He turned and looked back again toward the Eye itself. Of the three people waiting to get on, none were in the proper attire.
He checked his watch again, hoping that he was a few minutes early, but he was actually three minutes late. He shielded his eyes to see if he could make out the occupants of the various gondolas, but the glare made it impossible.
This standing and scanning had to stop. There was no better way to draw attention than to look lost. He turned again and started walking back toward shore.
It was possible, he supposed, that his contact couldn’t make it for some reason, but if that were the case, he’d have expected to hear from Iceman.
Then, there he was. A guy who appeared to be in his sixties sat on the wooden bench closest to the shore, one hand resting on a silver-handled cane, the other holding a phone to his ear. As disguises went, this one was outstanding. The red Nationals hat couldn’t have been more obvious, but the jacket he wore was more of a forest green than the brighter color Kellner had been expecting.
Kellner didn’t walk directly to the guy, but rather took his time, moving at a slow stroll. The guy never looked at him, just kept talking on the phone. Great tradecraft.
When Kellner finally made it to the bench and sat down, he seated himself only a foot or two away to facilitate quiet conversation.
The man shifted to his left, away from Kellner, and shot him a look that rang a warning bell. Maybe this wasn’t—
Somebody sneezed. It was a loud thing that pulled Kellner’s head around. Twenty-five feet up the dock, closer to shore, a younger man in a green jacket and a red Nats hat was approaching. When they made eye contact, the guy gave a subtle shake of his head and kept walking toward the Eye.
Kellner let him pass and was going to give him a ten- or fifteen-second lead before he followed, when the old man on his left said, “Can I help you?” It was not a friendly offer. From the way he held his phone, the line was still open.
“Probably not,” Kellner said.
“Then how about you give me some space?”
Kellner moved over a bit and then stood.
“This guy,” the old man said into his phone. “Plops down like we’re lovers and just sits there . . .”
Yeah, that was awkward.
Green Jacket was waiting for him all the way at the end of the dock, staring out over the water, or at least pretending to.
“Hi, Steve,” Kellner said, following his script.
The contact turned. “Hey, Chuck.”
“Redskins or Bills this year?” Kellner said.
“I say Falcons,” the man said. “Maybe Chargers.”
That was it. The sign and countersign were disposed of. Now all Kellner had to worry about was that this guy hadn’t tortured his real contact to learn the script. Of course, Steve had to worry about the same thing, and that was what provided the needed balance for this association.
“I’ll be straight up front with you,” Steve said. “I don’t like this arrangement. We shouldn’t be together.” If he’d altered his appearance, he’d either done it subtly or he was really damn good with disguises. He presented as early forties and athletic, but not in the way that most operators were athletic. He looked more like a fit cop than a fit snake eater.
“Not going to argue with you on that,” Kellner said. “But I was never asked for my vote.”
“Did you even get instructions?” Steve asked.
The on-the-nose nature of the question put Kellner on edge. “Tell me about yourself first,” he said.
“What is this, a fraternity meeting?”
Kellner took a step back. “How about you dial it down a little? Look, dude, I don’t know you from Adam. Try this, then. Back there when you forced the sneeze. How did you know it was me?”
“I didn’t.” Steve said. “I knew that the other guy wasn’t me but could have been. Throw in the fact that I’m running late, and I had a hunch. Now, what the hell are we doing here?”
“Didn’t Iceman give you a target?”
“And a date,” Steve said. “Clearly, we’re to wreak havoc here, but what’s the plan?”
Kellner jerked his head toward the shore. “Let’s walk and talk. This is exactly the wrong spot to discuss what I want to talk about.”
Chapter Twenty-four
The Golden Buoy Hotel on America Avenue sat three blocks back from the waterfront. At ten stories, it defined the first row of tall structures. Its marketing brochures touted the best views of the river, perfect for Independence Day fireworks. Who wouldn’t pay extra for an unobstructed view of the Potomac Eye against a backdrop of beautiful pyrotechnics?
The lobby staff greeted Kellner and Steve with warm smiles and hearty good-afternoons, to which they responded in kind. The lobby itself was a utilitarian space, designed for weekday businessmen and weekend families, where the seats needed to be functional yet not necessarily comfortable. The color palette melded blues and yellows in ways that Kellner thought induced more stress than comfort, but who was he to judge? He was a beige kind of guy.
At the elevators, they waited for a middle-aged couple to clear the car before they stepped in. The top two floors required a special card to access, so Kellner pressed the button for the eighth floor. From there, they walked down the green-and-yellow carpeted hallway—honest to God, who paid people to design these spaces?—toward the exit door at the end of the hallway. The exit stairway was blessedly bland and concrete, and he was happy to see the sign that read FD ROOF ACCESS. This was where firefighters would go if they needed to get to the top to take care of fires or utility issues on the roof.
As the stairway door clicked behind him, he rattled the knob. It was locked. That meant a long walk down when they were done here. They climbed the four half-flights past floors nine and ten in silence, and another flight later, they were confronted with the locked access door to the roof.
The lock was barely a lock at all. Kellner pulled his pick set from his pocket—the same one, in fact, that a Secret Service neighbor had given him as a gift way back when Kellner was a teenager. The neighbor’s name was Al, and he was always anxious to impress the kid next door. Kellner inserted the tension bar, raked the top pin tumblers and then the bottom ones, and the cylinder turned.
“Well, that was easy,” Steve said.
Kellner replied with a grunt. Steve’s newly found aggressive friendliness put him on edge. The guy seemed nothing like a killer.
As they stepped out onto the gravel-covered roof, Kellner thrust his arms out, as if making a presentation. Ta-da! Seeing the vista made the mission plainly obvious. The entirety of the Potomac Eye lay before them.
“There it is,” Kellner said. “I was just on that puppy. Moves at a snail’s pace. The range to the front of the gondolas is four hundred yards, give or take. The glass isn’t glass, and the shots aren’t hard. We can plink at those sons of bitches all night long, and they’d have no place to hide.”
Steve smiled and put his hands on his hips. “You are one sick man,” he said. He clearly meant it as a compliment.
“Well, I try,” Kellner said. “I’m thinking a suppressed AR in seven-six-two. A little bit of overkill, but it will make some damn big holes.”
“Even suppressed, it’s going to draw a lot of attention,” Steve observed.
“That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?” Kellner said. “People will hear shots, but there’ll be no muzzle flash. Among these buildings, I figure the noise will bounce around so much that they won’t be able to figure out where it’s coming from. At least not for a few minutes. And that’s all we’ll need to get a couple hundred rounds downrange and get the hell out.”
Steve pinched his lip as he listened to the plan. “So, how do you see my role?”
“I see you as the opening act,” Kellner said. “There’s going to be a lot of security down there because of the holiday. I’ll act as your spotter at first to take them out. Use whatever weapon platform makes you more comfortable. Once we identi
fy the uniforms and wipe them out, that will buy the time I need to go to work on the Eye.”
“I can be a second shooter on that,” Steve offered.
“I think that’s a bad idea,” Kellner said. “The cops are going to go apeshit when this goes down and their own people drop first. I need you to keep an eye out for them and neutralize those threats as they arise. Then, when my mags are empty, we’re done. Thoughts?”
Steve chuckled. “I’ve already said it, dude. I think you are a sick man. I love the plan.” His expression changed to one of curiosity. “Do you know if we’re the only show for Halloween? Are there other ops going on simultaneously?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Kellner said. “I do sense that this is our last op for Iceman and that he wants it to be huge. So, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more. But I just don’t know.”
“I don’t get why he’s doubling us up like this. We could make a lot bigger mark if we worked separately.”
“Hey, the check cleared,” Kellner said. “Everything other than that is above my pay grade.” He started walking across the rooftop, examining the details. It was difficult to walk more than a few feet without bumping into a vent pipe or an air handler, big gray boxes that hummed more quietly than Kellner would have expected.
“What are you thinking for cover?” Steve asked, articulating Kellner’s thoughts.
“Everything up here is one shade of gray or another,” Kellner said. “At night, it would be pretty monochrome.”
“We could build a couple of shelters,” Steve said.
“Exactly,” Kellner agreed. “Hell, we could drape ourselves under a gray blanket and be invisible from the air.”
“Put gravel on top of the blanket,” Steve said.
“Yes, exactly,” Kellner said. “Exactly. The cover only has to last for a few minutes, and then we’re out.” It was time to test his new companion. “What do you have in mind for an exfil plan?”
Steve pinched his lower lip as he pivoted slowly on his own axis, taking in the details. “First of all, I’m leaving my weapon right here. They can track it all they want, but they’ll just end up at a National Guard armory somewhere in Texas, where the gun was stolen five years ago. I’ve never been to the place, and my prints cannot be on it.”
“Agreed,” Kellner said. “But you’ll need to be careful in the hotel room, too.”
“What hotel room?”
“I booked two rooms for the next two nights. Your name is Steven Boyer, by the way, in case you lose your key or something.”
“Isn’t that a little risky?” Steve asked. “Anything that prolongs our exposure seems like a bad idea to me.”
“If you don’t want to stay, then don’t,” Kellner said. “Just have a good excuse as to why you’re going up to the occupied room levels when you don’t have a reservation. Don’t get confused by the lackadaisical security effort you saw downstairs today. I expect security to be tight as hell at this place on tomorrow night. We’ve created quite the panic over these past few weeks. I’ll have my rifle in a guitar case.”
Steve acknowledged the logic with a quick twitch of his head. “Why two nights?”
“Less suspicious than checking out on the night of the op.”
“Fine. So, on to exfil.” He pivoted again, then he walked to the edge of the roof and looked down. “That’s a long-ass rappel,” he said. “You’ve been brooding over this for longer than I have. What are your thoughts?”
Kellner cleared his throat and bounced his eyebrows. He liked being recognized as the expert here. “The only reasonable way down from here is through the stairwells. So, I figured we need to flood the stairs with occupants we can blend into.”
Recognition bloomed in Steve’s eyes. “You’re going to set the building on fire. That’s a little shortsighted what with us being up here and everything.”
“Incendiary bombs,” Kellner said. “One in your room, one in mine. Put a flashbang in with the incendiary to get everyone’s attention. Once the fire alarm goes off, we’re set. We just go with the flow.”
Steve thought about that for a while. “You know, given the mayhem out on the street, the cops aren’t going to let everyone just flow past.”
“You can’t stop people from fleeing a burning building,” Kellner said. “I plan to pull off my shirt and go down looking as if I’d just been rousted from bed. I think it’s my best shot. In a perfect world, you’d go down a different staircase, and then we part ways and never see each other again.”
Steve paced, clearly running the plan through his head. “Do you think we can kill the power to the hotel?” he said after the long pause. “That would really raise the stakes on the panic scale.”
It was Kellner’s turn to study the problem. “I imagine it’s a lot harder to get into the electrical room than it is to get up here on the roof.”
“One thermite grenade is all it would take,” Steve said. “We shoot it remotely. The lights go out, and we get another fire and even more confusion.”
Diversionary tactics had long been a staple in Kellner’s life. The tactical equivalent of sleight of hand, where the magician draws you to look away from where the action is happening, a good diversion allows operators to do what they need to do and get out before the targets realize that they’ve been hit.
He liked the idea of killing the power, but blinding the enemy was only effective if you yourself had night vision. “How would we get NVGs out of here?” he thought aloud, referring to night vision goggles.
“Why would we need them?” Steve asked. “I figure we wouldn’t kill the power until we were on our way out. The stairway will be lit by emergency lights.”
Kellner liked the idea, but it had a flaw. “If we kill the power here, that’s like firing a flare that says, look at me.”
Steve waited for the rest.
“Why stop at the hotel?” Kellner said with a wink. “Why not black out the whole block?”
Steve smiled. “You know how to do that?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Kellner said. “I’ve done it for Uncle Sam in shithole corners of the globe. Can it be a lot different to do it here?”
* * *
Boxers parked at the curb outside the People’s Bank. “This is the place,” he said. It was from this ATM that the camera had captured Kellner walking by.
Jonathan opened the door on the shotgun side and stepped out. He adjusted the Colt on his belt on his right hip and the radio on his left, all hidden by the suit jacket he was tired of wearing.
He didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly, but he hoped that he’d recognize it when he saw it. He’d visited Alexandria many times over the years—the locals called it Old Town—and he’d always found it to be beautiful. On a chilly fall afternoon like this one, the view across the Potomac was stunning. Hard to believe that this wide expanse of water was the same narrow river that coursed through Fisherman’s Cove.
The bank building was only a block up from the water. In the distance lay the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, the site of a mass shooting of which he was a victim—or a potential one—not so long ago.
From the angle of the security photo, it was clear that Kellner had been walking toward the water when the picture was snapped.
Jonathan took out his phone and took several photos of the buildings and businesses that surrounded him. Then he set them to Venice with a request for her to see if any of them had useful imagery.
Sometimes, when you walked in the steps of your enemy, you could learn to understand him better. That was his theory, anyway, when he started strolling toward the water. He was halfway there before he knew that Gail and Boxers had followed him.
The town fathers had torn down an ancient boat club at the end of the street to make room for a city park–slash-marina. They strolled to the end, where a guardrail constructed of three courses of horizontal iron pipes kept people from falling in. Given the median blood alcohol content of Old Town partiers on a Saturday night, Jon
athan imagined that the rails were the first things built.
“Bridge give you flashbacks, Boss?” Boxers asked with a smile.
“Over the years, it’s hard to find a view that doesn’t trigger a flashback,” Jonathan said. “So, what do you think Kellner wanted? Why did he walk down here?”
“Do we know that he walked here?” Boxers asked.
“Work with me,” Jonathan said. “Pretend that he did. Why?”
“He likes the view,” Boxers said. Clearly, he wasn’t going to play the game.
“Recon,” Gail said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jonathan said. Then, with a nod to Big Guy, he added, “Okay, that’s what I was hoping. What was he looking for?”
“Targets,” Gail suggested. “Or exfil routes, or, more in line with Big Guy’s view of the world, a place to eat.”
“No,” Boxers said. “It was a target.”
The words startled Jonathan. “That was a quick change of heart.”
“Because I just saw the perfect target for the kind of work he does.” He pointed toward the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
At first, Jonathan thought he was pointing at the bridge itself, and he was inclined to disagree. Short of blowing the thing up during rush hour, it would be hard to get the kind of body count these guys had become addicted to.
But then he looked beyond the bridge, and it fell into place. Way in the distance, the loop of a giant Ferris wheel cut a half-circle over the bridge span.
“The Potomac Eye,” he said. And there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that they’d identified the next target.
Chapter Twenty-five
Thanks to the presence of the massive Greyson Hotel and Casino, Capital Harbor was at once everything Jonathan abhorred and everything Boxers loved. Jonathan looked at gambling as a form of regressive taxation, attracting people who couldn’t afford the games to cast reason aside to joust at the Windmill of Luck, all the while surrounding themselves with a façade of opulence that was nowhere to be found in their own lives. He thought of gambling as a form of legalized addiction from which authorities looked the other way because the addiction lined their pockets.
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