“And your people fired you?”
“Sort of,” Swamp said. “Officially I’d been recalled for the national emergency. They mostly just unrecalled me, but, yeah, you wouldn’t confuse it with a promotion. Jake, what’s the news on Connie Wall?”
“Getting stronger. Walking on her own to the bathroom. We’ve got a picture of what happened that night, but still no description of this dude as a guy. She keeps saying there’s something else she remembers, but she can’t surface it. You know, pain meds.”
“She going to make a full recovery?”
“As long as she doesn’t pop an infection. Which is one of the reasons she wants out of that hospital as soon as possible.”
“And the other?”
“This guy’s still loose. And we had to pull our door cop off because of this goddamned inauguration.”
“Where would she go? Not back to her house?”
Jake fingered his collar. “Um, I told her she could stay at my place for a little while. Until we get this guy.”
Swamp glanced at Shad, who rolled his eyes. “I told him,” Shad said. “She’s a wit. They hook up, it could compromise any court case.”
“We catch up with this mutt,” Jake growled, “there won’t be any court case. Righteous-shooting hearing maybe, but no court case.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Swamp said, looking up at the video camera to make sure the red light wasn’t on. “As of yesterday afternoon, Gary said we’d heard from about two-thirds of those realty offices. It’s all I’ve got right now, so that’s where I’m going to concentrate. Can you guys run a similar screen?”
“On what?” Jake asked.
“On the name Erich or Eric Hodler. And also that Suburban. You know, DMV, moving violations, parking tickets, the tax office, telephone company, PEPCO, traffic stops. Go back to that Saudi bank and ask if those papers have come over from the car dealer, and if anybody’s been in to pick them up. They call you when and if he comes in. Like that.”
“Yeah, sure,” Jake said. “Actually, I had some of that done right after the car thing, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to run it again.”
“Gary has flags up in the national credit bureaus and, of course, NCIC.”
“If he’s what you think he is, you won’t see him there.”
“True,” Swamp said. “So maybe you guys need to keep running it, right up until that speech goes down next month. The federal systems won’t comb those sources near as well as yours will.”
“Okay, we’re done here, I guess,” Jake said, getting up. “We’ll keep stroking it. You call us if your guy gets a hit.”
As they left the interview room, Swamp asked if all the uniforms meant what he thought.
“The whole force is back in the bag as of seventeen hundred tonight,” Jake said. “Inspection, would you believe. Then shifts starting midnight tonight. The feds have the Capitol Hill perimeter and inside; we flood the lockdown zone outside the perimeter. Everyone below the rank of lieutenant. The whole department’s gonna basically shut down for this thing.”
“If I surface an address, will you guys need a warrant?”
The two detectives looked at each other. “Yeah,” Jake said. “We probably would. Better hope you don’t turn up anything until after the inauguration, though. All those parties, there won’t be a sober judge in town.”
“Who wants a sober judge for a search-warrant hearing?” Swamp said.
It took three hours to get Connie out of the hospital, transported to her house, and set up on the ground floor in the dining room. The visiting nurse hadn’t been too happy with the piece of plywood over the dining room window, but otherwise it was a fairly workable setup. The kitchen was right there, and there was a lavatory in the front hallway. Connie had asked the transport driver to retrieve her keys and personal effects from the Shelby, and the hospital-supply company had shown up with the bed and a wheelchair thirty minutes after Connie arrived.
The nurse had left her with a small Thermos of soup, some saltines, several bottles of water, and a number to call if she got into trouble. They’d done a practice movement to the bathroom, with Connie walking to it and then gratefully using the wheelchair to return to the hospital bed. But she was home, the heater was working just fine, the doors were locked and the alarm set, and she had that handy-dandy twelve-gauge snake gun within arm’s reach. The nurse would return at eight o’clock the next morning and use the key Connie had given her to get back into the house. The West Virginia tow truck operator had parked the Shelby as far up in the drive as he could, apparently aware of how valuable it was. Someday she’d clean out that garage and get it totally out of sight.
Her innards were in that curious state of sensation where she couldn’t be sure everything was all right or not. The trip across town, the new bed, all the activity, a new pain medication, and the need to be awake for most of the afternoon were all conspiring to make her feel uneasy. She felt as if her plumbing system was only loosely suspended inside, which had her taking constant inventory of every twinge and gurgle. She fell asleep at dusk with all the lights on and her right hand on the pain pump’s control button.
That thing she was supposed to remember drifted tantalizingly close to her conscious mind, then wafted away again each time she reached for it. She could almost visualize it, and a part of her brain knew that it was important. Something that bastard had said.
At 5:00 P.M. Heismann drew the venetian blinds on the ground-floor windows and turned on some lights in the living room. He’d walked over to a local bar and grill for a beer and a sandwich. It was already dark outside, and the streetlights were wearing amber halos, which promised fog and mist later. He had the heater going in the house, although warily mindful of what was lurking in that fuel tank. He’d even gone back down this morning to look again at that new wiring, but his training convinced him to leave it alone. Mutaib wasn’t doing anything that he, Heismann, wasn’t also planning to do. It was just that Mutaib was going to take a direct hand, while he was going to get the Ammies to solve his problem for him.
He heard noises from next door, and then the sound of his neighbor’s back door opening and closing. He quickly turned out the kitchen light and peered through the blinds. The librarian was going down the steps, carrying an overnight bag. She went into her garage, and a moment later, a car he hadn’t seen before was backing out of the garage. She got out, secured the garage door, and then got back in and drove off down the alley.
So she does have a car, he thought. Well, this is perfect; she’s probably going to stay with a friend or relative until all this security nonsense had been lifted. Now he wouldn’t have to kill her. Unless, of course, she came back tomorrow before noon. But that overnight bag indicated otherwise. And, of course, there’d be nothing to come back to as of Friday afternoon. He hoped she had fire insurance.
Now to the real business: the weapon.
Swamp went back to his apartment after talking to the two detectives. His home voice mail had one message from Gary, which said simply “No hits.” He changed into jeans and a sweater, put on some music, and began collating his own list of realtors before realizing his list of calls to return had to be incomplete. He called Gary at the office and asked him to fax a marked-up list to the Kinko’s across the street. He then asked him what the scuttlebutt around the office was regarding his sudden disappearance.
“Not a word,” Gary said. “It’s like you were never here. Mr. McNamara had the department heads in for a meeting this morning, and now everybody’s radio-silent. Plus, lots of people have been drafted to help with the security detail up at the Capitol tomorrow. Me included.”
“There’s a good deal. Great day for some sick leave.”
“Not an option,” Gary said. “There’s only like fifteen of those realtors who haven’t answered.”
“I’ll take it from here. If I get a hit, I’ll pass it on to the District cops.” He thanked Gary and hung up. He had decided not to tell anyone in his old offi
ce about his new job. He trusted Gary, but what Gary didn’t know, Gary couldn’t blurt out.
Twenty minutes later, with the faxed list in hand, he started making his calls. Some of the offices came up with only voice mail, and those he put down on a recall list. By five o’clock, he was down to four offices. On the third of these, a harried-sounding woman picked up. Swamp could hear voices arguing in the background.
“Crown Realty, can I help you?”
“Yes, ma’am. This is Special Agent Lee Morgan, U.S. Secret Service. We called a few days ago, asking if you’d had any recent transactions with the Royal Kingdom Bank here in D.C.?”
“Wait a minute,” she said. The background noises became muffled as she put a hand over the phone and joined the argument. Then she was back. “Do you know what you’re asking? We have over two hundred and fifty local listing files, and then there’s all the MLS stuff we work. It would take—”
“Ma’am?” Swamp interjected. “Could you perhaps just run quickly through your bookkeeping program? Do a global search for Royal Kingdom Bank? That would do it, wouldn’t it? I’m not looking for listings, just completed transactions—rentals, sales. Like that.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the woman said, “Okay, hang on while I check.”
Swamp heard some keyboard clicking, and then she was back. “Good call, Mr. Special Agent. We closed a rental last week on Capitol Hill. The tenant is a Mr. Erich Hodler, some kind of artist. Sculptor, I think. He’s doing lobby art for the Royal Kingdom Bank, and they’re the leasee. Prepaid it for six months, in fact. How’s that?”
“That is perfect,” Swamp said, excited now. “What’s the address?”
“Um, I’m a little uncomfortable about doing all this on the phone. Is there a way I can reach you?”
“Sure,” Swamp said. “Fax it to me at the Old Executive Office Building.” He read off Gary’s fax number, which showed up at the top of the faxed list of realtors. “That way, you’ll see who you’re connecting to.”
“Okay, that works for me. It’ll be a few minutes, though—some people are coming in.”
“As soon as you can, and thanks very much,” Swamp said. “You’ve been a big help.”
Swamp hung up and quickly called Gary. He told him about the hit and asked him to intercept that fax when it came in and then call him with the address. Gary said he’d try, but that there was an unscheduled briefing for all hands regarding tomorrow’s security-detail assignments going down in five minutes. All Swamp could do was ask him to wait as long as he could for the fax. Then he called Jake Cullen, but once again, everyone was in a meeting about the inauguration preparations. He asked to be plugged in to Jake’s voice mail, then left a message about making a hit with the realtor screen. Then he hung up. He wanted to bang his head against the wall in frustration. Right when he almost had locating data on their quarry, everybody in town was looking at something else.
He went into the kitchen, fixed a drink, and took it to the balcony window. It was almost fully dark outside, with a visible mist blowing by the windows. He looked at his watch. Ten minutes had passed since he’d spoken to Gary, who was now probably being dragged down the hall by his boss to attend the security-detail briefing. He tried to think of anyone else he might call. Mary. She wouldn’t be at the briefing. But then he looked at his watch again and saw that it was 5:30. Mary, experienced civil serpent that she was, would be long gone. He swore out loud.
He couldn’t do anything until he got that address and then talked to the District cops. And Bertie. Don’t forget your new boss, there, sunshine, he told himself. But this was a significant development, and at least the District cops would be all over it, even if the feds elected not to care. He decided to go out and get some dinner, rather than sitting in the apartment and going crazy.
Heismann went upstairs and retrieved his tools and the small bag of wedges. Starting at the topmost mark on the biggest piece of marble, he cleared out a two-inch-long hatchet-shaped hole in the supposedly solid marble. Then he tapped one wedge into the hole until it just stuck. He repeated this procedure all the way down the line of holes, then began tapping the wedges in random order. After a few minutes, there was a loud click as a vertical crack appeared in the marble surface. He kept hitting the wedges, top, bottom, center, widening the opening until there was another cracking sound, and then the two halves of the block split open and fell onto the floor with a thump that shook the house. Good thing she left, he thought as he grabbed the weapon to keep it from toppling over. Then he sat back on his haunches and admired it, a dull green-colored 120-mm mortar. Soviet-born and bred, the tube was sixty-six inches long and weighed 130 pounds. With the standard base, it would weigh almost 350 pounds, but for what he was going to do, the modified wooden base he’d assembled would be quite good enough.
Mutaib’s people had wanted a bomb or bombs, or even a missile, but Heismann had talked them out of that. A mortar was perfect for this kind of attack. The target was heavily defended but stationary, and a mortar required no human penetration of the building or security zone by the bomber. There were no electronic emitters to warn of an impending attack. No fancy radar guidance system to be spoofed by defensive jammers. No heat source on which defensive infrared missiles could home. The mortar rounds, themselves weighing forty-four pounds, almost all of which was high explosive, could not be diverted once fired—they were essentially dumb and blind high-explosive rocks, obeying only the immutable laws of physics. And while it was true that the American Army had a radar that could see the incoming rounds and compute the reverse trajectory to locate the firing position, that wouldn’t save anyone in the target area. Downstairs were ten rounds, similarly encased in marble blocks. Five were general-purpose high-explosive rounds; the other five were fragmentation warheads, which would go off eighty feet above the grounds and shred the entire kill zone with white-hot hypersonic shrapnel.
Standing up, he dragged the tube across the floor to the wooden platform he’d built in the center of the room. The base of the tube had a projection on the bottom that was meant to fit into the receiving groove in a heavy steel base plate. Inside the crate was a much smaller version of the real base plate. It had holes drilled around its perimeter, which would allow him to bolt the plate to the plywood stack and then set the mortar down in its groove. Attached to the tube was a single tubular metal leg that could swing out and support the tube at the correct firing angle and also set the firing azimuth.
Many people considered a mortar to be a crude device, but it was actually capable of precise artillery work. The barrel, or tube, was almost five inches in diameter, and the weapon’s mobility, with only a three-man crew, meant that a lot of high-explosive rounds could be rained down on a target without having to move an entire artillery company into the field. Its accuracy was a function of how precisely two sets of coordinates were known: the location of the mortar and the location of the target. He had both of those, expressed in units of accuracy of less that ten feet. Wind, atmospheric pressure and temperature, humidity, and differences in elevation between the firing point and the target point could all affect accuracy and became more important the longer the distance to the target. But this weapon could shoot effectively four miles, and his target, at a range of 2,600 meters, was just over one mile away. Given the two main coordinates, his handheld calculator would tell him the elevation angle for firing and the line of fire, expressed in degrees true. All he had to do now was establish the direction of true north in the room.
He found the magnetic compass he’d bought earlier and set it down on the floor by the north-facing bedroom window, well away from the heavy steel tube in the middle of the room. Marking magnetic north, he scratched a line in the finish of the floorboard, then repeated the process on the other side of the room. He drove a nail into each scratch and tied a string between the nails to establish a straight line that ran across the room, very near the tube. The next part would take some estimating. Consulting the GPS unit, he
was able to get the correction to account for variation for the geographic position of the town house, which turned out to be a six-degree easterly difference between what a magnetic compass would read and true north. Using a protractor, he established the actual true-north line with a second string and nail set, making sure this string touched the bottom center of the tube, then removed the original string.
He again consulted the GPS unit and determined the firing azimuth, which was 342 degrees true. Then he set up the calculator and entered the range. The calculator gave him the firing solution for full-charge rounds: seventy-two degrees of elevation. He bolted the truncated base plate down onto the plywood stack and then wrestled the heavy tube onto its notch. Then, using the monopod leg, he set the tube at the required angle of elevation and locked the leg. Using a string once again, he scribed an arc in the floorboards; the origin was the tube’s center notch, and the arc had a range of ninety degrees, starting on the true-north string and extending to the left, or west, of that line. Then he measured out eighteen degrees of arc, which was true north minus 342 degrees, and made a mark. Maintaining the tube’s elevation angle, he swung the base of the leg to match up with that final mark. Then he looked up to see if the rounds were going to clear the skylight.
He frowned. The trajectory was going to be too close to the left edge of the skylight.
Now he had a decision to make: He could offset the entire stack of plywood and support boards and thereby move the firing trajectory closer to the center of the skylight, or he could widen the skylight. Given that his neighbor was out for the night, he elected to widen the skylight. It took an hour and a half of awkward work, because he was trying to be very quiet about the fact that he was tearing a hole in the roof of the building. It was harder than he thought it would be to get through the rafters, plywood decking, the tar paper, and finally the shingles. When he thought he had enough room, he took a break, pasted on a beard and a mustache, and went out for a coffee at the nearby all-night convenience store. He saw several police cars prowling the neighborhood streets closer to the Capitol complex, but his own street remained empty. He watched for any signs of interest in his duplex, but there was no one about and only the normal evening lights showing along the street.
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