The Beltway Assassin

by Richard Fox

  CHAPTER 4

  Interstate 495, the highway nicknamed the Beltway since it formed a ring around Washington, DC, is as infamous for its traffic as for its location. Significant portions of the highway could turn into a parking lot with the slightest provocation, be it a fender bender, a struck deer, or a wayward yellow cone on the side of the road.

  Max McBride gunned his BMW M6 forward another ten feet in his plodding and inexorable progress to the exit in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He grumbled as his wipers shoved aside another sheen of freezing rain. Red taillights glared at him through the drizzle.

  “Come on,” he said as he checked his cell phone for the time. He was scheduled to speak at a Heritage Foundation grip and grin, but this traffic wasn’t cooperating with his plans. DC had some of the worst traffic in the nation on a good day. Add moisture to the equation, and spilled molasses could make better time.

  McBride picked up his speaking notes from the passenger seat and went over the main points of his speech for the umpteenth time. Monetary policy and the Fed’s artificially low interest rates wouldn’t excite most listeners, but the Heritage Foundation, which had several senators and congressmen from the nation’s more conservative districts, was interested.

  The $80,000 speaking fee had interested McBride most of all.

  A horn from behind made him jerk his head up. Ten bare yards of asphalt beckoned to him. Ahead, a tall, scraggly-looking vagrant meandered between the idling cars, knocking on windows. The vagrant wore a too-big overcoat, pregnant with rain water, which sloshed around him as he moved. McBride’s BMW made a small advance, and he turned his attention back to his notes.

  The vagrant knocked on the driver’s side window of the car ahead of McBride. McBride grabbed his cell phone and thumbed through the numbers to his contact at the conference. Might as well call in a little late. The traffic on 495 was equal for all the attendees who were commuting from DC proper; no one would complain about a fifteen-minute delay.

  McBride kept his phone to his ear and his eyes down on his notes as the vagrant approached. McBride hoped his preoccupation would be enough of a hint to the vagrant to keep moving.

  Knuckles rapped against his window. McBride kept his head down.

  Another knock.

  “How does it feel?” came from beyond his window.

  McBride glanced up at the vagrant. The man had bent over and stared at McBride through the water-streaked window. His bearded face was soaked by rain; bloodshot eyes quivered in their sockets. McBride felt the icy scratch of fear in his gut; the mentally unstable always made him nervous.

  “How does it feel to have so much blood on your hands?” the vagrant asked, his voice muted by the glass.

  McBride shrugged and shifted his BMW into drive. Something thumped against his door as he drove away from the vagrant. He glanced at his rearview mirror and saw the man cut across traffic and vault over the road guard.

  “Damn wackos,” McBride said.

  The car to his left honked twice. He looked up to see nothing but bumper lights ahead. The car next to him honked again.

  “Hey! Hey, mister!” someone shouted.

  McBride rolled his eyes and turned his head. This commute was going to be enough of an annoyance to earn a Twitter rant.

  From her car, a young woman with thick glasses and dark hair motioned to him to roll down his window. McBride rolled down his window just enough to expose his chin.

  “Mister, you got something on your door,” she said, pointing to his front-side door.

  McBride rolled his window down the rest of the way and peered over the side. There was a black plastic box stuck to his door. He grabbed the box and tried to pry it off, but it was stuck fast.

  “What is that?” the woman asked.

  “Hell if I—”

  The blast propelled hundreds of screws and washers through McBride’s door, shredding him into mangled flesh. The shrapnel tore through the next two lanes of traffic, instantly killing four people. The blast wave opposite the shrapnel wave crushed the young woman’s face and blew her out the other side of her car.

  Sound from the explosion rumbled as far away as the Mall and the parking lot at the Pentagon.

  ****

  To Ritter, the weirdest thing about the FBI’s TEDAC building was the color. Whoever had decided that a light-yellow color for a multistory building in the middle of Quantico’s Marine Corps base forest had either a horrible sense of humor or the artistic sensibilities of a bureaucrat who’d found a deal on canary-colored paint.

  He and Shelton walked toward the entrance over thin puddles left from the day’s rain. Ritter looked over the building, noting camera locations and access points other than the front door. There wasn’t any visible security other than a contract security guard lounging in a golf cart on the ground floor of the parking garage.

  Shelton opened the first double set of doors and let Ritter pass him. Ritter got a sideways look at the inches-thick bulletproof glass door as he went inside. At the entrance were a secure box, security gates, and more bulletproof glass meant to keep an armed assailant from getting beyond the armed guard, who looked Ritter over with more than a passing interest. Ritter’s Glock 23 handgun under his jacket set off the metal detector.

  Ritter feigned annoyance and flashed his badge for the security guard, who scowled at him.

  “Sir, you need to remove your firearm before you pass through the detector. They don’t have that protocol at your home office?” the guard asked.

  Ritter unsnapped the fitted plastic holster from his belt and handed it over, weapon and all.

  “Sorry, my mistake,” Ritter said. He took a ticket from the guard and looked at Shelton, who stood beyond the metal detector with a smirk.

  He let me go first so I’d screw up in front of the guard, Ritter thought. What a pal.

  Ritter left the security entrance and waited for Shelton at an elevator bank. After a second, he pushed the call button. He moved into an elevator after a door opened and hit the close button. Shelton caught a glimpse of Ritter as the doors shut and rushed to the elevator. Shelton jammed a foot between the doors and got them to reopen.

  “You know where you’re going?” Shelton asked.

  “Sort of. I just thought you might appreciate some passive-aggressive bullshit too,” Ritter said as he hit the button for the third floor.

  Shelton rolled his shoulders to adjust his jacket. He looked at Ritter as if he were a dog that had defiled a carpet. “What’s the matter, spy guy? You need me to hold your hand while you play FBI?” Shelton asked.

  “Keep fucking around and see if you can get a job as a mall security guard. Do you want to get this bomber or not?” Ritter said. Ritter knew he was on thin ice, but there was no way he could portray that to Shelton. If Ritter was arrested for impersonating a federal agent, there was some ambiguity as to whether Shannon could get him released.

  As a non-official cover (NOC) officer, Ritter’s work in foreign countries was always done without the net of diplomatic immunity employed by CIA spies who traipsed around under the guise of State Department employees. A bribe or extraction from custody with varied levels of violence might mitigate a police arrest in third world countries. To do the same in America was…dicey. Shelton had Ritter over a barrel, but he probably didn’t know it.

  “Arrest, Eric. I make arrests,” Shelton said. The doors to the elevator opened with a ding.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Play along, and we’ll get this done faster than waiting for your bureaucrats to approve every decision in writing and in triplicate.”

  Ritter stepped from the elevator and looked up and down the hallway. “Where is—?”

  “Ballistics is to the right, rookie,” Shelton said.

  “No, the person we’re looking for is…” Ritter glanced at the numbers on a door and went left.

  They passed a glass-enclosed office, where two technicians poured a viscous, black liquid into a flattened copper cone. A cart with dozens of
copper cones, a centimeter thick and varying from the width of a can of soda to a dinner plate, was next to their workstation. The technicians ignored Ritter and Shelton’s passing.

  “Explosively formed projectiles. All the parts from Iraq and Afghanistan come here for exploitation,” Shelton said.

  “Never my problem set,” Ritter said. Iran-backed insurgents in Iraq almost always used explosively formed projectiles, EFPs. His focus had been on the al-Qaeda militants in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, a place not known for Iranian influence.

  Ritter stopped in front of an opaque glass door, checked the numbers, and knocked.

  A few seconds later an Asian woman in her early twenties opened the door. Her straight hair fell over her shoulders, outlining a V-shaped pale face. The powder-blue lab coat looked like a tent over her rail-thin frame.

  “Oh…um…” Her eyes rolled up and to the right as she tried to remember something. “Are you looking for Stacy? She’s at the dentist’s office,” Irene said, giving the code that there wasn’t any danger to her or Ritter.

  “Sure hope she can make it to dinner later,” Ritter said, returning the same status.

  Irene, one of the Caliban Program’s newest analysts, stepped aside and let Ritter and Shelton in. The lab was sparse and looked as if it had been cleaned out a few hours ago. A single laptop glowed on a countertop next to a dirty set of beakers.

  “I’m waiting on the IT Department to set up computer workstations, which is taking forever,” Irene said. “By ‘forever,’ I mean I actually have to wait for it to happen. More analysts are coming in from Colombia. You wouldn’t believe how much effort this case is getting from these goofballs.”

  Shelton cleared his throat.

  “Is this your beard?” Irene asked Ritter.

  “His what?” Shelton stroked his five o’clock stubble.

  “Nothing,” Ritter said over his shoulder before turning his attention back to Irene. “You have a run of the place?”

  Irene tapped the host of badges hanging from her lanyard. “You flash the right one of these, and you can get most anything you want around here. I swear, they think I’m from Area 51 or something.”

  “We have something. Need to get prints, ballistics, and DNA off it right away,” Ritter said. He motioned to Shelton with one hand, a misdirection while his other hand tapped in a code on the cell phone in his pocket.

  Shelton handed over the bullet casings. He opened his mouth to speak, but a ringing cell phone preempted him. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the caller.

  “My wife. Be right back,” he said and left the room.

  Ritter waited until the door was closed before he pulled Irene into an embrace. He cupped a hand under the back of her head and pressed his cheek to hers.

  “You have the bugs running?” he whispered into her ear.

  “Yes. Tony said everything’s as it should be.” She wrapped her arms around him and clasped her hands on his lower back.

  “If you’re compromised, get out of here and get to the safe house,” he said. He ran a hand down her arm and squeezed her elbow. Anyone watching would assume they were taking the assumed privacy for a moment’s passion. Cindy, Ritter’s lover, wouldn’t complain about this bit of tradecraft, but she sure wouldn’t like it.

  “I’m not some friggin’ ninja like you. What if someone shows up with a gun?” she said, fear in her voice.

  “Just get the tests done before—”

  The door flew open, and Shelton barged in. “She must have butt dialed me because…the hell?”

  Ritter and Irene jumped apart. Ritter adjusted his tie, and Irene pulled her hand from Ritter’s back pocket.

  “Hey,” a voice said from the open doorway. A technician with greasy hair and a puffy face stuck his head in the doorway. “You guys might want to come see this. Nobody’s getting the weekend off now. TV’s on in the break room.”

  Shelton frowned at Ritter and Irene, then followed the technician down the hall. Ritter looked at Irene and at his rear end which she’d been touching mere moments ago, confusion written on his face. Irene shrugged and raised her hands, expressing her own confusion.

  Ritter felt his face flush. Irene wasn’t trained for field operations and must not have known that a surreptitious ass grab wasn’t part of the maneuver. He’d keep it quiet, since Irene would lose fingers if Cindy ever got wind of what had just happened.

  In the break room, a dozen FBI employees were watching a flat-screen TV on the wall. The live news feed showed several smoldering cars on a highway. Large text decried “The Beltway Bomber?” next to a small map showing the highway ringing the capital. A small burning animation sat on the graphic where the bomb had gone off, another on Ashburn where Bendis had met his fate.

  “An IED on the Beltway. Can you believe this?” someone said.

  “It sure wasn’t buried under the highway,” Irene said. She plucked at her lower lip as she concentrated on the news feed.

  “How do you know that?” Ritter asked loudly enough for the rest of the room to hear the question. If he could get all these analysts on the problem, so much the better.

  Irene pulled a pen from her pocket protector and tapped its tip against the TV screen. “You see the blast pattern on the asphalt? Just a bunch of cracks. No asphalt ejected like we’d see with a subsurface IED…or the crater we’d see if it was surface laid.”

  “One vehicle took the brunt of the blast, but the car wasn’t flipped over,” an analyst said. “It looks like it was almost sheered in half by the blast.”

  “So the bomb was…right next to the driver’s door? A few feet in the air?” Irene asked.

  “A magnetic IED?” Shelton asked. The audience turned to look at Shelton, murmuring. “I saw this in Iraq a few times. Hajji would slap a bomb on our fuel tankers and try to set them off once they made it back to our base.”

  The analysts nodded, and the murmuring grew louder. Irene’s face flushed, and she crossed her arms over her chest. Ritter suppressed a smile; Irene always prided herself on being the smartest person in the room. For someone—who wasn’t even wearing a lab coat—to connect the dots before she did would gall her pride.

  A pair of analysts stepped toward the TV and started a discussion with Irene.

  “Think this is the same guy?” Ritter asked Shelton.

  “Two complex bombings in less than twenty-four hours, and you think they’re a coincidence?” Shelton said. “Killing someone with an IED isn’t a crime of passion. It takes time, planning, and precise execution. This perp knows what he’s doing.”

  “The attack on Michael Bendis wasn’t an isolated event. We’re dealing with a serial killer,” Ritter said.

  ****

  Located just west of the Beltway, Tysons Corner was a boomtown. The gigantic contractor firms that had consumed a significant portion of America’s intelligence and defense budget had grown the town from a few scattered farms and a single gas station in the 1980s to a sprawl of corporate high-rises and trendy restaurants.

  Francis Zike spat a bisected sunflower seed into a Styrofoam cup and checked his dashboard clock again. The Iranian was late, as usual.

  Zike looked at the half-complete concrete columns amid the idle construction equipment across the highway from him. The much-daunted Silver Line, meant to run from Dulles International Airport to the heart of Washington, DC, was behind schedule and over budget, which came as a surprise to absolutely no one.

  A dilapidated Honda parked next to Zike. A blond man in his early forties, with a widow’s peak and a mustache that would have been appropriate in a 1970s adult film, looked at Zike through their car windows. The Iranian had arrived.

  Zike unlocked his car doors, and the Iranian let himself into the car.

  “You’re late,” Zike said.

  “Traffic just got worse,” the Iranian said. Zike, who’d traveled to almost every country America had serious dealings with and had heard just about every accent English could carry, would never have gues
sed the Iranian was from anywhere but the United States based on his voice.

  “About that.” Zike spat another seed shell into his cup. Since the bombing on the Beltway, government staffers, policy wonks, and professional class of lobbyists had reacted with the usual amount of DC maturity; they’d panicked. Highways out of DC were choked with cars as rumors about the Ashburn attack crept into the blogosphere and Twitter feeds of the nation’s policy makers. “You care to explain why the hell Jefferson is active without our express order? Did you forget the very specific terms of our deal?”

  The Iranian kept his hands on his lap; his fingers tapped against his thighs as if a separate twitch possessed each.

  “I didn’t unleash him. Jefferson has…gone rogue,” the Iranian said.

  Zike smashed his cup against the dashboard. It exploded like a grenade and sent sunflower seeds everywhere.

  “Rogue? What do you mean he went rogue?” Zike asked.

  “He missed his check in two days ago. I went to his normal haunts to find him. Nothing. I thought he was having another one of his episodes. Then he killed the first name on the target list. No warning. I went to clean out the caches we set up for him, but he got there before me,” the Iranian said, unfazed by Zike’s outburst.

  Zike rubbed his temples and cursed his fate.

  “What’s the matter? This is what you wanted,” the Iranian said. “Fear and chaos in the capital.”

  “We wanted every name on that list crossed off within hours of each other,” Zike said. “I knew we should have eliminated him as soon as the other prospect flaked out. He’s smart enough to build bombs and use them properly, but he’s a damn nutcase. Why the hell did he blow up some wonk?”

  “I, unlike you, have spent a great deal of time with him. He’s delusional, convinced that those responsible for your nation’s foreign aggression must be punished. That he’s adding to the list of targets doesn’t surprise me. Don’t worry. He has nothing that can come back to me. You made sure of that,” the Iranian said.