He hoped it wasn’t the hotel. For all of his planning, he had not anticipated this possibility. If it was something to do with the building materials, he’d have to get outside before he could get a signal. That was thirty seconds in the elevator, forty seconds through the makeshift hall leading to The Shops at National Place, and another twenty seconds through the stores themselves to F Street. He knew because he had already timed it. Ninety seconds total — more than enough time for any number of unpleasant things to occur. Plenty of time for Ryan to get into the hotel, and more than enough time for the HRT to set up a hasty perimeter.
Maybe it wouldn’t come to that. He pushed and held the button a second time, willing his creation to do its work.
Ryan was in the van for less than five seconds when he found what didn’t fit. His hand was sweeping between the seats when it banged into a boxy metal object. Shifting his weight over the seat to stare down at it, he couldn’t see what practical purpose it might have served. It looked like a cover of some kind, but when he tried to lift it, it didn’t budge. Then he pulled on the other end and it came right up. He flinched, waiting for the inevitable blast. When nothing happened, he looked down and saw a single switch.
He flipped it without hesitation. Leaning back in the seat, breathing hard from fear and the long sprint, his mind raced to figure out what had just transpired.
Two seconds later, sounding distant through the thin steel partition, Ryan heard the unmistakable high-pitched tone as a cell phone began to ring somewhere in the cargo area.
After another few seconds had passed, he looked in the rearview mirror to see a procession of black limousines turn from 12th onto Pennsylvania at breakneck speed, only to make another sharp turn onto 13th a split second later.
Jared Howson burst into the lobby with his gun up, oblivious to the wide-eyed stares and screams that accompanied his entrance.
A security guard was standing just inside the door, but didn’t move to interfere with the policeman or the gun in his hand. Howson turned right toward the concierge, scrambling to recall the name he had seen on the passport.
“Bidault! Claude Bidault! What’s his room number?” No one responded. They just stared at him with their hands held high. “WHAT’S THE ROOM NUMBER?”
One of the men finally grabbed a keyboard, his hands shaking. “Bidault?” Howson nodded impatiently. “Room 545,” the concierge said. “Elevators are that way.”
But Howson was already gone, the Glock 9mm down low in a two-handed grip. He moved fast toward the elevators, then caught a flash of a dark green oilskin jacket and stopped instinctively, trying hard to remember. He had seen that jacket somewhere before… He sprinted past the atrium toward the escalators.
Kealey moved into the hotel with less fanfare, but everyone knew why he was there. A few fingers pointed him past guest registration on the main lobby level.
Indecision for a moment. He didn’t have a weapon, but Vanderveen was running and would soon be gone. Hold or follow? A glimpse of a Metro PD uniform at the top of the escalator made the decision for him.
He moved in that direction, only to find his path was blocked by a large security guard. The man had a radio up and was speaking into it urgently. He turned his attention to Kealey: “Stop right there, sir! I said stop!”
Ryan slowed to a fast walk, his hands up in front of his chest, palms out in a conciliatory gesture. “I have a reservation here. I’m sorry for the trouble, I’m just late meeting someone…”
He hit the security guard hard in the solar plexus, then lifted his knee into the man’s face. The guard fell back, tumbling into a coffee cart and sending several steaming urns crashing to the floor.
Ryan was aware of swarming blue uniforms in his peripheral vision as he sprinted up the escalator. He was passing covered glass doors when he heard a popping noise up ahead, and then what sounded like two more shots carrying over the cries of terrified onlookers.
He picked up the pace as the screams intensified in volume.
Howson knew he was moving too fast, but he was young and his adrenaline was through the roof. More importantly, there was an open area up ahead, and he’d definitely caught another flash of the oilskin jacket.
The whole way, from the van to the lobby, the lobby to the escalator, the escalator to here — all forty-five seconds of it — all he could think about was the story it would make. He couldn’t wait to tell it on the old man’s porch… There was no little voice, nothing inside telling him to slow it down, otherwise there wouldn’t be any story, and he was running hard. He saw light spilling from left to right at the end of the hall, heard the sound of a bustling crowd, and kept pushing forward. Past a steel-shuttered elevator pit, past a plastic Dumpster filled with trash, and then into the basement level before realizing his mistake, because the lure of the light had prevented him from turning right.
It came without warning. There was no explosion of sound, no tunnel of light, and no pain. All he felt was a grazing sensation at the back of his head, and then darkness.
Ryan was about twenty steps and seven seconds behind. He saw the prone figure of the police officer as soon as he entered the construction area, and tried not to look at the gaping exit wound in the young man’s face, or the spray of blood and tissue on the tile in front of him as he reached down and snatched up Howson’s Glock.
Ryan sensed that Vanderveen was not waiting to get the drop on him, and he needed to move fast now if he wanted to catch up. He turned into the open area recklessly, the 9mm down low in the same two-handed grip that Howson had adopted less than two minutes earlier. Twenty feet in front of him, Ryan saw people running in his direction out of Filene’s Basement, the only store on the lowest level. He bounded up the stairs, passing black bins of cashmere and racks of discounted Prada, forcing his way through the frantic crowd, knowing full well that this might be his last chance at getting close enough to put the man down for good.
Vanderveen was about fifteen seconds ahead of Kealey when he passed through the glass doors leading out onto F Street, moving quickly but casually. His posture was relaxed, and calm enough so that none of the passersby immediately noticed what was dangling from his right hand.
The few extra seconds gave him the time he needed to scan the street for police cars or the unmarked Suburbans that were favored by so many of the government’s more notorious agencies. He wasn’t thinking about what had gone wrong; there would be plenty of time for that later. At the moment, his only goal was to get out of the city as fast as possible.
He stepped into the road, crossing the first lane before a westbound Camry with a dented hood screeched to a halt a few feet to his right. As the shocked and relieved driver furiously leaned on his horn, Vanderveen walked around the side of the vehicle.
The man had been smoking while he drove, and the window was rolled halfway down, despite the cold. He started to say something smart as the person he had nearly hit approached his door, but never got it out. Vanderveen smoothly lifted the. 40 with his right hand and jammed it into the driver’s ear, pulling the trigger once.
Ignoring the screams of nearby pedestrians, Vanderveen pulled open the door and yanked hard on the driver’s body, which tumbled lifelessly out into the road.
Then he was in the car and moving away, not bothering to fully close the door until he had already upshifted twice. Looking up to the rearview mirror, he saw the glass doors of the National Place building swing open as a figure emerged at a dead sprint.
Kealey burst out onto F Street in time to see the red Camry pulling away in a squeal of tires. He had the Glock up in a heartbeat, banging away two shots at the retreating vehicle, going for the tires but catching the bumper instead.
Then it howled around the corner onto 14th, disappearing from view. Kealey swore under his breath, saw the body on the street and moved to pull someone out of their vehicle. Seconds later, a pair of black Suburbans with light racks flashing on top came flying up behind him on 13th Street, slamming forward to a
halt at the intersection. Then there were men streaming out of the vehicles with their MP5s locked onto his head, screaming, “FBI! Drop the gun! Drop the gun right now! ”
Kealey turned and shouted back, for what seemed like the tenth time in as many minutes, “I’m a Federal officer! Susskind knows me, for Christ’s sake! The guy you’re looking for just turned that corner-” He almost pointed before he realized he still had the gun in his hand. “In a red Camry. I got the plate-”
“Put the gun on the ground! Do it!”
The people approaching him didn’t look all that accommodating. He had his left hand on the door handle of a silver Mercedes, the middle-aged woman behind the wheel staring up at him in fear and shock. Ryan took his hand away and lifted his arms at the elbows, the grip of the gun pinched between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Swearing again, he set the weapon on the pavement and stepped back as the agents swarmed in around him.
It was over, and Vanderveen was gone.
CHAPTER 35
LANGLEY, CAPE ELIZABETH
The debriefing was held at Langley more than eight hours later, with very few people in attendance. The director’s office was spacious enough to accommodate the small crowd, which included Naomi Kharmai, who had been flown back from Ashland courtesy of the Virginia State Police, Jonathan Harper, DCI Andrews, and Ryan Kealey.
It had been relatively easy for Harper to get Kealey out of FBI custody. Susskind spoke to the D.C. field office’s HRT commander just minutes after the second shooting on F Street, and orders had been relayed from there to the team that was holding him. The handcuffs came off almost immediately, and his Beretta was retrieved from Howson’s body and returned to him. The agents that he rode with expressed regret at the incident, but only reluctantly; the muted apologies he received were next to inaudible. The Suburban in which Kealey was seated departed immediately for Tyson’s Corner, but most of the agents remained behind to secure the scene and wait for reinforcements.
He couldn’t really blame them for arresting him. He had been out on the street in civilian clothes with a gun and no identification, standing less than 5 feet from a man with a gunshot wound to the head. In retrospect, Ryan realized that being confronted by the highly trained HRT operators was a lot better than most of the alternatives. At least they hadn’t shot him out of panic.
When he arrived at the TTIC less than twenty minutes after leaving the scene, the helicopter blades were already turning. Despite angry protests from Director Landrieu and Joshua McCabe, Harper had arranged for transport for Ryan and himself so they could be immediately flown back to Langley. Unfortunately, that was where the rapid movement ended. They had been forced to wait for hours, as the DCI had been caught up in a lengthy inquisition by a shaken President Brenneman at the White House. Now, seated in the director’s capacious office, the events of the morning seemed like nothing more than a horrible dream.
It wasn’t a dream, though, and Ryan had proven it by recounting his story to Director Andrews no less than three times, all the way from the time he received Harper’s telephone call up until his detainment by the FBI. Kharmai had also been asked to thoroughly describe the events that had transpired in Hanover County. The two junior officers did most of the talking, but they got some of the answers they were looking for as well.
Naomi was seated next to Ryan, while the two senior officials sat in comfortable armchairs on the other side of a low coffee table. She had enjoyed a long hot shower in the women’s locker room upon returning to Langley, and someone had been dispatched to her house to pick up some clothes. Her unknown benefactor had chosen well. As a result, she looked a thousand times better than she had that morning, and was anxious to learn more about the disastrous raid in Virginia.
Harper was the one to explain it to her. “The Bureau’s Explosives Unit concentrated their efforts on the basement. They found damage consistent with a gas-leak explosion, but leaks almost always originate from the output valve, which is located on the ground floor. So they think that Vanderveen disconnected the fittings to the stove, drilled a hole into the tile and rigged up a hose leading down to the basement. Then he used duct tape to seal off the hole and all the air vents leading out, so that the gas was just trapped down there.”
Harper took a sip of coffee and continued: “They found other evidence that corroborates that account as well. There were pieces of a gasoline can — one of the old-fashioned metal ones — jammed into the walls, and what appeared to be two contact plates and traces of SEMTEX H. He didn’t have time for anything fancy, so he simply taped a block of explosives to a gasoline can, then wired up a battery to an electric cap. The device was set to go off when the buffer was removed from between the steel plates.”
Ryan was shaking his head. “What about the bomb in the van?”
“That one was a little more complicated, though not overly so,” Harper said. “They only got around to moving it a few hours ago; there were some concerns about booby traps, especially after what happened in Hanover. The ATF guys that are taking it apart all say the same thing: simple, but efficient. He wired up a cell phone to the SEMTEX H, which was concealed in five steel trunks. By the way, you would have been screwed if you’d gone in through the back, Ryan. He had antihandling devices on the phone and two of the trunks.”
“But not the switch.”
“Not the switch,” Harper agreed. “He didn’t want to risk a premature explosion, so a wrong number to the phone wouldn’t have made a difference as long as there was no power going from the battery to the circuit. You said you heard the phone ring?”
“Yeah, it rang about two seconds after I flipped it.”
“That was Vanderveen trying to set it off. Those few seconds made all the difference, Ryan.”
Ryan felt a little bit sick over how close he had come to being wiped out, along with about eight city blocks. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “all I did was flip a switch.”
Harper was nodding slowly. “He needed to be able to activate it quickly, but he couldn’t exactly get in the cargo area and start rooting around in the middle of a busy city street. It was the best way for him to do it, and if it wasn’t for you showing up when you did, it would have worked.”
Ryan fell silent. He didn’t want to think about what had almost happened. There would be plenty of time for that later, but Naomi didn’t notice his hesitation, and she wasn’t finished: “What kind of damage are we talking about?”
The deputy director cleared his throat. “Well, there’s no definitive answer. I talked to Bateman — that’s the guy heading up the ATF task force, by the way — and he gave me some round numbers. We would have been looking at serious damage to every building in a four-block radius, plus some varying damage out to twelve blocks from ground zero. That would have included Freedom Plaza and Pershing Park. Estimates, and there is some dispute on this, are between 400 and 500 dead, plus anywhere up to 2,000 injured. The time of day was factored in to that as well; if it had been a few hours earlier, for example, the casualties would have been much lower.”
Ryan looked at his hands.
Director Andrews turned to stare out the window, ashen-faced. “My God.”
“What about the angle?” Ryan asked. “He was going after the motorcade, right?”
Harper nodded and said, “That’s right. There’s even more dispute over that question. He was definitely going after the motorcade, but it’s not clear if he would have been successful. Bateman thinks it would have worked, but the Bureau’s people are saying otherwise.”
The DCI broke in and added, “He stacked the odds in his favor by placing concrete blocks against the partition. That close to the actual device, it would have pushed most of the force of the blast directly out into 13th Street. I think he came closer than anyone wants to admit.”
Kharmai and Kealey fell silent at the candor of the remark, but Director Andrews was only getting started. He turned back from the window to appraise them carefully. “Needless to say, there’
s going to be some serious fallout in the next few weeks. The first choice, of course, would have been to keep the whole thing quiet. After Senator Levy’s assassination and the Kennedy-Warren, the last thing we need are reports of a 3,000-pound bomb nearly taking out the president’s motorcade. If it had just been the evacuation on the waterfront, we could have explained it away. A few heads would have rolled, but we might have swept it under the mat.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. Vanderveen killed two people in his escape, including a Metro police officer. Both of them died in crowded areas, so there’s no way we can play it down. This is going to be headline news for the foreseeable future, so the president’s advisors, in all their wisdom, are trying to spin it into a positive thing, a major success for U.S. law enforcement. No one wants to call it what it really was.”
“A near disaster,” Ryan said.
Andrews nodded in agreement. “Exactly. But it’s out of our hands now, so if they want to play politics, we have no choice but to play along. Anyway, the president is looking to publicly slap some backs. That means you two. Especially you, Ryan.”
Kealey’s response was immediate and heartfelt. “There’s no way that’s going to happen.” He saw the DCI’s reaction, checked himself, then said, “Excuse me, sir. I just don’t want to have anything to do with it. Besides, we’ve never operated that way, and the president knows it. I don’t want my face on television, and I don’t want to give any interviews. I just want to know what we’re doing to catch the bastard.”
Harper looked up and sighed heavily. “He didn’t get far in the Camry. It was found in an underground parking garage in Anacostia, and in the trunk, the body of a twenty-nine-year-old secretary.” Ryan swore and looked away, thinking about how close he had come to stopping Vanderveen. “He chose carefully; there were no cameras in the garage, no way to immediately determine what kind of car he switched to. The woman was missing her purse, so it took a while to track her down. They started with the neighboring buildings… When they found her employer, they got her name and a vehicle registration from the DMV. Then, of course, they found out that her car was missing. So there’s a nationwide APB out on her Camaro, but no one is especially hopeful. Just taking the woman’s ID gave Vanderveen a two-hour jump on Susskind’s people.” The deputy director paused to take a sip of coffee. Studying Harper’s weary expression, Ryan thought that the man looked exhausted, then realized that he probably didn’t look much different himself.
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