The Hearing

by James Mills

  Carl said, “Leave them.” He turned and ran back to the street.

  Another explosives dog, a brown-and-white beagle that arrived about two minutes after the first one alerted, walked its handler directly to the back of the Mercedes and sat down, panting and wagging its tail. Pulled away on its leash, it immediately returned and sat down.

  “That’s it,” the handler told Carl. “Definitely.”

  “All he did was sit down,” Carl said, trying to talk the handler out of it.

  “That’s what he does. Smells explosives, he sits down. It’s there, believe me. Snoopy’s our best dog. Never misses.”

  An ATF agent who’d come with the dog handler walked slowly around the Mercedes, examining the front, back, top, bottom. His name was Rolf Zaeder, and he was older than Carl, well into his fifties, short and fat, a roly-poly little man with a ruddy, jolly Santa Claus face. A small RF locator in his hand had already detected radio frequency emissions, con sistent with a remote control receiver, coming from the Mercedes. Now Zaeder got down on his knees, breathing hard, and peered underneath. He waved a hand at Carl.

  “See that?”

  Carl took a look. A thin, stiff, gray-colored wire protruded six inches along the bottom of the left side of the Mercedes, disappearing into a hole the size of a pinhead.

  “Antenna,” Zaeder said. “Only you don’t normally see antennas under the bottom of vehicles, do you? So something’s not exactly kosher.”

  Carl said, “Talk to me.”

  “Probably comes from a remote detonator. Could be a garage-door opener, model-car radio control, cellular phone. Press the button, flip the switch, dial the number, current goes into a blasting cap, Va-voom.”

  Zaeder struggled to his feet, brushed dirt off his knees, but seemed in no rush to put distance between himself and the Mercedes.

  Carl said, “So it’s a remote detonator. Not a timer.”

  “Both.”

  “You said—”

  “If it’s a remote, there’s a timer too.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They’ve got a remote, they’re waiting to see their target, waiting for something to happen, right? If it never happens, they never see the target, what do they do? Get in the Mercedes and drive back where they came from? No way. People who use remotes always—always—have a time limit. Usually a few hours. Rarely more than a day. Longest I ever saw was Cairo in ‘eighty-nine, car bomb at the Jordanian embassy sat there two days, then Boom! Who wants to recover a car bomb? Real professionals, take pride in their work, the device never gets taken, enemy never gets a chance to examine it.”

  “So the Mercedes will sit there, and if nothing happens, eventually it’ll blow up all on its own.”

  “Right. Eventually. Hours, days, who knows?”

  “So what are you recommending?”

  Zaeder took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “If whoever has the remote hasn’t blown it yet, he hasn’t seen what he wants to see. They’re waiting for something, an arrival or departure, maybe someone coming to the reception, or someone at Blossom. If they know there’s fortification, they’ll want to get their target outside.”

  Knight walked up, shook hands with Zaeder. “The PD’s evacuating neighboring buildings. I told them at least a square block, maybe more.”

  Carl said, “Is Blossom fortified?”

  Knight said, “Up to five hundred pounds per square inch on the facade.”

  Zaeder said, “The limo’s probably another three hundred.”

  “If all the numbers are right,” Knight said, “the judge and Samantha have a chance inside the limo inside Blossom. Inside the limo outside Blossom—in the driveway, on the street—it’s another story.”

  Carl looked at Zaeder. He shook his head. “Outside, forget it. Zero.”

  Carl said to Knight, “Let’s keep them where they are, at least for the moment. Till we work something out.”

  Knight left. Zaeder kept his eyes on the station wagon. “I’d like to know what’s in that thing.”

  “Guess.”

  Zaeder made a face, eyebrows arched. “You could get a thousand pounds into that vehicle, maybe closer to two thousand if you reinforced the shocks—half what they had in Oklahoma. Ampho, dynamite kicker, do a lot of damage. High explosive, say Syntex or RDX, and it’d be a lot worse. The whole block’ll go.”

  “How much damage would it do to the house?”

  “That house? There?” He pointed at Blossom. “Oh, it won’t damage that house at all. It’ll just totally mush that house right down into the ground, squash it so flat you won’t even know there was ever a house there.”

  “And someone inside?”

  “Turn ‘em into slop.”

  “Two people, inside an armored limousine in the garage.”

  “Front of the house?”

  “Back.”

  “That’s good. Underground?”

  “About halfway down. The house’s built on a hill, so part of the back of the first floor is underground.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t know. They might make it.”

  “Odds?”

  “Wouldn’t want to say. We don’t even know what’s in the thing. Won’t know till it blows up.”

  “We’d prefer not to wait that long.”

  Zaeder shot him a glance. He didn’t like the sarcasm.

  Carl said, “No way to find out?”

  “Oh, there’s a way.”

  “And that is?”

  “EOD. Explosive Ordnance Division.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “Start with a probe. Take a Customs probe, what they use at the airport, find out is that cake you brought back from Paris filled with cocaine or diamonds. Drill a tiny hole in the top of the Mercedes, stick in a probe, couple of feet long, little barb on the end, come out with a speck of ammonium nitrate, you got an ampho bomb. Comes out with RDX, a whole different problem. Probe hits, say, six inches in from the top and sides, the vehicle’s packed. Big, big problem. Not packed, not so bad. We might even cut a hole in through the top, get a man in there, take a look at the detonator, see something familiar, easy disconnect, no problem. Hook up the Mercedes, tow it way, everyone goes home safe and sound.”

  He smiled, widely, ear to ear.

  Carl said, “Put a man in there?”

  “Yeah. Or a woman. Someone little. Squirm around. Depends is the Mercedes filled or not.”

  “You’ve got people who do that?”

  “EOD does. Oh, sure.”

  “What kind of person would do that?”

  “Someone not too tightly wrapped.”

  18

  Samantha and Gus had been alone in the limousine for three minutes, and Gus’s eyes were in a hard stare. She didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts. After another minute he looked at her.

  “I’m sorry, Samantha.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “That you’re … in this predicament.” He smiled, trying to encourage her. “But don’t worry, it’ll be okay. A lot of action, right?”

  “Yeah, really. At least if we’re stuck in a car it’s a limo. I never knew politics was this exciting.”

  “It’s not politics. It’s a judicial process.”

  She stretched her legs. Her feet didn’t even touch the back of the front seat. She had a lot of questions, but Gus didn’t look like he needed questions. The limo had a TV. Maybe something would be on the news. Too soon for that. Also a fax machine and a bar. Gus looked like he could use a drink.

  With what she hoped was an encouraging smile, she waved a hand at the row of glasses in a door recess, and said, “Have a drink?”

  Gus said, “What? I didn’t—Oh, no, thanks Samantha, I don’t think so right now. Thanks, anyway.”

  It was twenty minutes since Gus and Samantha had been rushed into the limousine, and Carl stood with Knight in a growing crowd of agents and police near the intersection of Blossom’s street with a traffic circle three blocks
away.

  Knight said, “I don’t like leaving them there. We ought to drive them out.”

  His boss, chief of security for State Department domestic dwellings, had just arrived and was agreeing with Carl. “If there’s a remote and they’re waiting for sight of Parham, he’s better where he is. We need to talk to the fortification people.”

  Carl, standing on a patch of grass by the curb, said, “On their way. Along with everyone else.”

  Knight, looking up the street, said, “Speak of the devil.”

  A dark blue tractor-trailer made its way around the traffic circle. An FBI command truck, it had a yellow Justice Department seal and the letters FBI emblazoned on the side. It pulled to the curb, and a man in the passenger seat jumped down.

  An agent in a windbreaker with ATF on the back said, “I wouldn’t.”

  The FBI man looked at him with a half-grin, uncertain.

  The ATF agent said, “Move it or lose it.”

  “Where would you put it?” The FBI man, understanding, had lost the smile.

  “Up there. Out of sight. Get some buildings in the way.”

  Ten minutes later the command truck was parked 200 yards up a side street at right angles to Blossom. Inside, counters running the length of each side were covered with computer consoles, TV monitors, radios, telephones, and fax machines.

  Knight, sitting in a wheeled swivel chair at the console nearest the entrance, said to Carl, “You have any opinion when that thing might go off?”

  “Any second. Or next week. Or when someone sees the judge come out, or Samantha. The device has a remote detonator, but it also has a timer.” He repeated what Zaeder had said about remotes always having timers. “I’d love to know when the timer’s set for. But right now we have to be more concerned about the remote.”

  Knight said, “Who’s holding it, would you guess?”

  “Who’s close enough to see? Norwegians? Brazilians?”

  “Not too likely.”

  Carl said, “Across the street?”

  When Knight took over the Blossom security job, he’d read classified background reports on the neighbors. The Colombian Trade Commission, which had moved in a year earlier across the street from Blossom, was run by the Colombian security service, tightly linked to the cocaine traffic, and if there was nastiness in the area the Trade Commission would bear watching. He had also seen a top-secret White House “alert memo” mentioning Colombian agents and predicting a terrorist action in the capital.

  Carl, who had also seen the memo as well as the hard data supporting it, had his own suspicions. The head of the Freedom Federation, with a reputation like Helen Bondell’s for tooth-and-nail combat, had to have had something solid in mind, something that scared her, when she took the time, trouble, and risk to meet a federal agent in a coffee shop to warn him about Vicaro.

  Carl sat in the swivel chair next to Knight, picked up a phone, and called the limousine.

  “Gus, it’s Carl.”

  “What’s happening? Where’s Michelle?”

  “Michelle’s fine. I’m not exactly sure where she is, but she’s not in the house. She went out someplace. She’s okay.”

  “Tell me about the Mercedes, Carl.”

  He told Gus about the explosives, the remote detonator. “We’re going to have to ask you to stay put for a while. We’ve got about a million security folks out here, and more arriving. Samantha okay?”

  “She’s fine. Find Michelle, Carl.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll call back. Are the keys still in the ignition? Todd said he left them there.”

  “Yeah, they’re there.”

  “Okay. Talk to you soon.”

  Samantha asked, “What’d he say?”

  “Well …”

  He looked at her.

  “You don’t want to scare me, right?”

  “Samantha …”

  He’d have given anything to have her somewhere else, somewhere safe.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t get hysterical or anything. Are we going to get blown up?”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad.”

  His thoughts shot back to a meeting that morning with his father. It’d been the first time in two years he’d seen the man, and their conversation had been a disaster. They’d always seemed unable to meet each other halfway on anything, and this time—well, his father had really handed him a bombshell. And now he had another bomb to think about, a real one, in the street. What was going on?

  Samantha said, “I could die. My mother used to tell me all the time, ‘Do this you die, do that you die.’ What’d Carl say?”

  “Not much more than we already know. There’s a Mercedes parked outside the house, and they think there might be a bomb in it. But there’s armor on the front of the house and on this car, so if we stay here we’ll be okay. And when they get the bomb disconnected we’ll come out.”

  “How long does he think it’ll be?”

  “He doesn’t know yet. He’ll find out.”

  “Can we turn on the air-conditioning? It’s really hot.”

  “I think we’d better save the power, Samantha. If we run down the battery, we won’t be able to use the phone.”

  “What about the TV? Maybe we’re on TV. Then Carl won’t have to tell us stuff, we’ll already know.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “You think we’re going to be here a long time, don’t you?”

  “Not necessarily. But it’s good to be prepared, right?”

  Gus thought about the White House alert memo he’d seen two days ago. The complete version, with attachments, was far more informative than the preliminary phone call the White House intelligence coordinator had made to Rothman. An investigator employed by a law firm friendly to the White House (Dutweiler had once been a senior partner) had “just happened” to be driving past Taeger’s business office early one morning when he noticed the lights on. He parked and watched. A visitor went in, stayed twenty-eight minutes, came out, drove away. When the investigator checked the visitor’s plate number, it turned out to be registered to John Harrington.

  Forty-two minutes later, about the time it would have taken Harrington to drive home from Taeger’s office, a Pen Register on his home phone showed a forty-seven-minute call to the Federal Correction Institute near Chicago, where Ernesto Vicaro was incarcerated. Twelve minutes after the conclusion of that call, prison telephone records showed a call from Vicaro to a “cousin” named Jonathan Tander. Four minutes after that call, Jonathan Tander’s phone was used to call a New York apartment rented six months previously by a commercial trading company owned by TransInter, with links to the Colombian foreign intelligence service. A federal tap on that phone recorded coded conversation between two males discussing what CIA analysts believed were meetings and travel plans. Two days later three special action agents entered the country through Dulles and Miami International. Subsequent record checks identified one of the agents as an explosives and vehicle-bomb expert named Rubi Aguilera. And now, hardly more than a week later, there was the Mercedes station wagon, loaded with explosives, parked outside Blossom.

  Gus thought about Vicaro, the fifteen-year-old bully try ing to pull other kids off the wall of his father’s bullring, and his father letting him do it. Four years later he’d been an intelligence agent in the Colombian embassy, then a Colombian legislator elected with his father’s money, and finally, the obese young man under arrest in the back seat of a DEA car in Montgomery.

  He thought about Harrington’s offer of a bribe, and the bullets in the luggage locker.

  He thought about the political treachery of men like Senator Eric Taeger, of other men with out-of-control ambition for whom Washington had been the final stop before suicide or prison.

  He thought about the man Michelle had discovered in their garage, and the millions of dollars already spent in a media smear against him.

  He thought about the stakes: the approaching Supreme Court decisions that over the next few decades co
uld reshape the nation’s social, moral, and spiritual assumptions.

  He thought about physical violence and moral violence and the fundamental difference, if any, between the two.

  He was certain of two things: First, the Mercedes out there was proof enough of Vicaro’s determination to kill him. Keeping Gus off the Supreme Court wasn’t the only thing motivating Vicaro—Gus had put Vicaro in prison, the only man ever to have denied him anything. Pride, reputation, and ambition demanded Gus’s death. Gus knew, as certainly as he had ever known anything, that if he left the limousine and walked out of Blossom, he would die. John Harrington might be interested only in Gus’s withdrawal from the nomination, and so might people like Helen Bondell and Senator Taeger, but Vicaro wanted him dead—whether he withdrew or not. The second thing Gus knew was that he was ready. He would not withdraw. If he died, he died. But he would not withdraw.

  An FBI agent named Max Iverson, just arrived in the command truck from the Washington terrorist unit, said, “I say, tell ‘em to drive out.”

  Skinny as a skeleton, Iverson had a bow tie, short-sleeved shirt, and he’d been told by his boss that the lead agent would be DEA’s Carl Falco, on loan to the White House. The FBI wasn’t happy surrendering leadership to another agency, particularly since Falco, a GS-15, ranked lower than Iverson. But Rothman, speaking for the White House, had told the attorney general twenty minutes after the bomb alert, “Falco’s who we know, someone the judge knows, and Falco’s who we want.”

  Another late arrival, a white-haired man sweating in a gray seersucker suit, unbuttoned his collar and said, “I wouldn’t.” He looked about five years past retirement age and had the mischievous eyes of a rocking-chair geezer in an old people’s home.

  “Garry Hardy,” Knight said. “State Department Security. Our golden oldie. Fortification and armor expert, used to build castles in the Middle Ages.”

  Knight grinned. Hardy prided himself on knowing everything there was to know about fortification and armor—buildings, vehicles, boats, aircraft, people, even animals. Years ago he’d designed an armored garment for a German shepherd.

  “So?” Knight said. “What can you tell us about Blossom?”