluctuation in the wind or temperature can cause a bullet to deviate a few millimeters; a few millimeters from the barrel equates to more than a dozen feet at a distance of a mile or more."
Chase raised an eyebrow and inspected Peter.
He started to blush.
"What? In a past life, I wanted to be in the Army. Even went through the sniper course."
Well, aren’t you just full of surprises, Chase thought. This reminded her of Floyd, and she glanced up at him. The man was still at a computer, looking more like a Secret Service Agent than the few Agents she’d already met.
She shook her head and turned her attention back to Peter.
"How old are you? You can't be—"
A commotion on the monitor on the wall caught her attention and she went silent. The President had stopped speaking and was now surrounded by nearly a dozen Secret Service Agents. She even saw SO Pratt as part of this group; he was still shouting commands and pointing at something when he led the President back to safety.
“What the hell?”
The camera suddenly turned to the crowd, but before Chase could see what was going on, the feed cut out and William Woodley’s hairless face reappeared.
"America: there has been an assassination attempt on the President of the United States," he said in a tone that was brimming with both excitement and terror. "I repeat, there appeared to have been an unsuccessful attempt on the President’s life."
The man pushed his fingers to his ears as if listening to someone instructing was what to say next.
Chase bolted to her feet. Her hands were shaking so badly that it proved difficult to pull her cell phone out of her pocket. She hadn’t gotten through to dialing Stitts’s number when it seemed like every light in the command center—of which there were hundreds—suddenly lit up.
"They got the guy!" a tech said excitedly as he hurried toward the door. "We got the guy who shot Senator DeBrusk!"
Chapter 31
It was the junior Secret Service Agent to Stitts’s right who made it into the crowd first. Stitts, not having the luxury of an earpiece, took a moment to collect himself before sprinting after him.
The young agent was all elbows and knees as he thrust his way through the crowd. The man pounced, going airborne to cover the last three feet between himself and the cameraman.
Still fixated on the camera on his knee, the man never saw the tackle coming.
The Secret Service Agent’s shoulder struck the cameraman in the side and sent them rocketing backward. Stitts watched as the man's neck was whipped backwards before the two men skidded across the pavement.
And then everybody descended upon them. Stitts himself got knocked to the ground by another Agent, despite the fact that he had his pistol drawn and was shouting that he was FBI since the ordeal had begun.
"Back! Everyone get back!" someone yelled into the crowd. "Get the fuck back!"
Twenty or so Secret Service Agents were on top of the cameraman now, who looked dazed even before the first of the blows came. It was a vicious scene, reminiscent of a stray tourist wandering into a camp belonging to a cadre of starving cannibals.
Stitts couldn't believe it.
The man didn’t fit his profile at all; he was just a guy trying to fix his camera, to get a decent video of the President.
And it looked as if the Secret Service was going to kill him.
"Stop!" Stitts yelled. Someone grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him to his feet. He tried to shake free, but the person’s grip was too tight. "Get the fuck off me! I’m FBI!"
"Calm down, Stitts," a familiar voice whispered in his ear. The hands let go, and he turned to glare at the man who grabbed him.
SO Pratt stared back, a grin on his pink face.
"We got him," he said with a chuckle. "We got the guy."
Stitts started to shake his head, to tell him that no, they didn’t get the guy, that they had it all wrong when Pratt pointed at the camera lying on the ground beside the fallen cameraman.
"A gun," Pratt exclaimed. And then, to Stitts's surprise, he realized that there was a gun; it was a small, custom pistol that had been tucked into the camera, somehow becoming a part of it.
"What?" he gaped.
It wasn’t the first time his profile had proven off base; case in point when he thought that it was a man who was responsible for the Download Murder killings in New York a couple years back, but that was a simple oversight.
This was just plain wrong.
Even now, with the evidence before him, Stitts couldn’t see it; Senator DeBrusk’s murder had been calculated, specific, expertly carried out.
This, on the other hand, was clumsy and inelegant.
"We got the guy," Pratt exclaimed again. He slapped Stitts on the back. "Way to go, Stitts, we got the fucker."
Chapter 32
Chase finally managed to dial Stitts’s number as she hurried out of the command center. At the last moment, she reached back and grabbed one of the walkie-talkies sitting in a docking bay and attached it to her hip. Then she gestured at Floyd to get the car running.
Peter Horrowitz was at her side and it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to come with her. This was fine by Chase; she actually liked the man quite a bit. He wasn’t like the others. And he also had a dearth of knowledge concerning bullets and rifles, and crime scene re-creations that would probably come in handy.
Just as she got into the backseat of Floyd’s car, Stitts answered.
"Chase?" her partner asked breathlessly.
Chase got right to the point.
"Stitts? What the fuck is going on? I saw on TV—"
"Some asshole tried to pull a gun out of his camera and shoot the President. Secret Service was all over him; they’re taking him to an undisclosed location now to interrogate him. Jesus, Chase, it was an absolute shit show."
Chase reached out and tapped Floyd on the shoulder to get his attention.
"Tell me where you're headed, and I’ll meet you there. I'm in the car with Floyd and ATF Horrowitz."
Floyd had already started to drive, but most of the streets were either still blocked off from the Senator’s shooting or from the assassination attempt on the President. There was no way that they were going to get even close to the White House no matter how many times she flashed her smile and her badge.
But that was alright; Chase doubted that the ‘undisclosed location’ would be near the White House.
Plausible deniability and all that.
"Yeah, Secret Service’s not going to let me tell you over the phone. Did you bring a walkie? I can tell you over the walkie."
Chase lifted it from her belt and turned it on.
“Yeah, got one.”
"Go to channel 2."
Chase looked at the device and tried to figure how to change it on to channel 2. The car suddenly came to a stop and Chase lifted her eyes to the window.
"Floyd? What’s going on?"
"I don't know, A-a-agent Adams. It seems like this r-r-road is blocked too."
Chase wound down the window and leaned out the window.
A state trooper was blocking the intersection with one hand, while using his other to waive a convoy of vehicles through.
Dirty Money (A Chase Adams FBI Thriller Book 5) Page 9
