by Sean Parnell
“Don’t close it up all the way,” he ordered. “Just enough so the flesh can’t shrivel back.”
“Okay, okay.”
Steele took out his cell and tried calling Pitts, though he didn’t really expect him to pick up, and he didn’t. Then he called the White House switchboard.
“Get me the chief of staff,” he said to the operator.
“Mr. Lansky’s not here right now, sir. May I ask who wants him?”
“Patch me through, tell him it’s Steele, and do it now.”
Lansky was at home, but he wasn’t sleeping. He had a big day ahead of him.
“Speak,” he said to Steele.
“Sir, I just had a close encounter with Lila Kalidi,” Steele said. “Took me by surprise, since I thought she blew out of Key West.”
“What? Who the fuck said that?”
“Never mind, sir. We’ve got her cell and we’re trying to crack it. Gut tells me she’s moving on something big.”
“Okay, what’s your call?”
“You’d better call HRT and put them on standby.” Steele meant the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. They were the best counterterror team in law enforcement, and unlike Delta, they could operate on domestic soil. “I’ll advise as soon as we’ve got something.”
“Okay, here’s my cell.” Lansky read off his number and Steele plugged it into his contacts. “Call me directly, and nobody else.”
“Roger, sir,” Steele said and hung up.
“I . . . I think I did it,” Frankie whispered from behind him.
“Good. Get a couple of Band-Aids and slap ’em on.”
“Oh, God,” she mumbled again and went off to the bathroom.
Ralphy threw his hands up over at his worktable. He started pulling on his wild curly hair.
“I freaking can’t do it,” he moaned. “And I don’t think we’ve got the time to petition Apple.”
Then Frankie stormed back out of the bathroom with the Band-Aids.
“Ralphy!” she snapped. “Break the freaking phone case open, yank her motherboard, and use the Rainwear on my comp!”
“What’s Rainwear?” he begged.
“It’s an app I wrote, for God’s sake. If nothing else it’ll suck off her GPS coords for the last twenty-four. At least that, puleeez!”
“Okay, okay . . .”
Ralphy did as she instructed, dropped the tiny board in a “toaster” that he used to emulate hard drives, and plugged it into Frankie’s Alienware. He opened her Rainwear app and it started scanning the board, and he crossed his fingers on both hands and started rocking, as if he were praying. Two columns of “balloons” started dripping down the monitor display. The ones on the left held military times and the corresponding ones on the right held latitude and longitude readouts.
Ralphy blew out a sigh of relief, but then he glanced down at Lila’s pried-open cell and said, “What the freak is that?”
“What?” Steele said.
“There’s something vibrating in her cell, Steele. And there’s also a weird little piece of, like, red clay. . . .”
Steele stood up. “It’s a self-destruct.”
Ralphy jumped up, with Lila’s cell clutched in his sweat-pooled palm. He started running around the living room.
“Bathtub!” Frankie yelled.
Ralphy sprinted for the bathroom, ran inside, came out again, slammed the bathroom door, gripped the knob, smeared his back against it, and squeezed his eyes shut. There was a sharp hollow bang from inside, a flash of light haloed the doorjamb, and then a slither of smoke spewed out the bottom between his bare feet.
He opened his eyes.
“Shit.” He groaned. “There goes my security deposit.”
Chapter 47
Alexandria, Virginia
The first gunshot killed FBI undercover Special Agent Terry Palamino on McConnell Avenue at 6:43 a.m.
Palamino had a wife, a kid, and a dog at home, and he knew he was the canary in the coal mine. He was dressed as a homeless vagrant, looked old enough to be a Gulf War vet, had a brown woolen cap on his head, a bushy gray beard, an M65 field jacket with the 25th Infantry lightning shoulder patch, piss-stained jeans, and battered Timberland work boots.
He shuffled along McConnell from west to east, past the condo complex on the south side, crossed over Shillings Street, and headed for the ugly industrial area that bordered South Pickett. When he hit the soiled white warehouse, he slung his garbage bag over his left shoulder, dragged his filthy right fingers along the concrete front wall, and headed for the double glass doors, muttering to himself about “stinkin’ rich folk and politicians.”
The doors were padlocked and covered up from the inside with butcher paper. He peered through the half-inch crack where they met in the middle, and pounded his fist on the glass.
“Anybody in there?” he hollered, and then coughed up a smoker’s hack. “Anybody got somethin’ to eat for a veteran?”
Palamino had multiple medals for public service and was a very brave man. Dasha, the Chechen, shot him through the door crack from six inches away with his AR-15. Now he was sprawled on his back in the street with half his face gone.
An FBI sniper was lying prone on the rooftop of the building across the street that hosted “Metro by T-Mobile.” He was covering Palamino with an Accuracy International AW Magnum firing .338 Lapua cartridges, and the range was easy—less than a hundred meters. He had no clear sight picture through his Schmidt & Bender scope, but the second he saw the back of Palamino’s skull blow off and the agent collapse, he took the shot anyway.
His bullet pierced the glass front door, bounced off of something right behind it, ricocheted back in fragments, and shattered the glass, which cascaded down and covered Palamino’s twitching boots in glimmering razor-sharp shards. “Shit,” the sniper hissed through his headset.
It appeared that Lila Kalidi was a firm believer in worst-case scenarios. One of the first things she’d done after renting the warehouse was to have her men cover the front doors from the inside with the butcher paper, then weld quarter-inch-thick steel plates to the frames. She’d also ordered her men not to initiate action unless they had absolutely no choice, but Dasha, her Chechen team leader, had battled the Russian NKVD and Spetsnaz and knew a probe when he saw one.
Since dawn, Dasha had been watching the sprawling Van Dorn Station shopping center, which was directly to the left across the street and had more than twenty-five restaurants and stores. It was already almost 7:00 a.m. on a weekday, but there was barely any traffic, and no one was out in the parking lot or passing by on McConnell Avenue.
It was clear to Dasha that someone had secured the entire area.
This “homeless” guy was a cop.
Boom.
Game on.
Also, by this time, all of Lila’s men were thoroughly high. Committing suicide, even for a mission of martyrdom, takes some liquid courage, and while alcohol is forbidden by Shariah law, other mind-altering substances are not. Somali gunmen are enamored of khat. PLO terrorists are often pumped up on Quaaludes and sometimes heroin. Lila’s men had spent the night smoking hash in their hookahs, laced with fenclonine. They’d also used one of the trucking company’s power drills to make three-inch gunports in the warehouse’s cement walls, at the front and on both flanks. It was like a landlocked version of the Civil War’s ironclad ship the Monitor.
Now, with Palamino’s fresh corpse lying outside the front doors in a crawling pool of thick blood, they cranked up their boom box to full volume, and a weird, ethereal tenor saxophone started wailing, followed by a brass section, hammering drums, and a Hammond organ vibrating all of the walls. Then came the raw, gravelly voice of Meat Loaf, howling the intro to one of his 1990s hits.
It echoed all the way west down McConnell and around the corner to the First Cash Pawn Shop, where the FBI had just set up their command post. Their radios were going crazy with “officer down” calls and ambulances were already screaming down Van Dorn Street from up north.
FBI Special Agent in Charge John Loughran, who knew he was about to have the worst day of his professional life, turned around to Eric Steele and said, “What the hell is that?”
“‘Good Girls Go to Heaven,’” Steele said with a grim smirk. “‘Bad Girls Go Everywhere.’”
“Holy fuck,” said Loughran. “This is gonna be a shit show.”
And indeed it was. The FBI had no idea who was in that warehouse, nor how many. All they knew—from this mysterious and “ghosted” federal agent named Eric Steele—was that the murderous female terrorist they were hunting had spent 50 percent of the past twenty-four hours at that very location on McConnell Avenue.
And that hadn’t been easy to glean either. Back at Ralphy’s apartment, Frankie’s Rainwear had struggled to create a mirror image of Lila Kalidi’s movements, by mining them, of all things, through a Washington, D.C., mobile parking app that was running in the background on Lila’s cell (terrorists have to park somewhere too). However, the activities of all of Lila’s smartphone apps were also double-encrypted by an umbrella program called Chameleon, implanted there by Millennial Crude. It was four o’clock in the morning before Frankie realized that all of Lila’s time stamps and GPS coordinates were reversed and transposed—after all, it wasn’t possible that only one hour before attempting to kill Steele, Kalidi had been in Guatemala.
When Frankie jumped up from Ralphy’s worktable and yelled “Epic!” they knew she’d unscrambled the scrambler.
Steele called Ted Lansky. Lansky called Special Agent Loughran. Steele then called Dalton Goodhill, who, remarkably, was in the middle of an all-night game of Texas hold’em in Springfield, Virginia, with four other vets from Special Forces 5th Group. Goodhill then called Allie “Whirly,” who by stroke of luck had fallen asleep in the Program team room over at Langley AFB, after cleaning out her locker and preparing to look for another flying gig.
“I was just packing up all my shit,” she said in a sleep-drenched groan.
“Well, unpack your shit and get your ass in the air,” Goodhill said.
He told her to roust a ground crew, crank up the Program’s 1998 model Bell 212 helicopter (camouflaged with a white body and blue tail boom, colors of the DC Metropolitan Police’s “Falcons”), fly over to Sixteenth Street NW in Crestwood, and hover three feet above Ralphy’s building.
“Watch the wires over there and don’t set it down,” Goodhill said. “Those old roofs are tar paper and timber and you’ll put a skid right through.”
“Roger, Blade,” she said as she zipped up her flight suit, grabbed her helmet, and sprinted for the bird.
Allie took off and called Steele when she was one minute out. Steele grabbed Ralphy and they charged up the brownstone’s stairwell, burst through the fire escape doorway, ran bent-over through Allie’s roaring downblast, climbed into the bird, and banked high and away for Alexandria.
Frankie stayed back at Ralphy’s place, hoping to crack something else on Lila’s motherboard and mine some more crucial intel. She also had to deal with Mrs. Jepson, who was very unhappy.
Dawn was already breaking bright, crisp, and clear when Allie set the helo down in the northern parking lot of Jiffy Lube Multicare, just off of South Van Dorn Street in Alexandria, a double-lane suburban highway that ran north and south, bordering the target area on its western flank. The landing was a tight squeeze, because the Bell 212 is essentially the civilian version of the military’s UH-1 Huey, with a forty-eight-foot-long main rotor blade that barely cleared the telephone poles, the whipping sycamore trees, and a yield sign. The Bell also has that same pounding rotor thwop as the Huey, which turned everyone around from where they were ordering their Egg McMuffins at the Mickey D’s just next door. Mouths agape, they watched as a tall, black-haired dude in a leather jacket jumped from the “police” helicopter, followed by a pudgy curly-headed kid with a laptop case, who both sprinted across Van Dorn through morning traffic, headed for who-knew-where.
Then the rest of the cops had shown up, but there were no sirens or fanfare. Arlington PD set up the first cordons well outside the active perimeter, staying out of the line of sight of something farther south, and using whispers and hand signals rather than bullhorns to keep civilians from wandering past their blockades. The FBI rolled in shortly thereafter, in their sleek black Suburbans and black vans with spinning radar dishes and satcom antennae. But they too stayed out of sight of whatever was going on farther south, and gathered in clumps of whispering men and women and hissing radios outside First Cash Pawn.
That’s when they’d sent in their canary, Terry Palamino—a move objected to by Steele, who told SAC Loughran that Lila Kalidi had a penchant for killing anyone who interfered with her lifestyle. But Loughran hadn’t listened to him, and now Palamino was dead and Meat Loaf was wailing.
Another burst of gunfire—this time long and nasty—suddenly banged and echoed off the walls along McConnell Avenue, as from inside the warehouse Yassir let loose with his AR-15 and took out all the windows, and the kitchen, at the back of Mumbai Darbar Indian Cuisine.
And that wasn’t the end of it. Dasha didn’t want the cops outside to get the idea that maybe there were only a couple of lightly armed gunmen inside the warehouse who could be easily taken, so he had Ricardo thrust his AR barrel through a gunport on the eastern side and sprayed a full mag of thirty rounds across a parking lot, shattering the entire glass front of the Evolution Volleyball Club.
There was no doubt about it anymore. If Lila Kalidi was in there, she wasn’t alone. It was HRT’s turn.
The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team is not a group to be messed with. Based out of Quantico, Virginia, it is one of the foremost counterterror units in the world. Composed of three separate assault elements, the size of which are classified, HRT’s operators are considered on a par with the U.S. Army’s Delta Force or the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and frequently train with both of those top-tier units, as well as with the United Kingdom’s SAS, Germany’s GSG9, and France’s GIGN. HRT’s helicopters, vehicles, breaching tools, diving and parachute gear, weapons, and “battle rattle” are so similar to those of any other elite military squadron that the only thing to distinguish them, on the street or in the field, is their round black shoulder patch worn below a subdued American flag on the left sleeve, which features a flying eagle gripping a length of steel chain and the motto servare vitas, To Save Lives.
They rolled up in a couple of monster-looking black armored vehicles stamped hrt. One assault element disembarked outside the pawn shop, while the second vehicle cut high above the Van Dorn Station mall to circle around to the far side of the warehouse. The first element’s leader climbed down from his vehicle—a Lenco BearCat similar to the one owned by Lila’s wild men, but with a long assault ladder mounted on its roof—looked at Steele from under his helmet, and said, “Whatcha doin’ here, Hotshot?”
“Hi, Smokey,” Steele said and shook the operator’s tactical-gloved hand. They had served together in Special Forces, long ago. “The bad girl’s mine.”
“From what I heard on comms, you can have her. What happened to your face?”
“Are you gonna go in?” Steele said.
“Yeah, but first we’ll do the negotiator dance,” Smokey said.
“Okay. Got some gear for me?”
Special Agent Loughran had been listening to the exchange and stepped in.
“Steele, you can’t just join this team on the fly. I can’t allow it.”
“Really?” Steele said.
“Loughran,” Smokey, the HRT leader, said, “once we show up, you lose your jurisdiction.”
“Absolutely not.” Loughran shook his head. “It’s a no-go.”
“Will it help if I have the president’s chief of staff call you?” Steele said.
Loughran looked at his watch. It was closing in on 9:00 a.m.
“My guess is, right about now,” he sneered, “the chief of staff is rolling up on the National Cathedral for a funeral.”
“Right.” Stee
le smiled. “Which is why he’ll be supremely pissed if I interrupt him for this. Your call.”
“Fuck you, Steele,” Loughran snapped and walked off.
“Likewise.”
At that moment Dalton Goodhill roared up on a Harley-Davidson Street 750. He was wearing jeans, engineer boots, and a sleeveless gray sweatshirt with a desert camo field jacket and flying goggles, no helmet. His short-barreled shotgun was nestled in his shoulder rig under the jacket.
Smokey said to Steele, “Go in the beast and get a vest from the trunk behind the passenger seat. What’re you carrying?”
“A Sig, nine mil.”
“Okay then, you’re Tail-End Charlie. You want us to take her alive?”
“Yeah, so I can kill her myself.”
“This chick must’ve really pissed you off, Hotshot.”
“Got any frags?” Steele asked.
“Frags?” Smokey’s eyes bugged. “We don’t use grenades domestically, my man. Think you’re back in Kabul?”
“Right.” Steele grinned. He climbed into the truck, stripped off his jacket, put on a Level 3 Kevlar vest, put his jacket back on, and started rummaging around until he found a hidden can of M26 fragmentation grenades in their cardboard cocoons and stuffed one into his outside jacket pocket. When he came out of the truck, Goodhill was trying to convince Smokey to let him go in with the team as well.
“Who the hell are you?” Smokey was saying.
“I’m Steele’s uncle.”
“You spooks are all nuts,” Smokey said. “One of you’s enough.”
Ralphy was standing well back, clutching his laptop case, and not volunteering for anything.
Agent Loughran sent an FBI negotiator down McConnell Avenue with a bullhorn, but at least he was protected by one trembling agent with a mobile assault shield. It was a heavy curved slab of steel with a grip handle on the inside and a small slit window of ballistic plexiglass. They got within fifty meters of the warehouse, the negotiator called out proposals for a peaceful resolution over the bullhorn, and he and his escort were met with a hail of gunfire, which they only escaped because an HRT heavy weapons man had climbed onto the roof of Kabul Kabob Express and opened up on Dasha’s gunports with an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.