The American rk-1

by Andrew Britton

  The waterfront made him nervous, too. The few roads leading away from the area would be manned by dozens of Secret Service agents, ready to instantly seal off the perimeter in the event of an attack. He couldn’t abide the thought of being trapped in a tightening noose of Federal agents, even for the chance to see the Sequoia sink to the bottom of the Potomac. Supposing, of course, that he survived the encounter, the ensuing years spent rotting away in a Federal penitentiary would not be worth a few rapturous weeks of national anguish.

  No, he much preferred to live through the event. With 3,000 pounds of SEMTEX H strategically placed on the motorcade’s route, survival would be a definite possibility, and success all but guaranteed.

  Walking back to the Honda, Vanderveen swung onto the leather saddle and turned the key in the ignition. Kicking the bike into gear, he gunned the engine and sped off down 7th, heading north toward Pennsylvania Avenue. There was still a lot to see and do before leaving the city.

  “I can’t fucking believe you, Ryan. Andrews came down on me like a ton of shit for your little escapade in Alexandria. You know what he called it? Untenable. He used that word at least a dozen times. Did you hear me tell you not to leave a mark on him? Did you?”

  Once again, Ryan found himself seated across from Jonathan Harper, and once again, the conversation had taken a turn for the worse.

  He decided to go on the offensive. There wasn’t a lot to lose either way. “I’ll go willingly, John. I already told you I wanted out, but I’m your-”

  “What?” A grim smile played at the corners of his mouth. “You’re my what? Best shot at getting Vanderveen? Is that what you were going to say? Because the director doesn’t believe that anymore, and I’m not so sure of it myself.”

  “Nobody else has managed anything-”

  “And nobody else has shot dead a well-known businessman on foreign soil, Kealey. Nobody else has assaulted a prisoner in Federal custody. Every time that I tell you to keep things quiet, you turn what should be a simple operation into a fucking spectacle.”

  Ryan thought that he had taken it too far this time because Harper was using his last name. It was a rare occurrence. Against his better judgment, he pressed on: “And ninety-two dead on Connecticut Avenue, John? Eight Secret Service agents and a U.S. senator dead? What do you call that?”

  “It’s because we don’t play by their rules, Ryan, that we’re better than them-”

  “It’s because we don’t play by their rules that we’re fucking losing.” The words were spit out, along with the last of his self-restraint.

  A long silence ensued as they stared each other down over Harper’s desk, each waiting for the anger to dissipate in the other.

  “You don’t make my job any easier, Ryan.” It was the last jab, and right that it should belong to the deputy director. “Undoubtedly, you’re wondering why word of your late-night visit hasn’t reached the front page of the Washington Post.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “We cut a deal with Elgin. Full immunity, straight from the top.”

  Ryan flared, but Harper’s hand was up to stop him. “You don’t get a say in it, because it was your doing. The A.G. sent the offer directly to Elgin, because the attorney… You’ve met her?” A brief, angry shake of the head. “Well, the attorney is a high flier. She would have taken the publicity of a scandal over a deal for her client, but Elgin, dumb as he is, knew better. He said he would fire her if she broke the terms, and that would have looked worse for Harris than having her client walk away free and clear.

  “In other words, Ryan, we got pretty damn lucky. Harris was the easy part — we’re still trying to convince the watch commander that it would be better for all concerned if he just dropped the matter. He doesn’t want the publicity either, so that might help us out a little bit. Only — and I want you to pay special attention to this,” he said, jamming his index finger into the top of his desk to make the point clear — “only because we had something on Elgin are you still sitting across from me. Without that card to play, you would have been done, without question. You’re making it hard, if not impossible, for me to watch your back. You have a name, fair enough. The name is different from the passport used in Valencia. Once again, fair enough. But you had better hope that this information turns out to be golden.

  “Believe me,” Harper said with a scowl, “nothing should be more important to you right now, my friend.”

  Naomi Kharmai leaned against the back of the third black Suburban, shivering hard despite the pale sun overhead and the thick woolen peacoat that was pulled tight around her. She was extremely pissed off, a fact that had been made abundantly clear to the SAC in the staging area. She had asked Harper if it could be kept in the Agency, had almost resorted to begging him, but he had mumbled something about “pressure for cooperation,” and now she was essentially out of the loop. Despite being one of the first people on the scene, she had been told, in no uncertain terms, that she was now included only as a professional courtesy.

  She listened to the banal conversations of the agents around her and the clatter of automatic weapons as the HRT operators pulled gear out of their trucks and shrugged into heavy bulletproof vests.

  She was startled by the loud roar of a motorcycle racing down the road next to the parking lot. Turning toward the sound, she was almost blinded by the light reflecting from the bike’s chrome pipes and bright blue paintwork. Squinting into the scene, she jumped again when a hand clamped down on her shoulder.

  “Should be less than twenty minutes,” the man said.

  She turned to face Bill Green, the Washington field office replacement for Luke Hendricks. “What, exactly, are you waiting on?”

  “Search warrant to come through,” he replied. “I just got off the phone with one of my people at the courthouse. Evidently, the judge wasn’t too happy about how you dug up the information. She had a long talk with Alex Harris, and that helped out a little bit-”

  “You think she’s dragging it out on purpose?”

  “That would be my guess. We don’t really have a choice either way, so we wait here until we get the word.”

  “Hey, boss.” They both turned as another agent approached. It was one of Green’s fawning aides, a tall, well-dressed prep-school type. He handed the SAC a thin manila folder. “This just came back from the courthouse.”

  Naomi waited impatiently as Green perused the contents. “Well?”

  He glanced up and flashed her a smile full of straight white teeth. “It’s a go.” Before she could respond, he was running toward the lead vehicle, shouting orders at the HRT commander, and then back at her over his shoulder: “Pick out a vehicle. You can wait on the sideline, Kharmai, but the teams are full. You stay off the field, understood?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. She glared at his back as he climbed into the passenger seat of the first vehicle, which pulled fast out of the parking lot.

  She found what passed for room in the last vehicle, smashed in between two sweaty operators and their piles of gear. The Suburban swung from 7th onto D Street, racing east as the retractable stock of an MP-5A3 banged painfully into her knee for the third time. She gritted her teeth and, as she had done so many times in the past few weeks, silently cursed Ryan Kealey for putting her into this situation.

  The apartment building on D Street was less than impressive. The outside looked respectable enough, with a four-story brick facade and worn stone steps leading up to a solid door of weathered oak. As soon as she stepped inside, however, the smell hit her like a slap to the face. The stench was a putrid combination of various cooking smells, which wafted up from beneath closed doors and permeated the filthy walls, and the lingering scent of spilled beer and what might have been the contents of a baby’s diaper. She almost retched until she started breathing through her mouth, and then saw that the others were doing the same thing.

  Above it all, the piercing cries of a child and screamed obscenities from a Korean couple at th
e top of the stairwell.

  Naomi lingered behind as Green and the HRT operators moved rapidly up the first flight of stairs. She had been given a flat 9mm pistol, which hung loose from her hip.

  “How are they going in?” she asked Green when she finally caught up with him.

  “It depends on what they hear. If there’s activity inside, then it’s entry rounds. If it’s quiet, they’ll go with the ram.” She nodded and started forward, but he reached out to grab her arm. “Hold on, let them get into position.”

  The SAC listened to something over his earpiece, then turned back toward Naomi. “Okay, we’re moving up. Stay behind me.”

  Inside the cramped apartment on the fifth floor, Abdullah Aziz al-Maroub watched intently as the last two agents went up the stairs. If it had to happen on his shift, he was glad it happened early, before the monotony of the work set in. In another hour, his back would have been sore and his eyelids heavy. He might well have missed them altogether.

  He thought about how remarkably easy it had been to satisfy the apartment manager in the spring of 1998, when their predecessors had first set up in the city. It had taken nothing more than a few crumpled twenty-dollar bills to gain her permission, and the camera had gone up that same day. Positioned just above the transom inside the doorway, it gave him a clear shot of everyone leaving and entering the building. There was no sound; a video cable alone provided the images on the 20" screen in front of him, but he knew who these people were, and he knew why they were here.

  As he called out for Darabi, his eyes never left the monitor.

  Arriving on the fifth floor, Naomi saw that the operators were already in their preassigned positions. She held back with Green, her heart pounding in her ears.

  One of the men extracted a fiber-optic snake from his pack. Holding the miniature video monitor in his left hand, he kneeled and slid the unit’s tiny

  camera under the cheap wooden door of Apartment 5A.

  Vanderveen was on 12th Street heading south when his cell phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He pulled the motorcycle over to the side of the road and answered immediately. Only one person had this number, and she had been instructed not to call except in case of an emergency. “Yes?”

  “Listen carefully, I don’t have a great deal of time. The authorities are coming up the stairs right now.”

  “How many?”

  “Seven. Five are heavily armed.”

  He managed to stay calm, despite the fact that this woman had personally wired the necessary funds to his bank account and knew the name he was currently using. “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t be around to tell them anything. The place we’re using is clean. We’re almost finished wiping the disks.”

  “What about the phone? They can track-”

  “The phone was cloned. Believe me, you have nothing to worry about on your end. I’ve been doing this for a long time. Do you have the necessary funds?”

  “I already have most of what I need, and money left over for the rest of it.” He paused briefly. “So that’s it, then.”

  “I’m afraid so. Good luck.”

  Fatima Darabi pressed END without waiting for a response, her hands shaking as she deleted the call log on the phone. She had known it could come to this, but she had never really expected the worst. Now that the worst had happened, though, she knew she would do her duty. She felt a sense of falling inside, and wondered if her brother had endured the same as his plane fell to the surface of the Atlantic. Her reverie was broken as al-Maroub emerged from the bedroom, cradling an automatic rifle. She looked up. “Is it done?”

  He nodded. Darabi reached for her weapon.

  Without turning around, the operator crouched at the door, lifted one finger, then a second. His eyes, focused on the small screen in his left hand, suddenly went wide. Naomi, in the stairwell just behind the SAC, was leaning forward to whisper a question in his ear when a hail of bullets punched through the door in front of the entry leader. The first rounds caught him full in the chest, pushing him back across the dirty tile as the assault team returned fire.

  Kharmai dropped to the ground as the hallway erupted. Her hand was down by her side, tugging at the pistol, then groping for the strap that held it in place. The door in front of the fallen operator was being torn apart by bullets, as was the thin drywall on either side. The operators were scrambling for cover, but three went down before they could get out of the line of fire. Bill Green was lying next to her on the stairs, trying to talk, his mouth filling with blood. His face was frozen in a look of disbelief. Naomi saw with horror that at least a dozen rounds had shredded his body armor.

  In that paralyzing moment, fear was an iron fist around her heart. She was gasping for breath, her eyes welded shut. She could hear the whine of the bullets as they slammed into the drywall inches above her head. The downed operators were screaming in pain until one of the terrorists filled the hallway with another magazine full of 7.62mm rounds.

  The two surviving agents finally pulled it together, one providing cover as the other tossed a flashbang through a gaping hole in the shattered door. Naomi, with her eyes closed, didn’t see the blinding light that spilled out into the hallway, but the grenade’s concussion left her senseless as the door crashed inward and the operators disappeared from view.

  Sitting on the Honda at the side of the road, Vanderveen watched the traffic pass. His face was blank, but his mind was churning.

  It was time to walk away. Despite the woman’s words, he knew she would overlook something; it was inevitable. After all, they had somehow managed to track her down. He had a second set of documents that she had no knowledge of, a set that he kept on his body at all times. He had used them already, and needed them for the 26th, but they could serve him now in a different way. National Airport was just across the bridge, not more than a few miles to the south. From there, he could connect to an international hub and be out of the country in less than two hours.

  But then what? There were certain truths he had to consider here. There would be no place for him in the organization if he walked away now, that much was certain. The Iranians were the bigger threat. They might give him the benefit of the doubt, but more likely, they would assume he had blown the woman’s cover. Either way, his own future was now inexorably linked to the outcome of the operation.

  More important than any of this, however, was his own personal desire to see it through. For many years he had delighted in the perverse irony that the country he hated was giving him the tools of its own destruction. It had not been easy to feign his loyalty, especially in the beginning, when he was required to live in the squalid barracks and forced to take meals with his supposed peers. When he had finally revealed himself in Syria, it was with one end goal in mind: to inflict his pain on as many of them as was humanly possible. What waited in the barn on Chamberlayne Road would, in a few short days, advance this goal considerably. He could not, would not waste it now.

  He was dimly aware of a rising rage. He had to push it down; it would not serve him here, but the question remained: how could this have happened in the first place? They clearly didn’t have his bank account, the one he had used for the house and the van, otherwise they would have moved on him in Virginia. It had to be an outside source… Shakib? If he had been given the location of the safe house, it was certainly possible. But he’d never know because Shakib was dead, blown apart in the Kennedy-Warren, with Ryan Kealey waiting in the street below.

  Nothing changed in Vanderveen’s face with this recollection. Kealey. There was no doubt in his mind that his former commanding officer had something to do with this unfortunate development. It was bad enough that the man had the audacity to survive what should have been a kill shot in Syria. Now he was really pushing his luck.

  Something sparked behind his eyes. If Kealey wanted to be involved, then so be it. Vanderveen started the Honda and eased back into traffic.

  When she came back to herself, Na
omi was alone in the hallway. Standing up, she checked herself for injuries, afraid of what she would find. Miraculously, her body seemed to be intact. She walked on shaky legs toward the wrecked apartment. As she reached the doorway, the two remaining operators pushed out, oblivious to her presence, talking quickly but calmly into their lip mics.

  “TOC, this is Alpha 4, I have four agents down. I need EMTs now.”

  Naomi stepped into the devastation, slipping her pistol back into its holster. The cheap furnishings had been nearly destroyed, the carpet littered with splinters of wood and shards of shattered glass. One of the terrorists was lying spread-eagled on the floor. She felt bile rise in her throat when she saw what was left of the man’s face. She looked away quickly and forced a few shallow breaths, briefly catching the voices behind her in the process: “TOC, make that five down. I repeat, five down. Two tangos out of play. Confirm ambulances en route.”

  Passing into one of the bedrooms, she was aware of distant sirens. The room was sparsely furnished, its most notable feature a desk that had been smashed by bullets, and what looked like the remains of a laptop computer.

  Fatima Darabi was sitting against the wall where she had fallen. Her body was ruined, but her mind was still intact and all she knew was pain. She opened her mouth to breathe. When nothing happened, she realized that she had only a few seconds left. Through the rapidly encroaching darkness, Darabi watched as the dazed-looking woman wandered into the room.

  Darabi’s fading brown eyes flickered to the handgun lying next to her. One of the agents had kicked it out of reach just after he fired a half dozen rounds into her chest. It was a stretch, but she would try for it anyway. Her body was dying, but the hatred that drove her was as strong as ever.

  As Naomi examined the contents of the desk, she sensed something move behind her. She turned to stare at the body propped up against the wall, thinking she must have imagined the sound — until the eyes moved. Then, to her disbelief, the woman’s hand was reaching out for the Makarov that lay a few feet to her right. The operators had obviously assumed, in their haste to get back to their fallen team members, that the subject was dead. But she wasn’t dead, at least not yet, and the gun was in her hand and rising as Naomi frantically groped for her own pistol…