Fighting Roarke was not on his agenda. It was not something he’d been paid to do and it wasn’t something he relished. Today was the day he was going to treat Donald Witherspoon to a Grande Soy Cap with extra foam, and an unhealthy double shot of ricin. The taste of the processed castor beans would have been masked by the aroma and flavor of the cappuccino.
Although ricin has potential medical uses in bone marrow transplants and cancer treatments, the barista had chosen it because of its other attributes. He had a vial in his pocket with 900 micrograms. In comparative terms, it could have fit on the head of a pin.
Somewhere along the way Witherspoon would have finished his coffee, tossed it, or left it on a desk to be thrown out by an assistant.
The assassin knew how effectively ricin worked. Ingestion leads to stomach cramps, quite normal for a harried attorney under pressure. Cramps give way to diarrhea, which are accompanied by uncontrollable waves of nausea and vomiting. As the poison works its way through the body, protein production in the cells is prevented. Without any known antidote, liver, kidneys, and spleen shut down.
It should have been a simple kill, worth grand. But the plan fell apart, the mark was still alive, and the man known as Paul Erskine was running for his life.
By the time he cleared the outside door, his wig was off and curled up in his hand. He grabbed the top of his shirt and pulled hard and fast. Buttons flew in every direction. He didn’t stop to recover them. But as he ran, he yanked the shirt over his head and rolled it up. Next, he tipped over a trashcan, which would be rolling to the right when the Secret Service agent emerged from Starbucks. Finally, he doubled back, darting diagonally across the alley to an open service entrance leading to the mailroom of a 12-story office building. He reached into his back pocket for a perfectly crafted laminated building ID. He clipped it to his belt buckle, slowed down, found the clipboard he’d left hanging the day before, picked it up, and casually walked in.
He’d plotted an emergency escape route before taking the job. It was always his first priority. And while he had counted on a calm departure later that day through the front door, he was prepared.
A moment later, Roarke flew out of the Starbucks. He scanned the alley. Two ways to go. To the left, the alley extended some 200 feet; the right, only twenty-five feet before it intersected Federal Street. Depp had a twenty-second lead, enough time to make the street. A trashcan was still rolling in that direction. Roarke took off.
At Federal, he had another decision to make. He looked both ways. Now which direction?
Once inside, the assassin ran down three halls and into a stairwell. He bounded up two steps at a time, purposely skipping the first landings. He counted the floors as he climbed, not even breaking a sweat. When he arrived where he planned, he opened the hall door, stepped inside, and calmly walked to the men’s room. The night before, he visited the bathroom and hid a number of items in a box under the sink. Good. Still there. He removed the articles and went into the farthest stall.
Roarke decided to go left. Only a few people were to the right. None of them running or walking away from him. But to the left, there were two clumps of pedestrians. He could be in either one.
Roarke ran to the first group, keeping his gun out, but behind him. Not here, he said to himself as he passed the last man. He caught up with the second. Damn!
“See anyone running?” he asked.
No one had. He doubled back to the first group and asked the same question.
“No.”
Roarke stopped and calculated the possible escape routes. He quickly broke the street into quadrants and gave each a quick, but experienced, study. This took another fifteen seconds. There was no sign of Depp. Then he realized, because he didn’t come this way!
Roarke returned to the alley, looking for any door or window that might have been broken into. He found something even better: a service entrance to a building across from Starbucks. Roarke cursed his stupidity. He’d fallen for Depp’s deception. The trash can.
The door was not open, but it wasn’t locked. He went in, cautiously. The safety was off the Sig. He backed up against the wall and turned the corner fast, with his gun in the lead.
Clear.
He repeated the action through the second corridor, and the third, where a shriek echoed off the walls. A middle-aged woman saw a gun round the corner. Roarke quickly raised it into the air.
“Secret Service. Did you see a man come this way?”
“No!” she said, frozen in place.
Roarke looked around her. An elevator bank and a stairwell were ahead.
Another decision.
He chose the stairs, calculating the best place to get lost was higher up. With his gun still out, Roarke climbed. He contemplated opening the door to the second floor, then the third, but he decided on the fourth. Once through the door, he checked the offices, one by one, turning each doorknob. They were all locked.
The bathroom. Roarke entered quietly. The mirror provided an instant reflection of the urinals. They were empty. Further down, three toilet stalls. The doors were open to two. The very last one appeared closed.
Roarke walked slowly toward the back of the bathroom. He peered down, looking for shadows or motion. Nothing, but Depp could be standing on the seat.
He needed Depp alive. He didn’t know if he was armed, but he had to assume he was. Surprise was not an option.
“Secret Service! Come out now! Hands in the air.” He stepped silently to the side, away from where he shouted the orders.
No response.
Roarke crept closer, cutting an obtuse angle to the stall, hugging the wall where the urinals were. “Now!” he repeated. Once again, he moved away from where he spoke in case Depp aimed there.
He calculated that Depp couldn’t see him. He held his breath and listened for breathing or the shifting of weight on the toilet seat. He waited for thirty seconds and shook his head. Worse than hearing something was the absence of sound itself.
Roarke walked forward, barely sliding his neck around the partition. The door to stall three was only partially open, and at this angle, he could now see that no one was there.
He’d chosen the wrong floor.
At the same moment, a man one floor directly below Roarke adjusted his conservative blue-and-green-striped tie. He looked roughly 55. He pushed a pair of metal frame glasses into place, and ran his hand through his graying hair. He stood over six-feet. Then he let his body collapse into his suit. In that instant, he easily lost two inches. He exited the bathroom, walked to the far end of the hall, and stopped in front of a locked office. He reached in his right front pocket and removed a key, which perfectly fit the lock. He entered and immediately immersed himself in meaningless paperwork, which he’d also left the day before. Everything was as he’d left it in the rented efficiency office suite.
Roarke covered the next five floors as fast as he could. They were empty. By the time he made it up to eight, people were beginning to file in. Now he needed a team to locate Depp.
Reluctantly, he gave up. He walked down the stairs to the first floor and entered the lobby. No guard. No one to question. Roarke departed through the front door, crossed the street, and looked up and down Franklin one last time. He turned back to the building and looked up.
Two women were talking in a window on four. He could see a man on the phone on five. And on three, a businessman in a white shirt and suspenders was pacing with the phone in his hand. He was gesturing with broad movements, as if he was arguing with someone on the other end and looking out into nothingness. “Damn!” was all Roarke could manage.
The man pretending to be on the phone was thinking something entirely different.
Chapter 41
SASR Command
Swanbourne, Australia
the same time
“Ten minutes out,” the voice announced calmly. “Target in range.”
JL Ricky Morris looked at his o
ps screen. “Roger that. You are go. Repeat, you are go.” Morris was the operation’s commander. He was on a live link to the lead pilot of the twin Royal Australian Air Force F/A-18Ds, carrying out the mission objectives. The attack was the work of the SASR, the Special Air Service Regiment. In addition to the real-time displays radioed back to the Swanbourne, Australia HQ, Morris had satellite imagery, courtesy of the Americans.
“Target acquired,” the pilot said with no hint of tension.
“We’re fully committed now,” Morris barely whispered to the man next to him. The prime minister’s defense secretary, Chris Wordlow, nodded acceptance.
The room fell silent as two Lockheed Martin F-35 (JSF) Strike Fighters closed the distance in seconds.
“Warning, attack command received.” This time the voice was from a computer onboard the lead F-35.
Come on, Wordlow mouthed. An SASR Tactical Assault Group (TAG) had located the terrorist base just days earlier. It hadn’t been all that difficult. Once the bomb squad disabled the device discovered in the Sydney hotel, the SASR analyzed the parts. Everything had its own history, and everyone who fused a bomb left a signature of his handiwork. Sometimes it was a fingerprint, other times the wire or solder was a giveaway. It could be serial numbers or the origin of the C-4. In this case, it was a combination of the markings on the explosives and the radio transmitter.
The device was amateurish and familiar, the work of a small insurgent group holed up in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia.
The Australian government had been watching the Solomons since the Bali bombings years earlier. Instability in the archipelago made it a natural habitat for terrorists. The Solomon Islands government invited “cooperative intervention.” Prime Minister David Foss willingly agreed. Intelligence determined that, while most of the terrorist cells operated in Indonesia, the 992 islands of the Solomons—some of them very isolated—provided terrorists with the same degree of shelter. Even worse, they were too close to Australia.
That’s where the group was hiding—one of the small islands off Rennell, to be exact. The TAG advance squad confirmed their identity and location, about 300 kilometers south of Guadalcanal. The Royal Air Force was going to do the rest.
“Attack commit,” the monotone computer voice stated.
“We’re going in with AGM-65 Maverick and AGM-88 HARM on the first pass. The knockout punch will come when we drop the GBU-12 Paveway laser-guided bombs,” Ricky Morris said without taking his eyes off the three computer screens.
“Attack target.”
This was Wordlow’s first time witnessing an actual strike and it seemed all too much like a video game. The Strike Fighters were represented by moving triangles. The target was boxed. The missiles, small circles, separated from the planes. As they converged on the box, he shifted his eyes to another screen. There he saw what the missiles saw: live video of the terrorist camp looming closer and closer.
“Seconds now.” Morris pointed to the satellite feed. Barely two seconds later, the circle met the box, the missile-view cameras went black, and the satellite showed massive explosions. The base was obliterated.
“They’ll go in for another run, but it’s over,” Morris stated.
Wordlow leaned back and let out the breath he’d been holding. As many as 100 men, maybe some women, were incinerated in a thousandth of a second. They had no warning, no chance to look to Allah for deliverance. It was the price they paid, he thought without remorse, for planning to blow up the Ville St. George Hotel and the President of the United States.
Jack Evans thought the same thing, watching the attack from his command center in the Pentagon.
Chapter 42
The New York Times editorial offices
New York, New York
“Hey, I got this odd e-mail. It’s short and kinda weird.” Michael O’Connell handed it to his editor at The New York Times. “What do you make of it?”
Andrea Weaver read it and quickly dismissed the content. “These unsolicited e-mails are useless.”
O’Connell would normally agree. Internet tips hardly ever amount to much. The correspondence is usually comprised of verbose, argumentative complaints from disgruntled, anonymous readers. This, too, was anonymous, but there was something that piqued O’Connell’s interest.
“No phone number. No contact. No information,” Weaver complained. “Pass.” She returned it to O’Connell.
“That was my first reaction,” he explained. “But check it out again.” He gave it back to her.
She nodded affirmatively. “Bad English.”
“Maybe intentionally bad.”
She re-read the e-mail.
Andrea Weaver had been transferred to the news desk from Moscow only two months earlier. She had limited contact with O’Connell, but she’d been told to give the reporter, who was likely to earn a Pulitzer for his inside reporting of the Lodge investigation, room to work.
“You think this is about Lodge?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing that directly indicates that, Michael.”
“There’s nothing that precludes it.”
She read the correspondence a fourth time, then handed it back. “You probably don’t even need my approval on a travel voucher,” she said, acknowledging his star status at the paper.
“I know, but I do need to pick your brain. You’ve been there. I haven’t. Where should I go?”
He could see Andrea Weaver’s whole manner change. He’d worked her and she just realized it. “You are good.”
“Why, thank you,” he said through a laugh.
“Okay, sit down. Let me grab a map and we’ll see what looks most promising.”
Staritsa, Russia
Deep down, Aleksandr Dubroff hoped that nobody cared about him. He hoped that the State had forgotten him. But the very fact that he received pension payments reminded Dubroff that at least one department knew where he was, whether or not they knew who he was. Furthermore, he wasn’t naive. The FSB wouldn’t welcome him speaking to the West. Not with what he knew.
Dubroff’s career was built on secrets, deceptions, outright lies, and murder. He’d trained countless good young men to become merciless killers. He’d transformed medical students—who may have once dreamed of healing people—into torturers who inflicted unimaginable pain. He turned innocent girls into mistresses who would get their bedfellows to admit crimes against the State. And he taught everyone the lesson he believed the most: Trust no one.
While the Western press reported that Russia was transformed under democratization, Dubroff knew otherwise. Nations with no concept of democracy cannot suddenly be democratized. It was the way of Russia. For hundreds of years. He thought it was amazing that the Americans failed to realize that, even after Iraq. People need to be told. People need the State to make their decisions.
And now he was selling out the State—at least, the old regime. He feared the new leadership would not make the distinction.
Dubroff had already taken the first dangerous step. He sent an e-mail to the reporter O’Connell. But would the American be smart enough to act on the invitation? He hoped so.
The New York Times
Your reports fine.
Why do you write about things you not know?
You need information good.
Bearly a friend.
Michael O’Connell analyzed the printout at his desk. There were only four sentences to the e-mail, in obviously poor English. A trick, or a clue to the sender’s identity? He considered each word important and possibly meaningful on multiple levels.
Your reports fine. For more than a year, O’Connell’s beat had been Teddy Lodge. He’d covered the origins of the sleeper spy plot that won Lodge the election and almost put him in the White House. President Taylor had given him complete access to the military mission that garnered the proof. Other news sources quoted him. The author of the note had to be referring to the coverage
.
Based on information recovered in the American raid on Libya, O’Connell knew that the plot had been handed off from one Arab country to another, but it originated in Russia. The e-mail is from Russia.
Why do you write about things you not know? This was more puzzling. Is this criticism? An observation from someone who does know? This is what he immediately concluded. Even working with the White House and his ex-CIA sources, O’Connell knew very little, and understood even less. But the person who sent this to me does know.
You need information good. O’Connell got excited every time he read the line. The awkward English syntax aside, he felt this could be an invitation. You need… It sounded like an offer more than a criticism. And …information good. He believed that good meant correct. He believed the writer was indicating he or she had intelligence on the matter, and was interested in offering it up.
The letter was intentionally vague. The reporter reasoned it was written in such a way as to also pass as a complaint if intercepted. It might read that way to someone else, but in Michael O’Connell’s hands, it told another story.
Bearly a friend.
O’Connell saw the connection immediately. The root of the word—bear. This wasn’t about an animal. From his knowledge of the Cold War, “bear” meant only one thing. He was getting an invitation to come to Russia.
Starista, Russia
Dubroff moved cautiously. He smiled to neighbors when he left the house. They see my suitcase. It was a terribly weathered two-suiter. The leather was dry and flakey. “I’m going to visit my wife’s ailing sister,” he told the old woman who sold him eggs and milk.
“Where?” she asked. “You never mentioned…”
See? Everyone is suspicious. The Soviet way.
“In St. Petersburg. She has been failing for a long time,” he added.
Dubroff waved to his butcher, and when the vegetable seller asked when he’d be back with more mushrooms, Dubroff said in a week-and-a-half.
Executive Treason Page 28
