Now they didn’t know whether or not she was even alive.
Griffith returned after a few minutes. He was an African American, about thirty, with soft brown eyes and a scar across his right cheek. He wore a strange, uncomfortable look that Kealey recognized.
“Mr. Kealey, sir, you and Ms. Dearborn are cleared for escort to the exhibition hall,” he told them.
“Any word on casualties?” Kealey asked.
“They were described as considerable, sir,” Griffith said. “If you’ll follow Agent O’Neill, she will take you to the exhibition hall. After that, she will escort you outside the convention center.”
A young woman had walked up behind them. At Griffith’s command, she headed for the door. Kealey and Allison followed, still holding hands. Obviously, the matter had been booted up several levels—possibly to Jon Harper himself. They were to be permitted access and then gotten the hell out. Not for their safety, Kealey knew, but because he’d single-handedly done the job the FBI was supposed to have been handling. He was both a hero and an embarrassment. Kealey saw that in Griffith’s expression.
They crammed hastily into the stairwell, Kealey and Allison entering behind O’Neill, other tacs in her detachment falling in at the rear as the group made their way to the next floor, moving as one, a multi-headed organism, their footfalls striking a rapid, unechoing beat on the concrete steps.
The air had cleared somewhat, leaving a thin layer of white powder on the floor. It wasn’t ash; it was matter that had been pulverized by the blast. The heat inside the convention center had caused it to rise, forming the tester Kealey and Allison had passed through earlier. But now that power was being restored and the air-conditioning was back in various sectors, now that gravity was overcoming the thermal lift, the particles were dropping.
There were probably fragments of human beings in the powder.
On the upper landing, O’Neill halted briefly by the metal fire door. Kealey heard Allison snatch in a breath and tried not to betray his own apprehension, but he could feel it tighten his chest from the inside like an expanding metal ring. O’Neill shouldered open the door, Kealey following her through, into what he guessed was the pre-function room.
Kealey felt his stomach slide as he realized the damage up here was as bad as anything he’d glimpsed elsewhere. He heard Allison groan behind him. It was too late to tell her to turn away. Every sickening piece of the tableau was seared instantly into memory. The odor of charred plastic, rubber, and flesh would never be forgotten.
They stood side by side, looking at the blasted walls; the collapsed, dripping ceiling panels; the light fixtures dangling from scorched and blackened clumps of electrical wire; the broken glasses and bottles and pieces of tables, chairs, and other smashed and overturned furnishings that had been scattered around the cocktail area and ballroom. The microphone had melted on its stand and looked like ice cream that had pooled and been refrozen.
Kealey saw people lying on the slick, wet, debris-strewn floor, many of them dead, some with their bodies burned in spots to stiff, charred bone. From just inside the entrance it appeared the survivors outnumbered the fatalities, but whatever measure of comfort that gave Kealey was tempered by the sight of all the wounded: they were everywhere, bleeding, moaning, ripped apart. Many had probably been deafened, permanently, by the blast.
Crouched over them, their clothes torn and soiled, dozens of men and women were tending to the injured. FBI tacs were circulating throughout the room, after having made their entries through the windows and stairs. They were trying to assist as best they could. O’Neill’s detachment joined them.
Kealey felt Allison clutch his arm.
“Ryan, I see Julie,” she said, pointing.
The horror had so overwhelmed him, he had forgotten why he was here. It was one thing to see destruction abroad, in the third world, among people you didn’t know. This was a waking nightmare.
He followed her finger to a woman stretched out on the floor against one wall. A man was kneeling over her.
They made their way around O’Neill, quickly picking their way over and around the wreckage covering the floor. Partway over Kealey stepped on something soft, something that gave under his step—a hand. Just a hand. He kept going.
The man crouching beside Julie turned as he heard their approach, but he did not stop working.
Kealey crouched next to him. “She’s a friend,” he said. “We’re here to help.”
The man tilted his head sideways to the right. “Can’t hear on that side!” he said.
Kealey shifted to the man’s left, repeated what he had said.
“I’m José Colon, a doctor.” He snickered mirthlessly. “Good thing those SOBs attacked a medical dinner.”
Allison shuffled to his left. “You need to get it treated.”
“I will,” Colon said. “People who are bleeding go first.”
Allison offered him a strained approximation of a smile, while Kealey looked at his patient. Her eyes were shut, her blouse was shredded, and her arms and chest were a patchwork of slashes and puncture wounds. The side of her head was matted with blood from a long gash that ran from behind her ear to the top of her head. Colon was treating that now with bottled water and dabbing it with a piece of Julie’s blouse. There was a bloody length of material tied tight below her knee; two long, ragged wooden boards bracketed the leg.
The last two fingers of the woman’s left hand were gone. Colon had tied off the wound with another piece of blouse. It was saturated with blood, but the stain did not appear to be increasing.
“Mild concussion?” Allison asked, kneeling at the top of Julie’s head.
“I think so,” Colon said. “Are you a doctor?”
“Psychiatrist,” she replied.
“I gave her a GCS before I started on the leg,” he said. “She’s at two.”
“The Glasgow Coma Scale registers neural activity,” Allison explained to Kealey as she watched the doctor clean the wound. Two means reacts to painful stimuli and makes sounds.”
“That’s good?” he asked.
“Better than a one,” she replied.
“I treated the hand and leg first because of the bleeding. She’s got a compound fracture, but her vitals seem stable.”
Allison reached around and carefully lifted Julie’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. After a moment she laid it down. “Strong, all things considered.” She said to Kealey, “Obviously, you can’t know about internal injuries.”
“But we do need to find out,” Colon said. “I just wanted to stabilize her before they take her away. Can’t do much for this without suturing.”
“Look, I can finish here,” Allison told him. “Please go and get yourself seen to.”
Colon leaned back on his heels and nodded. With a final glance at his handiwork, he rose silently, like a wraith.
“Thank you,” Allison said after him.
He did not appear to have heard.
“I’m going to have to stitch this up,” Allison said. “See what you can get from the medics.”
“Give me a minute,” Kealey said, climbing awkwardly to his feet. His muscles were cramped and tired. The rest of him wasn’t too hot, either.
Allison waited, cleaning the wound as best she could. She used the tips of her fingernails to pluck splinters of glass from Julie’s flesh; they appeared to be the remnants of a faceted crystal goblet from someone’s table. It took some doing to work them out; they’d hit with force that was sufficient to penetrate, but not pierce, her skull. Fresh blood pumped from the wound as she pulled them free. Allison applied gentle pressure to the cuts as best she could, laying a ribbon of blouse fabric across them and placing her thumb across it.
A minute or so later, Kealey returned with the pack she’d seen an FBI man remove from his vest. The large white print on its black outer fabric read FIELD TRAUMA.
“I need an antiseptic and a fresh dressing, Ryan,” she said in a quiet voice.
Kealey crouched bes
ide her. He unzipped the case, reached in, and produced a dressing roll and a packet labeled CELOX.
“I don’t see any thread, just—”
“What you’ve got there will work for now,” she interrupted. “Tear open the hemostatic packet.”
Kealey pulled off the top and handed it to Allison, who applied the granulated agent to the wound after carefully brushing away Julie’s hair. Hair that had been so carefully done earlier that day at the hotel salon. That was the last time they’d spoken. Julie had been anxious but excited about the way things were coming together... .
The Celox had the effect of cauterizing the cuts without heat. As soon as the bleeding stopped, Allison pressed the gauze to the wound. It was self-adhesive and large enough to cover nearly the entire side of Julie’s head.
“It’ll do for now,” Allison said.
She looked up, and Kealey followed her gaze. O’Neill was standing behind him with two men and a collapsible gurney.
“We’ve been ordered to medevac her to GW,” she said.
“I’m coming with her,” Allison said.
“Yes, ma’am,” O’Neill replied. “In fact, we’ve just received instructions to that effect.” She regarded Kealey. “You too, sir.”
“I’m a civilian—”
“The president has requested it personally,” O’Neill replied. She grinned. “I was instructed to say that when you said what you did.”
Kealey grinned back. It felt good to smile, even at something stupid. “I’ve got a car in the garage here—”
“It will be taken care of,” O’Neill replied.
While they were talking, the gurney had been assembled and Julie carefully lifted onto it. Kealey excused himself to have a few words with Colin, who had made his way to the hall, and ten minutes later they were on board an FBI chopper, an intravenous saline drip in Julie’s arm, and a transfusion bag feeding blood into the other from a separate line. Although she’d experienced no respiratory difficulties at any point, oxygen was being provided through a breather as a routine precaution. The techs had gone through the checklist of vital signs and had determined her to be in serious but stable condition.
As the helicopter rose smoothly into the night, Kealey looked back at the spotlit disaster zone that had once been the Baltimore Convention Center. Smoke was still curling from several areas as firefighters pumped water into sections from which personnel had been evacuated. Crowds of locals and tourists were gathered beyond the extensive police barricades, and Kealey could see the reds of braking lights, and the glare of headlights, as traffic was backed up for miles.
The ripples of disaster, he thought. Whether the disaster was natural or man-made, the impact came in waves, short term and longer term, keeping people physically and psychologically destabilized. The effect on the individual and on society was aggressively exponential, far surpassing the destructive force of the event itself.
Kealey sat back in the fold-down seat, let his head lean back against the gently vibrating headrest. There was nothing he could do about the big picture. His job had always been to focus on the triggers. Even now, his forensic soul was sifting through the rubble. As Allison looked down at the men who were redressing Julie’s leg, he shut his eyes and replayed everything he knew.
The hostiles had been composed of Eastern European and Middle Eastern personnel. Probably the bombers as well. These were suicide attacks, from the look of it. Kealey had noticed what appeared to be the remnants of a body near the scorched epicenter of the ballroom blast. The dark blast radius and destructive swath suggested the attack had come near the entrance, not near the podium. Someone was hanging to the rear, probably near the open bar, where a suitcase or shopping bag could have been concealed.
How many people were involved? he wondered. The entire event had consisted of two waves of coordinated attacks: three bombings followed by the hostage taking. There were at least three bombers, multiple hostage takers, and who knew how many people in support roles, individuals who had not been apprehended.
It was big—at least the size of the September 11 attacks. How did something of that magnitude, with so many moving parts, get past the many watchful eyes of United States intelligence?
He didn’t want to contemplate the logical answer. It was one of those worst-case scenarios that had always troubled his bosses at the Company.
What had scared them most was not the foreign jihadists or the homegrown terrorists, but what they had come to refer to as the Fort Hood scenario, named after the attack that killed twelve and injured twenty-nine in November 2009, when an army psychiatrist turned a .357 Magnum and an FN Five-seveN semiautomatic on his fellow soldiers.
An inside job.
Kealey was keen to know what the president and his team had uncovered. But he knew from experience that it was probably nothing that would bring them close to understanding the magnitude of the support system that was responsible for Baltimore.
And was probably planning something else.
CHAPTER 11
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Jessica Muloni sat in a wood-paneled study, watching the convention center disaster on her iPhone.
She had been sitting in a deep armchair in the large room for over ninety minutes. The only person she’d seen was a man, about fifty, who had a very light step and wore a dark blue suit and tie. She met his feathery voice first as he buzzed her through the gate, then saw him briefly as he escorted her down a long, wide corridor notably devoid of ancestral oil paintings and lined instead with unfamiliar art by familiar American masters, like the Wyeths and O’Keeffe and Johns and Remington. Most of it was traditional, proud. The man showed her into this room; pointed out the beverage tray with its water, soda, ice; asked if she would like something to eat—she did not, thank you—then pointed to a phone by which he could be reached and closed the door silently.
She had accessed the CNN app on her phone, tucked it in her belt, and let it play as she moved around the room. About a half hour in, after she had looked at the collection of first editions and antique maps, she had almost called to ask for Liz to come by. Something about the woman intrigued her. Her poise was not an affectation. There seemed to be some steel in that woman’s spine.
Muloni went through two cans of ginger ale, found a small lavatory behind a pocket door beside a massive fireplace, then sat in the armchair and closed her eyes. She resisted calling Langley for inside updates because she didn’t want to leave a phone-to-phone e-trail. Her coworkers knew she was on special assignment; she didn’t want any of them to try and find out exactly where.
The CNN broadcast became white noise, and she dozed lightly, a habit acquired from years in the field: both the ability to catch some sleep where she could, and to wake quickly and alert as needed.
The snap of footsteps in the hallway woke her. She had slumped slightly and sat up almost involuntarily. She poked off her phone, put it on the side table and rose as Trask entered the room. Muloni was standing before she was even fully awake. She wouldn’t have fooled him, if that was her goal; she had noticed security cameras in the corners and in the hallway. Nothing happened here that Trask didn’t know about.
He came forward behind an extended hand, a big smile, and an apologetic wince.
“So sorry,” he said. “It was partly business, and partly ... mea culpa ... I lost track of the hour with all that’s happening out there.” He gestured vaguely toward one of the room’s two big windows before clasping her hand in both of his.
“I understand,” she said.
“I’m Jacob Trask. It’s a pleasure.”
“Jessica Muloni, sir,” she said. “It’s an honor.”
She didn’t know why, but she expected him to feign modesty and dismiss the compliment. He did not.
“Robinson and Elisabeth,” he said, gesturing her back into the armchair while he sat in another. “They treated you well?”
“Very well, Mr. Trask. Liz—Elisabeth—in particular. She fascinated me.”
“A remarkable woman,” Trask agreed. “She’s the former Athens-Clarke County sheriff, well connected among regional law enforcement. We knew each other through mutual political connections, and two months after retiring she came to work for me. She missed the excitement. And her patrol car.” He chuckled. “She said she would go to the market on a scooter to save on gas and would feel ... Unempowered was the word she used. No horsepower, no sidearm, no responsibility. Now she’s a highly trained security chauffeur. She’s had all the evasive and defensive training, and she carries a small arsenal in the glove compartment, under the dash, and upon her person.”
Muloni smiled. Trask seemed personable enough, accessible—but there was still scrim of some kind, a line he wouldn’t cross. She didn’t know what it was.
He filled a glass with ice from the bucket, shaking each piece off before dropping it into a tall glass. Then he poured water. He did not offer her any, and then she knew what it was: he was being kind to an employee, but not servile. He did not offer her a refill, did not ask her about herself or her trip. His one question was about how his staff had treated her. Even his apology was by way of explanation, not actual regret.
“You are surprised to be here,” he said.
“More than a little, sir,” she confessed.
“What did your superiors tell you?”
“Nothing,” she said. “If they knew why, they didn’t share that information.”
“They did not know why,” he said. “It was strictly need to know.”
The CIA doesn’t know why I’m here, but a civilian does, she thought. That was a little unnerving. As if the legends were true, that all the events in the United States—indeed, the world—were understood and manipulated by just a handful of mega-powerful industrialists and financiers.
“Your prisoner of late, Yasmin Rassin, is no longer in captivity,” he said. “Nor is she in Pakistan.”
Muloni immediately superimposed that information with the attack on the convention center. It didn’t fit—time-wise, in terms of her modus operandi, or pertinent to her skill set. Besides, she was a mercenary, not an ideologue.
The Operative Page 14
