Act of Terror

by Marc Cameron

  Kim leaned across, whispering so as not to wake Mattie. “You know the worst part?”

  Jericho sighed, defeated. “I can only imagine.”

  “You’ve ruined me for any kind of relationship with normal guys.” Tears pressed from her lashes. It would have been funny had her words not been so deadly serious. “I tried to date Bryce Adams, the manager at the credit union,” she sobbed. “... but he bored me out of my skull.

  He’d never been the particularly jealous type, but the thought of his ex-wife dating another man made Quinn want to kick Bryce Adams in the nuts and beat him over the head with an axe handle.

  “And then it dawned on me—” Kim smacked herself in the forehead with an open hand. “I suddenly realized I’m only interested in cops and firemen... . It’s like I have some sort of battered-woman syndrome ... but I’m the kind who goes for adrenaline junkies instead of bullies.” She sniffed, hanging her head. “What the hell have you done to me ... ?”

  “Come on, Kimmie.” Quinn moved across the aisle. She stiffened when his hand brushed her shoulder. He was sure she would have pulled away but for fear of disturbing Mattie, asleep now in her lap.

  Kim’s head suddenly snapped up, eyes probing like a CAT scan.

  “I mean, seriously, Jer ...” She threw up her hands. “What kind of OSI agent gets picked up in an unmarked jet and ordered back to Washington the same day someone tries to kill his family?”

  “I—”

  “Oh, please ... just shut up.” Kim’s voice was a whispered hiss. “You’ll only lie. It was hard enough before—seeing that look in your eyes, only guessing how cruel you really were... .” Her lips trembled as she spoke. “Now I’ve seen the things you’re capable of firsthand ... and so has Mattie.”

  Quinn opened his mouth to speak, but Kim’s hand shot up, shushing him.

  “Look,” she said with an air of clench-jawed finality that shocked even Quinn. “I know we owe you our lives. I know if it wasn’t for you, we would be dead... .” Her voice trailed off, but her eyes grew cold and seething. “But, if it wasn’t for you, this never would have happened.”

  Quinn wanted to explain, to tell her there had to be people like him in the world, but it all seemed too trite to say out loud. Instead, he just sat there and took it.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid ...” Her chest began to heave with bitter sobs. “I ... I don’t know what I was thinking, letting you back in.”

  “Kim,” Quinn said softly, staring at her tiny hand. “Don’t ...”

  She turned away to stare toward the flight deck, sniffing into a tissue. He’d lived with her long enough to know that when she looked away like that no amount of talking would get through to her.

  “I don’t know what it is you’re up to,” she whispered, still facing away. “I’m certain it’s something important—and I’m just as certain you’re good at it... . But do me a favor and leave us out of it.”

  She spun suddenly, her lips set in a tight line. “We’re divorced, Jericho. You need to start acting like it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Gaithersburg, Maryland

  2310 hours

  The two goldfish that were Ronnie Garcia’s sole dependents had miraculously figured out how to survive in a half a bowl of cloudy water feeding on their own poop. She sprinkled some shrimp flakes in the bowl and promised to change their water when she had a free minute. The fish tore after the food like little bug-eyed piranhas.

  She stripped off her polo shirt and threw it in the corner. She’d not been close enough to the men she shot to get any back splatter of blood on her, but the smell of gunfire and human pain hung to the dark blue fabric of her slacks. She loosened the straps of her ballistic vest, feeling the sudden lightness as she lifted the bulky panels over her head. She threw the vest on top of the laundry pile and took out the wooden comb she’d worn to the White House, shaking loose her hair.

  She, Veronica Garcia, had actually sat on a couch in the Oval Office and chatted with the president of the United States.

  “Oh, Papa, if you could have seen me ...”

  The thought of it still sent a shiver down her back.

  Then she remembered the killing.

  She wished there was someone she could call, someone she could confide in. She gave a fleeting thought to calling her ex-husband, but quickly realized he would only make her feel worse in the long run.

  In the end, she settled for a scalding shower. She stood under the water for a long time, leaning against the tile with both hands, hoping the heat would beat the memories of the day out of her body. She finally realized she really felt bad for not feeling bad enough and turned off the water.

  The night was warm for Maryland in late September and she left her hair wet, hoping it would help her sleep a little cooler. She brushed her teeth, happy to feel clean again, and slipped into her favorite pair of stretchy yellow terrycloth sleeping shorts. She found a white tank top wadded up at the base of her dresser, sniffed it, and pronounced it clean enough to wear to bed. Collapsing back against the pillow, she flipped out the lamp ... and stared up at the darkness, wide-eyed.

  Memories of the day whirled inside her head like a cyclone. Gathering witness statements and after-action reports for the joint investigative team from the CIA and the FBI had taken hours after the last shot had been fired.

  When she’d completed her reports, a trio of CIA shrinks had summoned her to a stark, white room to gauge her level of emotional and physical trauma. With just over seven years on the job, she’d never been involved in a shooting. It came as a shock to her interrogators that she wasn’t more bothered by it. It was a surprise to her as well, but the men she’d shot had deserved to die. They had been killing the very people she’d signed on to protect, so she’d killed them. It was that simple. She would never brag about it, but she would do it again if faced with the same circumstances—and then move on with her life. The Agency shrinks had looked at her sideways when she explained the way she felt, but in the end, they signed off, pronouncing her sane as anyone else at the CIA.

  One doc in particular, an older, Freudian-looking man with a twitchy right eye, appeared to be genuinely disappointed she was not pulling her hair out and running off screaming into the woods.

  The grilling had ended shortly before 7 P.M. Her supervisor sent her home on three days’ paid administrative leave—standard operating procedure after a shooting. She’d not even made it to her car before he called her cell to tell her to come in and put on a clean shirt. She’d been summoned to the White House.

  Ronnie’s job at the CIA made her no stranger to important political figures, and she’d become extremely hard to impress. But a personal meeting with the president, where he sat, legs crossed and smiling, to offer her coffee and tell her how much he needed her help? That was so very different from watching him walk down the marble halls at Langley.

  Now, locked awake in the darkness, she flipped on the light and kicked the down comforter off her feet. Even for a girl raised in the Caribbean, the evening was much too warm. She sighed, beating her head against the pillow. If her father could see her now, he’d roll over in his regulation communist grave.

  As a child in Havana she’d grown up immersed in a hodgepodge of cultures. Her father, a math professor from Smolensk, had known the importance of English and made certain his only daughter was fluent in that along with the tongues of her parents. Three languages, he said, gave her a good base from which to begin—

  “Someone who speaks three languages, milaya,” he would coax, using her pet name, “is said to be trilingual. And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?”

  “An American.” She would giggle at his little joke and he would tickle her as good fathers were supposed to do.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian support for Cuba had faded, pressing their family into near starvation. Her idealistic parents had been brokenhearted at governmental indifference toward those who had worked so hard to support t
he cause. They died within weeks of each other and she’d been sent to Miami to live with an aunt. She’d taken her mother’s maiden name because it fit the darkness of her looks—and made her less of a target in south Florida than Veronica Dombrovski.

  When she was still in high school, she’d watched a plainclothes Metro Dade police officer arrest a couple of gangbangers at a shopping mall and decided that was something she could do. Later, a friend in college had suggested she look into the CIA because of her language skills and she thought, yes, that was definitely something she could do. The semester before she graduated with a degree in psychology Ronnie had gone to the Agency website and sent in an email stating her qualifications and interest in the Clandestine Service. By then, Arabic and Chinese had nudged Spanish and Russian off center stage as strategic languages. She received a polite but curt reply, suggesting she complete a master’s degree in economics or try the uniformed division and get her feet in the door. Her father had been right. Three languages were a good beginning. The uniformed security police weren’t the Clandestine Service—but she was still CIA.

  Ronnie rubbed her eyes, picking up the stapled document of forty-one pages from her nightstand. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well make a plan. She looked around the cluttered bedroom, littered with laundry and dry-cleaning bags. Boxes from takeout pizza and Chinese restaurants perched on stacks of books and magazines. Housekeeping definitely wasn’t her strong suit, but she was a hell of a planner.

  Palmer had set her priorities, beginning with the circle of employees closest to the president—and that put the United States Secret Service at the top of her list.

  Ronnie was instructed to pay attention to key personnel, particularly the protective details of the president and vice president. Between the special agents and the Secret Service Uniformed Division, the lists contained over two hundred names. At first, she’d suggested it would take her a week per background. Palmer had countered, kindly but firmly, that she needed to review two per day, clearing these to assist her in her efforts. If she came across something out of the ordinary, she was to call him—and him only.

  He stressed the fact, at least a half dozen times, that there were very few people she could trust.

  The special agents in charge of each protective detail had been cleared already by Palmer himself. They would conduct personnel reviews of their own. Ronnie would provide an independent analysis as an extra precaution.

  Scanning the entire document before she made a concrete plan, her eyes fell to a name at the bottom of the seventh page—Nadia Arbakova, a special agent in the Protective Intelligence Division at Secret Service Headquarters in D.C. Arbakova listed a Special Agent James Doyle as her emergency contact. Ronnie remembered the name and flipped back through the previous pages until she found it. Just as she suspected, Agent James Doyle was the whip on the vice presidential detail. An experienced agent, the whip wasn’t a supervisor but took charge when the shift leader wasn’t around. Doyle’s connection to Arbakova and his relatively powerful position made the two agents a natural place to begin. She could knock two investigations out in half the time and give herself a little breathing room.

  “You just got yourself moved up to page one, Comrade Arbakova.” Ronnie did her best to imitate her father’s thick tones. A note beside Arbakova’s name indicated she was a second-generation American who spoke fluent Russian. Her home address was in Rockville. Ronnie would pass right by it on the way into the city.

  With a more concrete plan, Garcia gave a shuddering stretch, raising both arms high above her head. Maybe sleep wouldn’t prove so elusive. She’d stop off tomorrow morning and chat with Nadia Arbakova, catch her while she was getting ready for work and wasn’t suspecting a visit. Maybe she could practice a little of her rusty Rusky. And, if everything in Arbakova’s background came back clear, maybe they could even become friends, even if she was in law enforcement.

  THURSDAY

  September 28

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rockville, Maryland

  0130 hours

  Apredatory expedition. Turcoman slavers—the bane of Central Asia in the 1800s—called it alaman. Russians had been their favorite prey. Mujaheed Beg took a comb from his shirt pocket and ran it through thick black hair, making certain the high, Elvis Presley pompadour was in place. He smiled at the notion that he was up to the same work as his Turcoman ancestors—on American soil. A heavy black brow over a hooked nose gave him the air of an extremely dangerous man. An American professor at Berkeley, where he’d received his undergraduate degree in marketing, had dubbed him Evil Elvis. Instead of taking it as an insult, Beg reveled in the reputation.

  He had been born near the ancient Silk Road city of Merv, and Turcoman blood coursed through his veins. Predation came as naturally to him as it had to his merciless forbearers. He smiled when he thought of the old Silk Road axiom: If on your path you meet a deadly viper and a man from Merv—kill the Mervi first.

  Beg drove his rented Saturn past the row of untrimmed shrubs and trees in front of Nadia Arbakova’s house for the third time. The whitewashed brick appeared to glow under the hazy sliver of a crescent moon. It was set well back from the road, providing the perfect cover. Had his attack been destined for a trained CIA operative, he would have been more careful. Counterintelligence agents were, as a rule, much more wary than law enforcement. Even the potbellied bureaucrat handcuffed and lolling in and out of unconsciousness in the seat beside him had installed CCTV cameras and a decent security system in his home. Spies, even the fat ones, took precautions against people like Mujaheed Beg—but they were never quite good enough.

  Nadia Arbakova was no spy. What’s more, her personnel file ranked her as only a mediocre police officer. At heart, she was an analyst, much happier working puzzles than arresting criminals.

  Her scant record showed she qualified twice a year with her handgun, but her shooting skills were average at best. She would be easy to kill.

  Beg gave the unconscious boob in his passenger seat a lopsided smile. There was yet much to do before he killed anyone.

  The cell phone in his jacket pocket began to buzz.

  “It’s the boss,” Beg muttered to the drooling Arab beside him. “He always bothers me when I’m working.”

  He answered curtly. “Yes?”

  “Peace be unto you,” the voice said with the rapid click of Pakistani English. “I trust God has preserved you... .”

  “Peace be unto you as well, sir,” Beg said. He held the phone away from his ear and whispered to the unconscious man beside him, as if giving an explanation. “The boss always has to be so forward... .”

  There was a pause on the line. “Are you with someone?”

  “I am,” Beg said.

  “Very well.” Dr. Nazeer Badeeb continued clicking away. He never seemed to care if Beg was busy doing his work or not. “I am concerned about this woman. She is beginning to share her theories. I fear she will ... up some eyelashes.”

  The doctor firmly believed American intelligence services were less likely to eavesdrop on conversations in English—though, Beg thought, what this one spoke could hardly be considered English.

  “Eyebrows, not eyelashes,” Mujaheed sighed, correcting his employer’s idiom. “You mean to say raised some eyebrows.”

  “Of course,” Badeeb rambled on. “As you say. But I am nervous nonetheless.”

  “I will take care of that very soon.” The Mervi’s eyes shifted to the fat Arab, who snored fitfully in the pale green glow of the dashboard lights.

  There was the distinct metallic clink of a lighter on the other end of the line as Badeeb lit a cigarette before he continued his staccato whining. “We wish them confused and frightened. Disorganized, not fortified. They must not connect too much too soon.”

  “I understand,” Beg said. “I should begin my work then.”

  “Of course.” Dr. Badeeb released a long sigh, sounding like a windstorm over the phone. Mujaheed envisioned the cloud of ciga
rette smoke enveloping his employer’s sweating face. “You will find out how much she knows?”

  “With great pleasure,” the Mervi said. He looked through the foliage at the pool of yellow light spilling out Arbakova’s bedroom window and put the car in gear.

  Parking in a deserted alley behind the house, Beg roused the snoring Arab next to him with a stiff elbow to the floating ribs. A heavy dose of Rohypnol—roofies—had made the man pliable, but dazed. It had also caused him to spill the contents of his bladder all over the passenger seat. The man, whose name was Haddad, yowled in pain. His cry trailed off in a pitiful whimper.

  “What do you want from me?” he sobbed.

  “Whoa!” Beg said, tossing his head in a passable impression of Elvis. “You’re all shook up... . What do you think I want?” Beg sneered. “Half the world knows what you do for a living. It is not the secret you believe it to be.” He turned, holding up a black box the size of a garage door opener. Haddad’s eyes flew wide. He began to fling his head from side to side.

  “Nooo!” he screamed. “Nooo—”

  Relaxed in the driver’s seat, Beg depressed a white button on the box. There was a faint beep and the dazed Arab suddenly arched backward, driving thick legs into the floorboards as if stomping on the brakes. He slammed his head against the roof of the Saturn. Teeth crunched, giving way under the convulsive tension brought on by forty thousand volts from the stun-belt over flabby kidneys.

  It was such a fine show Beg wanted to clap.

  Eight grueling seconds passed before the man’s body fell slack. An acid stench filled the car’s interior as he vomited in his lap.

  Beg reached across with a pair of pruning shears and snipped the plastic zip ties around the Arab’s wrists. He shoved him a roll of paper towels.

  “You disgusting pig,” he spat. “We are going to meet a woman. Make yourself presentable. You will walk beside me to the front door. Try to keep from defecating on yourself. Say nothing ... and remember, I will have my finger on the button at all times.” He tapped the black box. “If you do as I tell you, this will all be over soon.”