by AD Starrling
The Ford skidded through a one-eighty spin and juddered to a stop two hundred feet from a stadium gate. Conrad jerked against the belt and slammed back in the seat, a grunt leaving his lips.
Three state trooper and four county police patrol cars screeched to a halt in a half circle, yards from the SUV’s front bumper. The officers leapt out of their vehicles with their guns drawn and aimed the weapons steadily at Conrad’s chest through the windshield. The immortal’s eyes flicked to his watch. It was fifteen minutes to ten.
‘Sir, keep your hands on the wheel where we can see them and do not make a move!’ shouted a middle-aged sergeant on the left. The man’s voice was muffled by the clatter of rotors as a Maryland State Police chopper joined the DC Met Police helicopter.
A muscle clenched in Conrad’s jaw as he waited for four uniformed officers to draw close to the vehicle. The sergeant reached the driver’s door first and opened it carefully.
‘I’m armed,’ said Conrad. He turned his head slightly so he could meet the officer’s eyes. ‘The weapon’s on the passenger seat.’
Although his expression remained professionally detached, the sergeant visibly stiffened. ‘Is it loaded?’
‘Yes,’ said Conrad.
The sergeant directed one of the other officers to retrieve the gun. As the policeman opened the door, Conrad heard the noise of the large crowd already gathered in the stadium complex. A mob was forming beyond the circle of police vehicles, people stopping to gawk at the unfolding drama. Sunlight flashed on mobile phones as some took shots of the scene. The second officer retrieved the HK P8, passed it carefully to a colleague, and kept his Glock on the immortal.
The high-pitched wails of sirens and the roar of engines suddenly rose in the distance and grew louder. Conrad tensed at the telltale sounds of a motorcade. His eyes darted to his watch. The speech was not scheduled for another forty-five minutes. He hadn’t expected Westwood to get here until well after ten. He turned to the sergeant.
‘There’s a US Secret Service agent called Laura Hartwell inside that stadium right now.’ Conrad’s fingers clenched on the steering wheel. ‘I was talking to her on the phone before I got cut off. You need to tell her there’s going to be an assassination attempt on the president during today’s fundraiser. They need to abort this visit and get him the hell out of here right now!’
The sergeant’s grip tightened on his gun.
‘Speak to one of the agents inside and ask them to get Hartwell down here,’ the immortal continued in a strained voice. ‘Tell them Conrad Greene wants to see her.’
The sergeant stood still for several seconds, his expression unreadable. Conrad let out the breath he had been holding when the man finally reached for the radio clipped to his uniform and requested to be put through to the US Secret Service on a coded frequency.
A female voice came across the radio channel a moment later. ‘Hartwell here. What can I do for you, officer?’
For the second time that day, Conrad’s heart throbbed inside his chest.
‘Ma’am, DC Met Police followed up on a threatening 911 call made from a prepaid mobile phone about forty minutes ago,’ the sergeant explained after identifying himself. ‘The call was located to a stolen Ford SUV traveling at high speed on Interstate 495. We’ve just apprehended the driver of the vehicle on the grounds of the stadium. He’s insisting he has important information to convey to you about an impending threat to the person of the president. Says his name is Conrad Greene.’
A silent beat followed. ‘Describe him!’ barked the voice.
The state trooper scrutinized Conrad. ‘White male, six foot two, one eighty, dark brown hair, gray-blue eyes, snake tattoo on the left fore—’
A colorful expletive erupted on the airwaves. The sergeant’s eyebrows rose slightly. Surprise darted across the stony faces of the police officers close enough to have heard the exchange.
Conrad suppressed a smile. Though she could act every inch a lady when she wanted to, Laura Hartwell could swear, fight, and drink with the best of them. It was one of the reasons she had fitted in so well with his team.
‘It’s not a tattoo,’ he heard her mutter darkly, ‘it’s a birthmark. What’s your position?’
‘We’re outside the main ticket office,’ replied the sergeant. ‘We’re kinda hard to miss.’
‘Wait there. I’m on my way,’ she commanded.
Conrad followed the state trooper’s orders to step out of the vehicle and lean against the hood. He was aware of the eyes of the crowd drilling into his back as the officers cuffed him. One of the policemen retrieved the staff weapon tucked in his waistband.
He was being marched to a squad car when running footsteps rose from the direction of the stadium gate.
‘Hold up!’ a female voice shouted.
Conrad froze in his tracks.
The sergeant looked around. ‘Agent Hartwell?’ he asked with a small frown.
‘Yes,’ said Laura Hartwell.
Conrad saw her appear out of the corner of his eye and remove her sunglasses. The immortal turned slowly and beheld his soulmate for the first time in a hundred years.
As his gaze swept over her lightly freckled skin, high cheekbones, full lips, and hazel eyes, emotions old and new welled up inside him. Love, desire, resentment, regret, and sadness were sentiments he had lived with for a long time.
The shock was a bolt from the blue. Before her expression shut down into a cold, businesslike mask, Conrad thought he detected a flash of some nameless emotion in the golden-green depths. It caused him to wonder.
‘Do you know this man?’ asked the sergeant.
Laura’s gaze moved to the state trooper. ‘Yes, I—’
‘We have about thirty minutes to figure out the positions of the killers,’ Conrad interrupted urgently. He ignored the racing of his heart, which he knew had as much to do with the physical proximity of his mate as with the looming danger, and pressed on. ‘The envelope I was telling you about is on the passenger seat of the SUV. The maps are floor plans of the stadium. I think I know how to decrypt the encoded passages.’ His voice hardened. ‘You guys should still evacuate the president.’
Laura’s eyes narrowed at his words. ‘This is a National Special Security Event,’ she stated frostily. ‘Our teams went over every inch of this place in the last few weeks to design and coordinate the optimal operational security plan. We did it all over again last night with the K-9 teams. All the checkpoints were established and have been maintained since zero six hundred hours. There are metal detectors on the gates and the stadium staff has been security cleared. We’ve looked at every potential threat scenario during the site surveys.’
The cuffs clinked around Conrad’s wrists as he shifted on the warm asphalt, apprehension making him restless. ‘Have you received any intelligence of an impending threat?’
‘No,’ Laura replied.
‘Did you come across anything odd during your search?’ he questioned insistently.
‘Negative.’
‘Then you’ve missed the assassins,’ said Conrad.
Laura cocked an eyebrow. ‘Or there is no threat.’
Conrad quelled the tide of dread rising inside him as precious seconds ticked past. ‘Are you willing to take that risk?’
She went still at the question. The state trooper looked curiously between the two of them.
‘Goddammit!’ Laura exclaimed. She exhaled sharply. ‘Fine! Let’s take a look at what you’ve got.’
Conrad waited tensely while Laura assumed custody of his person from the state troopers.
‘I need my weapons,’ he said when she returned and removed his cuffs.
Laura muttered something unsavory under her breath and headed back to the sergeant. She spoke to the man briefly and came back a minute later with hi
s gun and the gilded staff.
‘I didn’t expect that to go so smoothly,’ said Conrad, glancing at the frowning sergeant.
‘I assured him nothing would give me greater pleasure than to personally shoot you if you tried anything,’ Laura replied with a mirthless smile. ‘Besides, the US Secret Service is the lead agency for this kind of event. What we say goes.’
Conrad suspected the shooting comment had not been made in jest. He retrieved the envelope from the Ford and followed her as she jogged back to the stadium.
‘Where’s your command post?’
‘We’re on the second level, in the Owner’s Club,’ came the curt reply.
They left the slow-moving crowds behind and entered a brightly lit lobby patrolled by officers from the local and state police. Dozens of watchful eyes scanned them as they entered a lift.
The elevator opened onto a small atrium that led to a glass-walled concourse. Conrad followed Laura down the corridor and glanced at her curiously as they entered a luxurious lounge and headed for the back. Though she wore the same conservative, two-piece suit and earpiece as the rest of the agents they had crossed paths with, it was evident from the way they deferred to her that she was their senior.
‘I thought you were part of the president’s personal detail,’ he said.
‘I am,’ she replied, her expression aloof. ‘My boss wanted me on the shop floor today.’
Conrad digested this information for a couple of seconds. ‘Are there more immortals among your ranks?’
She opened a door, a look of irritation darting across her face. He stifled a sigh and walked in behind her.
The command center was in one of the executive suites of the Owner’s Club. The floor had been stripped of its opulent furnishings and replaced with a business-like bank of tables holding computer monitors and telephones in front of the panoramic bay windows looking out over the football field. Detailed maps and charts were pinned to a series of boards on the left. Two men and a woman hovered next to them.
Laura strode toward the tall, black man looming over the group.
‘Clint, this is the guy I was telling you about,’ she said, interrupting the low hubbub of conversation. She looked between Conrad and the black man. ‘Clint Woods, Assistant Special Agent in charge of the Office of Protective Operations. Conrad Greene.’
Conrad acknowledged the senior agent with a curt nod. Woods observed him woodenly while Laura introduced the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the Special Operations Bureau of the Maryland State Police and the Deputy Chief of the county police Special Operations Division.
‘So, Greene,’ said Woods, ‘what was so urgent that you had to get everybody’s panties in a bunch?’ His disgruntled voice boomed across the room. A couple of the Secret Service techs glanced over their shoulders. The Deputy Chief of county police blew a sigh through her lips and rolled her eyes.
Conrad looked at the clock on the wall. It was eight minutes past the hour. He walked wordlessly to the table next to the boards, upended the envelope, and spread the contents across the surface. Silence fell over the group as they scrutinized the photographs and floor plans of the FedEx Field stadium.
‘What’s this?’ said the Deputy Chief quietly.
Conrad briefly retold the story of how he had come across the envelope. He did not elaborate on the details of his trip from Alvarães to Washington.
The Lieutenant Colonel raised an eyebrow. ‘And you didn’t report this to the local authorities in Brazil?’
‘No,’ retorted Conrad. ‘I didn’t know who I could trust.’
‘What makes you think there will be an assassination attempt on the president today?’ said Woods. He was frowning at the pictures of the agents. Laura smoothed out the maps and studied them intently.
‘Because of the haiku at the top of the first sheet,’ said Conrad. He tapped a finger on the paper in question.
‘“On Freda’s Dark Day, For the Rightful Blood to rise, The Falcon must fall,”’ quoted the Lieutenant Colonel. He shrugged. ‘So?’
‘“Freda’s Dark Day” refers to Typhoon Freda,’ Conrad explained. ‘And “Falcon” is the codename for President Westwood.’
Understanding dawned on Woods’s face. ‘The 1962 Columbus Day storm,’ he breathed.
‘Exactly,’ Conrad concurred. ‘We’ve got less than twenty minutes left to find the two killers.’
Laura’s head jerked up. ‘What makes you think there are two of them?’
‘Because of the other nine lines,’ Conrad replied. He pointed them out. ‘I think each paragraph is a message to an assassin about where they should position themselves for the shot.’
Laura frowned. ‘There are three paragraphs.’
‘The third killer was the guy who died in the plane crash,’ said Conrad steadily. ‘He had calluses between his thumb and forefinger from using a sniper rifle.’
Laura turned to Woods in the taut lull that followed, her expression troubled. ‘Although I hate to admit this, Clint, Greene is right. We should abort the visit now.’
Relief flashed through Conrad at her words. She believed him.
Woods ran a hand through his receding hair and sighed. ‘You know as well as I do what he’ll say to that. He’s gonna want to see an act of God before he changes his mind.’
Laura chewed her lip and remained silent.
Conrad looked between the two agents. ‘It’s your call, isn’t it?’ he said, making no attempt to mask his surprise. ‘He shouldn’t have a say in his personal security matters.’
Woods cast Conrad a mocking look. ‘We do not order our commander-in-chief. We only advise him. We sometimes have to do it loudly and vehemently, but still, we can only recommend a course of action.’ He lowered his voice a notch. ‘I can tell you don’t know this president.’
Laura pulled a face. ‘He’s a stubborn bastard.’
The Maryland Lieutenant straightened, his back rigid. ‘You are talking about our Head of State here!’
Laura eyed him coolly. ‘I’m sorry. The president is a stubborn bastard, sir.’ She ignored the man’s disapproving glare and turned to Conrad. ‘You said you could decode the passages?’
‘Yes,’ he replied with a quick nod. ‘I think they might have used a stacked cipher combining a date shift and the Vigenère square. The keyword is Falcon. The date is—’
‘10-12-1962,’ Woods cut in. ‘The day of the storm.’
‘Yes,’ said Conrad.
The Maryland Lieutenant threw his hands in the air. ‘What the hell is a Vigenère square?’ he exclaimed.
‘It’s a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, Bob,’ muttered the county police Deputy Chief. She shrugged at the man’s expression. ‘So sue me. I took a course on cryptography.’
Laura got one of the techs to print out a Vigenère table while Conrad wrote out the nine encoded lines on a fresh sheet of paper. They used the table, followed by the date shift, to painstakingly recreate the original text. Five minutes later, they examined the new words he had written out.
‘That still doesn’t make any sense,’ said Laura with a frustrated sigh.
Conrad’s heart sunk as he studied the incomprehensible text; he had been certain that he was on the right track.
The Deputy Chief had been gazing at the paper as intently as the rest of them when she suddenly gasped. ‘There’s a third cipher!’
She snatched a couple of blank sheets from a printer tray and drew a different sized concentric circle on each piece of paper. She marked out sections on the circumference of the two rings and filled them in with all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0-9.
‘Dammit!’ swore Conrad as the policewoman grabbed a pair of scissors and started to cut out the smaller circle. ‘The Alberti disk!’
‘It’s anothe
r encryption tool, Bob,’ snapped the Deputy Chief, preempting the question hovering on the Maryland Lieutenant’s lips. ‘In fact, it was the first mechanical cipher device ever invented.’ She placed the small disk inside the large one, stuck a pin in the middle, and stared at Conrad’s partly decoded text. ‘What’s the key?’
‘Try the date,’ urged the immortal. He glanced anxiously at the clock.
The Deputy Chief started scribbling on the paper. Conrad followed the fast movements of the pencil with his eyes, his gaze occasionally skipping to the disk to double-check the decryption as she rotated the inner ring to align the ciphertext with the plaintext.
They ended up with a jumble of thirty-six numbers and six letters. The Deputy Chief’s eyes grew round at the same time that Conrad’s heart plummeted. The answer to the riddle stared him in the face.
‘Holy shit!’ whispered the policewoman, the color draining from her face.
Chapter Eight
Woods was already barking into his radio unit.
‘Sniper teams, we have possible hostile subjects at the following locations! I repeat, we have possible hostile subjects at the following locations!’ He gave out the three sets of geographic coordinates scrawled on the paper and snapped out instructions to the agents and law enforcement agencies on the ground and in the air. ‘Get ready to abort and extract the president on my command!’ he shouted into the mouthpiece. ‘And tell him if he doesn’t do as I say, I’m walking out the door!’ he added with a growl.
Laura grabbed the sheet bearing the decoded text and shoved it in front of one of the Secret Service techs. ‘Get those numbers on the screen!’ she snarled.
Sweat beaded the guy’s forehead as he brought up the digital map of the stadium and typed in the coordinates. Three dots appeared on the display. Laura studied the monitor for a couple of beats, took out her FN Five-seveN semiautomatic pistol, and yelled out orders into her handheld microphone as she raced for the exit.
