Threat Zero

by Nicholas Irving

  “Vick?” Bronson said. He looked at Wilde and then at Harwood. “No. Fucking. Way.”

  “Not fucking. Just friends.” Wilde tossed her hair and smirked at Harwood. The emerald eye contact was just enough to cause Harwood to refocus on the task at hand before he let other thoughts pollute his mind. “Besides, he’s on Bumble now.”

  “I need to see Samuelson’s place,” Harwood said. “Now.”

  Bronson looked back at the papers then laid wide eyes on Harwood.

  “I’m sending Special Agent Valerie Hinojosa,” Bronson said. “Definitely not Agent Wilde.”

  “Agent? Promotion. Congrats,” Harwood said.

  Bronson lifted a handheld radio to his mouth and said, “Agent Hinojosa, please come outside.” Then to Wilde, “We’re good here.”

  “Roger that, boss,” she said and departed.

  In the moments between Wilde’s departure and Hinojosa’s arrival, Bronson said, “Stay away from Faye, Reaper.”

  “You’re not my daddy, nor hers, Bronson. But judging by my orders, which I need back, by the way, I’m not going to have the time to be the bird dog you seem to be,” Harwood replied.

  Bronson stiffened and huffed until Agent Hinojosa approached.

  “Secret agent meeting under the stairwell or just a lovers’ spat?” Hinojosa quipped.

  “What? Is everybody a comedian? We’ve got twenty-two killed—twelve family members, ten Secret Service. We think it was domestic terrorism, and you guys are auditioning for improv?” Bronson said.

  “Gallows humor, Marine,” Harwood said. “Only way to survive.”

  Hinojosa didn’t look anything like he expected she might. Reddish-brunette hair pulled into a severe ponytail, fair complexion, a few freckles across the bridge of her slender nose, high cheekbones, and wide copper eyes. Her ancestors probably traveled on the Mayflower. She was well put together in her navy wool suit with white silk blazer. Low pumps instead of high heels. Slight bulge under the blazer. What kind of pistol did she carry?

  “So, what’s up?” Hinojosa asked.

  “This is Vick Harwood. Army Ranger. They call him The Reaper. He’s on special assignment. I need you to watch him as he goes through Samuelson’s room.”

  “Watch him? You need a babysitter, check your Tinder dates.”

  Bronson had a reputation of dating women in their twenties, ten years his junior. The dig produced a smirk from Bronson.

  “None of them have clearances,” Bronson shot back. “Nor do they work for me.”

  “Neither do I,” she replied.

  “Au contraire. You are on special assignment to my task force until further notice. You know this.”

  Hinojosa sighed. “I haven’t been through Samuelson’s room. Why does he get to go?” she protested.

  “Not my call.”

  Hinojosa raised her eyebrows. “Higher than you, boss? Director?”

  Bronson said nothing. Returned her level gaze. Fireworks.

  “Oh my God. Higher?” Harwood didn’t know if she was mocking him or truly shocked.

  “Just take him up there,” Bronson directed and stormed off.

  In the wake of Bronson’s departure, Harwood said, “How long you been part of his team?”

  “I’m not,” she replied. “They flew me in today from Texas. I’ve got skills they need.”

  “Such as?”

  “Right now, you don’t need to know that. My task is to babysit your ass. So, let’s go,” she said.

  Harwood followed her. He understood the tensions and quick retorts. Most likely, the last thing Hinojosa wanted to do right now was to escort some interloper to Samuelson’s room. They climbed stairs and walked through an open hallway, a pitched roof covering the walkway with clear views behind the apartment complex and to the front, toward the ambush location. Hinojosa lifted the yellow crime scene tape and opened the door. They walked through a standard apartment building hallway, apartment doors on either side.

  “The other residents?” Harwood asked.

  “Being interviewed as we speak. Using the gym facility as a holding area. Interviews in the conference room off the manager’s office.”

  She removed a key from her blazer pocket and lifted more yellow crime scene tape as she stepped into what he immediately recognized as Samuelson’s room. The window was still half open. The chair remained in front of the window. Twenty-two spent casings lay on the floor, scattered haphazardly, presumably ejected from the rifle as someone—Samuelson?—fired into the convoy of family members. An SR-25 sniper rifle lay on its side to their right, near the desk where Samuelson’s smartphone remained. There was blood splatter on the ceiling, along with some chunks of brain matter. A single hole punctuated the artistic spray, the blood streaking outward in thin, jagged lines. To his left was the kitchen, which looked relatively intact. To his right, beyond the two chairs, one for shooting and one for suicide, was a tattered sofa. Beyond that was a door to the bedroom, a mattress on the floor visible. The sheets were rumpled and clothes were on the floor. Typical bachelor’s apartment.

  “Damn,” Hinojosa said.

  Harwood said nothing. Used his sniper skills to collect information. Scanning, logging, assessing. Something was missing. He looked back at the chair facing the window, the supposed shooter’s platform. To the right was a small table and poorly upholstered chair. A couple of shirts lay wadded in the chair. Newspapers and magazines were on the end table.

  Beneath the stack of magazines, he remembered seeing the MacBook. Now there was no MacBook. He would go back and check it, but he was certain he had seen it earlier.

  “Did anyone remove anything?” Harwood asked.

  Hinojosa looked at him.

  “No. Why?”

  “Just a logical question. So, we are looking at the apartment as it was, save Samuelson’s body?”

  “That’s my information. Initial first responders on the scene were Maryland State Troopers, then Secret Service, and then us. The Secret Service turned it over to us. They collapsed on the president and the cabinet members who were awaiting the family members at Camp David. There’s a Secret Service liaison in the manager’s office. He may know more. I do know that forensics has gone through this place with a fine-tooth comb. Place was pretty clean. One set of footprints. Samuelson’s fingerprints on the casings and rifle. GPR on the sleeves.”

  Gunpowder residue findings on Samuelson would not be unusual if he pulled the trigger once, but Harwood remained curious and would pursue the specific pattern of the residue, which he considered important. They spent ten more minutes walking through the apartment. The refrigerator was empty save a couple of half-full Gatorade bottles and some Clif Bars. The bedroom did not improve upon its first impression. It was a tangled mess of clothes that Samuelson had dumped where he was standing at the time. Running shoes, shorts, and shirt here; jeans, T-shirt, and boots there. Going back to the small living and dining room, he studied the spray pattern of spent casings. Each was marked with a plastic evidence marker that stood up like a small triangle with numbers one through twenty-two. Sitting in the chair, he leaned forward, closed his eyes, and then opened them, as if he were the shooter.

  A quarter mile beyond him he had a perfect shot at each of the vehicles that had made the hairpin turn. He used a shooter’s pose to silently work the rifle from the lead vehicle, the Charger, to the rear vehicle, a Suburban. He repeated the process, this time thinking about timing. Repeated again, thinking about casing expenditure. With each phantom shot on each vehicle, he looked over his shoulder and checked the brass and related evidence markers. Made a note that something was off about where the brass had landed. He couldn’t quite place it, but it wasn’t natural. If he had worked left to right or right to left, the spray should include some logical dispersion. But what the evidence markers indicated was a more tightly grouped array of casings. Not all bunched together, but neither were they logically dispersed as they should have been. Plus, the bedroom was a mess. The kitchen was nasty. Bu
t this living area floor was clean. The pile carpet showed vacuum streaks that looked like a backgammon board.

  Noted.

  Samuelson’s dead. Let’s not jump to any conclusions.

  “Where’s Sammie’s body? I have instructions to identify him.”

  Hinojosa paused, looked away, and then came back to him with soulful eyes.

  “Part of him is up there,” she said, pointing at the ceiling. “And the rest is in the morgue in Hagerstown. Closest place with one. State troopers escorted the body there. We have a forensics team there.”

  Harwood nodded, considered her flip response, judged it to be out of character with the sorrowful countenance, and decided to change directions.

  “Feeling left out?” Harwood asked.

  She lowered her chin, perhaps the closest thing she would offer to a nod.

  “I dropped everything I was doing in Texas to come up here. We all want to be useful, Reaper.”

  Reaper.

  Harwood nodded, but continued staring at the table near the window. “Totally understand that,” he said, absently.

  “What’s missing?”

  Harwood walked to the end table, squatted and used the back of his fingernail to lift the magazines.

  “There was a MacBook or some kind of computer underneath these magazines. Study the video of the FB Live event,” Harwood said.

  “That’s something,” she said. “As far as I know, nothing’s been taken by law enforcement except for Samuelson’s body.”

  They spent another ten minutes looking through the apartment. On the refrigerator were two pictures of Harwood and Samuelson in desert camouflage, holding their rifles, checkered kaffiyehs across their faces, leaden stares looking at the camera. They looked dangerous, almost psychotic. When Hinojosa turned to open the door, he removed the two pictures and pocketed them.

  Harwood stepped into the hallway and watched her lock the door and secure the yellow crime scene tape back in place. His mind was buzzing. Why was the living room completely vacuumed and cleaned? Could Samuelson have technically pulled off the ambush alone? As far as Harwood knew, he wasn’t an expert on construction of EFP improvised explosive devices. To place them in fake Styrofoam curbstone and make it look real took talent … and experience. Samuelson didn’t have that.

  “Any trace of explosives in the apartment?”

  “No. But there was a key to a storage unit in a nearby facility. One of those places you rent monthly. The unit is in Samuelson’s name. Paid in full with cash for three months.”

  “Prints?”

  “Samuelson’s and a few of the people who run the joint. That’s what we’ve got so far.”

  “Makes no sense,” Harwood said.

  “No, it doesn’t. But everything points to Samuelson.”

  “He either didn’t care who knew what he was doing and actually did this, or was set up,” Harwood said.

  “This way,” she said.

  He followed her to the next apartment. More crime scene tape plastered a giant “X” across the door. She removed it on one side and opened the door with another key.

  Inside was a perfectly normal-looking apartment with plaid sofa and love seat, cherry end tables and coffee table, and big-screen television. The apartment looked uninhabited, a furnished corporate kind of deal.

  “What’s this?” Harwood asked.

  “We got a kid’s cell phone video that showed this window was open also. Samuelson could have been going back and forth.”

  Harwood shook his head. “Wouldn’t make sense.”

  “Unless you didn’t want a rocket up your ass. Secret Service carries those.”

  They spent ten minutes walking through the pristine unit. Everything in place.

  “Who rents it?”

  “A holding company.”

  The walls showed a couple of nicks, minor chips in the paint. He stood at the window, which was closed. Then knelt, putting himself at a shooter’s level. The view on the ambush scene was just as good, maybe better. Blue lights spinning. Floodlights glaring. Harwood took aim, pulled an imaginary trigger, turned to watch where the casings would eject. Saw the floor and sofa. Nothing visible. On all fours, he crawled to the green-and-burgundy plaid sofa and lifted a flap. Using his cell phone flashlight, he scanned beneath. Something winked at him.

  “Either someone shot from in here or a kid found this and put it down there,” Harwood said.

  “What?”

  “A brass 7.62 shell casing just like the ones in Samuelson’s place. We need the techs to do a hundred percent sweep of this apartment.”

  She was on her knees, looking from the opposite direction. Her eyes poked beneath the dust cover of the sofa, looking like a feral animal searching for food.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Roger that.”

  Harwood snapped a picture of the casing before using a latex glove to secure the shell, which he placed in his pocket. He stood and took pictures of the nicks in the wall. Some of the casings expended from the SR-25 would have been wildly bouncing off the walls in the rapid-fire succession mow down that had occurred. This room had been used for the ambush. Maybe Samuelson’s had, too. But this one, for sure.

  “This is something,” Hinojosa said, standing.

  “Roger. No video cameras?”

  “Only in the parking lot. There are some along the exterior of the building and the stairwells but as you might imagine they were disabled an hour before and after the attack.”

  “Why would Samuelson do that? He couldn’t do that, at least not that I’m aware of.”

  Hinojosa paused and lifted her eyes toward him. There was something familiar about her face, but he couldn’t place it. She was beautiful with creamy skin. He chalked it up to her likely resemblance to a movie star or actress that he had seen. The eyebrows and forehead, so perfect, and so unique at the same time.

  “Hinojosa? Married name?”

  “Divorced name. In the process of changing it back.”

  Harwood nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Standing at the door of the apartment, a clock ticked somewhere. Like a second hand or a countdown. The crazy descending numbers of a basketball scoreboard clock showing the one hundredths of seconds. The frightening countdown of an IED bomb timer. How long had they been in the apartment? Five minutes, max?

  “Quick,” Harwood said. He grasped Hinojosa by the arm and opened the door, pulling her into the hallway. She seemed to understand and strode with a long-legged gait behind him. They reached the stairwell, spun down the stairs, and ran into the courtyard near the pool, ducking behind a storage shed. He pulled her close as he heard the click of the detonator followed by the explosion.

  Samuelson’s room erupted as a bomb cratered half the building. Heat licked at his face as he turned Hinojosa away from the blast. Debris blew past them, the shed pinging with shrapnel impacts.

  CHAPTER 4

  The fire trucks on hand circled quickly to spray down the blaze in the middle of the apartment building.

  Harwood had pulled Hinojosa out of the blast radius at the last moment. Shards of glass and wood littered the area. The building had collapsed inward, with Samuelson’s apartment and the ones on either side completely destroyed.

  In the gym Harwood removed the SR-25 casing he had secured in the second room. Walked over to a man who had both arms covered in tat sleeves. His thumbs were working a smartphone he cradled in both hands.

  “The playboy says you’re the man who can find fingerprints,” Harwood said.

  “Max Corent. That’s me. Found you, didn’t I, Harwood?”

  “You’re the guy that connected my rifle to all the Chechen bullshit?”

  “The one and only,” Corent said. He lifted his glasses and stared at Harwood. “That was some wicked shit that went down.”

  A few months before, Harwood had faced off with his combat nemesis, Khasan Basayev—aka the Chechen—only to have the conflict unresolved. Was the Chechen dead or alive? Corent must hav
e seen the contemplative look on Harwood’s face.

  “He’s dead. Every shred of evidence we recovered showed he lost too much blood to stay alive in the Atlantic Ocean. Sharks, hypothermia, nobody to help him. He’s dead.”

  “Hope you’re right, Corent. Can you check this for prints?”

  “Just a sec. Reading this tweet.”

  “Tweet?”

  “Twitter. It’s only been the new thing for the last few years. Get with the program, Reaper,” Corent said.

  “That’s social media, man. C’mon. This is a crime scene. I need intel,” Harwood said.

  “Actually, journalism is dead. All those talking heads on television are opinion assholes. Left, right, it doesn’t matter. You want the real scoop, it’s right here.”

  He held up his phone and flashed his Twitter app at Harwood.

  “What’s the real scoop, then?” Harwood asked.

  “I hear your sarcasm, Reaper, but listen to this from Maximus Anon. ‘Camp David Ambush inside job. Explosion at sniper hide site destroyed evidence. Carly Masters was target. MTF.’”

  “More to follow. Talk to me about Carly Masters?”

  “The Secretary of Defense’s daughter. General Masters. She worked for the Senate Intelligence Committee staff.”

  “Already there’s someone with that level of detail? Who’s Maximus Anon?”

  “I’m telling you. Because you can have anonymous accounts we don’t know who these people are. Could be someone in this room. But Maximus Anon is probably the most informative and well informed of all the researchers out there on Twitter. Spygate. Crossfire Hurricane. North Korea. Singapore. Iran. The mid-term bomber. He broke all that stuff before it happened.” Corent waved his hand around the buzzing gym. “Most of them are clueless.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of bullshit. But I’ve got something real for you. That bomb didn’t destroy all the evidence,” Harwood said. He held out the shell casing wrapped securely inside the latex glove. Corent nodded and took the glove. The spent cartridge looked like a severed finger in the translucent material. He dumped it on a sheet of wax paper and used a pipe cleaner to lift it to the light. Squinting, he said, “Yeah. Def, bro. There’s prints here.”