Morgan sat down at the table and opened the computer. The message had to be short and to the point—anything else might risk losing their attention. He typed,
Praetorian is using you. The bombs are real. He is not who you think he is.
He hit Send. Scott texted him:
Got it. Sending now.
It was out there. Now, he had to hope it would work.
Chapter 109
The calls started coming in early in the morning. By the time Frieze arrived, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, which she didn’t have time to change out of, the office was bustling with activity.
“What’s going on?” she asked Gus, who was on the phone.
“Just a minute,” he said into the receiver. “We’ve gotten two potential terrorists in the city saying they’re part of a group planning a bomb attack. I said hold on. They say they were deceived, that they want to turn themselves in.”
“Two calls with the same story?”
“No. The Bureau’s been getting calls like from all over. We’re up to something like twenty-five countrywide.” He turned his attention back to his call. “Yes, keep him in detention there. We are sending down an interrogator to—”
Frieze sat down at her cubicle and brought up the reports to get up to speed. One of the suspects, a BU student, was in police custody. Similar calls had been made to the police in a long list of cities, including LA, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, and New York, with most coming into Washington, DC.
Conley’s call to her rang not ten minutes after she walked into the office.
Frieze picked up. She spoke first. “Why was I sure that you’d had something to do with this?”
Chapter 110
Lily met Scott in the morning at his Brooklyn apartment, where he and O’Neal had put together a workspace that had its own chaotic logic. All the furniture in the living room had been pushed up against the walls, and five laptop computers, two tablets, and papers bearing inscrutable diagrams took up the rest of the floor space.
“What is going on here?”
“Shh,” Scott said and turned back to O’Neal. “What are we doing wrong?”
They were in the zone. This wasn’t the time for jealousy. Lily sat down on an orange modern armchair, crossed her legs, and watched.
“We’ve accounted for a margin of error on each of the established criteria,” said O’Neal, pacing over the paper-strewn floor, hands mussing her hair in frustration. “We’ve filtered through the probable parameters. We’ve broadened the search functions to include possible errors in the records, misspellings, and ages. But we just don’t have enough of a correlation to narrow it down. We need more parameters.”
“We’ve got refugees,” he said. “Against age, major cities, job, marital status, ethnicity, income, hospital stays, accounts on all the sites we have records for.”
O’Neal let loose a frustrated groan. “What are we missing? What else can we look at?”
Lily had a stroke of insight. “Psychiatric records.”
Both turned to her in surprise. “What?” said Scott.
“These people were supposed to be brainwashed, right? Brainwashing is an extreme form of abuse. These are people who are traumatized. They’re going to have a record of mental health issues.”
“Could work,” said O’Neal to Scott with a shrug.
He sat on the floor at one of the computers and navigated the complex user interface. “But psychiatric care databases have a mess of diagnoses. It’s going to be hard to search.”
“Medication,” offered O’Neal, crouching at a computer of her own. “We have a national registry of prescriptions. Let’s cross-check our algorithm against anxiety medications, weighted by degree of seriousness.”
Lily scraped her manicured nails along the armrest as the program ran. Scott tapped the floor, and O’Neal tugged at her hair.
“I got something!” exclaimed Scott. “Nine hits exactly, two of them already dead. All refugees born within a year of each other. Lily, you’re a genius!” He leapt up off the floor and kissed her.
“Uh oh,” said O’Neal. “Guys, sorry to interrupt, but this is bad news. Get Conley on the phone. We need to get these names to the FBI right now.”
Chapter 111
Lisa Frieze ran the names of the suspects Conley had given her. What she saw made her go numb.
She leapt from her chair and ran across the office, which was roiling with the energy of crisis mode. Gus called out to her, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
She burst into Chambers’s office without knocking, interrupting a meeting with the Special Agent in Charge.
“Agent Frieze, if you value your job, you’ll remember that a closed door means—”
“It’s urgent, sir. It could not be more urgent. I will stake my job, my entire Bureau career, on this. I just need you to listen to me for two minutes.” She was aware of looking like a crazy person, an impression not helped by the fact that she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt in a room with two men in suits.
Chambers grumbled under his breath. “George, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Sir,” Frieze said to the SAC as he left the room looking skeptical.
“You made a bet,” said Chambers, “Now show your cards.”
“This list of people,” she said, putting the printed sheet on his desk. “Now, I know this sounds crazy, but these are Soviet sleeper agents, raised in this country since before the end of the Cold War. All these people turning themselves in, they’re just distractions to draw our attention away from the real attack.”
“And where did you get this list?”
She opened her mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Damn it, why didn’t she prepare a lie? “A . . . source.”
“I see.”
“Look, they all came to the US as Bosnian refugees. No parents. All spent much of their childhoods in the same orphanage. And all of them just happen to work for utility companies in major US cities. Do you think that’s a coincidence?”
He set the list down on his desk. “Stranger things have happened,” he said. “And yet, what I have never heard of is for a group of sleeper agents to spend more than twenty years in deep cover for a nation that doesn’t even exist anymore.”
Frieze swallowed hard. “I know, sir,” she said. “I know how it sounds.” She wasn’t sure how much even she believed it. But Conley had never lied about something like this. “We need to act on this. They have access to our infrastructure. Put together, they can hit tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Americans. If we don’t we’ll be responsible for maybe the greatest terrorist attack ever to hit American soil. Do you want to be the person remembered for that?”
Chambers looked out the window at the snow, falling thick outside. “I’ll tell you, Frieze, you make a heck of a case. We’ll do it. I’ll send this along the pipeline and vouch for you. But if this goes south, it’s your ass.” Chambers picked up the phone and dialed. “IOSS? Chambers, from the Boston field office. I need the Crisis Management Unit. Right now.”
Chapter 112
“In position.”
Lisa Frieze, bundled in a tactical vest, Colt .22 in hand, crouched in the FBI van. The target was in his Arlington, Massachusetts, home, a ground-floor apartment on a calm, sunny street. Their surveillance had shown that the target, Marko Novak, was inside.
“Move out!”
She opened the back door of the van and stepped off, leading the SWAT team toward the apartment. They broke up into two groups, one to take the front door while she led the other to the back door. The battering team got into place.
“On my signal,” she said. “Breach and clear!”
They rammed the door, and the team moved in, clearing the kitchen and moving into the hall, Frieze bringing up the rear. They found Novak, thin and black-haired, in the bedroom, trying to escape through a window with a metal box in his hand.
“On the ground!”
Novak ignored her and push
ed himself out the window. Frieze took aim. Novak’s chest erupted with blood, staining the snow black in the predawn light. The sniper had gotten him.
“Target down!” someone called out
“Area clear!”
Frieze holstered her weapon and went around outside to Novak’s body. He had dropped the tin, featureless and as big as a lunchbox, as he fell.
The bomb squad moved in and took the tin into a mobile glovebox chamber. Built out of reinforced steel, the chamber could withstand small-scale explosions and was kept at a pressure near vacuum, so that even in the event of a breach air would only flow in and contaminants could not escape.
Frieze called Chambers.
“We got him,” she said. “He was shot down trying to escape.”
“The other teams have reported in,” said Chambers. “All five other targets neutralized.”
“Chambers, he had a box in his hands—the bomb squad is opening it up now.”
“It’s liquid VX,” said Chambers. “Nerve agent. Nasty stuff. Kills you even if you don’t inhale because it gets absorbed through your skin. We had an incident in one of the New York operations. The target broke the vial when she saw she had no escape. We have three agents dead and five in critical condition.”
Damn. Frieze didn’t want to think about how many dead that would have been, even if just Novak had completed the attack as planned.
But she wasn’t breathing easy yet. There was still one more sleeper out there, which meant that there was one last vial of VX at large.
Chapter 113
Annemarie was putting away the cutlery from the dishwasher when Ansley came in through the garage door. His home was an alien place now that the mission had superseded every bout of trouble, every effort, every connection he had in that place. It was something other now.
“Bruce?” Annemarie asked, right arm akimbo in her chili pepper apron. “What are you doing home?”
Annemarie felt alien, too. They had been married sixteen years and she did not know him—not the real him. She knew only the shell that he had shed. Only what he had pretended to be for all those years. For decades.
“Honey, are you feeling all right? You look pale.” She looked at his hands. “Bruce, you’re shaking!” She moved toward him in concern.
Ansley gritted his teeth and grabbed a knife from the dishwasher rack. It carried a six-inch kitchen blade, slender and sharp. The handle was still warm from the wash cycle
“Bruce?” She took a step back. “Bruce, what are you doing with that knife?”
Chapter 114
Morgan and Alex sat in a state of suspended animation in their motel room. There was nothing for them to do, nowhere for them to go. It was all up to other people now. Both were too anxious to eat, too anxious to even talk. Morgan knew how to calm his body and keep still even in times of tension. Alex fidgeted, drumming her fingers on the desk, doodling on a notepad, or playing with the phone cord. Otherwise they just watched, in alternation, the phone and the computer for updates.
The first came early—a series of terse messages from Conley as the sleepers were caught or killed by the FBI. The last one came before 8 A.M., and now, all they could do was wait either for a Hail Mary or for the last terrorist to complete his mission.
Morgan’s phone rang. Alex fell off the bed in surprise.
He picked up on speakerphone so that Alex could hear. “Morgan.” It was O’Neal, manic and out of breath. “I found it! The last sleeper. He changed his name. That’s why they weren’t warned about him. His name is Bruce Ansley now. He lives outside DC. In Fairfax.”
“What’s the target?”
“He’s listed as an employee of the Water and Sewer Authority,” said Scott. “Problem is, he doesn’t seem to stay in any given office. He’s a quality inspector, so he’s got access to all the water utility installations in the city. He drops that vial of VX into any of them . . .”
“Got it. Text me the address.” Morgan hung up. Alex was already standing. “We’re on the move. You’re going to this Ansley’s house, on the off chance that he’s still there.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to the city. Whatever his target is, it’ll be there.”
Chapter 115
Alex parked her motorcycle on the next street over from Ansley’s suburban home. She jogged around the corner, passing a housewife walking a golden retriever. She came up on the house on foot.
There was a car in the driveway, which held space for two—and the empty space had an oil stain that suggested another car spent a lot of time parked there. Someone was out, but someone else might still be inside.
Alex slinked around the side of the house toward the backyard, keeping her head low. As she passed a row of small windows, she raised her head to peek in through one. It opened into the kitchen, the picture of suburban normality until she caught sight of something that made her gasp.
Not worried about detection anymore, Alex ran around the corner and tried the back door. It was unlocked. She went inside and headed straight for the kitchen, where she confirmed what she had only glimpsed before.
A woman—Ansley’s wife, she figured. Dead. Murdered in her own kitchen, a knife wound through her apron, her neck slit.
Alex was reaching for her phone to call her father when she heard crying. It was faint, but she was certain it was inside the house. Alex crept, careful not to make any noise. Entering a stranger’s home was an uncanny experience—both intimate and foreign. The Ansleys seemed normal to judge by how they lived—two-story house, homey, timeworn furniture, family pictures on the mantelpiece. But one of the people in those photographs had been killed by the other.
Alex climbed the stairs, following the sound of crying. She found its source in the first room to her left. A girl. She might have been thirteen or fourteen, judging from the decoration of her room, a mixture of little girl’s items with pubescent interests in pop stars and makeup. She was huddled in the corner of her room, holding her knees, a thousand-yard stare on her face.
A six-inch kitchen knife was on the floor, still bloody. It had stained the girl’s pink shag rug. Alex couldn’t make out any injury on her. She folded over the rug with her foot to hide the knife from view and stepped closer to the girl.
The girl flinched away.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Alex. “I’m here to help. Please. What’s your name?”
The girl just stared at her. Urgency was making Alex impatient, but she bit her lip and held it back. The last and least helpful thing a traumatized child needed was someone browbeating her into communication.
Alex looked around the room for anything that might help her make a connection. Her eyes lingered on a poster on the wall. “You like Taylor Swift?” Alex said. “She’s one of my favorites. What’s your favorite song?”
The girl didn’t answer. Didn’t even look at her. Alex found another potential topic in a photo collage above her desk.
“You like horses? Do you ever go out riding?”
Nothing.
Alex looked around again and her gaze landed on a stuffed giraffe on a shelf. She remembered reading that trauma caused people to regress, to act like they were when they were younger. The stuffed animal looked stained and frayed, which told Alex it had been loved a lot.
Alex took it off the shelf and held it out to the girl. “Hey,” said Alex. “Look what I got.”
The girl held her stare on the giraffe, then reached out and grabbed it, enfolding it in her arms and closing herself up again.
“What’s her name?” Alex asked.
“H-his name,” the girl said, stammering, “is Tobey.”
Alex smiled. “What about yours?”
“Pam.”
“Pam, my name is Alex. Nice to meet you. Listen, I just need to make a phone call, but I’ll be right back, okay?”
“No!” she cried. “Please. Don’t go.”
“I’ll just be right out in the hall. Okay?” The girl nodded.
&nb
sp; Alex left the room with quiet steps and called her father.
“Dad,” Alex said, keeping her voice down so the girl couldn’t hear. “It’s too late. He’s gone. He, uh—he killed his wife. But his daughter is here, too. Alive. She isn’t hurt, but she’s in pretty bad shape. I think she saw something. But Ansley—Dad, he didn’t kill her. He brought the knife up here, but I think he couldn’t do it.”
Alex heard Pam’s sobs as her father considered this.
“Alex,” he said, “Stay with her and keep the phone close. I might still need you before this is done.”
Chapter 116
Bruce Ansley swiped his keycard at the door of the Hayes Street Water Pumping Station, fighting through his splitting headache to focus on appearing normal. He walked inside the vast open chamber, control panels, and meters against the walls. The scream of the eight pumps sending thousands of gallons through their pipes pounded in his brain. He was sweating, rubbing his temples. He couldn’t even walk straight.
“Hey, Bruce, are you feeling okay?” someone asked. The identity of the person didn’t register with Ansley.
“I’m fine,” he growled. He felt for the vial in his pocket and fought through the pain. This was the day. What he was made for, the consummation of his entire life.
He looked at the valve through which he would pour in the VX nerve agent, on the third pipe from the back, accessible through the catwalk. That was his purpose. His mission.
Ansley ran into the bathroom and vomited into the nearest toilet. He was tormented by visions of his family. The face of his wife as he murdered her. Of his daughter, shrinking from him, terrified he’d do the same to her. Cory, who wasn’t there—what would become of them? Of his kids?
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