by Doug Raber
But it didn’t matter. She was in the tunnel under the access road, and within moments she’d be back on the bike path. Her pursuer was on foot. No way can he catch me.
The screech of brakes and honking of horns made her reconsider. But she was on the bike path heading north. If they were in a car coming from the parking garage, they’d be going south. They can’t get to me from there.
More honking was followed by the roar of an engine and screeching tires. She looked back and saw a gray sedan cutting across the lanes of southbound traffic and into the grassy strip between the access road and the bike path. Goddamn it! He’s going to get me on the bike path!
Sarah pushed even harder, cursing herself as she lost speed on the uphill portion of the flyover across the airport entrance from the northbound lanes of the George Washington Parkway. He can’t follow me over this bridge. It’s too narrow.
More honking. More screeching tires. He’s staying down at ground level, cutting across the airport entrance, right through the traffic. Keep pushing! Don’t let up now. He’s still behind you, Sarah.
She was on the downhill portion of the flyover, making up the speed she’d lost on the uphill part. I should be okay now. The bike path is narrow where it goes under the parkway. He won’t be able to follow me.
Fuck! I don’t believe it. More honking. The maniac is driving against traffic. Keep pushing! She was less than 100 yards from the pedestrian tunnel beneath the railroad, but the car was closing rapidly. She could hear the engine. It was getting louder. She didn’t dare look back.
Then she was in the tunnel, and a fraction of a second later she heard the crunching and tearing of metal behind her. She was through the tunnel, and there was no longer a gray car chasing her.
Sarah still didn’t dare to ease up. She was only a few hundred feet from the garage where Jake was waiting with the truck. She rode across the side street without stopping, barely avoiding two cars whose drivers honked in anger. She turned the corner and rode into the parking garage. “Jake!” she screamed. “Let’s go! Move it! Move it!” She heaved her bike into the bed of the pickup and scrambled into the cab. Instead of sitting on the passenger seat, she crouched in front of it, below the dash. “Get the hell out of here, Jake. Anywhere, but get out.”
Less than a minute later, Jake told her they were driving north on Bell Street. “Turn when you get to 15th, Jake. We need to get away from here. Let me know when you’ve cleared the shopping area, and then I can sit up and help navigate. Take Route 50 heading west. There are a lot of strip malls out this direction. We can stop somewhere so I can tell you what happened. I don’t fucking believe it, Jake. Those bastards tried to shoot me!”
* * *
Chapter 32
Intelligence
The problem, he said, is that court rulings over the last few years have made it ‘perfectly acceptable’ to use military troops within U.S. borders for ‘logistical support’ …
—CNSNews.com, 2009‡
Day 33: Calling It Close
Earlier that day, Parsons was working in his office. He hadn’t slept much. He felt terrible, and his mood was worse. All because of that bitch, Lockford.
The previous evening, while he was waiting for Lockford and Overman at the Leesburg airport, air traffic control contacted him to say that the pilot of the Cessna had diverted to Petersburg, West Virginia. The controller said it was just a pilot exercising good judgment by putting safety first. Parsons knew otherwise.
Parsons had alerted Zaborsky, who immediately asked the West Virginia State Police to intercept the plane and its passengers. But by the time an officer reached the airport, there was no sign of Sarah and Jake. Even the plane was gone, and once again there was a mix-up with the flight plan. Nobody at the airport seemed to know what its next destination would be.
Parsons’ Sunday morning funk was interrupted by a shout. “We got something here!”
He rushed to the cubicles where Tarkington and Harkness were looking at computer screens. “This is the real-time feed from NSA on Sarah Lockford’s cell phone. She started using it at about 10:20 this morning. She placed a call about 45 minutes ago. We don’t have that number yet, but she hasn’t turned off the phone. We’re tracking her. Look over here …”
The other screen showed a map of the D.C. area. “Here—she was in Bethesda, just north of D.C., when she made the call. She stayed there until 10:30 and then started moving south. First on Massachusetts Avenue and then on Rock Creek Parkway. She stopped again near the Lincoln Memorial. Now she’s headed north again. It looks like she’s probably heading toward I-95, maybe toward New York City.”
“Keep on it. I want to know who she called.”
A technician interrupted. “Got the number here sir. I should have the name in a minute.”
Parsons frowned at Tarkington and Harkness. “I don’t like this. Everything this woman has done so far shows she’s real smart. And now she just leaves her cell phone on for us to follow her? She knew we could track a cell phone from the beginning, or she would never have bought those disposable phones. I think she’s trying to fuck with us. She’s got someone else in their terrorist cell driving north, but she’s going somewhere else.”
“Here’s the information on the call she made. It was to somebody in D.C. named John Smith. Address is 2900 Constitution Avenue, NW.”
“Fucking bitch!” Parsons was red with anger.
“What is it, sir?”
“Are you a complete idiot, Tarkington? Look at the name. ‘Smith?’ And the address. Don’t you know anything about Washington? There is no such place. Constitution Avenue ends by the Old Naval Observatory on 23rd Street. The 2900 block would be middle of the fucking Potomac.”
Harkness pointed to the map. “Until she stopped by the Lincoln memorial, she was going toward Reagan National.”
“You could be right. You and Tarkington get down to the airport. She’ll have to go through security to get on a plane. Take two men with you so you can cover all four of the gate areas. She might be meeting someone, but she’d wait near the security checkpoint. Make sure everyone has two-way radios and photos of both the woman and Overman. I’ll be there as soon as I update Colonel Zaborsky. Use your cover names. I’m Silver.”
“Roger that. I’m Steele, and Tarkington is Gold. The other two are Kupper and Nichols.”
“All right, get moving. And Harkness … Everyone carries a sidearm.”
Parsons returned to his office, where he found an update on the phone call that was made to Frank Wirth. Son of a bitch. Someone else at CDC. This is getting out of hand. There wasn’t time for him to walk to Zaborsky’s office, so he picked up the phone.
After learning that Frank Wirth worked at CDC, Zaborsky said he’d have their people in Atlanta bring him in for questioning. “I’ll tell them that they don’t need to be polite.”
“Colonel, things are happening pretty damn quick all of a sudden. We’ve got a lead on the Lockford woman.” Parsons explained that he was meeting his men at the airport.
“Stay in touch, Parsons. And don’t fuck up.”
Parsons ran to the parking place where he had left the unmarked car. He drove as fast as he could toward the exit of the Pentagon parking lot, the blue flasher on his dashboard warning others to get out of his way. In less than five minutes he was inside the airport perimeter, approaching the main parking garage entrances. That was when his two-way started squawking. “Nichols, this is Steele. Subject is on bike path heading north out of the airport. Gold is pursuing on foot. Intercept if possible.”
The car jumped forward as Parsons hit the gas. He was speeding north in front of the passenger terminal, and he swung left onto the access road that looped back behind the parking garages. As the road turned south, he looked to his right. There she is! He saw the woman on the bicycle. It was her, but he had already passed her going in the opposite direction. There—up ahead! Parsons saw a turnoff to the right.
The sign said “no access,” but th
at didn’t matter. He turned into a construction area and saw a small asphalt strip going through the trees to the west. He gunned the engine and shot between the trees to the bike trail. He turned on His flashing lights again and used his horn to warn anyone on the bike path. He thought he could see the woman a hundred yards ahead.
Parsons was driving nearly 50 miles per hour, when he realized he had to slow down—fast. He saw the bridge ahead. It was a flyover, clearly designed for bicycles. His car wouldn’t make it over. At the last minute, he swung the car onto the grass, and bounced across the northbound airport entrance from the GW Parkway. Cars were honking at him—no surprise, since he barely missed two of them—but he made it across.
There she is! Goddamn it! She’s even farther ahead. He was back on the bike path, and once more he gunned the engine. The path turned left beneath the parkway, and there was a railing separating the narrow path from the roadway. Again, the path was too narrow for his vehicle.
Parsons was driving against oncoming traffic on the southbound entrance ramp to the airport. Cars were coming at him head on. He leaned on the horn, hoping they would hear him, even if they didn’t notice his blue flasher.
Then he was clear. The bike path turned left away from the roadway, and the railing ended. He crossed the shoulder and bounced over the curb. He could see the woman ahead, no more than a hundred feet in front of him. He pushed hard on the gas pedal, and the car accelerated rapidly. For a moment, the woman seemed to disappear as the bike path went through a patch of trees, but Parsons hardly noticed. She wasn’t stopping, so he would have to try to knock her down. He hoped it wouldn’t kill her. He wanted to talk to her first.
Parsons knew the chase was over when he saw white on both sides of the path. Not on the ground, but something going up from the ground. By the time his brain had interpreted what his eyes had seen, there was no time to stop. “Fuck!” he screamed, jamming on the brakes as he crashed into the tunnel entrance.
When the crunching and scraping sounds stopped—it had seemed to Parsons that they had lasted forever—he sat in the car, looking at the airbag that had deployed. His horn was blaring. Once again, he spoke aloud. “Broke my fucking nose. Shit.”
Otherwise, he was physically okay, but he knew that wasn’t going to help. Now he’d have to explain to Zaborsky that he’d let the woman get away. And that he’d totaled a government vehicle. Even worse, he’d have to explain to somebody else just what the hell he’d been doing on the bike path in the first place. That particular somebody had just pulled up behind him in a car with red and blue flashing lights and the words “Airport Police” on the side. Already, his nose had swollen shut. He tried to lower his window, but that was jammed, too.
* * *
Day 33: Close Calls
His face hurt like hell. He couldn’t breathe through his nose, and the bandages made it hard to keep his eyes focused. “That’s it, Colonel Zaborsky. I guess I fucked up pretty bad. I’m real sorry. Especially about Tarkington, about him discharging his weapon. He says it was an accident, that he had it out just in case, and then he tripped. Damn I wish he hadn’t missed. That would have solved everything. Sorry, Colonel.”
“We’ll worry about being sorry when this is all over with, Parsons. Right now we have a job to finish. While you were out playing games at National Airport, we got a lot more data. First thing, both of the Wallingford cell phones, the disposable ones, were used at the same time, right about noon today. That’s right when you were chasing the woman. One of them called the other. And we got the locations. One was at the airport, and the other was just across the parkway in Crystal City. That’s where the woman was headed when you were chasing her.”
“So at least we know they’re still working together.”
“Right, but there’s more. Your hunch about Lockford’s cell phone was correct. It was a ploy. Remember how she stopped near the Lincoln Memorial?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, it turns out she was making a deliberate effort to send us off in the wrong direction. About an hour ago, a husband and wife from New Jersey stopped to get coffee while they were driving back home from a trip to D.C., and the wife found a cell phone on the floor of their car. She said that she thought it might belong to the ‘nice young couple’ that they had met by the Lincoln Memorial, and she called the cell phone company to report it. Of course they notified us immediately, and we’ve recovered the phone.”
“How does that help us? I mean now that Lockford can’t use it, what difference?”
“To start with, take a look at this image that was on the phone. Lockford tried to delete it, along with almost everything from the phone, but our tech guys are good.”
Parsons glanced at the full color printout, and he looked like he was about to lose his lunch. “Christ, Colonel, what the hell is that? I mean, I’ve seen guys who’ve been shot up pretty bad, but even they didn’t look like this.”
“That’s a full-blown case of smallpox. I haven’t confirmed yet with Bradshaw, but I think it’s probably the Navajo guy in Farmington. We know they’ve found his body, but now it looks like Wallingford, or Lockford, took a picture first. I don’t know why. I thought maybe it was to share with other members of their cell, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Why’s that, Colonel?”
“When Lockford first turned on the phone, she used it to send that image. It wasn’t a voice call. NSA has confirmed this. And now they’ve confirmed your assumption about Mr. Smith. It’s a fake name, all right. NSA followed up with some of their state-of-the-art tracking technology, and they think they pinpointed the location of both the caller and the recipient. They were both in the same place. It’s a residential area, and one of the houses is owned a guy named Jennings. He’s FBI, the head of their national security division. Why would they be sending the photo to him?”
“Could it have been a threat? They were warning him about what they’ll do next?”
“I’m not sure, but I can’t think of anything else. I told Under Secretary Edwards, and he just told me to sit tight, that we’re not sharing our information directly with FBI or any of the other agencies. He says that it’s all going through the Secretary of Defense first. The only thing that I can see here is that we’ve got to find the woman. And once we find her, she’ll talk to us. You can be damn sure of that.”
“I’d be happy to run that interrogation, sir.”
“One other thing, Parsons. Atlanta called back, and they’ve been able to talk to this guy Frank Wirth that Lockford called on Friday. Actually, it was Overman that called him. Wirth said that Overman asked him to check out a possible case of smallpox up in Maryland. He admitted that he thought it was crazy. Remember, none of the other people at CDC know anything about this stuff yet. But Wirth agreed to check it out. He said that was SOP when a request like that came in.”
“Where in Maryland?”
“He wouldn’t give our people any other details. Said we’d need to go to the head of CDC to get that information. I’m waiting to see how hard Edwards wants to push to get that information, but it could be important. They could have launched another attack here on the East Coast, and maybe they told this guy Wirth in CDC just to show them what they’re capable of doing. Maybe that’s what they told the FBI guy. I sure as hell don’t like it. We need to take these people down.”
The phone rang, and Zaborsky picked up the receiver. He listened for several minutes, occasionally saying “uh-huh” or “yeah.”
When he hung up, he turned back to Parsons. “We’ve got a new lead on them. Overman has an uncle in West Virginia. Lives right near the Petersburg airport.”
“Have you picked him up?”
“We talked to him. He wasn’t very cooperative—used to be a damn professor somewhere—but he finally admitted that he let Overman take his pickup truck. We’ve got the make, model, and plates. We don’t have many field men for this, but I want every one of them out looking for that truck. They were up near Bethesda earli
er today. Let’s focus on the west side of D.C. from Bethesda down to the Lincoln Memorial. And also on Virginia side of the river going north from the airport. We don’t know for sure why they were in Bethesda, if it might be more than the FBI guy Jennings. But we can sure as hell look around there. Tell your people to be careful if they start cruising the area near Jennings’ house. If Jennings has a security detail, we don’t want them asking us questions.”
* * *
Chapter 33
Sarah and Jake
The Defense Intelligence Agency is seeking an exemption from American law to give officers greater latitude in interviewing potential intelligence sources inside the United States, the agency’s top lawyers said Friday.
—New York Times, 2005‡
Day 33: Noodle Soup
Sara and Jake were sipping hot tea in a small Vietnamese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, five miles west of the airport. It was in one of the strip malls that Sarah had mentioned. They had chosen it in part because there was parking in the back, where the truck couldn’t be seen from the highway, in case someone had seen them when they left the parking garage in Crystal City. The proprietors, an elderly couple, spoke almost no English, and Sarah and Jake were able to order only because there were some English labels on the menu.
Sarah had told Jake most of her harrowing story during the 15 minutes it had taken them to drive to Falls Church. “At least you got the slides to Charles. You completed that mission successfully.”
