by Jack Mars
The photos were amazing. In one photo, a much younger Don was standing with Arnold Schwarzenegger, demonstrating to the actor a big MK-19 grenade gun. In a newer one, Don was putting a jiu-jitsu move on Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg was inverted, his legs in the air, his head on its way to a safety mat. Luke knew that Don sometimes consulted with Hollywood, helping to make their celluloid fakery seem vaguely realistic.
There was more. Here was Don, receiving what looked like a Bronze Star from Jimmy Carter. Here he was shaking hands with Ronald Reagan. Here was one with Bill Clinton. Here was one of Don with a paternal arm around Susan Hopkins. And another of Don standing near a river with the current Speaker of the House, both men wearing fly-fishing gear. Here was Don addressing a Congressional committee.
Luke sensed a presence behind him in the room.
“Hello, son,” Don said.
“Hi, Don. Great pictures.” Luke turned to face him. “You get around, eh?”
Don came all the way into the room. He wore a dress shirt and slacks. His body language was relaxed, but his eyes were sharp. He sat behind his big desk, and gestured to the chair facing it.
“Have a seat. Take a load off.”
Luke did.
“Politics…” Don said, “…is war by other means. Networking is a big part of how I’ve kept this place going. Our people do a great job, but if the big-wigs don’t know about it, then we’re out of work. To the bean counters, we are a line item, about as important as the one marked Miscellaneous.”
“Okay,” Luke said.
“I see you got a shower,” Don said. “Freshened up a bit?”
Luke nodded. The shower facilities here were first rate. And he kept two changes of clothes in his locker, even while he was on leave. He wasn’t feeling a hundred percent, but he was a lot better than before.
“Close call today, huh?”
“I guess we’ve had closer ones,” Luke said.
Don smiled. “Either way, I’m glad you’re not dead.”
Luke returned the smile. “Me too.”
“We still partners?” Don said.
Luke wasn’t sure how to answer that. They had been together a long time. Until today, there had never been a moment, not one, when Luke thought Don didn’t have his back. Today there had been two such moments. And in both cases, Don’s instincts had been wrong. Don had been skating in one direction, and the puck had been sliding off at full speed in the other direction. If Luke had listened to Don, then the President, the Vice President, and a lot of other people would have died.
It was a profound change, much like seeing an iceberg the size of Kentucky calve away from Antarctica and fall into the ocean. It was a huge thing to witness, but the implications of it were even bigger.
Maybe Don was getting old after all. Maybe he was seeing the Special Response Team collapse all around him, this organization he had built over ten years, and he was scared. Maybe its demise was giving him a whiff of his own mortality. Maybe it was clouding his judgment. Luke was willing to believe these things.
“We’ll always be partners,” Luke said.
“Good,” Don said. “Now listen, you’re still under suspension. I haven’t been able to budge them at all. I think they’ll rescind it, but it may be a day or two, so I’m going to send you home. You okay with that?”
“Don—”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, son. You were on leave anyway. After everything you’ve done, you deserve a couple of days off. Hell, you look like something the cat dragged in here.”
“I have new orders, Don.”
Don’s face was firm. “On whose authority?”
Luke looked him directly in the eyes. “The President’s. He told me to continue pursuing the leads we had this morning, and then report back to his security team at Mount Weather. I’d like to do that with the people here at SRT, but he told me if I had any trouble, they’d put Secret Service resources at my disposal.”
Don smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. Luke felt a small twinge about that. SRT was teetering on the brink, and now the President was taking Don’s agents. Even so, Don needed to man up. This wasn’t about egos or agency budgets. This was about getting a job done.
Don looked at the top of his desk. “Well, if the President ordered it, I don’t see how I can say no. I don’t see how the FBI Director can, either. Until I hear otherwise, you have whatever you need.”
*
Trudy Wellington’s disembodied head appeared on the flat-panel wall monitor.
Luke, Ed Newsam, Don Morris, and half a dozen members of the Special Response Team sat in the conference room. Real food was spread out on the long black table—sandwiches from the delicatessen less than a mile from headquarters. Luke’s was corned beef and sauerkraut on pumpernickel bread.
He glanced at Ed. Ed had also showered and changed. He wore a black SRT jumpsuit now. He held a cold pack to his eye. He had devoured two sandwiches and had a large mug of coffee in front of him. The mug was black with red lettering: JET FUEL. Ed looked alert, immense, formidable—a different man from half an hour ago. Outside of the busted face and the swollen eye, he was very much the same man Luke had met that morning.
“Can you guys hear me okay?” Trudy said.
“We hear you fine,” Don said.
“Video output look all right?”
“Looks good to me. Is Swann there with you?”
“He’s right behind me. He established this uplink.”
“Good,” Don said. “What do you have for us?”
“Well, we’ve got chaos,” Trudy said. “The National Guard has been mobilized. Every single vehicle, at every bridge and tunnel out of Manhattan, is being searched. The traffic is gridlock everywhere. Tow trucks are clearing out parked cars to open lanes for emergency vehicles. The police have the subways and commuter rails on lockdown. One entrance and exit at each subway station is open, and every person coming in searched. Every single bag is being opened. The lines are several blocks long. The crowds in Times Square became so large that the police closed the subway station there and cleared the square. At least ten thousand people are walking north toward Central Park. Reports of vandalism, mostly smashed shop windows, are widespread in that area.”
“What else?” Don said.
“As we speak, hundreds of thousands of people are walking across the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, 59th Street, George Washington, and 138th Street bridges out of Manhattan. It looks like September eleventh all over again. Mostly, people are calm, but I hate to think what this place would be like if the attack had happened here.”
“Any word on that laundry van?” Luke said. “We don’t know what radioactive materials were used in the attack on the White House. With the van still at large, there’s always the possibility of a second attack.”
“We’re on that,” Trudy said. “Eldrick Thomas, remember him? He was found in a parking lot along Baltimore Harbor. That lot is right off an exit ramp from I-95. It’s a hot-spot of drug trafficking and prostitution, so the Baltimore police have surveillance cameras at the top and bottom of the driveway leading to the lot. The camera at the bottom, which is right at the parking lot entrance, has been disabled, probably by the very people it’s meant to monitor. The camera at the top is still functional. Swann, can you load those videos?”
The display monitor went to split-screen. On the left side, Trudy was looking back at something out of sight of the camera. On the right side, grainy video footage appeared. It showed a four-lane road at a stoplight. The road was empty.
“We just got this half an hour ago,” Trudy said. “For whatever reason, Baltimore PD was reluctant to give it up. There was a moment when I thought we were going to have to go to a federal judge.”
As they watched, a white delivery van came onto the screen. The logo on the side of the van was clear. Dun-Rite Laundry Services. The van turned right, which made it face the camera directly.
“Okay, Swann, stop it right there,” Trudy said. “Yo
u can see the license plate. It’s grainy, but we made it out. New York commercial plate, AN1-2NL. The same plates that were on the van when we first caught it on camera near Center Medical Center. Now watch when it leaves.”
The video skipped, and the van disappeared. In a moment, it was back, this time facing away from the camera. Luke could make out an orange blur where the license plate would be.
“This is twenty minutes later,” Trudy said. “See the plate? It’s a New York residential plate, 10G-4PQ. Now watch as the van turns left to get back on the highway. See that? The laundry logo is gone. Very clever.”
“So what are we doing about it?” Luke said.
“There are APBs with every municipal police force in a three hundred mile radius. Maryland and Virginia State Police helicopters are in the air with still images from these videos, scanning every white van on the roads.”
“What if they garaged it?” Ed said.
Trudy shook her head. “It won’t matter. The past eight hours of footage from every single traffic camera in Maryland and Virginia has been outsourced to a company in India. Right now, four hundred people in Delhi are watching videotaped traffic with one task: look at every white van, and find the one with orange New York license plates that say 10G-4PQ. Bonuses for the workers, and the company, are triggered by how fast they find it, and not by how many hours they put in. Someone is going to spot that van very soon, and once they do, it’ll be a simple matter to track every single street light it passes until it stops.”
“Whoever is in that van is going to be desperate,” Luke said. “They’ve already lost two of their guys. If they get the sense we’re closing in, they’re likely to blow themselves up. When someone finds that van, I want us, meaning SRT, on the scene. We need to take those people alive.”
“We’re going to do the best we can,” Trudy said. “But we had to open it up. There are fifty police forces with this information, and a dozen intelligence agencies. If we kept it to ourselves, the danger is we would never find it.”
“I understand that,” Luke said. “But if we take the Little Bird, we can be anywhere and land almost anywhere pretty quickly. Just give us some warning.”
“Will do,” she said.
“Now what about Ali Nassar?”
“For that, you need to talk to Swann.”
Trudy disappeared and Mark Swann’s face appeared. “Luke, we sent a three-man team up to extract Nassar from his apartment. Unfortunately, they got there a few minutes late. When they arrived Nassar was already leaving with a security contingent from the Iranian mission. They were armed, showing their weapons. We didn’t want to risk a shoot-out on the street, and frankly, our guys were out-numbered and out-gunned.”
“Where did they go?”
“This was before the White House was attacked, so street traffic was pretty open. They came downtown and brought Nassar inside the Iranian mission on Third Avenue. The place is locked up tight. It would take an army, plus some casualties, to get in there and bring him out. Short of a declaration of war, we’re not going to do it, and even if we did, we’d probably find him dead.”
“Shit,” Luke said.
“Never fret,” Swann said. “CIA has managed to plant more than two hundred listening devices in that building over the years. Eleven of them are still active. It’s a big building, but Nassar’s voice was captured on at least two of the devices. There was a lot of arguing going on when they brought him in. It’s all in Farsi, so it doesn’t do us much good, but CIA has translators, and my Langley connection, gave me the scoop on what was being said. They’re going to smuggle him out of the country, possibly as early as today.”
“How are they going to do that? All the flights are grounded.”
Swann raised a finger. “All the commercial flights are grounded. Private flights are still taking off. There’s a private jet at Kennedy airport gassed up and ready to go. The Iranian mission is a few blocks from the Midtown Tunnel. If and when the traffic clears up, it’s a straight shot through the tunnel, out to the Van Wyck Expressway and down to Kennedy.”
“Can we have him arrested if he comes out?”
Swann shrugged. “The NYPD and Homeland aren’t cooperating. I think Begley is pissed that you were right, and he’s going to bite his own nose off on this. We could detain Nassar ourselves, if we’re willing to fight for him, and if he doesn’t come out in some kind of disguise, or packed away in the trunk of a car.”
“I want every exit from that mission watched,” Luke said. “We can’t let him get away, even if it means we—”
“Luke? Luke?” Trudy’s voice was back, but not her face. “Luke, we’re just getting some intel on that van. It’s been spotted. They tracked it to a junkyard in Northeast DC. It’s parked. We’re going to have satellite imagery of it in about thirty seconds.”
Luke was already standing. He glanced at Ed Newsam’s chair. Newsam wasn’t in it. Luke looked at the door of the conference room. Ed was at the door, holding it open.
“I’m waiting for you,” Ed said.
Luke looked around the conference room. Don was sitting up in his chair, staring straight head.
“Don?”
He nodded.
“Go.”
Chapter 27
1:45 p.m.
Ivy City - Northeast Washington, DC
The man was a ghost.
He had no name. He had no family. He carried no identification. If he were fingerprinted, his prints would turn up in no criminal or military database that existed. He had a past, of course he did, but that hardly mattered now. He had broken from that past life, and then he had broken from the man who once led that life. Now he lived in a sort of eternal present. The present had its rewards.
He lay on his stomach on the roof of an abandoned three-story building, he and his long-range rifle, the THOR M408. He thought of it as the Mighty THOR, and he and the rifle acted as one. He was its life-support system. It was the source of his creative expression.
All around them, the roof was piled up with discarded junk. Clothes, boxes, an old microwave oven, a shattered black and white television. There was a rusty shopping cart up here, as well as the entire drive train from what had probably once been a pickup truck. How or why someone had carried that thing up here…
It wasn’t worth thinking about.
The building, as dilapidated as it was, had been only recently abandoned. Forcibly so. Until this morning, it was the home of eight heroin addicts who took shelter there every night. Their stained mattresses, their discarded clothes, their dirty needles, and their pathetic keepsakes were spread throughout the various rooms. Their mindless graffiti ramblings were all over the walls and in the stairwells. The man had walked through it all on his way to this roof. It was quite a spectacle.
The addicts had been quietly rounded up and removed before first light. The man had no idea what their fate was, nor did he care. They were in the way, so remove them. It would probably be a favor to everyone, including themselves, if they were killed.
The man took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again, he re-sighted on the target. He lay under a remnant of an old green awning, the kind that people used to cover their side yards with to keep out the rain. The giant sound suppressor from his rifle was the only part of him that was visible from the outside. Yes, he was very confident that no one could see him here. And no one would hear the shot when he fired it.
His scope was zeroed in on the front passenger door of a white van parked in a junkyard across two alleys from here. The powerful scope made the van door seem bare inches away. The man would prefer to take the shot now, but the glare from the sun made it hard to see through the window. Anyway, the instructions were to wait until the door opened and the subject stepped out.
That was the entire job. Wait until the door opens and a man steps out. Fire one shot into the man’s head. Break down the Mighty THOR. Slide out from under the awning and walk downstairs to the street. A
nondescript car would be waiting for him in front of the building. Get in the passenger seat and let someone he had never met drive him away.
There was more to it, something about a drunken hobo who would then wander into the junkyard to relieve himself, and remove any telephones and other traceable communications devices. But that wasn’t the man’s business, and he knew nothing more about the hobo. The streets around here were overcrowded with ragged hobos drunk on wine and beer. It could be any one of them.
The man on the roof wasn’t a hobo. He was wearing a brown maintenance man’s uniform and when he left the building, he would be carrying a toolbox. No one would look at him twice. He was probably a representative of the absentee landlord, and had come to fix some minor problem with the building.
Until then he waited. And he watched that van door.
*
Nothing made sense anymore.
Ezatullah Sadeh sat in the front passenger seat of the white van. He had just awakened from a feverish sleep filled with nightmare visions. His body and his clothes were soaking wet with perspiration.
He shivered, though he knew it must be a warm day. He had been vomiting earlier in the day, but it seemed to have stopped. He glanced at his phone and saw that it was already well into the afternoon. He also saw that there were no messages for him.
The confidence he had felt this morning had long since evaporated. It had been replaced by confusion. They were parked in a dirt lot overgrown with weeds and filled with junked cars and garbage. Outside of the gates to the junkyard was a slum. It was a typical American concrete wasteland, dismal shops all crammed together, crowds of women carrying plastic bags and waiting at bus kiosks, drunken men on street corners holding beer cans in brown paper bags. He could hear the sounds of the neighborhood from here: automobile traffic, music, shouts and laughter.
The last instructions he had received were to come here to this lot. That was early this morning, in Baltimore, just before they lost the one called Eldrick. Ezatullah had never completely believed in Eldrick’s submission to Allah, and could never bring himself to call the man by his Islamic name, Malik. At the time, it seemed a shame that Eldrick had panicked and run when he did, just steps from glory. But now…
