by Jason Kasper
“This is my happy face,” Nora replied, her jaw slack.
The man assumed a broad stance between the two flagpoles mounted on the road median behind him, aiming the phone at them before pausing to address Nora in a somber, reprimanding tone.
“Miss, this is a serious occasion—please stop smiling so much. It is quite distracting.”
Then he raised the phone, tapping the screen before appraising the picture with a nod of approval.
“This will do.” He handed the phone back to Michaela. “You have a beautiful family.”
“Thank you,” she replied, taking the phone as the man continued walking across the bridge without another word.
Dayton said cheerfully, “He was nice.”
“He was weird,” Nora muttered.
Checking the image on her phone, Michaela replied, “Well, it looks like he got a smile out of you.”
Her husband gave a mocking gasp of surprise.
“A smile? From Nora? Maybe we should hire that guy to follow us around for the next week.”
Looking down the sidewalk, Michaela saw the man’s figure receding. He was strolling calmly, hands in his pockets, looking out toward the falls as he closed with the US Customs checkpoint.
34
Longwing Isolation Facility
Rockingham County, North Carolina
Ian entered the building before his team, flipping on the lights as they began shuttling in equipment bags from the truck outside, an Agency driver waiting at the wheel for their approval to depart.
They called this building their ISOFAC, or isolation facility. The term was a military one, but the exterior of these grounds was anything but: the main gate had an ambiguous sign reading Operations Center, Public Works, along with a phone number to call for access.
Beyond that, a half-mile-long road threaded through a section of woods, partitioned from the surrounding forest by a perimeter fence lined with cameras, sensors, and ominous government-produced NO TRESPASSING signs. While the fenced area included a few small ranges where they could fire suppressed weapons, most of their training was conducted in a network of military and Agency training sites up and down the East Coast. The vast majority of the fenced land surrounding their facility was simply a forested barrier to outside view.
And the interior of the ISOFAC wasn’t much to look at—there were rooms for weapon and equipment cleaning and storage, a planning bay that had been cleared of materials before they’d departed for Syria, and individual workstations they used to prepare their respective segments of each mission brief.
As team leader, David handled the overall scheme of maneuver and actions on the objective, but each man planned in depth for their respective specialties: Worthy managed the route planning, Reilly covered medical contingencies and casualty care by phase of the mission, and as second-in-command, Cancer was in charge of the training and rehearsals, then overall logistical considerations from the moment they left the ISOFAC until they returned.
But every portion of mission planning occurred within the framework of Ian’s specialty: intelligence.
As the men ferried their equipment from the truck, Cancer announced, “Reilly, get Ian’s equipment put away and clean his weapon along with yours.”
Reilly sounded appalled. “Seriously?”
“Listen, he may be deadweight in a gunfight—no offense, Ian.”
“None taken,” Ian said.
“But he’s got the biggest brain on the team and when it comes to intel, he’s our man. Ian, what else do you need?”
“Fresh pot of coffee.”
“On it,” Worthy said, moving to the coffeemaker.
Ian called after him, “And I don’t want to see the bottom of my mug until I’ve found what I’m looking for.”
Worthy halted in place and said in a measured tone, “Don’t push your luck.”
Ian barely heard him—he was already striding resolutely to his workstation, which was distinguishable at a glance from all the rest.
Four computer screens lined the desk, and everything was in order: his keyboard, mouse, and headphones exactly as he’d positioned them, ready for his bidding.
Which was a good thing, because Ian was in for a long night.
The team were phenomenal shooters, but when it came to good old-fashioned intelligence work, Cancer was right: Ian was their real asset.
And while finding the target was the most important priority at present, it was far from the last. Ian would have to divine every possible connection from a universe of data, trying to connect the dots between how a Chinese dissident had made his way to Syria and hooked up with an established terrorist network, to what his objective was in attacking the US instead of China, to how and why both the inconsequential town of Charlottesville and David’s family factored into the larger puzzle.
Then there was the larger question playing at the back of his mind: who had put all of these pieces together in the first place?
Because Bari Khan didn’t have the capacity to organize all this from either his native China or Syria, and ISIS was far too fractured to orchestrate such a sophisticated attack effort from the wrong side of the Atlantic. To Ian that meant someone else was pulling the strings, and he intended to find out who.
But at the moment, his first step was determining what in the hell Bari Khan intended to strike in Charlottesville. Right now, that mattered far more than why he was going to attack it—because once Ian had the target, he could reverse-engineer how Bari Khan planned to launch his strike. That in turn would lead him to possible avenues of getting the rockets into place, which opened up new threads he could follow outward in a spiderweb of possible intelligence leads.
And while the open-ended question of finding a terrorist target seemed overwhelming at first glance, Ian had more than enough to go off in beginning his search.
With Duchess’s confirmation of the University Hospital as a secondary target, he could easily rule out a majority of public sites and key infrastructure based on the proximity to closer hospitals, thus narrowing his search down to a key operations box. Then it was a matter of identifying likely targets within that box, and mapping launch sites capable of fitting a launch assembly for six hundred-plus rockets. From there he would overlay the circumference of the rockets’ 2.79-mile maximum range between launch sites and various targets, and look for the key overlaps between the two.
Of course, it all sounded easy when he thought of it in broad strokes. In reality, he was looking at hours of dedicated, highly caffeinated focus across multiple computer screens, all while wearing his Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones with a classical music playlist spanning 168 songs.
All told, he expected to have a minimum of three targets ranked by probability no later than six hours after he started his work.
He settled in his chair, powering up his computer and seeing the quad-screen setup glow to life.
Pinching his eyelids shut, he took a final breath and released it slowly. Then he opened his eyes, seeing the login prompt on his main screen and thundering his fingers across the keys to enter his password. He reached for his headphones and was in the process of donning them when Reilly called out behind him, “I found it.”
Ian spun in his chair. “You found what?”
“The target.” Reilly was standing a few feet away, holding up the personal phone he’d just recovered from his locker, and showed the screen to Ian. “POTUS is visiting Monticello with the President of India. 2:00 p.m. on July third. It posted to CNN twenty minutes ago.”
David said, “Let me see that,” and snatched the phone. After a moment’s pause, he looked up. “He’s right.”
Worthy entered the room holding the coffeepot, now filled with water in anticipation of brewing the first batch.
Holding the pot aloft, he raised an eyebrow to Ian.
“You still going to need that coffee?”
35
“Please have a seat,” the young female intern said. “The senator will be
with you shortly.”
Duchess walked past the young woman—she was what DC insiders referred to as a “skintern,” a leggy intern who pushed the limits of acceptable skirt length—and entered Senator Gossweiler’s office.
She stopped inside the open door, scanning the office interior for a few seconds before taking a seat in a leather-bound chair facing the empty desk.
Rather than simply calling her with any updated guidance, Gossweiler had summoned her to his office at a time slot of his choosing. This would be her final reckoning, the last chance to justify her actions and find if the presidential assassination plot had granted her any leeway in ordering David’s team into that final, last-ditch raid on the vehicle compound in Syria.
She suspected that Gossweiler wouldn’t honor that judgment call in the slightest, and so Duchess had brought a single bargaining chip with her—a photograph hot off an Agency high-resolution printer, safely tucked into her pocket ahead of his return to the office.
And what an office it was.
Duchess’s own personal workspace was arranged for utility—work, tea, and on occasion a nap break during extended shifts in the OPCEN. She didn’t have anyone to impress; aside from her Agency colleagues and Gossweiler himself, no one was even allowed in the Special Activities Center, much less to the compartmentalized project corridor in which she ran the newly minted targeted killing program.
Gossweiler’s office, by contrast, was arranged entirely to convey power.
She supposed this was a useful system in his line of work, where the closed-door negotiations with lobbyists and his fellow politicians were a fact of daily life.
The lone window was flanked by two flagpoles, one with the US flag and the other with the flag of Nevada. Framed photographs of Gossweiler with three presidents lined the walls, interspersed with various certificates from grateful constituent organizations. The shelves and tables were covered in files, polished wooden boxes, and displays of commemorative coins. There was also a large bronze statue of a cowboy riding a bronco, which she zeroed in on in the final moment before he entered the door behind her.
Duchess quickly stood.
“Senator.”
He swept past her on the way to his desk. “I’ve got exactly five minutes, Kimberly, so let’s make this fast.” Dropping into his chair, he aimed a finger at her and said, “You violated my direct guidance to authorize another Longwing raid.”
“I did so, Senator, only because the cargo was going to depart long before the military option arrived. And I’d just found out about the threat against the president, which raised my risk tolerance considerably.”
Gossweiler leaned forward in his seat, folding his hands on the table as if in anticipation of a meal. “You’re lucky on two fronts. One, your hunch paid off and some of the rockets were recovered. Two, you found out about the president’s visit to Monticello before I did, and I’m not a man prone to being uninformed. But this program is in its infancy and it’s already hanging by a thread. One more slip-up and I’m going to lose my funding, and then we’re back to sending drones and racking up collateral damage. So your luck isn’t enough to save you, not this time. In six days, I’ll have picked a replacement and you’re on your way out. I want a seamless handover—”
“Senator.” Duchess produced the photograph from her pocket and slid it across the desk. “You may want to reconsider the timing.”
He appraised the picture for a moment, then slid it back to her. “Is that supposed to be him?”
Duchess picked up the photograph, glancing down at the still shot from a black-and-white surveillance camera. In it was a man striding past, a baseball cap partially obscuring the features of his Chinese face.
“Our algorithms place it at ninety-six percent fidelity. It is him, Senator.”
“When and where was it taken?”
“Just over two hours ago at the pedestrian crossing on the Niagara Falls International Rainbow Bridge. He entered the US using a doctored Canadian passport.”
“Then why hasn’t he been rolled up yet?”
She placed the photo back in her pocket. “Bari Khan is currently among a free population of one hundred million residents on the Eastern Seaboard. We’ve got every possible local, state, and federal agency searching for him, and the NSA has a priority tasking backed by every possible interpretation of the Patriot Act. But so far, he’s been keeping a low profile.”
Swallowing hard, she continued, “And my career considerations aside, the worst thing we could do is break leadership continuity among the staff who’s tracked Bari Khan this far.”
Gossweiler scowled, seeming to regard this as a form of intelligence-backed coercion—which, to an extent, it was.
“Have you disbanded your ground team?”
“They’re stateside, and I’ve changed the codes on their facility so they can’t get access.”
“But you haven’t told them.”
“Not yet, Senator.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
“Because I’m going to inform the team leader in person. I owe him that much.”
“Do it fast. What else do you have for me?”
Duchess straightened in her seat. “Bottom line, we haven’t found the cargo. Screenings at Syrian and Turkish ports have come up dry, as has extensive coastal and border surveillance. And the Secret Service is investigating possible leaks but has found no definitive leads yet. They’re still in the process of administering polygraphs.”
“Maybe the cargo was forced underground.”
“Or maybe,” she said, “it is on a boat crossing the Atlantic as we speak.”
“You think the rockets were intended for maritime transport?”
“Bari Khan entered New York less than forty hours after the Longwing team reported seeing him in Syria. That is indicative of commercial air travel to any number of Canadian airports that have less security measures and scrutiny for flights returning from the Middle East—but there is almost no chance that he was able to smuggle such a large cargo in the same manner. We’ve been directing our primary focus to Syrian border crossings and major ports, and since both have come up empty, it’s entirely possible that the rockets didn’t move north to Turkey, but west to the unregulated coast. At the moment, my assessment is that the cargo is en route to the US via a trans-Atlantic crossing.”
“Cut the shit, Kimberly. Are you trying to tell me you honestly assess a credible threat to the president?”
She tried to determine what to make of his flippant tone—he seemed like he was trying to disprove any possibility that there was a pending attack.
“I do, Senator. The exploitation of material recovered from Bari Khan’s command post has resulted in no viable leads that would contradict a terrorist attack during the president’s visit to Monticello. And if we don’t have the rockets located in the next forty-eight hours, I believe that visit should be postponed.”
“I dare say that altering the president’s schedule is well beyond the abilities of a humble public servant such as myself.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Senator. Your humility has managed to put a Remington on the shelf.”
He swiveled his office chair toward the bronze cowboy atop a bronco, then spun back to her.
“That’s a reproduction, not an original. A gift from my wife after I was elected to the Senate. And for my first term, I slept on a cot in my office because I couldn’t afford an apartment.”
“Yet like every new member of Congress,” Duchess countered, “you managed to become a millionaire within a few years. I would contend that like your political career, it’s the outcome we need to concern ourselves with, not how difficult the path to get there.”
Gossweiler looked momentarily furious, but before he could respond, there was a double knock at the door. His chief of staff appeared, announcing, “One minute, sir.”
He nodded and the door closed again as Duchess waited for the inevitable reprimand.
But Gossweiler merely ga
ve a frustrated sigh.
“I’ve spoken to a friend. The Administration views the Monticello visit as the leaders of the two largest democracies on earth coming together to agree on their countries’ respective commitment to Jeffersonian democracy and human rights. The president has been informed of the threat, and he’s refusing to change the location.”
“He’d be playing into Bari Khan’s hands unless we’ve located the cargo by then.”
Gossweiler dropped a fist onto his desktop, knuckles down.
There was a sharp barking sound of bone on wood, and he snapped, “Then locate the cargo by then.” He composed himself with a quick breath. “I’ll approve you staying at the helm of Longwing until the rockets are stopped. Until then, that is your sole mission in life, are we clear?”
Duchess nodded. “There are thousands of possible ships. Given the timeline of the attack, we can narrow that down to a handful that are capable of crossing the Atlantic. Some of those ships originate from countries of questionable diplomatic relations.”
He considered this statement. “Use Customs and Border searches at the ports whenever possible. Make it look random. If you have to, bring in the DEA to put a counter-narcotics spin on it.”
“Understood, Senator. But there is one ship I’m particularly concerned with, and it will unleash a nightmare with the press if we raid it while cameras are rolling. I recommend a maritime raid, and I may need some overhead cover to accomplish that.”
At that moment his chief of staff appeared in the doorway and said, “Sir, you’re up.”
Gossweiler rose from his seat, and Duchess hastily stood as he said, “Do what you have to. Keep it as discreet as possible, but get it done.” Then he walked out of the office behind his chief of staff.
Duchess was escorted out by the young intern who’d seen her in. As they crossed through a lobby, Duchess glanced up at a television display to see Gossweiler live on CNN, striding onto the Senate floor.
