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Enemies Foreign And Domestic

Page 62

by Matthew Bracken


  It was all much too much for Brad. He’d been overwhelmed so many times in the last twelve hours, he dropped his head onto Ranya’s upraised knees and wept. She turned the nozzle onto his hair and washed him with strawberry-scented shampoo while he collected himself, hiding his tears among the warm water streaming over him.

  After a while, he lifted his head and asked, “How did you do it? I mean, how did you find me? And who were those guys with Phil Carson? I was so stupid, so damn stupid, standing out in front of the store like a big dumb jerk, not a worry in the world, and the next thing I know I’m getting shoved into a van…”

  “What did they do? What did they do to you on that table?”

  “It was pretty bad… They poured water on my face, but not like this.” He laughed weakly. “They covered my face with a towel, and kept pouring water on it. They practically drowned me. And they used electricity; they used cattle prods or something… But you know, eventually I figured out that they weren’t going kill me, at least not then. I heard them saying I shouldn’t be beat up too much, so I figured they were keeping me around for something else. That kept me holding on... I didn’t tell them much…it could have been worse I guess. I’m just glad you got me out when you did.

  “But do you know what was even worse than the table? The box. They had a metal box, a locker they kept me in, all crammed in and bent over. I’ll tell you the truth, the water table was almost better than the box. Some of the time they just left me alone on the table. And some of the time I think I slept, or passed out.”

  “It must have been terrible…”

  “It was, it was.” He took her hands in his and squeezed them. “But you got me out, you got us all out, I still can’t believe it… I still can’t believe you found me and got me out. I thought I was dead, I thought they were going to kill me, and you know what was worse? I was afraid they could make me betray you.”

  “You need to thank Phil Carson, not me. I couldn’t have done it by myself.”

  “And now he’s got George Hammet,” said Brad.

  Ranya’s eyes narrowed to slits. “The bastard who…murdered my father.”

  “We think,” he added.

  “Well, we’re going to find out. Carson’s going to find out.”

  “Then it’ll be payback time, at least for George.”

  “Damn right it will. Payback time. And payback’s a bitch.” She lifted her rum and coke from the corner of the tub and sipped it, then shared it with Brad.

  “So…what are we going to do next?” he asked her. They were leaning together, their wet foreheads and noses touching, staring into each others’ eyes.

  “Well… I thought maybe we’d finish our baths, and go to bed, actually,” she replied, sliding her feet around his waist. “If you can wait that long…”

  “I mean tomorrow, next week, forever? We’re both marked now, the feds have our names. I didn’t say anything, not much really, but they were asking me all about you. They were very interested in you, very interested. I mean, how long can we hide from them? They’re probably just going to shoot us on sight, these “stew team” guys, I mean, they’re not regular cops! But if we can make it to Guajira, if she’s still there at anchor, then we could just take off, leave everything and head for the ocean, we could sail down island, hide out…”

  Ranya intertwined her fingers in his and brought both of his hands up to her lips and kissed them, while still staring into his eyes. “All right Brad, I’ll go with you, just as far as we can make it.”

  The music paused for a few moments, and then “Witchy Woman” began, slower and sexier. They gently washed one another with strawberry-scented shampoo and a soapy pink washcloth. Gradually their fears dissolved in the warm water and rum and candle light, in the old fashioned bathtub, in the midnight cabin by the nameless river, in the middle of nowhere.

  ****

  Bob Bullard was sitting in the comfortable swiveling “captain’s chair” in the front of the team’s blue conversion van when he received word that Swarovski had gotten away. The keyed-up technician in the Virginia Power van described the scene to him as an SUV and a van had suddenly converged on the alley behind his house from both directions. The door of Swarovski’s attached garage had rolled up, and his own aptly named Ford Escape had roared off between his two escorts and was gone.

  Evidently Swarovski had a standby contingency plan for a raid which he had rapidly put into effect. He had not turned on any interior lights or used any of the phones they had been monitoring to call anyone, so his flight had come as a surprise to the surveillance team in the Virginia Power van. The rest of the STU Team, waiting a half mile away, had been caught flat-footed by the escape, and the surveillance team had not even gotten a license plate off of the two interlopers. The three vehicles were gone before the team could even think of mounting a pursuit.

  It was a tactical disaster all the way around. Now there was no avoiding it: he had to call his boss and report their failure. Malvone picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Wally? Bob. Bad news.”

  “What’s up? How did it go?”

  “It didn’t go. We had to abort; he was tipped off, and he got away.”

  “What? What do you mean tipped off? You’ve kept complete opsec down there, haven’t you? How could he have been tipped off?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, Wally, but it sounds like, um, somebody we know dropped the dime,” said Bullard. “Somebody who was staying back at the base to do a job tonight. The umm, new team leader.” The cell call to Maryland was unencrypted, so Bullard had to carefully dance around the subject.

  “What? Shit! Are you sure?”

  “We’ve got it all on tape, and we traced his phone.”

  “Why in the hell would he do that? You think that…you think he figured out what was going on with…ahh…the gimpy-legged guy?” asked Malvone.

  “It’s possible. It crossed my mind.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know, Wally. He’s not answering. His phone is out of service.”

  “What’s going on down there? At the base I mean? What’s the watch leader in the motor home say?”

  “They say everything’s normal. I mean, we’ve been in contact, and they know we aborted and we’re heading back down there.”

  “Well, ask them for me. Send them over to the offices and check it out. I’ll wait.”

  “Okay Wally. Call you back in a few.” Bullard hit “end” on his phone and speed dialed the STU mobile communications headquarters on the annex. The watch leader picked up after six rings, adding to Bullard’s frustration. He wondered if in the absence of Clay Garfield, the commo geeks were goofing off, playing computer games or getting liquored up.

  “Hi Dave, Bob here. What’s up?”

  “Quiet, nothing here. You’re on your way back now?”

  “Yeah, we are. Dave, I need a sit-rep real fast. Anything at all unusual going on down there? Anything?”

  “No, nothing Bob.”

  “Have you been down to the offices?”

  “No, not tonight. Big Clay told us to stay the fuck away from there. ‘Operators only’ he said. Said he had a mission or something, and we’re supposed to stay away from that end.”

  “Okay, Dave, now I’m telling you: go over there right now and bang on the doors and see who’s still around. All right?”

  “I’m on my way now Bob, give me just a minute.”

  “And Dave, take a look in the hangar for the Mercedes. Is it there?”

  “Let me see… Ahh, no Bob, there’s no Mercedes. It’s gone.”

  “Shit.”

  “What’s the problem Bob?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  Dave the commo tech said, “I’m at the offices, and it looks like nobody’s here.”

  “Nobody? Nobody? Are you inside?”

  “I can’t get inside. They’re both locked, and I don’t have the keys. I’m looking at the door with a flashlight right now. Bob
…”

  “What? What?”

  “It looks like somebody broke a key off in the lock.”

  “Shit! We’ll be there in an hour.”

  ****

  Ian Kelby, the young trial lawyer, was sitting in the office of his Rockville Maryland home surfing the internet after midnight. As usual he dropped into FreeAmericans to see what the next day’s top stories would be, and to see what important stories might not make it into the elite mainstream media at all.

  There was a story from western North Carolina, posted from an Ashville television station’s website. As it was reported, a raid on a suspected illegal arsenal had ended in tragedy, after the ATF had followed up on a tip phoned in to 1-855-GUN-STOP. The ATF had been watching a silver Airstream travel trailer, keeping it under both ground and aerial surveillance for an entire day before moving in.

  A four man ATF team had finally entered the place, after first using their own bomb disposal expert to search for booby traps. Only when the EOD technician gave the all-clear did the other agents enter the trailer to inventory and remove the illegal firearms. The Airstream had then erupted in a huge explosion and fireball, with torn, shredded and burning pieces of the trailer raining down across several acres.

  The four agents were also being collected and carried away in pieces. Apparently, a huge fertilizer and fuel oil bomb had been buried underground below the trailer, beneath a decoy bomb meant to be found, and it had escaped the notice of the ATF bomb disposal expert.

  This article posed a dilemma for the moderators of the FreeAmericans forum. How much smug gloating over the deaths of federal law enforcement agents could they permit without crossing over into the dangerous language of out-and-out sedition?

  Ian Kelby was reading the replies down the discussion thread beneath the bomb ambush article, when someone posted the information that he had just found a file called the FEDLIST.ZIP. It seemed to include all of the federal agents in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. The person who posted this information included a link which Kelby clicked; it took him to a popular music file sharing network. After several more clicks and a wait of a few seconds his screen was filled with a densely typed list of names and addresses. Down the left side was a column of five digit numbers, in ascending order: zip codes. The list continued unbroken through hundreds of entries.

  He scrolled down to his own Rockville zip code, 20850, and found nearby addresses listing four FBI and two ATF agents. One was a supervisor, judging by his job title and GS number. Kelby didn’t risk saving or printing any of the list. Instead he copied down the information long hand on a piece of scrap paper, and then he exited the site and erased the cookies from his computer.

  Kelby knew that such a sensitive list of federal employees would immediately be counterattacked by the government, and it would disappear quickly. The FreeAmericans moderators would also delete the link to the site as soon as they learned of it, in order not to be charged as an accessory to any crimes. The federal agents themselves, once they became aware of the list, would take extra security precautions and probably leave those home addresses and go into hiding. But if the list was brand spanking new, as Kelby supposed it was, the listed agents probably wouldn’t become aware of it before arriving at work tomorrow…so there was a narrow window of opportunity if he moved quickly.

  He began to consider several preplanned “boiler plate” operations for striking a target of opportunity on short notice. He spread out a road map of Montgomery County on his desk and began to weigh his options.

  ****

  Wally Malvone was pacing between his first floor refrigerator and wet bar while channel surfing the cable news networks when his cell phone rang again. It was almost an hour since Bullard had made his initial calls from their staging site near Leo Swarovski’s house outside of Richmond.

  “Yeah?”

  “Bob here.”

  “Okay Bob, what’s up, what’s the deal?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “They who?”

  “Ahh, the two, umm, employees, the ones who were running the errand, and our guests. They’re gone.”

  “All of them? All of them? Gone?”

  “Right, all of them.”

  “Shit! What happened?”

  “Hard to tell… A major snafu, that’s for sure.”

  Malvone was thinking fast. Maybe Hammet was smarter than he’d given him credit for. Maybe his big dumb Rottweiler loyalty was just an act. Maybe he’d sensed something wrong in Garfield’s offer to drive him home tonight after deep-sixing Edmonds. Clay Garfield wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, maybe he’d inadvertently given Hammet some warning in something he’d said. Even now Hammet could be heading to the FBI, or a congressional committee, or the Washington Post... He could have let the prisoners go, or he could even be taking them with him.

  “Okay Bob, we have to consider the annex totally blown, and you’d better think in terms of planning for visitors anytime. The wrong kind of visitors. So let’s pack it up.”

  “Pack it up? Now? Or in the morning?”

  “Now. Right now. How’s the weather? Can you get the plane off the ground?”

  “It cleared up, we can fly.”

  “Good. Get all of the vehicles and everybody out as soon as possible. Rendezvous at the new compound.”

  “The place in Maryland?”

  “Yeah, right let’s not be too specific, okay?”

  “Sure, okay Wally. We’ll be there.”

  “Tell the troops they’ll get 48 hours leave after tomorrow morning, that’ll get them moving. Sound okay?”

  “That’ll work,” replied Bullard.

  “We have to cut our losses down there. We’ve been there long enough to have an impact; it’s served its purpose. Now with our, um, ‘guests’ missing, it’ll be better to just not be there if the shit hits the fan.”

  “Understood. We should be out of here in one or two hours max, and at the new place before dawn.”

  “Call me when you come over the bridge into Maryland. I’ll meet you and guide you into the new place.”

  “Will do.”

  “And call if there’s any news about the…guests…and that situation.”

  “Of course, you bet. So our friend in Richmond, what about him?” asked Bullard.

  “Well, I guess he gets a pass, for now,” said Malvone.

  “Lucky S.O.B., huh?”

  “He is—for now. But we’ll get around to him later.”

  “Is that all, Wally?”

  “I guess so. Later Bob.”

  “Yeah, later.” Wally Malvone pushed end on his phone, flipped it closed, and tossed it onto his sofa. What the hell was going on with Hammet? Had Fallon or Sorrento gotten loose somehow, and Hammet fled in fear of the consequences? Or had Hammet let them go for some reason? Or had he taken the prisoners with him somewhere? There didn’t seem to be any way to tell yet, he’d just have to wait and see what was going to happen. But at least any government inspectors or news reporters sniffing around the annex after tomorrow would find nothing there, just an abandoned Navy airfield which was occasionally used for training the military and law enforcement.

  In the worst case, if Hammet was turning snitch to the media or the government, he would be hard pressed to prove that anything had ever happened on the old landing field. In fact, there was no official record of the STU Team ever being in Virginia at all, and there was still no official link between Hammet and the STU, not a single scrap of paper or email he could point to. Damage control could obviously be a problem, and the situation would demand caution until Hammet and the others turned up, but the STU could ride it out, he was certain of it.

  Actually, a straightforward escape by Fallon and the others was probably the best scenario Malvone could envision. If they killed Hammet and Garfield after forcing Hammet to make the call to Swarovski, they would only be doing his dirty work for him. And if the prisoners had escaped, they would be going to ground, running for deep cover and s
taying out of the STU Team’s way. Then, Fallon and Sorrento could join Edmonds on the STU’s most wanted list, two more targets on their expanding list of enemies, guaranteeing them job security and expanding budgets far into the future.

  Enemies were a very good thing to have, to Wally Malvone’s way of thinking.

  43

  Tuesday morning, FBI Director Wayne Sheridan requested an emergency meeting with the President. He met him in the Oval Office, before the morning meeting of the Homeland Security Team down in the Situation Room. Harvey Crandall, the President’s CSO and closest advisor, sat on an antique couch across the room from the President’s desk. The FBI Director slid a long computer printout across the desk toward the President, and dropped into the chair across from him.

  “What have you got for me, Wayne? A list? What is it, all of the militia terrorists?” President Gilmore smiled, ready to chuckle at his own joke, but he stifled his reaction when he saw the grim set to Sheridan’s jaw.

  “No sir, I wish it was. It’s a list of almost every FBI and ATF Special Agent in Maryland, the District, Virginia and North Carolina, over a thousand of them. It lays out their home addresses, phone numbers… everything.”

  “Who generated the list? I don’t understand. Is it our own?”

  “Mr. President, it’s all over the internet. It started showing up last night after midnight our time.”

  “What are you saying? Someone is trying to expose our agents? To what…endanger them?”

  “Well, certainly sir, that’s the clear implication.”

  “Have you shut down the website? Isn’t it a felony to do that, to release information about our federal law enforcement officers?”

  “Yes sir, it’s a federal crime, it’s a felony.”

  “Well, have you shut down the website? Arrest whoever put out that list! This isn’t free speech; this is way over the line! It’s intolerable! We need to make an example of whoever did this!”

  FBI Director Sheridan shook his head slowly. He said, “I would if I could, believe me, I would if I could. This is way past what we can deal with at Justice, at least in the kind of hurry we’re in. We’re already in discussions with the NSA, we need their help, this is…” Sheridan was nervously wringing his hands together on his lap, agonizing. “We’re trying to stamp it out, but that damn list keeps breeding like cockroaches, it’s not just on one website, it’s on thousands of computers! It’s broken into unreadable fragments, just random looking gibberish. My people tell me it’s hiding on music files that kids share! Music files! It’s some kind of worm program, like a virus, it combines these fragmented files and generates the list. I don’t really understand all the nuts and bolts of how this works, but it works, and so far we can’t stop it.”

 

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