by Sean Parnell
Shortly, their team leaders would begin to argue over who had jurisdiction over what. All of these gunslingers underwent the exact same training at FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, yet the Secret Service pros regarded the DS agents as lesser mortals, and the DS agents thought the SS people were snobs.
The event of national mourning was drawing near, but the grounds, the magnificent apexes, belfries, and vaults, the overpriced café just outside on the south lawn, and the two well-stocked gift shops hadn’t yet been closed down to tourists. That would only happen twenty-four hours later. So, in the meantime, the domestic and foreign visitors would enjoy their explorations of the lofty castle on a high knoll where kings prayed and presidents were eulogized, and they’d also get some great selfies with stone-faced bodyguards, grinning cops, and bomb-sniffing German shepherds.
The Chinese, the Swedes, and the hormonal college kids walked into the main visitors’ entrance, followed by the nun. They all purchased their tickets from the two friendly young women at the semicircular kiosk, palmed their cathedral brochures, and got in line for a security check. Normally the cathedral had no such arrangement, but given the upcoming event, the D.C. police had set up a magnetometer.
When it was finally the nun’s turn, she waddled toward the tall metal frame with her typewriter case. She was a tubby woman, perhaps in her thirties, though it was hard to tell. Her habit was a long, brown woolen tunic girded over her stomach rolls, then draped with a black scapular and an olive wood cross. Her cowl was a light gray collar and snug facial halo, topped by another black veil. Her face was pasty and pale, her full lips unglossed, and she wore a pair of large steel spectacles over her dull hazel eyes.
“Morning, Sister,” said a stout female cop, one of three D.C. uniforms manning the checkpoint.
“Good morning, my dear.” The nun smiled without showing her teeth.
“I’m sorry, but would you mind setting your case on the table?”
“I would not mind at all.”
The cop opened the thick, rectangular, black typewriter case. Its thin leather cover was peeling, and the machine inside was an ancient Olivetti.
“Well now, that’s an old artifact, isn’t it?” the cop commented.
“I am completing a thesis about Anglican architectural history,” the nun said. She had a slight foreign accent, perhaps Italian.
“No computers for you, huh, Sister?” one of the male cops said and smiled.
“They are the devil’s work.” The corners of the nun’s eyes crinkled, the cops grinned at her, and she lifted her vestments an inch off the floor and walked through the magnetometer without anything ringing. The cops closed her case and handed it back.
“There ya go, Sister,” one of the male cops said. “Save a prayer for us.”
“Oh, I shall,” said the nun. “Have a blessed day.”
She walked into the cathedral’s main space, crossed herself, and proceeded with her case directly down the wide aisle between the long rows of fine, heavy wooden pews. As she approached the very last rows up front, which would be the first reserved for funeral dignitaries, cathedral workers were assembling a stage and a large podium, as well as seats for the choir and orchestra, under the guidance of a handsome young woman in a long black skirt and modest emerald blouse. The nun stopped and looked up at the woman.
“Good morning, my dear,” she said. “Bless you and yours during this difficult time.”
The woman turned and smiled down at her from the stage. “Thank you, Sister.”
The nun turned slightly to the left and waved her small hand toward the front rows of pews. Her fingernails were clipped to the skin and unmanicured.
“May I ask, is this where the president and his guests will be sitting?”
“Oh yes.” The young woman gestured left and right at two towering marble columns the size of space rocket boosters. “They’ll be right there in the first two rows, between those two columns.”
“It is so terribly sad.” The nun shook her cowled head and crossed herself again. “Bless them in their hour of need.”
“We’ll do our best to care for them,” the woman said.
“God will care for them too.” The nun smiled, but without her eyes.
She raised her face to the cathedral’s high apse, then looked down past her scuffed wooden clogs at the floor, took her typewriter case, and headed for the far corner stairwell that led down to the underground chapels. Her heavy wooden clogs clicked on the marble staircase and echoed in the empty cavern, and at the bottom she encountered a uniformed Secret Service agent in a white shirt and leather jacket. She smiled and blessed him with an air-finger cross, and he touched the brim of his cap. She turned to the right and, silently counting her paces, walked along the corridor, turned left, and descended into the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea. It was the same chapel from which Alpha operators were carried to their graves.
She spent fifteen minutes there, alone in the second row of old wooden chairs, hunching and praying before the chapel’s dreary mural and a waist-high stone bier that served as a stand for coffins. Her fingers were intertwined on the chair back in front, and an observer might have thought that her hazel eyes were closed. But they were scanning the modest fixtures, the walls, and, most carefully, the ceiling, which formed the base plate of the main floor above.
At last she rose, took her case, waddled up the stairs and out the chapel’s other side and into the cathedral’s sumptuous underground gift shop, which was fifty feet long and filled with memorabilia, both touristic and pious. She paid cash for a large 3D puzzle of the National Cathedral, tucked the box under her arm, retraced her route through the dreary sunken Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea, headed back past the uniformed agent, all the way down the corridor, past the Bethlehem Chapel, and out the modest wooden exit door to the rear grounds of the holy site.
She found herself in an open courtyard of slate squares surrounded by further high stone buttresses, archways, and halls of stained glass. In the center was a fountain of rushing pure water spouting from what looked like a giant black metal rose and cascading down into an elliptical pool. Another pair of Secret Service agents were there, these in dark suits with obvious handgun bulges, alongside a uniformed K-9 D.C. cop with his bomb-sniffing beautiful beast, a black-and-caramel German shepherd on a tight leather leash.
The agents and the cop turned to watch the nun emerge from the cathedral, and she walked straight toward them, nodding her quiet benedictional greeting. She stopped very close to the dog, whose gleaming black snout was sniffing the air, and she knelt, placed the cathedral model box on the stones, and her typewriter too, and extended her hand, palm up.
“He is a beautiful creature,” she said to the cop. “May I pet him?”
“He’s friendly, Sister, but he’ll probably want to sniff you. That’s his job.”
The nun smiled. “We all have our tasks and talents, given by God.”
The dog trotted forward to the kneeling nun and began scanning her puzzle box and typewriter case with his twitching nose. . . .
Semtex is one of the world’s most powerful plastic explosives. It is manufactured in the Czech Republic by a company called Explosia, and has often been called the favorite Play-Doh of international terror. It is odorless, usually red-brick orange in color, moldable and malleable, extremely stable, and its main components are RDX (cyclonite) and PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate). Twelve ounces of Semtex hidden in a Toshiba cassette recorder blew Pan Am 103 out of the skies over Scotland in 1988, killing 270 victims in the air and on the ground. Semtex was used to utterly destroy the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998, killing 224 people and wounding more than four thousand.
Somehow, nearly a thousand tons of Semtex went missing from the Czech Republic and wound up in the hands of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi. Curiously, ten tons of Semtex fell into the stores of the Irish Republican Army and was used f
or three decades to kill scores of British soldiers, policemen, and innocent bystanders. The PLO used it, the Red Brigades loved it, and Hollywood had no idea what it was or could do, but it sure sounded cool and made a big bang.
In response to these multiple terrorist bombings, Explosia finally agreed to lace all Semtex products with trace elements that would make the product easily detectable, especially to trained sniffer dogs. However, the horse was already out of the barn. Semtex was invented in the late 1950s. No one seems to know exactly how many pounds of nondetectable Semtex are still out there on the black market.
There was a pinky finger–size molded tube of Semtex 1A, the type primarily used for blasting operations, hidden inside the nun’s Olivetti typewriter carriage. This particular batch had been manufactured in 1999, without any tracing or tracking elements, but even so it was cocooned inside a double sleeve of Saran Wrap.
The nun gently curled her fingers through the shepherd’s thick neck fur as he sniffed her cathedral model, and then the seams of her typewriter case. As trained to do by the trainers and handlers who’d raised him at Lackland Air Force Base, he remained standing and would sit only if his highly sensitive nose detected some sort of deadly explosive.
He did not sit.
He finished his sniffing, returned to his master, rubbed up against his thigh, and was rewarded with a loving head pat.
The nun rose to her feet and retrieved her puzzle and typewriter. Streams of sweat were dribbling down from her underarms and over the padding of pillow foam she’d used to make herself fat. Yet nothing showed on her beatific face but a sisterly smile, as she offered a nod of thanks to the kind policeman, walked directly north from the cathedral grounds, and exhaled a whisper of thanksgiving.
“It is indeed a blessed day.”
Chapter 42
Winchester, Virginia
Steele almost shot Meg Harden when she came out of the woods. He was all alone, or so he’d thought, banging away at a row of five steel disk targets with his father’s .45. He was wearing a pair of Peltor ear protectors on his head, gripping the pistol two-handed, and focusing out there at twenty-five yards as he dropped each plate with less than half a second between hits. Whenever he trained on the range, his mind was clear of everything, like a meditating monk, which was probably why he felt her presence behind him and nearly killed her.
He spun around and aimed the handgun at her face so fast it was like the blur of a samurai’s sword. She froze in place, ten paces away, her eyes placid and hands by her sides, waiting for him to assess. He raised the barrel, made the pistol safe, slid it into his drop holster, and took off the Peltors.
“How’d you know I was here?” Steele said.
Meg sighed and looked at the sky. “I missed you too, Eric.”
Steele didn’t apologize. He took in her fit form, her raven-black hair and crystal-blue eyes. She was wearing a green corduroy jacket with bone buttons, jeans, and small hiking boots. She looked like an L.L. Bean catalog model. He walked to her and bent his head, but she didn’t offer her lips so he kissed her cold cheek.
“I figured you wouldn’t take real R and R or go very far,” Meg said. “And whenever you’re stressed, you shoot.”
“I don’t get stressed, Meg,” Steele said, and he turned and walked back over to his shooting bench and started loading magazines for his Troy Industries 300 Blackout M4. He wasn’t so sure yet about the new cartridge, which basically turned the standard 5.56 mm round into a 7.62 x 39 mm Russian-type bullet and fired it from a modified upper receiver, but he figured he’d give it a shot. In general he didn’t like weird ammunition that you couldn’t find easily on the modern battlefield.
“I know,” Meg said, “you just get focused.”
“That’s right.”
She followed him over to the bench, not too close, and stood there with her hands in her jacket pockets.
“How’s the knee?” she asked.
“Coming along.” The bullets clicked into the magazine as he fed them in with his tactical gloves. “Did half of Hawksbill this morning.”
He’d gotten up at 5:00 a.m., driven out to Shenandoah National Park, and hiked halfway up the four-thousand-foot peak of the mountain. The knee resisted, because Petrov’s wrench had cracked a hairline fracture in the upper tibia, but that wasn’t something you could cast. The climb back down was painful, more so because he and Meg had once summited Hawksbill together.
From there he’d driven north to Happy Creek and finally out to Winchester, where the Program owned a thousand acres of do-whatever-you-want training area. It had been donated by Thorn McHugh, late of the CIA and allegedly a member of Cemetery Whisper, a secret club of disavowed intelligence agents. Apparently, McHugh, who came from a family of wealthy Yalies, knew more about the Program than he should have, and liked it.
“You’re the only man I know,” Meg said, “who tortures an injury into healing.”
“Maybe that’ll work with us,” Steele said.
“I don’t think so.”
He looked at her, squeezed the Peltors back down over his ears, and picked up the rifle. He said, “Gunfire,” and Meg stuck her fingers in her ears and turned to look downrange. Steele fired off ten rounds in rapid successions of five double-taps, but the second round of each pair didn’t ring because the first round had already felled the plate.
“Kinda loud,” Steele said as he lowered the barrel.
“What are you using?”
“Blackouts.”
“It’s a copy of a Russian round,” Meg said. “Louder, heavier . . . might even be dipped in vodka.”
Steele’s smile was no more than a lip curl, so Meg gave up on breaking the ice.
“She’s gone, by the way,” she said.
“Who’s gone?” He was loading a thirty-round mag now. He wanted to see what would happen on full rock ’n’ roll.
“Kalidi.”
That halted his activity and his fingers stopped dipping into his ammo can. His dark eyebrows furrowed down at Meg, and now she clearly saw the stitches from his left temple wound.
“What do you mean, gone?” he said.
“Not dead,” Meg said, “but she took off, fled the U.S.”
“Yeah, right,” Steele scoffed. “What do you know about that woman, Meg?”
“Everything. FBI confirmed it with Europol, MI5, and Israeli Shabak. Lila Kalidi, daughter of the late master blaster, Walid Kalidi. She was on a vengeance spree for her father’s death and got help from a Russian cyber cell. She killed Jonathan, Collins, and now Marty. The only reason she didn’t get you was because you never stand still for a minute.” She smiled weakly. “Impulsive apparently has an upside.”
“You keep using the past tense about her,” Steele said.
“She’s gone, Eric. Maybe something spooked her after Nashville.”
“Nothing would spook that murderous bitch,” he said, and his eyes slitted like a panther.
“Well, FBI says she made it to the Florida Keys, hopped a drug flight, and the pilot crossed international before the Coast Guard or DEA planes could catch up. Guesses are she made it to Havana.”
“I’ll believe it when I see a selfie of her with Raul Castro.”
“I’ve got the FBI Red Notice request to INTERPOL right here.” Meg patted her pocket where she had her cell phone. “Want to see it?”
“No.” If he asked her for proof it would be like calling her a liar. Part of him wanted to believe it, but the larger part wanted to kill Lila Kalidi, and her fleeing like this would make that harder. Well, Program or not, he’d find her someday. He had a comforting thought of slicing her ear off and showing it to her before blowing her brains out. “I guess it’s a good thing.”
“I still love you, Eric,” Meg said out of the blue, as if somehow the departure of Lila Kalidi, or the fact that she’d gotten away, was all Steele’s fault, yet forgiven.
At that moment, something turned inside him. It was as if Kalidi’s leaving the picture might clear
the heavy cloud that had been hanging between him and Meg. He’d been awfully suspicious of her, and of everyone else except Dalton Goodhill, and maybe Ralphy, but now it didn’t seem fair. The Program was dead, soon to be buried just like its greatest benefactor, Denton Cole. What was left were the good men and women who’d sacrificed so much for it, in silence, without glory. Meg was one of those patriots. He owed her, and yes, it was more than that.
“I know,” he said. “And I want to make it right.”
“I said I still love you, Eric,” she said. “I didn’t say that I want to be with you.”
She reached inside her jacket. He tried not to watch her hand. She came up with a tissue. It was chilly in the forests of Winchester and her nose was running.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen after this,” she said. “The Program’s gone, maybe it’ll be replaced with something else. Who knows? But it’s obvious to me that two people in this kind of life can’t make it together. I used to be so tough.”
“You’re still tough.”
Meg laughed softly. “I can barely breathe when you’re gone. And you’re almost always gone. It makes me feel like a whiny woman. I think I need to be the alpha in a relationship. Maybe I’ll marry a kindergarten teacher, boss him around, make him raise the kids. He won’t be as hot as you, but he’ll probably live to be forty.”
“You don’t think I’m going to live that long?” He was smiling slightly, but it was phony.
“No,” she said, and she walked to him, reached up, caressed the back of his neck, and pulled him down. Her kiss was modest, yet it lingered for a moment, as if imprinting a memory. She backed away again.
“I guess we won’t be seeing each other at President Cole’s funeral,” she said, “since none of us can go. But maybe, sometime, I’ll see you at his grave.”
She turned and walked away, and Steele saw that she’d parked her car beyond a copse of trees and that’s why she’d seemingly emerged from nowhere. The engine kicked over and soon the sound was gone, and he turned back to his shooting bench. He hesitated for a moment, then drew his .45 again, instead of using the rifle, and started firing away at the targets.