The military curfew was news to him and he listened carefully, thoughtfully, trying to calculate what it all meant.
Obviously the troops were looking primarily for terrorists, armed Colombians. If they discovered him it would be solely by accident.
When he had schemed and laid his plans he had never considered the possibility of troops. But he knew there would be unexpected complications so he was not unduly worried. As he sat there in the darkness thinking about it, it seemed to him that the thing to do was to stay holed up until the troops found the terrorists and life on the streets returned to normal. Then once again he could melt into the crowds.
The fact that his picture had been widely disseminated didn’t concern him. He had spent too many years as an anonymous face. He had dealt at the same gas station in New Mexico for five years before the owner began to recognize and greet him. And in a city the size of Washington the inhabitants studiously ignore the faces they see, avoiding eye contact. This was no small town. Human nature would protect him.
He tuned the radio to another frequency band, the police band, and experimented until he heard the dispatcher. He would listen for an hour. That would give him a feel for what was happening in the city.
Of course, he could walk out of the District tonight and steal a car in the suburbs and be on his way back to New Mexico when the sun rose, but no. There were two names left on that list Tassone had given him—General Hayden Land and William C. Dorfman. Which should he try first?
Or should he forget about those two and make another try at Bush? About the only way to get Bush now would be to blow up the whole hospital. That would be a project! Impractical to hope one man could successfully accomplish such a project on short notice of course, but interesting to think about. This was getting to be fun.
And once again Henry Charon, the assassin, smiled to himself.
“All calls to nine-one-one are recorded,” Special Agent Hooper explained. “I thought someone from the military might want to listen to this, just for the record, since you guys are sort of in charge right now.”
“I like your delicate phrasing—‘sort of in charge.’ ”
“Anyway, I called over to the Pentagon and they suggested you. The people at Guard headquarters said you would be wherever something was happening.”
Jake let that one go by.
“Anyway, we’ll have this tape analyzed by a computer for background noise, voice prints, all of it. We’ll eventually get everything there is to get. But I thought you might like to give it a listen.”
“Where?”
“Up here.” Hooper led the way up a set of stairs. Toad, Rita, and Yocke trailed along behind Jake.
“There’s a woman being murdered in an apartment house on New Hampshire Avenue. I can hear the screams. Nineteen-fourteen New Hampshire. Better hurry.”
Hooper played the tape three times.
“He’s talking too fast.”
“He doesn’t want to stay on the line very long.”
“He’s from the Midwest.”
“He’s white.”
“He sure as hell isn’t Colombian.”
“Captain,” said Tom Hooper, looking at Grafton. He had sat silently while Toad and Yocke hashed it over.
Jake Grafton shrugged. “He could have edited that down if he had wanted. Even talking fast, he stayed on the line longer than necessary.”
“What do you mean?”
“He could have said as little as this: ‘Nineteen-fourteen New Hampshire. I can hear the screams.’ ”
“So?”
“So. You asked what I think. That’s what I think.”
“Maybe he’s smart,” Jack Yocke said. “Would the dispatcher have sent two officers over Code Red if all she had had was an address and reported screams?”
Hooper thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ll ask. Maybe not.”
“So it’s hurried and wordy and breathless. Unrehearsed, if you will. And it gets immediate action.”
“It did,” Hooper acknowledged. “Officers were there in three minutes. The bomb exploded thirty seconds later.”
“Lot of fire,” Rita Moravia commented. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“Probably gasoline,” Hooper told her.
Jake Grafton checked his watch. He needed to get back to the National Guard Armory and talk to General Greer. And call General Land.
“You going to be in your office in the morning?” he asked Hooper.
“Yes.”
“Could you give me a rundown on what you have on the assassin at that time?”
“Sure. But it isn’t much.”
“About ten.”
“Ten it is,” Jake Grafton said and turned his gaze to his entourage. “Well, children, the night is young. Let’s get busy.”
Henry Charon’s sedan exploded right on schedule, just as Jake Grafton was leaving police headquarters. The glass in the huge windows of the nearby grocery store disintegrated and rained down on the unusually large crowd, people there to stock up on food for the next few days. Six people were injured, three critically. Miraculously, no one was near the sedan when it blew, but four parked cars were destroyed by the blast and the intense heat. The fire in the parking lot was burning so fiercely by the time the fire department arrived that the asphalt was also ablaze.
The assassin heard the calls on the police radio frequency. Satisfied, he turned the radio off and replaced it in the dry niche in the rock above his head, then slipped from the cave for another scout around. All he could hear were the sounds of vehicles passing below, and they were becoming infrequent.
The wind was cold, the rain still coming down.
As he undressed and crawled into his sleeping bag he reviewed the events of the last few days. Lying there in the darkness pleasantly tired, feeling the warmth of the bag, Henry Charon sighed contentedly and drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WHEN Jake Grafton arrived at the National Guard Armory, over a dozen young men and three women were being led into the building in handcuffs. The troops escorting them pushed them roughly along with their rifle butts. One woman who refused to walk was being carried.
“Uh-oh,” Jake muttered as Jack Yocke pulled into a parking place in the lot reserved for government vehicles. As he got out of the car he could hear them cursing, loudly and vehemently. One woman was screaming at the top of her lungs.
The screams followed him down the hall as he headed for General Greer’s office.
The soldiers searching the Jefferson projects had run into problems, the general said. People refused to open doors, some had illegal drugs in plain sight, and some verbally and physically attacked the soldiers. The officer in charge, Captain Joe White-Feather, had arrested sixteen of the most vociferous and truculent. He also had, the general said, another eight men on a truck coming in. Some residents of the projects had sworn that these men were drug dealers, and indeed, several pounds of drugs and a quantity of weapons had been recovered by the soldiers.
“We can’t not arrest them,” the general said, and Jake Grafton glumly nodded his concurrence. In some complex, convoluted way, this whole mess was about illegal drugs and the people who sold and bought them. The soldiers were going to have to address the problem of the sellers and the users whether they or their superiors wanted to or not.
Captain Jake Grafton, naval officer, instinctively recoiled from the implications of the solution. Here was a law-enforcement function pure and simple, yet as the representatives of the government on the spot, the soldiers had to do something. But what? A problem needing a surgeon’s scalpel was going to be addressed with the proverbial blunt instrument, the U.S. Army.
Jake Grafton reached for the phone.
Amazingly enough, no one on the Joint Staff had considered this possible complication. Career officers to a man, they had approached the problem from a purely military standpoint. The time crunch had demanded that logistics and the command, control, and communications functi
ons—C3—be addressed first. That was about as far as anyone had gotten. Yet the problem was reality now.
He got home that night at three a.m. Callie was waiting for him when he came through the door.
“Amy asleep?”
“For hours.”
“Got any coffee?”
She nodded and led the way to the kitchen. When both of them had a cup in front of them and were seated at the kitchen table, she asked, “How is it going?”
He rubbed his face. “We’re locking up everyone who resists military authority and everyone in possession of drugs. Holding them down at the armory. The jails are full.”
“You’re exhausted, Jake.”
“Without a doubt, this is one of the worst days of my life. God, what a mess! We’re all in over our heads—General Land, General Greer, me, every soldier on the street.”
“Did you have any dinner?”
“Wasn’t hungry.”
She headed for the refrigerator.
“Please, Callie, I don’t want anything. I’m too tired. I’m going to take a shower and fall into the rack.”
“We saw you and Toad on television. Outside L’Enfant Plaza.”
“An atrocity, like something the Nazis did to the Jews. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Evil. You could feel it. Wanton murder on a grand scale.”
She came over and put her arms around his shoulders. “What kind of people would do that to other people?” she murmured.
Jake Grafton just shook his head and drank the last of his coffee.
The next morning he stopped by the armory before he went to the FBI building. The rain had slackened and become a mist, under a low ceiling. The streets and wide boulevards looked obscenely empty. Jake passed an occasional military vehicle, some government cars, and the usual police, but nothing else.
All the stoplights were working. He stopped at one, but his was the only car in all four directions. He looked, then went on through.
He was stopped at a roadblock on Constitution Avenue. A soldier standing forward of the door on the passenger’s side of the car held an M-16 on him while a sergeant checked his ID card.
The sergeant saluted. “You can go on now, sir.”
“Let me give you a word of advice, Sergeant. The people we’re after will start shooting at the drop of a hat. I suggest you get a couple more riflemen to cover each car as you approach it. And you might park a couple of your trucks sideways in the street here so they can’t go barreling through without stopping.”
“Yessir. I’ll talk to my lieutenant.”
Ninety-one people were now being detained at the armory. They were being held in unused offices and in the corridors and along the sides of the giant squad bay. The soldiers had been busy. They had obtained chain and padlocks from a hardware store somewhere and were securing belligerent people to radiators and exposed pipes and anything else they could find that looked solid.
Some of the new arrivals cursed and screamed and shouted dire threats, but the ones who had been there a while tried to sleep or sobbed silently. Some of them lay in their own vomit. “Withdrawal,” one officer told Jake as he walked by trying not to breathe the fetid stench. The soldiers had a couple of military doctors and corpsmen attending these people. Pairs of soldiers took prisoners to the heads one at a time.
Forty or fifty of the prisoners appeared to be just people who had ignored the order to keep their vehicles off the street. These people were sober and well dressed and were busy complaining loudly to an officer who was interviewing them one by one, checking addresses and driver’s licenses and writing all the information down, then turning them loose to walk home. The cars stayed in the armory lot.
Jake paused and listened to one of the interviews. The man was doing his best to browbeat the officer, a major. Jake signaled to the major, who left his interviewee in midtirade and stepped into the hall. “What are you doing with jerks like that?”
“Holding the worst ones,” the major said, smiling. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “That one isn’t too bad. He just can’t get it through my head that the military order didn’t apply to him.”
After a hurried conference with General Greer and a look at the map of the city, Jake drove off to FBI headquarters. He picked up Toad Tarkington en route.
Toad sat silently beside Jake and stared at the empty streets and rare pedestrians.
The federal guard at the kiosk at the main entrance of the FBI building telephoned upstairs. Two minutes later a junior agent arrived to take them upstairs. “Not many people made it to work today,” the agent told them and gestured toward the empty offices. “We have cars going around picking up people, but we’ll only bring in about half of them.”
Hooper was expecting them. He took them into his office and poured coffee from a coffee maker on his credenza. His clothes were rumpled and he needed a shave.
“What’s your job, exactly?” he asked Jake.
“The general sort of added me to his staff temporarily. I’m really on the Joint Staff, along with Lieutenant Tarkington here and sixteen hundred other people.”
Hooper had no reply. If the military bureaucracy were half as complicated as the FBI’s, further questions would be futile. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got about a half hour. Then I have to give a presentation to the presidential commission, or the Longstreet Commission, which is what I understand they’re calling themselves now that Chief Justice Longstreet is one of the victims.”
Without further ado he began: “As you may know, the President’s helicopter was shot down with a couple of Stinger missiles. American manufacture. We’re inventorying the Stinger missiles in every ammo depot nationwide and looking at every theft report we have, but we haven’t got anything solid yet. We’ve talked to everybody in a ten-mile radius of the little park on the river that the missiles were fired from, but so far nothing.
“Our best leads are the rifles that were left after the attorney general and the Chief Justice were shot. The rifles are identical, Winchester Model 70s, bolt action in thirty-ought-six caliber. We’ve tried to trace them both and we’ve gotten lucky. Ten years ago the rifle that fired the shot that hit the AG was sold by a gun store to a dentist in Pittsburgh. He sold it six weeks ago via a newspaper ad. A man called him about the ad, then showed up an hour later, looked the rifle over, and paid cash. No haggling and no name.
“But we got lucky again. Sometimes it goes like that and sometimes you can’t buy a break. The dentist described the man and he had a distinctive tattoo on his forearm. That came up a hit on the national crime computer. Guy name of Melvin Doyle, who as luck would have it was arrested three days ago in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, for beating hell out of his ol’ lady. Doyle’s done time for grand larceny, forgery, and a variety of misdemeanors.”
Here he handed Jake a computer printout of Doyle’s record. Jake glanced at it, then passed it to Toad, who read it through rapidly and laid it back on Hooper’s desk.
“Our agents talked to Doyle last night. He was threatened with a federal charge of conspiracy to murder a public official charge, and he talked. He says he acquired three Model 70s for a guy he knew as Tony Pickle.” He dropped another sheet in front of Jake. “This is Tony Pickle.
“Guy named Pasquale Piccoli, also known as Anthony Tassone. Grew up in the rackets, moved to Dallas in the midseventies. Was involved in S&Ls in Texas. Lately been living in Vegas.”
He sat and stared at Jake.
“And,” the captain prompted.
“And that’s it,” Hooper said. “That’s all the evidence we have.”
“The second rifle? Was it one of the three?”
“Don’t know. Doyle didn’t write down serial numbers.”
“Doyle get anything else for Tassone?”
“He denies it. We’re looking.”
“Okay, now tell me what you think.”
“Our Texas office is very interested in Tony Pickle. Seems he was sort of a Mr. Fix-it f
or some real shady S&L operators, most of whom are being investigated or are under indictment. It seems that two or three may have stepped beyond the usual bank fraud, kickbacks, cooked books, and insider loan shenanigans. It looks like they got into money laundering. Extremely profitable. Perfect for an S&L that was watching a ton of loans go sour and rotten.”
“What does Tassone say about all this?”
“Don’t know. We’re looking. Haven’t found him yet.”
“Who,” Toad asked, speaking for the first time, “were these S&Ls washing money for?”
Special Agent Thomas F. Hooper eyed the junior officer speculatively. “For the big coke importers. Maybe, roundabout, the Cali or Medellín cartels. That’s the smell of it anyway. Lot of money involved.” He pursed his lips for a second. “A lot of money,” he said again, fixing his eyes on the picture of Anthony Tassone.
“Forgive our ignorance,” Jake Grafton said. “But how much money does the FBI consider to be a lot?”
“Over a billion. At least that.”
“That’s a lot,” Toad Tarkington agreed. “Even over at the Pentagon that’s a lot.”
After using every minute of Hooper’s half hour, Jake and Toad left the FBI building at about the same time that Deputy Sheriff Willard Grimes pulled his mud-spattered cruiser up to the pump at the gas station—general store at Apache Crossroads, New Mexico. The deputy swabbed the windshield in the wind and bitter cold as the gas trickled into the cruiser’s tank.
When he had the nozzle back on the hook, Willard Grimes went inside.
The wind gusted through the clapboard building as he forced the door shut. “Whew,” he said, “think it’ll ever get warm again?”
“’Lo, Willard,” the proprietor said, looking up from the morning paper. “How many gallons?”
“Sixteen point six,” Willard said, and poured himself a styrofoam cup full of hot, steaming coffee.
The man behind the counter made a note in a small green book, then pushed it over for Willard to sign. Willard scribbled his name with a flourish. He put twenty-six cents on the counter for the coffee.
05.Under Siege v5 Page 46
