Roaches Run

by John Wasowicz

  Fernando Pena appeared in front of her. Shrunken by age and cruel fate, he was a deflated caricature of the commanding presence who roamed the halls of the Justice Department a decade ago.

  His daughter ignored him and walked out of the house and onto the porch. If, by following her, her father was somehow trying to affect or influence her actions, he was having the opposite effect. “Tell me what you want me to do,” she said. “I’m ready. I’m so ready.”

  “That’s my girl,” Landry replied.

  **

  WHEN SHERRY STONE arrived at Cameron Run, the campfire was still smoldering but the makeshift campsite was deserted. Two marked cruisers pulled to the curb a minute later, their emergency equipment blaring. Uniforms exited and surveyed the area. A senior family counselor emerged from the passenger side of one of the vehicles.

  “Where is everyone?” Stone asked.

  “They grabbed the little girl and headed into Old Town about ten minutes ago,” replied Snowe. “You should be able to find them without any problem.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Stone said. “Druggies are a wily group, and Maggie and her boyfriend are a particularly difficult pair to corral. We’ve had several run-ins with them during the past few months. They think they’re fooling people by living at this campsite, but we keep it under surveillance.”

  “You’re familiar with them?” asked Snowe. “Why didn’t you notify me? I’m Maggie’s probation officer. Plus, you know Mo and I are invested in her case.”

  Maybe you are invested in the little girl, but I’ve never heard Mo mention her to me one time, Stone thought. “We’ll find them,” she said. “If Maggie needs more treatment, we’ll haul her skinny ass into court and ask a judge to order it. The last thing we want is for Katie to be a motherless child.” She remembered that Tony Fortune, Katie’s father, died the night Katie was born. She hoped the child wasn’t cursed.

  “Mind if I ride along if you go out looking for her?” Snowe asked the uniforms, who nodded their consent.

  Stone wished them well. She looked at the time on her phone. She was late for the briefing. Of course she knew there was no need to rush. She was giving the brief.

  **

  LANDRY RELAYED his instructions to Pena. She was to go to the GreyStone Hotel. She was to arrive no earlier than 10:30. There would be two H-Pack backpacks by the credenza. She was to strap one on her back and go to the designated corner of Lafayette Square. “Got it?”

  She did. But there was one more thing. “I need to see you,” she whispered. “Can we get together tonight?”

  No way, he thought. There was too much for him to do. Yet he could not afford to alienate her. “There are so many logistics to work out,” he said gently. “Maybe tomorrow night.” Of course, if things went according to plan, there would be no tomorrow for her.

  “Okay,” she acquiesced.

  Landry hung up. He stepped out of the van. He lit a cigarette and looked across the water at Roaches Run. Smoke curled out of his mouth. He finished the cigarette and snuffed the butt in the dirt with his heel. He still had to call Ari Hammond, number three, the one that gave him the most trouble.

  Standing at the far end of the sanctuary, he dialed the number. No answer. He took a deep breath, turned, and looked east across the G.W. Parkway toward Gravelly Point. The sun hung over the Potomac River. Further to the left, the Washington Monument was visible, with one side of the obelisk glistening while the adjoining side was hidden in shadow.

  As Landry surveyed the area, a man stood at the edge of the soccer field at Gravelly Point with a pair of binoculars focused on the van parked at Roaches Run. The phone inside his jacket pocket rang. He lowered the binoculars, which hung around his neck by a nylon cord, and pulled out the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Took you long enough,” Landry replied as he moved from the van to his car. “Where are you? What are you doing?”

  “I am in D.C., preparing to die.”

  Landry brushed the statement aside. “Tomorrow morning, I want you go to room 909 at the GreyStone Hotel at exactly 11 a.m., retrieve an H-Pack backpack, and take it to the southeast corner of Lafayette Square.”

  “And blow up like a firecracker.”

  “You aren’t going to die.”

  “Yeah, sure, if you say so.” Hammond laughed. “You recruited me to strap explosives to my body and stand at a congested corner during the height of the Memorial Day weekend. And you have the audacity to say that I’m not going to die. Your plan is modeled after the December 2009 attack inside Camp Chapman in Afghanistan.”

  Landry was taken aback.

  “We both know the score,” Hammond said. “No one’s walking away unscathed from this thing.”

  Landry considered the lengths to which he had been forced to go. To win over Suleiman, he presented himself as a radical extremist. With Pena, he adopted the persona of an environmentalist nihilist. And lover. For Hammond, he acted like a lunatic. All three of them had mental health issues, but Hammond was a certified nutcase. He had actually been locked up in an asylum at one point.

  “It’s cool,” Hammond said. “I’m ready to go out in a blaze of glory.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “Do I? Just look at what those fools did in January, breaching the Capitol. People died. It doesn’t take much to ignite things in this town. But I don’t give a damn. Like I say, I’m ready to go out in a blaze of glory.”

  Landry suddenly felt a pain behind his left ear, like a hairpin driving into his temple. It was the feeling he got when he was being watched. Did someone have him under surveillance?

  On the other side of the parkway, Hammond raised the binoculars and trained them on Landry. A plane appeared in the sky moving left to right, its engines announcing the plane’s descent. Hammond pressed the mute button with the thumb of his left hand.

  “Where exactly are you in D.C.?”

  Hammond waited until the sound of the roaring engines diminished. He unmuted the phone. “Lafayette Square,” he said. “I’m casing out the area.”

  “Hang on a second,” Landry said while walking swiftly to his car. He jumped in, threw the vehicle into reverse, backed up, downshifted into drive, and darted out of the parking lot. He merged with southbound traffic, navigated a straightaway between taxis and Uber drivers, turned 180 degrees, drove by the arrival gates, and took the ramp to the northbound lanes of the G.W. Parkway.

  He signaled right and swept into the entrance to Gravelly Point. It had taken less than three minutes. His eyes surveyed the parking lot, the soccer field, and the open field leading to the river. He stopped the car and jumped out.

  Another plane descended overhead, its engines echoing across the field and drowning out all other sound.

  “Sorry about that,” Landry said into the phone when the noise had died down. “Something came up. I couldn’t talk.”

  “Not a problem,” Hammond said.

  When he had seen Landry’s car tear out of Roaches Run, Hammond surmised Landry smelled something fishy. So he dashed to his car, drove up the parkway at breakneck speed, and stopped at the monument north of the 14th Street Bridge. Your instincts are good, but mine are better. Give it a little more time and you’ll get the full measure of how much better.

  “Listen,” Hammond said. “If there’s nothing else, I’ll be going. But to be clear, I have no illusions about your plan, and be assured that you can count on me. This is the sort of moment I’ve fantasized about for a very long time.”

  He hung up.

  Landry stood in the Gravelly Point parking lot and looked across the parkway to Roaches Run. The van was visible from where he was standing. He sensed something. Yet it was inconceivable for him that he was the prey. After all, he was the alpha.

  **

  “DAMN,” Wilson cursed. She was logged out. She had been distracted by the files she had printed and lost track of time. When she finally punched the keyboard, the system requested a password. She tried to recall ho
w many times she could guess at a password before the system locked her out. Was it ten? Fewer than that? She hesitated. Did she want to risk it? If so, what six to eight numbers had he used?

  Hoping that Landry kept the password hidden somewhere, she frantically opened the drawers to his desk, then the credenza, and finally the overhead cabinet. Nothing. Then she discovered a locked cabinet. She went to the credenza and fished for keys. They were stored in the back. She tried each key on the keychain until she found one that opened the cabinet. And there, taped on the inside of the door, was a code: 1793159.

  Not particularly original, but par for the course, she concluded. He’d drawn a square with a diagonal strike through it. She typed the numbers in the box for the password.

  It worked.

  This was a game changer. Not only did she now have unlimited access to his computer files, but she could review the printed items at a leisurely pace. Once she gathered sufficient information, she planned to contact the media. And she knew exactly who to call.

  **

  KATZ ARRIVED at the operations center in Ashburn with ten minutes to spare. The building was on a nondescript cul-de-sac in a nondescript industrial park. It looked like the other large, three-story, flat-roofed buildings in the area, with one exception: the 10-foot fence topped with rolls of razor wire that surrounded it. There was also a guardhouse at the fence entrance manned by two tall sentries armed with long guns.

  Katz stopped at the entrance and flashed his PIV card at the guard who stepped forward. The guard nodded and signaled to his colleague to open the gate and lower a metal barrier at the base of the entrance. Katz drove over the metal spikes that would pierce the rubber tires of his car if headed in the opposite direction. He parked in the half-empty lot. Since March of 2020, most people had been teleworking. Traffic and parking – once the banes of his existence – were no longer a problem.

  Once inside, he used the card again to go through the turnstile and enter the lobby. He removed his personal and work phones from his pockets and placed them in a small metal locker, and dropped the key into his pants pocket. Then he entered the sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF.

  Santana was already there, along with Mai Lin, his special assistant. They were both seated against the wall; there was an empty seat between them. The room was filled with some twenty people, half of them seated in chairs along the walls and the remainder seated at least six feet apart from one another around a long, oval-shaped oak table covered with phones, computers, and speakers.

  On the wall was a huge screen with the faces of the remaining members of the group. There were more members participating remotely than in the room. The call was on a secure line.

  Katz slid into a chair about six feet from Lin.

  “You should be up there,” Lin chided him, glancing at the empty seats at the table.

  “You should sit up there,” Katz said. “You’re the superstar in our operation, not me. Plus, you’ve attended all the briefings. I only know what you and Santana tell me.”

  Over the past three and one-half years, Lin had repeatedly proven herself as a skilled analyst and prodigious worker in his office. Two years ago, while pregnant with her son, she had been wounded in a terrorist ambush. Last year, she played an instrumental role in identifying the person who murdered Jane Hutton, the head of the office’s civil branch.

  “Okay, I’ll slide up there when Sherry finishes her presentation,” Lin joked.

  “I’m serious,” Katz replied.

  Lin made a motion for him to shush and turn his attention to the head of the table, where Sherry Stone was standing at a tabletop podium.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get started,” Stone said. She adjusted her mask. “For those in the room, check your pockets. If anyone inadvertently brought any electronics into the room, put them in the lockers outside.” Around the room there was a rustle as people reached into their pockets to be sure they had not brought a device into the SCIF. A few sheepishly stood and stepped outside.

  Once everyone had returned and taken their seats, the lights dimmed and the room fell silent. A bright lens flashed an image on the screen, with part of the image falling across Stone’s face. She shifted the podium slightly to the left to escape the glare.

  The door to the conference room opened again, emitting light. A stocky figure entered and took a position along the wall. Landry would have been on time if he had only brought his PIV card. It was hell getting through the gate and into the building without it.

  “After 9/11, a lobbyist named Hugh Spates helped pass legislation to reimburse businesses affected by a terrorist act near a federal site if that site was a potential target of the attack,” Stone began.

  A face flashed on the screen. The man was fit, with blond hair, a rugged chin, and blue eyes. His smile was contemptuous.

  “It was a noble act,” she continued. “But as sometimes happens, the angels of his better nature abandoned him. Now he’s trying to use that law to stage a phony terrorist act and collect a handsome return from the federal government. Specifically, he’s planning to detonate explosives to destroy buildings he owns near the U.S. Capitol.”

  The next slide was an overhead photo of warehouses along a railroad line. In the upper right corner was the U.S. Capitol building. “Spates owns several properties along this railroad track in Southeast D.C.,” Stone said. The next slide showed a target with the bull’s-eye directly over one of the warehouses. “The warehouse he owns and intends to destroy is around a quarter mile from some of the most important real estate in the city.” The target’s circumference covered several buildings below Independence Avenue, including the O’Neill and Rayburn House Office Buildings.

  “He’ll never get enough explosives onto Capitol Hill,” someone said. “It’s too heavily guarded.” The point was well taken, Katz thought. Even though the National Guard troops brought to Washington to reinforce the Capitol grounds following the January 6 attack and to safeguard the city during the swearing-in of the new president had departed, there was still a robust presence of officers and heightened security.

  “Nothing stops a fool,” Stone said. “Spates thinks he’s invulnerable. If anything, he believes recent events provide legitimacy to his plot.”

  Next Stone displayed a photo of a railroad line running through Crystal City parallel to the G.W. Parkway south of the 14th Street Bridge. “He’s going to do it by train,” she said. “The explosives are going to be loaded onto a train in Virginia and carried over into D.C.”

  The lights came back up. People shifted in their seats. Many members of the group already knew about the attack because they were involved in surveilling the operation. Due to their diligence, the attack was never going to be allowed to take place.

  Stone reached down and picked up an orange canvas backpack. She placed it on the table in front of her. “In the late ’60s,” she said, “JanSport and Gerry Outdoors designed a lightweight nylon backpack for campers and hikers. In no time, students of all ages were using them, from kindergarten to professional school. More recently, they’ve moved to the workplace, where everyone from summer interns to CEOs uses them. They are, in a word, ubiquitous. Maybe some of you have one.

  “This particular orange-colored backpack, called the H-Pack, has become the backpack of choice for terrorists. Maybe it’s because of its large interior cavity, absence of zippers and side pockets, sturdy leather bottom, or canvas exterior. For whatever reason, most of the bombings in the past six years, domestically and around the world, have involved H-Pack backpacks. In fact, if security officers see someone with an H-Pack backpack at an airport or special event, you can be sure they’re going to give that person additional scrutiny. So be aware of that if you own one.”

  Landry smiled smugly to himself.

  “Yesterday,” Stone continued, “our surveillance detected two H-Pack backpacks placed against a fence running along a strip of land south of Crystal City. An hour later, the backpacks were sn
atched by Spates’ accomplices, Levin Wallace and Peter Morley. On this occasion, the backpacks were not filled with explosives. Instead, they contained a large amount of cash, namely $25,000 in $100 bills.”

  “Wasn’t one of them whacked last night?” asked one of the better-informed members of the group.

  Stone nodded. “Late last night or early this morning, Morley was found dead at Four Mile Run. He was also our confidential informant. Based on his information, we learned that Spates is planning to stage the event this weekend. We believe Spates retrieved the backpack from Morley’s car after he killed him.”

  “Has Morley’s murder jeopardized the operation?” someone asked.

  “No,” Stone answered. “Our information shows that Spates is driven by an intense ego and a sense of desperation. He thinks he’s bulletproof. Plus he’s in financial straits. We believe that he’s not going to stop now and that he’s confident no one is going to link the murder to the explosion. In fact, in the hours ahead, I expect him to place explosives along the same fence line where he previously put the money. He’s not backing down now.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said the person who had posed the question. “Do you think the operation might be jeopardized because someone on our side leaked information to Spates? I mean, why else would he kill Morley?”

  Stone seemed surprised by the question. “I doubt that’s the case,” she said. “In fact, it never occurred to me until you just suggested it.” She looked around the room. “I can’t believe someone in this room, or anyone connected with this investigation, would leak the identity of our CI to the target of our investigation.” She paused. “If I find out otherwise, there will be hell to pay.”

  Katz leaned over to Lin. “There’s no leak. The shooting was accidental. Spates had no intention of killing a member of his crew. And Stone’s right when she says Spates is going to proceed with this insane plan.”

  Lin looked at Katz. She knew him well enough to know he was probably right.

  **

  IN THE CARNAGE following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, few people focused on real estate insurance policies. Hugh Spates was the exception. As a young lobbyist for the real estate insurance industry, he paid close attention to the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act and the more than $30 billion that was paid in claims related to the attacks. While the media and the public focused on compensation for first responders and the families of victims, Spates saw real estate claims: developers, landlords and tenants, and others who suffered huge losses and received enormous compensation. In the horror of crushed bodies, mangled steel, and shattered glass, Spates saw opportunity.