Think, Frankie. Think through it again. From square one, and fast.
* * *
The president waited for the applause to subside before continuing once again. “But the hate I speak of has no boundary. No one person, or group, or ideology holds domain over it. But all people hold domain over the power to reject it, to look away when the opportunity to hate presents itself, or to stand up and confront it when hate challenges us.” He looked up again, seizing immediately on the strong eyes that bore down on him. “Some of us have been hate’s victim more than others. I want to introduce to you three very special people. Darren and Felicia, would you please stand. And Dr. Preston.”
The three guests of the president stood, receiving a dose of welcoming applause from the members below.
“Members of Congress, these three wonderful people have experienced the depths of despair, and the heights of renewal. They have seen the result of hate. Darren and Felicia Griggs have experienced it more personally than most of us ever will with the loss of their daughter to an act of hatred at Saint Anthony’s Church in Los Angeles along with three of her friends. And Dr. Anne Preston has worked with them to see that their lives are not also destroyed by this senseless act. The weak use hate as their ally, the strong reject it. But the sting is painful all the same. Darren, Felicia... our sympathy is for your loss, our admiration is for your strength.” The president was the first this time to lift his hands in applause.
* * *
The front door to the secretary of state’s house opened after a quick knock. One of the two Secret Service agents guarding the front entered and came straight to the study. Coventry lowered the volume and stood to meet him. “Yes?”
“Mr. Secretary, Fauquier County Emergency Communications just got a nine-eleven call saying that four black males are planning to kill you tonight.”
Art and Jones both stood upon hearing that, followed quickly by Bud.
“The caller apparently overheard these guys talking,” the Secret Service agent explained briefly.
Coventry looked back to Jones. “The militants?”
“It would fit,” Jones said. “I think.”
“But why would they let themselves be overheard?” Bud asked.
Blame the monkeys. Art recalled that statement from Chester Hart. “Is someone running down where the call came from?”
“State Police have a unit on the way to the call site.”
The gathering was quiet for a moment before Coventry spoke. “Is there anything...”
“It could be a crank, sir,” the agent theorized. “Or, who knows? But our team out back got the same word, and the State Police is sending two cruisers by just in case. Just relax, sir. We’ll take care of everything.”
The four men watched the agent exit to the front.
“Interesting,” Coventry said as he turned. He saw Jones staring at Art. “What?”
“Jefferson?”
Art didn’t hear the director’s one-word inquiry. His mind was racing through the possibilities that this new piece of a very interesting puzzle might present. Blame the monkeys... Have to get them to do it for you... But why the call? A setup? “A setup.”
“A setup what?” Bud asked.
Art looked left toward the rear of the house, then to the windows on his right. Whiteness swept across the curtains covering them. Headlights. Then a brighter flash, and a sound familiar from so long ago. Familiar and frightful. “GET DOWN!”
The front door blew in just as Art’s warning was heeded.
THIRTY ONE
Strike
The side door of the minivan was already fully open when Darian slowed the vehicle a hundred feet shy of 695 Hillsborough. Mustafa took aim through the opening with the M79 as he did, drawing a bead on the front door of the secretary’s house. He breathed, noted one target already near the door, another coming out through it, and squeezed the trigger. The six-ounce 40mm grenade leapt from the fat barrel with a metallic pop and arced gently toward its aim point, impacting low on the small stone porch a hair more than a half-second after firing.
Hundreds of shrapnel fragments flew outward from the explosion, a good deal of it tearing into the two Secret Service agents standing just feet from the point of impact. Both were killed instantly, and the remaining blast and fragmentation did the rest of its significant damage on the wooden front door of the secretary’s house. The seven-foot-high slab of oak was split in the middle and pushed into the foyer by the force of the blast.
Darian accelerated to the house and stopped in front. He hopped out, weapon in hand, Moises joining him in a race to the smoking door. Mustafa had already reloaded the M79 and stayed with the car. He caught sight of a form coming up the driveway of the house and fired straight at it. It disappeared in a flash and a scream.
* * *
Jesus! Art lifted his head in time to hear a second explosion and immediately drew his weapon. He was on his knees and looking at the shattered front door as shadows fell across the opening.
“Get them back!” Art yelled to Jones, who also had his weapon out.
The director pulled the secretary up and toward the kitchen. Bud followed, looking back at Jefferson just as he began to fire toward the front door.
* * *
“SHIT!” Darian yelled, two shots hitting the doorjamb to his right. He stuck the Ingram through the opening and sprayed fire to the left. Moises saw movement toward the rear of the interior and fired half a magazine that way.
* * *
Art saw the stubby weapon just before it fired. He rolled left and retreated in the same direction as the others had. He found them in the kitchen, the director covering the arched opening to the foyer.
“Everyone all right?” Art asked.
“Yeah,” Jones reported. “They’ve got firepower.”
“Where are the Secret Service guys?” Coventry asked. There was no response. He knew what that meant.
Art lifted his head a bit and looked over the island to the far side of the kitchen. There was a door, shades on it drawn. The two Service agents guarding the rear were supposed to be out there, but Art hadn’t heard any fire from them. Had the second explosion taken them out? He then looked behind, checking the abandoned study. Empty. And... His eyes saw the steps rising from an alcove off the kitchen. “Does that go upstairs?”
Coventry nodded.
* * *
Darian and Moises stepped back from the front door together. The NALF leader had communicated his wish to Mustafa with a clear hand signal. As they hunched behind large cement planters to either side of the porch a third grenade was fired. It penetrated to the rear of the house before exploding.
The NALF entry team went in behind it.
* * *
The detonation of the small but powerful fragmentation grenade threw all four men in the kitchen to the floor. Despite the protection of the counter, shrapnel ripped through the room. One shard of metal tore a gouge across Bud DiContino’s forehead.
“Damn!”
Coventry pulled the NSA farther back in the kitchen, finding more shelter back behind the island and nearer the sink.
“This is not good,” Art said to the director.
“We need cavalry.”
As Jones said that the kitchen was peppered by automatic fire from two weapons.
* * *
Darian reloaded, as did Moises, and advanced along the left wall of the foyer. He stopped, went to his tiptoes, and fell back to his young comrade.
“Back there,” Darian whispered, pointing toward the kitchen. Moises peeked around him briefly. “I’ll move there, you cover my rear. That room back there. That’s where the shots came from.”
“Got it.” Moises backed up, taking a position at the base of the stairs, his eyes sweeping left and right as his leader inched deeper into the house.
* * *
Jones held up two fingers in a V. Two guns.
Art nodded, looking behind once again. In the study he saw a shadow fall from
the foyer. He looked back to the director and mouthed behind us.
It was obvious they had to do something. They were outgunned—at least two automatics and someone lobbing grenades at them—and outmaneuvered. Art looked to the small staircase again. Or were they?
You cover here, Art mouthed to the director. He pointed up, then down, then to the front of the house. Jones nodded and slid a bit to the left. When he looked behind Art was already heading fast up the stairs.
* * *
Mustafa glanced at his watch. A minute and a half already. It seemed more like an hour. He had already discarded the M79 in favor of his Ingram, suppressor off like the others, and was hunched down between a government sedan at curbside and their minivan. Windows all along the street had lit up, and he was beginning to hear sirens in the distance. Things were going to have to happen fast, or else it would get—
Movement to the right!
He rose up, looking over the roof of the car, catching only a glimpse of a shadow, but that was enough. The Ingram bucked as he aimed and tapped the trigger. Sparks flashed off the sidewalk as wild rounds hit the cement. Auto glass shattered. Metal was punched. Orange flashes...
The lone surviving Secret Service agent fired from over the rear deck of one of the Crown Victorias, taking one of the attackers by surprise. Six rounds from his Sig Sauer pistol found their mark, felling Mustafa Ali. He fell into the open side of the minivan, then to the ground. The agent, sporting some nasty but superficial shrapnel wounds to his head and shoulders, backed away to the other Service Ford and got immediately on the radio. He passed out after putting out an “agent needs help” call.
* * *
Art was up the stairs to the second floor and moving down the hallway he hoped led to the main staircase as fire from outside made him pause. When it died he continued, stopping as the upstairs landing opened before him. He peered carefully down, trying to keep his cover, and saw Moises Griggs standing at the bottom of the staircase.
Dear God, don’t make me have to kill him.
* * *
Director Jones held the Smith & Wesson 1076 two-handed, wondering if the lessons he’d learned so long before as a Bureau street agent would help keep the bureaucrat he’d become alive. One thing was certain: his ears were still good. They were easily picking up a clearly identifiable sound: shoes on broken glass. And it was getting closer. Much closer. Just on the other side of the counter.
* * *
Art knew what he might have to do. And he would...if it came to that. But there was another avenue of approach.
He saw the Griggs kid keep shifting his gaze from the study to the rear of the house, completely ignoring the stairs and the landing. If he could get close enough, just close enough to—
* * *
Coventry had a napkin from a drawer pressed against the NSA’s head wound, but that wasn’t enough to staunch the flow of blood. The sticky liquid already covered Bud’s face, and most of his shirt. The secretary needed to get pressure on the wound, something to hold it tight. My tie. He pulled the striped piece of silk loose, and looked toward the front of the kitchen, where the director was...
No. Above the counter, silhouetted in the light, a dark figure was advancing, pointing some sort of gun into the kitchen and right at—
“Gordy!”
* * *
Art heard the yell and saw Moises step away from the stairs. He took that opportunity and made his move. With his weapon trained on the young man, he ran onto the landing and down the stairs, reaching the third step and vaulting the banister with one hand as shots rang out from the kitchen.
* * *
Director Gordon Jones made his move, too, with fear but no hesitation, and as he did he saw the barrel of the easily recognizable Ingram submachine gun swivel from its aim at his friends farther back in the kitchen to him. His own weapon was coming to bear also, quicker, and he fired two center-mass shots at the gunman.
* * *
Darian Brown felt the shots impact like large spikes. It startled him, but he pulled the trigger of his weapon anyway and swung it right, stitching a path of bullets across the kitchen until the magazine was empty. Then two more spikes drove into his chest and he fell backward, eyes open, but only blackness before them.
* * *
Art came over the banister and onto Moises Griggs with one hand around his neck and the Smith & Wesson pressed into the soft back of his skull. They tumbled backward to the debris-littered foyer, Art spinning him facedown as they did. The Ingram was pinned to the floor under Moises Griggs, his hand still gripping it.
“Kid, show me your hands! Now!”
Moises pulled at the weapon, trying to get it free.
Art pressed the barrel hard into the back of Moises’ head and put as much weight on his body as he could. Sirens blared outside, getting louder. “I WILL KILL YOU!”
“Go ahead!” Moises screamed and tugged.
“Don’t do it, Moises! They set you up! They used you! Used you all!” Finger on the trigger, ready to pull.
Moises eased his struggle a bit, the claim from the pig striking a nerve. “What do you mean?”
“Who were you doing this for, Moises?! Huh?! DO YOU EVEN KNOW?!”
Doing for? How does he know about... “Why?”
Less resistance now. Keep it up, Arthur. “Because they tipped us off!” Art had to take another shot now. He had to reach the kid. “They were white, weren’t they?”
Stillness. “How...”
“Moises, they were the ones that killed your sister. The same ones.”
What? “Tanya? No.”
“Were they young or old, Moises?” Art saw in his peripheral vision the director step into the open to cover the kid.
Tanya? “Young.”
The voice was almost resigned now. Art recalled what he could of Barrish’s sons. They had to be the ones dealing with the NALF. John Barrish would have been too recognizable. He had to convince Moises. “One of them, did he have a lazy eye?”
Eye? Oh, God, no! Brother Darian had talked about the white boy’s weird eye, even calling him Popeye a few times. “Yes. God, no, please. It can’t be!”
Art holstered his weapon and pulled at Moises’ gun arm, freeing it—empty—from under his body. With no resistance from the now sobbing young man he brought both hands back and cuffed them together, then rolled him off the Ingram and pulled him to the stairs. He then looked to Jones. “Is everyone in there all right?”
“Bud is hit, but it’s a head graze,” Jones reported. Anything on the head had the potential to be a bleeder. “Jim has it covered.”
“You got one, sir?”
Jones nodded without glee. He’d never shot his weapon in anger during his entire career. This was a hell of a way to make up for that.
All at once there were screeching tires and sirens droning to a stop in the street out front. Virginia State Police officers were in and around the house without delay. Art, however, was not finished with Moises Griggs.
“Look at me.” When the young man didn’t Art lifted him by his jacket and pinned him against the wall. Moises made eye contact then. “I want you to listen good, because I have no time to fuck around.” Art glared through the young man’s tears. “What else did you do? The nerve gas? Where is it?”
Moises hesitated, not knowing what to do, what to think, or even if he should be alive. He was lost where he stood.
“Moises, don’t fuck with me. Is it at the Capitol?”
No response, just mild sobs.
Hit him with it, Arthur. “Moises, your parents are there right now. Tell me! What else did you do?!”
Mom? Dad? No. God, no...
“WHERE IS IT?!”
Then it came like a flood. Art, however, heard only the first three words. Once he did he let Moises Griggs fall to the ground and ran outside to his loaner, calling Agent David Rogers at the Capitol and agonizing through each ring.
* * *
Word was going out quickly that somet
hing had happened at the secretary of state’s Falls Church home, and that a mysterious 911 call might have something to do with it. The Virginia State Police unit assigned to check out the call’s point of origin, a truck stop off I-66 near Marshall, made haste in doing so. After just a minute of questioning the waitresses and a few patrons of the small cafe at the stop, the troopers had a brief description of the youngish man who had made a call from the public phone located at the end of the counter. One waitress remembered the man’s strange eye, a descriptive point the troopers immediately seized upon thanks to the broadcast from their communications center, and one trucker remembered seeing the “screwy-looking guy” get into a Honda, dark green, maybe. Another trucker recalled the car cutting in front of his rig as he entered the truck stop, zooming away up the entrance to westbound I-66.
With that the troopers had something to go on. They radioed in the information, and within minutes there were seven VSP cruisers, marked and unmarked, converging on the stretch of interstate between Marshall and I-81. A helicopter was also racing that way from an assignment near Winchester.
* * *
David Rogers flipped open his cell and heard the excited voice of Art Jefferson. He handed the phone immediately to Frankie as requested.
“Aguirre.”
“Frankie, it’s inside,” Art said quickly, somewhat winded.
“What? How?”
“Vorhees... He was picked on purpose... That’s why Royce didn’t use Crippen...” Breaths, heavy, fast. “Frankie, it’s in his leg! Get it!”
Frankie’s eyes went wide as she handed the phone back to Rogers. It was more of a toss, really, and all he heard was “Oh, my God!” from her as she bolted into the Capitol.
As she did, phones and radio circuits all over Washington suddenly came to life.
* * *
The VSP helicopter began scanning the interstate from a point five miles west of Marshall, flying at two hundred feet and a hundred miles an hour as the trooper-observer surveyed the light traffic through powerful binoculars. Just past the Highway 522 connector he got a hit. A mile and a half back an unmarked cruiser was tasked with making a quiet pass of the vehicle to ID the driver. It accelerated past a hundred to make up the distance. The word now was that the suspect was not to be stopped, just followed. It was where he was going that was important.
Capitol Punishment (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 3) Page 31
