Act of Terror

by Marc Cameron

  “Let them through, Reagan.” Palmer stepped out of an alcove at the end of the hall. He wore khaki slacks instead of his customary suit. The sleeves of a starched white shirt were rolled up to his elbows.

  “Thank you for coming so quickly.” He handed Quinn and Thibodaux each a pair of blue nitrile gloves to match the ones on his own hands, then dismissed Reagan the skater boy with a curt nod.

  “Hope the double extra-large are big enough for those shovels you call hands, Jacques,” Palmer said as he turned to walk back down the hall.

  Quinn unzipped his leather jacket and took a deep breath. Putting on the gloves flooded his mind with memories of the near miss they’d had with weaponized Ebola less than a month before.

  Palmer raised his own gloved hand as he walked, appearing to read Quinn’s mind. “These are more to protect the crime scene than your health.”

  Thibodaux groaned. “Since when do you use your hammer teams to go all CSI?” The mountainous Cajun was fine when it came to killing bad guys or bashing heads together, but he was known to have a bit of a weak stomach when too much time had passed from the point of violence.

  “Since someone started torturing American spies.” Palmer stopped at the gaping doorway at the end of the shadowed hall. A white refrigerator stood a few feet beyond the door at the edge of the kitchen. It was covered with photos of what looked to be three separate young families. Each bore enough of a resemblance to the other to suggest they were related. The absence of any male influence in the house led Quinn to believe a single woman lived here. The photos on the fridge were likely her siblings, nieces, and nephews. A framed diploma hung in the hall to the right of the doorway proclaiming the graduation of Nadia Arbakova from the United States Secret Service Training Academy in 1998.

  Palmer pointed to the doorway with an open hand. “They’re through there.”

  A single lightbulb tried feebly to fight away the darkness. Thin tan carpet did little to absorb the sound of their footfalls on the creaky wood. The walls to the stairway were painted glossy white and adorned with a cluttered mix of more family photographs. The broken frames and glass of two lay shattered on the steps, indicating a struggle. The moldy, metallic smell of terror and urine met Quinn on a wall of dank air from below.

  “So, the woman who lived here is one of the victims,” Quinn said, half to himself. The air grew moist as they made their way single file down the stairs—it was cooler, but no more comfortable. Even surrounded by people he knew, the heaviness in the house made him grateful for the familiar bulk of a pistol under his jacket.

  “Brilliant police work.” Kurt Bodington stepped around a concrete block wall at the bottom of the steps. “I suddenly find myself surrounded by crack investigators.” A sneer dripped from his voice. Quinn had never met the director of the FBI but found it easy to dislike him instantly. The man was, after all, a lawyer.

  Palmer stepped closer to a silent Hispanic woman who’d come around the corner behind Bodington. She was tall, with an athletic build that reminded Quinn of a lifeguard. A shimmering dark blue blouse accented the light tan of her suit. Sensible shoes, as black as her hair, made Quinn think she might be FBI. The hint of humility in her amber-flecked eyes made him wonder.

  “Agent Veronica Garcia with the CIA,” Palmer said. “She’s the one who discovered the bodies this morning.”

  “Has an uncanny habit of being at the wrong place at precisely the right moment, if you ask me,” Bodington grumbled.

  Garcia shrugged off the insult, but her eyes flashed daggers. She kept her hands clasped behind her back, as if to restrain them from slapping Director Bodington.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Garcia.” Quinn raised his blue glove. “I’d shake your hand, but ... anyhow, anyone who Director Bodington dislikes is a friend of mine... .”

  “Let’s get to the yolk of the egg,” Palmer said, jaw muscles clenching as he glared at both men. “You two can duel at high noon after this is over.”

  Virginia Ross stepped around the corner of an unfinished Sheetrock wall. Thibodaux gave Quinn a tiny nod, agreeing with Arnie’s earlier assessment. More academic than clandestine operator, Ross wore fancy blue pumps, navy slacks, and a yellow blouse. Smallish shoulders and broad hips made her look like an inverted blueberry ice cream cone.

  Operator or not, she was more savvy in the ways of politics than Bodington, and enough of a spy to project a measure of tense civility.

  “Officer Garcia was conducting a background check on Agent Arbakova. She stopped by a little after seven this morning and stumbled onto this interrogation site—”

  “Interrogation site ...” Quinn mused as they rounded the corner into the stark light of the open basement. It was interesting that Palmer had introduced Garcia as an agent, but her boss had called her “officer.”

  Bodington breathed in quickly through his nose, mouth clenched in a tight line, as if disgusted at having to discuss such things with anyone outside his own realm of control.

  “Interrogation site?” Thibodaux whispered, swaying like a giant tree as he took in the gruesome sight in front of them. “Is that what we’re calling this now?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The nude body of a dead man hung upside down in the center of the ten-by-twenty-foot unfinished basement room. His swollen feet were tied together by rough cords draped over a fearsome metal hook in an exposed rafter. Bare copper wires looped around each big toe, then ran to a small, gas-powered welding generator on a folding table a few feet away. The dead man’s fingertips were raw and bloody from clawing at the rough concrete floor. His head-down position had caused his belly to distend horribly. His face was puffed and unrecognizable. Pooling fluids leaked from his nose and gaping mouth to the bare concrete below. A closer inspection revealed circular electric burns to his groin and wrists as well as his ankles. The wires around each big toe sunk deeply into charred, blackened flesh.

  Quinn had seen this sort of thing before. A colonel in the Afghan KHED had suspected a teenage goatherd of involvement with the Taliban. The evidence against the kid had been overwhelming, but many Afghans like him had been pressed into service. Few possessed the zeal of their Saudi and Chechen compatriots and gave up information easily.

  Quinn had arrived too late to stop the interrogation. The colonel had hung the nude boy from a rafter by his feet, run copper wires to his big toes and increased the voltage until he twitched like a marionette. “The Dance of Death,” the colonel had called it.

  The colonel had been from Hazara—a tribe particularly mistreated by the primarily Pashtun Taliban. The boy was Pashtun—and that had been enough to kill him, no matter what he’d known or hadn’t known.

  Quinn studied the man hanging from the hook in front of him. Like the KHED colonel, whoever had done this had had an agenda beyond interrogation. The depth of human cruelty never ceased to amaze him, even though he himself had caused the death of more than a few enemies of his country—and even a certain amount of pain.

  This was not an interrogation. This was someone’s entertainment.

  Quinn stepped closer to the hanging body, studying the scorched flesh behind the dead man’s knees. There came a point in any “enhanced” interrogation when the subject would say anything to stop the pain. That point had come and gone with this one long before the torture had stopped. Anyone trained by an American intelligence agency would know that—if they even cared.

  “We know who he was?” Quinn said.

  “One of ours,” Virginia Ross said, eyes darting nervously around the room. She took a tentative step closer to the body. Her eyes suddenly locked on the congealing pool of fluids under the dead man’s yawning mouth, she seemed not to know where to put her feet. Her words came in short spurts with a hard swallow in between each phrase. “Tom Haddad ... he was an analyst. . . assigned to the Middle East desk.”

  “Is his name on Congressman Drake’s list?” Quinn asked, knowing the answer before it came.

  “It is,” Ross said, s
wallowing again. “He transferred back to Langley from Cairo three months ago.”

  Quinn turned to look at Bodington, but said nothing.

  The FBI director returned his glare for a long moment before shaking his head. “We weren’t looking at him for anything, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  Quinn didn’t know whether to believe either director. It wasn’t unheard of for the Bureau to watch Agency assets without informing their bosses—or vice versa, though the CIA wasn’t supposed to conduct operations on American soil. Quinn did a lot of things he wasn’t “supposed” to do, so he naturally assumed the CIA did what was necessary to get the job done.

  “If he’s not on anyone’s radar, how’d he get on the list?” Thibodaux asked. “Maybe he really was a mole.”

  “We’ve yet to figure that one out,” Palmer said grimly, nodding toward an empty chair with shreds of duct tape at the arms and legs. “There’s one more.”

  Someone had been tied there, likely made to watch.

  “Worse than this?” Thibodaux moaned. He turned to Quinn. “I’m gonna need one of my grandmama’s good-luck gris-gris bags to protect me. This place is chockablock full of evil, beb.”

  “It’s a woman.” Palmer held open the door to a small unfinished storeroom. “This is ... was her house.”

  Quinn stepped through the narrow doorway to find a small room awash with blood.

  As a younger man, just starting out in the business, he’d been amazed at the amount of fluid inside a human body. There was a reason they called it “wet work.”

  The pallid corpse of an amber-haired female was thrown back over a collapsed stack of cardboard boxes. She looked to be in her late thirties—maybe Quinn’s age. Her throat had been cut, all the way to the bone—Quinn guessed with some sort of wire. She was naked but for the beige bra that was bunched up cruelly under her armpits. A high-school yearbook and a small wooden music box—presumably things precious to the woman—had fallen out of the boxes and lay below the ashen white of the woman’s trailing wrist. Droplets of coagulating blood pooled below the tips of curled fingers. High cheekbones and the steep angle of her jaw made Quinn guess she might have a hint of Asian blood. Her storm-gray eyes were thrown wide in a silent scream of terror.

  Quinn turned away after he’d taken in as much as he thought he needed. Each time he saw a woman who’d been hurt or killed—and he’d seen far too many—he couldn’t help but think of Kim. “Anything I can learn from this one?”

  “FBI techs say she was raped,” Palmer said.

  Bodington leaned a hand against the door frame. “Too early to tell if there’ll be any DNA. Son of a bitch bit a chunk out of her shoulder though—probably trying to subdue her. My guys can get a good cast of his teeth from the wound. Looks like the old girl put up a fight.” He nodded to the tip of a female finger, complete with oddly untouched pink nail polish, lying on the concrete floor. “Killer probably used a garrote. Old girl must have gotten a finger inside the piano wire before he yanked it tight—”

  “The old girl’s name was Nadia,” Veronica Garcia interjected from the doorway, behind Director Ross. She was icy, detached. “Nadia Arbakova. She worked for the Secret Service in their Protective Intelligence Division.”

  “Was she on Drake’s list?” Thibodaux asked.

  “No,” Palmer mused, almost to himself. “Oddly enough, she was not.”

  “She’s on my list,” Garcia offered.

  “Oh.” Bodington gave a sarcastic smirk. “You’ve been in the field a half a day and you already have your own list?”

  To her credit, Garcia ignored the pompous attempt to keep her in her place.

  “She has a relationship with an agent on the vice presidential detail. He’s one of the priorities you gave me.” She looked at Palmer, who gave her a reassuring nod. “I’d planned to review her background information with her this morning.”

  “So,” Bodington mused, “you just happened to drop by at exactly the right time to find two dead bodies in the basement?”

  “I decided to stop off and chat with her this morning,” Garcia said. “Her house is on the way in from mine. Thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”

  “Damn appropriate metaphor.” The FBI director smirked, nodding at Haddad’s body. “Maybe that’s exactly what you did.”

  Quinn had had enough. “You need to shut your mouth,” he hissed, suddenly losing patience.

  The FBI boss blustered, rising up on the balls of his feet as if he might actually get physical.

  “Calm down, Kurt.” Palmer held up a hand. “He’d kill you before you could make a fist.” He turned to a grinning Garcia. “Please continue, Agent Garcia. What’s the boyfriend’s name?”

  “James Doyle,” Veronica said. “He’s working day-shift at the Observatory today. I have an appointment at three-thirty to talk to the agent in charge of his detail.”

  “Very well,” Palmer muttered. “One victim on the list and one not ...” He walked back toward the stairwell door as he thought, ignoring the grotesque, bag-like figure of Tom Haddad’s bloated body. When he reached the base of the stairs, he turned to face the rest of the group. “It goes without saying we have a cold-blooded son of a bitch at work here, maybe more than one. This idiot congressman has crossed the line by going public with the existence of his list.”

  “Has he released the names?” Thibodaux asked. “I thought he said it was a secret.”

  “Drake has his own version of WikiLeaks. The entire list blasted out over the Internet last night right after his show.” Palmer reached in his shirt pocket and removed a folded sheet of white paper, looking directly at Quinn. “Take a good look.”

  “Think I’ll recognize some of the names?” Quinn took the paper.

  “I’m sure you will, son.” Palmer sighed. “You’re one of them.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Some men killed for pleasure. Some, like Mujaheed Beg, were blessed with a righteous cause. To hold another’s life in one’s hands was enjoyable enough, but to kill an American—that was such a pleasure as to be sinful, unless the cause was a holy one.

  The Mervi ran an olive hand through his hair, combed back like a wood duck. He squinted at the sun. It was nearly noon. His target would arrive at any moment.

  A cloud of insects hovered like pepper tossed into the air a few feet off the paved jogging trail. Cicadas buzzed in the thick foliage along the shore of a small lake, ticking out their last few calls of the season. A swimming beaver cut a long V in the brown surface, disappearing under a raft of lily pads.

  A creature of the desert, Mujaheed had been unaccustomed to such an abundance of life. He swatted a mosquito that landed on his cheek. A striped lizard scuttled along the paved asphalt trail before darting into a tuft of brown grass.

  A car door slammed on the far side of the lake, echoing off the water.

  Beg looked at his watch. So predictable.

  Lake Artemesia Park was a stone’s throw from the Beltway and adjacent to the College Park Metro station. Though it was in the city, the little gem of a park was tucked in among the trees and connected to miles of wooded trail. A peaceful lake beckoned University of Maryland students like Grace Smallwood who liked to run in the woods.

  Mujaheed leaned against the cedar post of a small gazebo off the trail, pretending to stretch his calf muscles. He was dressed in a pair of gray running shorts and a black T-shirt. Apart from a small cardboard box in his right hand, he looked like any other jogger.

  Most visitors preferred the cool of the evening and the park was nearly empty. One other runner—a young Asian man with a South Korean flag on his T-shirt—and a gaggle of young black women pushing baby strollers had passed him a few moments before. Beg gauged his timing so he’d meet Grace Smallwood coming from the opposite side of the lake, well away from the mothers’ gossip group and the other jogger. The sight of so many women out in the open with their heads uncovered disgusted him. They deserved the rewards they reape
d.

  Mujaheed counted to twenty, then fell into an easy trot along the trail. He went counterclockwise around the lake trail to meet Grace Smallwood as far away from the others as possible.

  Mujaheed had found the Russian woman the night before bland as a wet cloth. She’d fought, but not as well as he had hoped, considering she was supposed to be trained in such things.

  He’d changed his shirt after he’d finished with her, and then taken some time to look through her bedroom. When there was an opportunity, he liked to get a feel for the life he’d just ended. He’d found little but a few photo albums and an inordinate amount of sewing crafts. A small framed photo of Arbakova beside a Native American man sat on a bedside stand. They both wore Secret Service T-shirts. It was the only evidence that she had any sort of a social life.

  Mujaheed had lain back for a time on the soft sheets of her bed, watching a news program with a volatile U.S. congressman named Drake. The politician spoke in inflammatory sound bites about the evils of the Islamic world and the dangers of the U.S. weakening its ties with Israel. Mujaheed pointed his finger at the screen as if it were a pistol. He turned the channel to Jeopardy! before drifting off, the scent of the woman he’d just killed lulling him into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  The doorbell had awakened him with a start.

  It took a few precious moments to get his bearings and remember where he was. There’d been no time to chide himself for his stupidity. He’d barely had time to slip quietly out the back door as a dark, intensely beautiful woman came down the hallway. She’d called for Arbakova by name, as if they were friends.

  He’d paused to peer back in through the kitchen window, cursing that he couldn’t stay and spend more time with this one. The slight bulge at the ankle of her tan slacks told him she carried a pistol. The danger of the weapon had aroused his appetite all the more. The sure way she moved, the hard gaze in her eyes, told him she possessed all the fighting spirit Nadia Arbakova had lacked.