McGrath watched as black-clad figures moved quickly toward the front of the jewelry store. Four men moved in from the left, and four more moved in from the right. He could tell they weren’t going for the door as that entrance was likely wired with explosives. The front man of each group held a tool that looked much like a sledge hammer, and they were going to use it to break out enough of the window wall to storm the store.
Hurry up, goddammit! He’s been in there too long with my daughter!
Fifteen seconds. That was time enough for a deranged man to sever two limbs, even if he had to chase down a panicked fleeing victim.
A single-file line of four more HRT members headed straight for the front door using the television van as a shield. They lined up behind the van and all the teams halted, no doubt while the commander verified the rear assault teams in the alley were also in position to breach the back of the jewelry store.
In an instant of clarity, McGrath realized they were all playing right into Carl Johnson’s game plan. He had shown he wasn’t the kind of planner who would leave this particular milestone to chance. He’d know the HRT would breach as soon as he severed the camera feed. He’d know he would have mere seconds to complete his task, and he would have planned for exactly that eventuality.
“Nancy, have the HRT pull back. Quickly!”
She relayed the instructions and almost immediately the teams on the monitor withdrew.
“What are you thinking, Aaron?”
Aaron McGrath’s heart sank as he realized his daughter was already dead. If not, she would be very soon, along with her family, and the FBI men and women prepared to breach.
“It’s a trap,” McGrath said. “Johnson’s no longer in there.”
Chapter 45
1419 EST Tuesday
Arlington Heights, VA
McGrath had just uttered the words when the store blew. He knew it was going to happen and he knew his daughter was still inside, but it still kicked him in the gut.
“No!” He turned and upended a vacant analyst’s desk. The keyboard and monitor tumbled to the floor. “No!”
The explosion was nothing short of spectacular. It was clear the terrorist had wired not only the front and back of the store, but also the ceiling and both walls. The concussive blast shattered the windows of the jewelry store, the adjacent office building, and the historic bank building. The men of the assault teams had begun to pull back, but they were still inside the concussive blast zone. They were tossed into the street like tiny toy soldiers.
The blast slammed the TV van over on its side and then onto its top. The HRT members sheltered behind it had just begun to withdraw, so they were spared a crushing death, but McGrath could see they were all injured. Had he not given the order to withdraw, the terrorist would have claimed nearly twenty more lives.
Christ! What does it take to stop this man?
He turned back to the monitor and watched a huge fire ball billowing outward and upward, an angry boiling rush of orange and red flames, and thick black smoke. A similar ball of fire erupted from the rear of the jewelry store. If there was any doubt as to the fate of the hostages, it vanished completely with the collapse of the store ceiling. The shared right wall and part of the ceiling of the historic bank also collapsed, and the second floor of the office building to the left simply folded over into what had been the jewelry store only seconds before.
McGrath’s encrypted cell began to ring, but he didn’t answer. He simply unhitched the cell from his belt and threw the device against the far wall where it shattered. He knew who was calling. The president had ordered the team to keep her updated on the Albuquerque situation, and she had been patched into the HRT video feed.
McGrath and his team had predicted a number of possible outcomes to the hostage interview, but never in a million years would he have predicted that particular outcome. An hour ago, as he’d watched the terrorist’s interrogation video, the subsequent interview with his daughter hadn’t made any sense. Now it did.
Johnson had baited them with the video. He’d planned every aspect of the interrogation down to the smallest detail. It had been an act, a splendid performance. It was yet another misdirection.
He’d been several moves ahead of the TER every step along the way in his quest for revenge. He had asked Agent Cummings for his address because he wanted McGrath to think he was coming for him. But that wasn’t his endgame at all. His true objective was to make him watch his daughter and her family die. McGrath had fallen for the ploy and now Anita was dead.
But the terrorist was not.
McGrath felt an anger unlike any he’d ever felt before. He clenched his fists to keep from trembling as he stepped past Palmer and growled at the young bald analyst.
“Get HQ on the line,” he said with a hoarse whisper. “I want three code-black teams deployed to Albuquerque by midnight. I’m going to put an end to this threat.”
“Aaron.” She drew his name out slowly, like she wanted to object. “What are you doing?”
Nancy stepped to his side and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, but he brushed her hand away roughly.
“I’m doing what I should have done yesterday. I’m going to kill that sick bastard.”
Chapter 46
1422 EST Tuesday
Arlington Heights, VA
Palmer narrowed her eyes at the look on her commander’s face. He was in shock, and he was angry, and she could see he was on the verge of losing his self-control.
“Johnson is not the mission, Aaron. You need to think this through.”
Palmer faced McGrath’s right side as he faced the wall monitors. Joey, the analyst on duty, sat in front of them. His desk faced the monitors, but he swiveled sideways in his chair. He looked expectantly at Palmer, as if he knew McGrath’s instructions violated protocol.
Palmer shook her head at the analyst. “As you were.” To McGrath, she said, “Focus on the mission, Aaron. The more you escalate this conflict, the more Johnson will escalate in return. Surely, you can see that trend in his behavior.” McGrath looked like he was going to object, so she shouted at him. “The mission is to find Melissa!”
“I’m the Director of this agency and the Event Commander, and I establish the mission!”
McGrath reached out to grab the analyst by the shoulders, presumably to turn him back to his workstation, but Palmer reacted instinctively. She swept his hands aside, shoved him away from the analyst, and stepped in between them.
“Security!” She hollered for the guard in the front foyer. “Get in here!”
The cell phone on her belt began to ring even as the burly guard rushed into the operations room. As soon as McGrath refused to answer his cell, she knew the president would call her, because she was the deputy commander.
“Ma’am?” the guard said. He was a big black man with biceps the size of her thighs. The guard glanced from her to Joey and finally to McGrath, who stood several paces away. The Director had a wild, angry look in his eyes, and he breathed in shallow gasps.
“Remove Director McGrath from this room and confine him upstairs until I tell you otherwise. Sit on him if you have to, but do not let him out of that room. Understood?”
McGrath countered. “You don’t have the authority—”
“Aaron, you’re a threat to the mission, and the mission is only to find Melissa, not to send assassins after a civilian. Johnson will have contingencies for that action. We know this now. The more this escalates, the more collateral damage we’ll have.”
She paused and said, “Now, we’ll do this my way.”
The guard stepped to McGrath’s side and said, “Sir, will you please come with me?”
Palmer looked at her commander, and for a moment she thought he was going to charge her. The fire she’d seen in his eyes calmed quickly, though, and he nodded. The guard escorted him out of the room, and Palmer realized she was holding her breath. She started breathing again and patted Joey on the shoulder as she retrieved her ringing cell
.
“Palmer.”
“What the hell is going on over there?!”
“Madam President,” Palmer said. She paused, then said, “I had to relieve Aaron from duty.”
The president was silent for a moment. “I understand. I saw the live feed. Anita and her family were in that store when it blew.”
“No, they weren’t,” Palmer said. “Johnson is becoming a master of deception, and as you can see, he’s interfering with our primary mission. We have to take him out of the game, and for that I’m going to need your help.”
“I’m listening.”
“There’s only one way to neutralize Carl Johnson now. We have to give him what he wants.”
Palmer outlined her plan.
“How will you find him?”
“I won’t have to,” Palmer said.
She glanced at the center monitor again. Numerous fire trucks were spraying streams of water into the burning rubble of the store and its two neighboring buildings. She couldn’t see the fire trucks on Third Street, but she could see their streams of water arching in from the right.
“Madam President, there’s no way Johnson would consider his mission complete as long as Aaron and Alfonso Reyes are alive. I think he had an exit strategy, and I think he’s coming here to Virginia. I think he’s going to walk right up to Aaron’s front door.”
Chapter 47
0639 EST Wednesday
McLean, VA
Carl Johnson’s taxi driver let him out where Dolley Madison Boulevard and Old Dominion Drive intersected. He skirted the west edge of a huge park his cell phone GPS map labeled McLean Central Park. Three blocks later, he stood in the morning chill facing the house of his nemesis. The security gate at the end of the gravel driveway stood wide open.
He’s expecting me.
It had been many years since he’d taken a one-year project management job on the east coast, and he’d forgotten how bitterly cold the winter weather could be. Thirty degrees in Virginia felt a lot colder than the same temperature in New Mexico. It was the wind that made the difference. And the humidity. It soaked through the clothing and into the bones.
As he examined the government agent’s house, he reveled in the thought that McGrath’s demise was imminent. Then he would turn his attention to Alfonso Reyes.
Carl had pulled Anita McGrath Chapman into the basement of the jewelry store, and they made their way under the historic bank by way of an access hole jack-hammered in the connecting stem wall. Then Carl detonated the C4 explosive planted by the mercs, destroying the above-ground part of the jewelry store.
He had planned to force Chapman into an old safe that measured about ten feet wide, six feet deep, and eight feet high. He figured the safe was left over from the bank’s early days nearly a century past, but it was clearly too massive to move without destroying walls.
Garcia had his guys modify the door lock. It now featured a twenty-four-digit cypher lock. A large warning sign on the door of the safe proclaimed a half pound of C4 explosive was attached inside the safe, along with trip wires and vibration sensors, which could only be deactivated by the cypher lock. When he opened the safe to shove her inside, she discovered her family was not in the safe, so she went berserk and attacked him.
He shuddered at the uncomfortable memory. Because of Anita McGrath Chapman, the mission had suddenly and unexpectedly changed.
Movement in his peripheral view drew his attention to his right. A woman stepped from behind a thick tree beside the driveway.
“Do you have any weapons on you?”
The woman was tall and slender, a couple inches taller than he was. She had a narrow face with a cute little upturned nose and sinister, sky-blue eyes. She looked extremely fit and...lethal. She looked like a younger Merc Four, like a female version of Agent Klipser.
Carl growled at her. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? The ones who got my son killed.”
The woman wore black tactical pants with Velcro pocket flaps everywhere, and assault boots. She also wore a thick, black turtleneck shirt under her black field jacket which, no doubt, hid a weapon or two. Most of her blonde hair was hidden under a black knit cap.
“Yes.” She nodded. After a long pause she added, “My name is Nancy Palmer. The operation wasn’t supposed to go down like that.”
He tried to muster up some anger or hatred for the woman, but her honesty had somehow defused his emotional turmoil.
She repeated her question. “Do you have any weapons?”
“I don’t need weapons,” Carl replied. “I have his family.”
She searched him anyway. “We found the safe.”
Carl nodded. “Then you know she probably has less than six hours of air left.”
“But her family is not in the safe?”
“Correct.” There wasn’t enough room or air in there for everyone.
“I figured you held them off-site to control her.”
He narrowed his eyes, wondering where she was going with that line of questioning. What did she hope to discover about him? Maybe she was trying to profile him. Maybe she was trained in finding his weaknesses by watching his body language.
“Correct again.”
“You had a SWAT uniform with you, didn’t you? That’s how you got out of the building.”
Carl cocked his head a bit. He thought he detected a hint of grudging respect in her words, but he wasn’t sure. She was fishing for something. Maybe she was assessing his resolve.
“I had fireman’s gear hidden in the basement,” Carl said. “I couldn’t assume your boss would figure it was another ambush, so there was a strong possibility all the HRT folks would be dead or injured.”
“In which case you’d be easily identified if you walked out of there in black.” She paused for a moment, then said, “We had State Police and National Guard on all the roads. How did you get out of New Mexico?”
“There are many unmarked jeep trails in and around the mountains. I got up into Colorado, then across and down into Oklahoma, then onto a flight in disguise.”
“Yes, we picked you up at Reagan National Airport on facial recognition. You planned that too, didn’t you?”
He’d discarded his dreadlock disguise as soon as he landed.
“I wanted McGrath to know I was coming.”
Palmer regarded him silently for a long while, but her expression was unreadable. Finally, the agent said, “You should go inside.”
Carl pivoted and looked around. McLean was definitely not a town for normal folks. Though the lots on which the houses of McLean were built were fairly small, all maybe a quarter-acre, the houses themselves were totally upscale. Every house had a privacy wall of some sort with secure driveway gates. Most of the homes were of Victorian design, two and sometimes three stories high.
Well-tended front yards, fancy light fixtures, and lamp posts decorated the homes. Some of the properties had crushed coral driveways and some had cobblestone. There were no ordinary concrete or asphalt driveways, not in this high-end neighborhood.
Some of the homes had open shutters—either real or fake—and Carl guessed that the wood-clad, over-sized windows that decorated the fronts of the homes were triple-pane, energy-efficient fixtures he knew trended toward very expensive, especially when you had twenty or thirty of the huge windows in a single house. That alone would set an owner back a hundred grand, he thought. Most of the front doors he had seen along his ride were extra-tall, extra-wide, expensive hardwood doors with fancy knobs and intricate inlaid windows.
He turned back toward McGrath’s house, which he guessed was worth upward of one and a half million. The lights were on throughout the house. The sun was just dawning, and the morning had a cozy feel as the sun began to break through the high clouds.
As Carl gazed at the front of McGrath’s house, he thought about Anita Chapman again. In all his years he’d never hit a woman. Ever. And now he had beaten a woman senseless. With his fists. With his elbows. With the hard plastic butt of
his gun. Because she wouldn’t get in the safe. Because she was the daughter of the man who got his son killed. Because he lost control and took out his frustrations on her instead of him.
He could hear her screams and curses echoing in his head. He could see her bloody face as she kept coming at him. She wouldn’t quit. She wouldn’t stay down. Finally, he kicked her so hard, she tumbled to the back of the safe, and he swung the heavy door closed. Then, right before the door slammed shut, Anita Chapman screamed and charged again, and for a moment Carl thought she was going to get smashed in the doorway. There was no way he could stop it because the door weighed several hundred pounds.
And he had seen her bloody face up close the instant before the door closed. She looked like he felt inside.
It was one thing to order mercenaries to do his dirty work. It was quite another to actually get his own hands dirty and bloody. Torturing and beheading Klipser, and breaking Cummings had been things Carl considered victories, rites of passage, but beating Chapman filled him with a deep sense of shame that haunted his very soul.
He paused halfway up the drive and stood there for a moment wondering what kind of man he had become. He could justify, or at least get mentally past, killing federal agents or cops whose crime was that they took orders from a rogue government agency, but seeing Anita Chapman’s bloody face every time he closed his eyes tortured him. And what he almost did to Cummings’s daughter shook his conviction. He remembered seeing her big brown eyes, wide with fear, staring at him.
In a moment of clarity, he knew exactly what kind of man he’d become and was not happy with his conclusion. He was Klipser and McGrath wrapped up in one shell.
The mission had to change.
Carl continued up the long cobblestone drive. He heard the crunch of Palmer’s combat boots as she followed. He turned onto the pave-stone footpath that led off the drive, across the grass, and up to the front door. The extra-wide door was already open a few inches so he pushed it open and stepped in without knocking.
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 23
