Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

  Diana sighed. She still looked completely disreputable, apparently. She reached—slowly—into her purse and pulled out her wallet. She flashed her military ID card at the clerk and spoke in her most professional tone of voice. “I’m an intelligence officer with the Army. I’m helping provide security for the inauguration, and I’ve got a bit of a problem. There are some men moving down this street whom I need to follow. Is there a stairwell inside this building, maybe a fire escape, I could use to get to the offices upstairs? I’d be tremendously grateful if you could help me.”

  The woman weighed her words for a moment. “Is that a disguise you’re wearing?” she asked.

  Diana grimaced. “Yes. Horrible, isn’t it? But it was the best I could do when I spotted these jokers.”

  The clerk came out from behind the counter. “Follow me.”

  Diana followed the woman into a small back room with a desk, a coffee machine and a door that looked as though it led to a bathroom. Diana frowned as the clerk stopped near a metal locker and stooped down inside it for a moment. Was she reaching for a weapon? Diana tensed in preparation for disarming the older woman.

  The clerk emerged with a cardboard box. “Lost and found. Is there anything here you could use?”

  Diana sagged in relief. “Bless you.” She rooted around in the assorted items of clothing and came up with two scarves, one a vivid cobalt blue, and the other a pattern of assorted brown tones. “These are perfect. I’ll return them when I’m done with them.”

  The clerk shrugged. “No need. They’ve both been in there awhile. The fire escape is this way.” She led Diana to a heavy-looking metal door and punched in a code on the number pad beside it. The door buzzed and the clerk opened it. “Good luck.”

  Diana looked the woman in the eye sincerely. “Thanks. I really appreciate your help.”

  And then she was off, racing up the stairs to the building’s second floor, and as she had hoped, a long office complex that spanned the entire block of stores below. Unlike the jewelry store, the fire doors onto this floor were not locked. She walked quickly all the way to the far end of the building and stepped into the corner office. A man wearing a white shirt and a sloppy tie looked up from his desk.

  “Can I help you?” he asked in surprise.

  “Yes. I need to look out your window for a moment.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She moved past the guy as she flashed her military ID yet again. “I’m doing security for the inauguration and your office has the view I need for a minute. I’ll be out of here in a flash.”

  She plastered herself against the wall beside the window that looked down on the street she’d just left. She watched the ebb and flow of humanity below, and sure enough, after a minute or so, three people stood out from the normal movements of the crowd. The man in the camel coat, the guy with the ponytail in leather, and…Darryl. Sonofagun.

  The man in the camel coat turned the corner, and she shifted over to the office’s other window. Yep, standard search pattern in progress for a lost target. Straight out of the government training manual. Who were these guys? More CIA trained terrorists, or no kidding government types this time?

  All three men were Caucasian. Not one among them looked even remotely Berzhaani. Not Q-group material, then. Somebody else. But who, dammit?

  “May I use your phone?” she asked the guy at the desk.

  “Um, sure,” he said cautiously. Man. Even mostly cleaned up, she still exuded some vibe that made people think she was trouble.

  She leaned across his desk and dialed zero. Asked the operator for a taxi company. Got a dispatcher on the line. She held her hand over the phone and asked the poor guy whose office she’d invaded for the street address of this building. He told her quickly, as if he was relieved at the idea of getting rid of her. She relayed the address to the dispatcher. Twenty minutes, the guy said.

  “Make it ten and I’ll double the fare and throw in a tip for you,” she said into the receiver.

  “Done,” was the prompt reply.

  She put down the phone and smiled gratefully at the office worker. “Thank you so much for your help, sir. You have no idea how valuable your assistance has been.”

  “No problem,” the guy said, warming up to her dazzling smile.

  “One last favor, if I might. Could you tell me how to get out of this building?”

  He gave her directions to the elevators down to the main lobby. She made her way to the ground floor of the building and lurked inside, partially hidden behind a big, fake fig tree. At least it wasn’t a palm tree, this time. She kept a sharp eye out for her three tails, but saw none of them. Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, they’d moved on past this area in search of her.

  Ten minutes later on the nose, a Yellow Cab pulled up out front. Using the muted brown scarf to cover her head and shoulders, she hurried outside to the cab and jumped in. “Thanks for getting here so quickly,” she told the driver.

  He nodded in the rearview mirror. “Where to?”

  She thought fast. If the Q-group was trying to make a political statement, they’d do it in front of the largest possible crowd, which meant the Mall and its teeming thousands of tourists. “As close to the Mall as you can get me,” she answered.

  “Which end?”

  Good question. The blasted thing stretched forever. How was she supposed to figure out where they’d mount their attack along its length in the next hour? Well, it wasn’t as if she had any choice but to just start looking. Gabe’s motorcade would probably enter the Mall from 15th Street beside…

  “Take me to the Washington Monument.”

  “You got it.”

  “And could you drive conservatively so you don’t call any attention to us?”

  The guy’s eyebrows went up in surprise, but he nodded. After all the rush to get here, he probably figured she was in some giant hurry. She was, but it was more important at the moment that her tails not spot her.

  The foot traffic was heavy, and various streets were closed such that the cab could only drop her off a block north of the towering spire of the Washington Monument, but that was close enough. She paid the guy double the fare plus an extra twenty-dollar bill for his dispatcher and watched him pull away. She walked quickly until she hit the back of the crowd that was lining up ten people or more deep along Madison Avenue to watch the parade, which was due to start any minute.

  A sea of faces spread out before her, stretching a mile or more to her right and wrapping all the way up Capitol Hill and around the Capitol building itself. The east end of the Mall was filling up fast with people, there to watch the inauguration ceremony and listen to Gabe’s inaugural address on the huge platform that had been erected on the Capitol steps.

  Where would she go if she were planning to assassinate the President-elect, and when would she do it? Gabe would be standing still in the open when he took the oath of office and gave his inaugural speech. It would be easy to use a high-powered rifle and take a shot at him then. Except he’d be surrounded by bulletproof podiums and antisniper measures galore. The less likely option was to hit him in his limousine, which was heavily armored and protected by Secret Service to the hilt. He’d be invincible in the vehicle. C’mon, Diana. Think like a killer. How would she do it?

  Everybody would believe he was safe inside the limousine. If the Q-group could pull off killing him there, the psychological blow to the country would be even greater. It would deliver a message that nobody was safe anywhere. After listening to these guys talk on the Internet for the last couple of months, that sounded exactly like the sort of logic they’d use. Okay. The limo it was. Now, where along the parade route would she try it?

  She started to walk. Madison Avenue was a one-way street with traffic traveling west under normal circumstances. But today it was closed and the parade would move east along it. The cold air burned in her lungs and she breathed out a cloud of condensation as she walked quickly along the perimeter of the crowd, looking fo
r something. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but it had to be here, somewhere. Some spot that was better than the next to make the hit. Some feature that made it the perfect place to kill a president.

  The crowd continued to swell around her. Lord, there were a ton of people out here. She was so insignificant among them. One among tens of thousands. How was she supposed to make a difference? She couldn’t do it. She was going to fail. Desperation settled around her, constricting her lungs until panic began to set in. Relax. Breathe. The brain shuts down when panic hits. Keep thinking. But the demons had her in their grip. She fought to no avail against the drowning sensation that worsened with every step she took. The Smithsonian’s massive American History Museum loomed on her left, taking up a full city block. She walked even faster, nearly running past the Natural History Museum, which was no less enormous. The red brick of the original Smithsonian building loomed across the mall, ugly and factorylike.

  Nothing jumped out at her. She had no earthly idea where Q-group was going to make its run at Gabe. Being out here wasn’t doing any good. A man jostled her. She looked up. Focused on his face. Round. Ruddy. Caucasian. Not her man.

  Maybe instead of trying to find a place, she should look for the Q-group members themselves. She had their pictures in her purse. She looked around frantically, focusing on each face until they all blurred into a sea of disembodied features.

  Gabe was going to die.

  She had to get help. Tell someone! Not a policeman in sight. In the far distance, she heard a band begin to play. Oh, Lord. The parade was starting. By sheer force of will, she beat down the impulse to run screaming. She had to do this. For Gabe. She fixed his face in her mind. His intelligent, compassionate, laughing eyes. And gradually, her pulse calmed. Her breathing slowed down until the steel bands around her chest loosened. Better. Now think!

  She looked up at the buildings clustering around the Capitol ahead. If the Q-group had snipers and high-powered rifles there, she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. There were so many potential perches for a gunman atop the many buildings in the area or behind an office window, she’d never find the killer in time. She’d have to leave that one up to the Secret Service and the FBI, who were much better suited to foil that sort of plan than she could ever be.

  Besides, the Q-group attack in Chicago relied on direct application of force. Blowing up Gabe’s car would be much more their style.

  She looked around, trying to orient herself. In her panic, she’d lost track of where she was. Over there. The West Building of the National Gallery of Art loomed well ahead on her left. A huge banner down the side of the building announced an exhibit of paintings celebrating freedom and its many faces. The banner looked like a stylized American flag, and the thing was a good three stories tall. It would make a great backdrop for a video shot or a photograph.

  Bingo. That was where they’d do it! They’d splatter Gabe’s brains all over a giant American flag. What could be more ironic or make more of a political statement than that?

  She took off running toward the building, scanning faces as she went.

  Somewhere nearby, among these throngs of people, was a small team of men intent on killing Gabe Monihan. And she had only a little while left to find them.

  12:00 P.M.

  She reached the National Gallery of Art and its enormous banner. The sidewalk in front of the great structure was crammed with people packed in shoulder to shoulder. Nobody could move over there, let alone maneuver into position to kill anyone. No, the Q-group would have to operate on this side of the street with the relatively open Mall behind them.

  The first band passed, a high-school drill team complete with a line of half-frozen girls in hot pants trying to smile and remember their routine. A sheriff’s posse from somewhere in Pennsylvania passed by on fractious horses. They didn’t like the cold any more than their riders did.

  She scanned the sheaf of papers clutched in her hand and went back to watching the crowd. She moved slowly now, methodically observing everyone on this side of the street. She’d swept the area once and was making a second pass through. The faces in the pictures were burned into her brain, and this time she was trying to imagine them with disguises, either in the form of facial hair or clothes obscuring part of their features as she checked out the crowd. She had to spot one of them soon or Gabe was history.

  The gnawing sense of doubt was growing in her gut again. She hadn’t done enough. She hadn’t cracked the code soon enough, hadn’t warned the right people in time. Gabe was going to die a horrible, bloody death because she’d let him down. For the third time, she scanned the crowd in front of the art gallery. Nada. Her panic, held at bay for the moment, notched up a little higher.

  She was a screwup. Always had been. Her teachers always moaned about how she was wasting her potential. What they didn’t know was that her “potential” was a lie. She was not smart, competent Josie, who could fling a supersonic jet through the sky with perfect precision, who handled every crisis in her life exactly correctly, who never screwed up when the chips were down. She was the afterthought little sister. The tagalong who basked in the reflected glow from her illustrious sister but never shone on her own. And man, was she about to blow it big-time.

  She jumped when her cell phone rang in her purse, emitting an electronic version of the George Thurgood classic, “Bad to the Bone.” She dug it out and looked at the caller ID. “Private Call,” it announced. She clicked it on and put it to her ear. “Hello?” she said cautiously.

  “Hi, Diana. It’s me.” She about dropped the phone as the dulcet tones of Gabe Monihan’s voice caressed her ear.

  “How’s it going?”

  She forgot to breathe. “Uh, i-it’s going,” she stammered. “I’ve stirred up a real hornet’s nest if that counts for anything.”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m in front of the National Gallery of Art along your parade route. I think this is where the Q-group will try to hit you.”

  “Lovely,” he commented lightly. His truncated comments struck her as odd. As if maybe he couldn’t talk in the company he was in.

  “Can’t talk much right now?” she asked.

  “Exactly,” he said pleasantly.

  “Got it. Fine, you just listen and I’ll do all the talking. I think I’ve uncovered the identities of the men who comprise a Q-group cell. They look to have been based out of New Jersey for the last year or so. I think they’re the ones planning to kill you today.” She paused in her recitation. “Lord, I hate even hearing those words said aloud.”

  “Ditto,” he agreed.

  “At any rate,” she rushed on, “I got detained by Army Intelligence for stalking you…isn’t that a laugh…but my grandfather sprang me. His driver tried to kidnap me, but I got away.”

  “Your grandfather?” Gabe asked incredulously.

  “Long story. I’ll tell you about it later. The thing is, I tried to get a copy of the pictures of the guys I’ve identified as the Q-group cell to Owen Haas. I doubt he received them, however. I expect it’s too late to get them to him now, since I’d guess you’re getting ready to move.”

  “I’m in the car now,” Gabe replied.

  “Are you sure I can’t talk you into telling anyone that these turkeys are going to try to hit you again?”

  “I’ll be happy to do it after I take the oath. But not until then.”

  She huffed in frustration. “I was afraid you’d say that. If you get a moment alone, tell Owen to keep an eye out for six to eight men of Berzhaani descent. They all look to be around thirty years old or so. Middle height, medium builds. It’s not much for him to go on, I know. But they’re out here, somewhere. I can feel it in my gut.”

  “Me, too.”

  Now that she thought about it, he did sound tighter than a high-tension wire. But she only knew that because she’d heard him this morning when he was relaxed and open by comparison. The guy hid his stress well. Heck, he had good cause to
be stressed out, even if there weren’t a bunch of guys hanging around trying to kill him. He was about to take on one of the toughest jobs on the planet.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  “Okay. I’m not crazy about giving big speeches, truth be told.”

  “And you’re a politician?” Surprise made her voice higher than usual.

  “I never was much for campaigning. I enjoy the work, but I’m not fond of what goes into getting the job in the first place.”

  “Not much for kissing babies?” she asked sympathetically.

  “Actually, I like that part,” he replied. “The worst part of it is having to shake hundreds upon hundreds of hands when every last person in the crowd wants to impress you with their firm grip. My hand gets so sore I can go days at a time unable to pick up a pen.”

  “Wow. And you had to feed and shave yourself, too.” She added, “You can’t imagine the visual image I’m getting right now of Owen Haas feeding you cereal while shaving you.”

  Gabe’s rich laugh filled her ear. “Thanks. I needed that.”

  She asked, “So aren’t you supposed to be doing something important and Presidential right about now?”

  “Nah, Justice Browning will tell me what to say. I just repeat after him, and voilà, I’m President.”

  “How about your speech? Are you going to get through it okay?”

  “I’ve got the whole thing memorized. Besides, all I have to do is read it off a teleprompter.”

  “Here’s a tip for you from my high school speech teacher. Wave your arms around a bit and pound your fist on the podium a couple of times. It’ll make you look passionate and will stir up a bunch of patriotic zeal in everyone’s chests. Then they won’t care so much what you actually say.”

  He sounded genuinely amused. “Wave my arms and pound the podium, huh? I think I can handle that. Any advice for me on running the country?”

  “Don’t get me started,” she warned laughingly.